Vista vs. dll's

[willisgt]

I've got a program which is exhibiting undesirable behavior when run on laptops or tablet PC's running Vista. The problems seem to be confined to the HTTP dll, and either the SQL or Crypto dll.

1. The program pushes and pulls text to and from a server using the HTTP protocol. This, it has no problems with. However, when downloading binary files via HTTP, some manner of error occurs. I can't duplicate the error as I don't currently have a Vista laptop.

2. The program starts up and pulls the user's data from a local database. The data, especially the password, is encrypted. Again, an error is occurring which I can't yet duplicate. I strongly suspect the problem is with the Crypto dll, rather than the SQL dll, as all non-encrypted reads and writes to and from the database are working properly.

The program works perfectly on any XP machine.

As I say, I'll have this tested on a Vista machine in the next 24 hours. Until then... has anyone else observed problems with complied programs running under Vista?

Note: The program was compiled on an XP/sp2 machine.

As always, any help/thoughts/insights are greatly appreciated.


Gary

:sign0163:

 

[agraham]

has anyone else observed problems with complied programs running under Vista?

No. I run Vista on my desktop and all my libraries are compiled by VS2005 on this machine and I have not seen any problems either with libraries or compiled (legacy and optimised) B4PPC programs that I could put at Vistas' door.

I had trouble with the HTTP library acessing a secure server as the underlying .NET HTTP client is very picky about protocol and refused to play with the authentication headers that this particular server returned - so I wrote my own (very simple) authenticating client in B4PPC on top of the Network library. However this seems to have nothing to do with your problem. If anyone wants the Base64 encoding routines they are welcome to them.

You don't say what the "undesirable behaviour is" - presumably incorrect data? You say "binary", do you mean true 8bit raw binary or base64 encoded binary?

 

[willisgt]

Solution

I discovered the source of the problem.

Vista apparently has certain special security 'features' with respect to the 'Program Files' folder, which were interfering the my application's operation.

We opened up the permissions on the folder where the application in installed, and presto - problem go away.


Gary

:sign0161:

 

[agraham]

IVista apparently has certain special security 'features' with respect to the 'Program Files' folder, which were interfering the my application's operation.

To expand in case it is of use to somebody else. In general unless an app is running as an administrator Vista, for security reasons, will not let an app write into a folder under "Program Files" and will not give any warning that it has blocked such attempts. Vista provides a folder "ProgramData" where Vista aware apps are free to create folders and write temporary data. However many legacy apps will try to write to their installation folders and these either need folder permissions changing or to be run a administrators.