Microsoft this week released a whitepaper to help enterprises fix compatibility issues between their custom applications and Windows 7. Small compatibility fixes are known as shims. But most enterprises don't fully use the power of shims, says whitepaper author Chris Jackson, a member of the Microsoft Windows Application Experience SWAT Team. A critical component of using shims is managing them over the lifetime of the application via a custom shim database. This document offers guidance on when to apply shims, and how to manage them.
Having (hopefully) learned its lesson from Vista, this whitepaper is one of many tools Microsoft is offering to address W7 application compatibility. Here are a list of more resources from the Application Compatibility and User Account Control page in Microsoft's Download Center.
- Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.5 -- Inventory, assess, and prepare applications for Windows 7 and Windows Vista deployment projects.
- Windows 7 Application Quality Cookbook -- Originally intended for developers, the Application Quality Cookbook is a comprehensive resource describing application compatibility changes in Windows 7.
- Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility Resources -- If you are in the process of piloting or deploying Internet Explorer 8 or Windows 7, these resources can help you determine potential compatibility impacts beyond the changes to the user agent string in IE8.
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