As a Programmer, what specific problems have you faced with Windows Vista?

Question

Please share problems faced by you as

[1] A Developer writing software FOR Vista.

[2] A Developer writing software ON Vista.

Answer 1

See what-are-the-main-differences-between-programming-for-windows-xp-and-for-vista for a good starting point.

Answer 2

I had trouble with some embedded tools from QNX. These tried to write temporary files to C:\

That failed because the programs were not allowed to write to this location. It was a major PITA until I found out how to run the tools with administrator rights.

Answer 3

The UAC (user access control) means that a lot of actions are restricted by default, e.g. writing to certain parts of the registry, write access to certain folders e.g. Program Files.

So our programs needed to be modified to cope with this.

Answer 4

Simple one related to registry access was annoying to me. Under the default privileges you can't create an Event Log.

Answer 5

Developing ON Vista:

Older versions of Visual Studio run badly if at all.

Being unable to automatically register COM components during the build process or copy files to the windows install drive without running as Administrator is annoying.

Developing FOR Vista:

Also, developing extensions for Internet Explorer is a real PITA. Since IE runs in protected mode by default to develop an extension that accesses anything outside of IE you have to use an external broker with an elevation policy and proxy those transactions through the broker. Considering all of the crap that is spread from IE plugins this makes good sense, but it doesn't make it any less of a pain :P

Other than that no real problems.

Answer 6

Nothing in particular directly related to programming on Vista. However, some of the apps I've been involved with access network drives and we see a lot of issues with network drives either operating extremely slow or just disappearing from Vista. Same site with Windows XP has zero problems.