Windows Vista

The advent of Windows Vista has caused a lot of headaches around the developer community. The Coccinella is no exception.

I should say right away that I have not access to a Vista box so much of the work has to made "in the dark." There are two problems that have reached me. First, there have been reports that user prefs were never stored, but a "vanilla" launch was made each time. It turned out that Vista only allows an app to store files in very limited number of places. I picked the wrong place since I used the environment variables such as HOME and USERPROFILE to get the preference directory. The correct way is to look at the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders for the directory, which in my case was C:\Documents and Settings\Mats2\Application Data. Before I had stored things one directory up, and the reason I didn't see this directory was that it is normally hidden. All this is now fixed, any old prefs folder is automatically moved to the new place for XP etc.

The second problem was a real pain in my rear parts, so to speak. The UX XP theme wouldn't load on Vista for some unknown reason. I saw a complete recoding in front of me. But I was fortunate enough to get a mail from Georgios Petasis who wrote the original version of the XP theme code. The problem was really stupid and I should have seen it myself. There was a test:
if (os.dwMajorVersion <= 5 && os.dwMinorVersion >= 1))
which obviously fails on Vista since that is 6.0.

Now things are looking much brighter but there are probably much more to do: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista/Certified_for_Vista.aspx

In any case I have rebuilt the tclkit used as runtime for Coccinella on Windows at http://coccinella.sourceforge.net/tclkits/tclkit-tile.upx.exe which has tile statically linked due to various reasons. Tile is still at version 0.7.3, both the statically linked one and all binaries in the cvs tree. I'm waiting on Joe English to update to 0.8.0 before I upgrade.