Vista Support

[Mike_Park]

Hi,

I've built an MMF app in version 1.5 and would like to know what the official line from Clickteam is regarding running it on Vista. For example is MMF 1.5 supported on Vista or do I need to upgrade the application to MMF 2, or is Vista support not yet available but planned for xyz release?

Thanks,

Mike

[Yves]

MMF 1.5 applications should work fine on Vista, however they are executed in "compatibility" mode. How that works:

When you run your application, the Program Compatibility Assistant of Vista will try to detect if your application needs to run in administrator mode or not.

If your application is executed in administrator mode, everything works like under an XP administrator account, except that Vista asks for confirmation each time you run your application.

If your application is not executed in administrator mode, then usually it should work the same. In non admin mode on Vista you are not allowed to write to system directories (like the Program Files directory), but in "compatibility" mode, Vista allows applications to write to system folders : in this case it writes the files to a virtual folder and displays them as if they were in the system folder. They did this, I guess, mainly for applications that write to their install folder. So, most of the old applications should work with Vista, but you might experience problems if you want to modify files installed by the installer of the application in administrator mode (not sure though).

In MMF2, build 245, we have added an option to let you choose the privileges of your application on Vista. This build is still a beta version, but should be validated within 1 or 2 days. This option let you choose between 3 modes :

1. Old compatibility mode, described above, for old applications.

2. As invoker : in this mode, your application is executed with the same privileges as the user (or as the application that runs it if it's executed by another application). For most the users, this will be non-admin privileges, i.e. your application won't be allowed to write to the Program Files directory or other system directories, and if you write keys to the registry it will be allowed to write to the HKEY_CURRENT_USERS folder only. This is the prefered mode for Vista applications, and for the future as MS might remove the compatibility mode in future versions of Windows. If you need to store config files to the user's hard disk, you have to store them to the user's application data folder, as you cannot store them to the application install folder anymore (the File object contains expressions to retrieve the pathname of this directory).

3. As administrator : your application is executed with elevated privileges and works like in XP admin accounts. Only difference : Vista will display a confirmation dialog box when your application starts. This mode is reserved for appplications that really need to modify system files or registry keys.

Hope this helps.

[Mike_Park]

Thanks very much Yves.

I've installed and run the application on Vista Business and it is not executed in administrator mode, and from a quick play it appears to work fine.

Cheers,

Mike