Application Quality
Developers can improve their customers’ experience through Windows Vista technologies and tools that guarantee a consistent system/program interaction, provide greater usability, improve stability and fault tolerance, increase accessibility, and provide enhanced performance. For example:
Tools and clear guidelines are available to better enable developers to handle version and system compatibility issues.
Powerful enhancements to error handling, document recovery ,and application restart mechanisms mean that application stability is enhanced and end-user data is better protected.
The application recovery support is also available to installers and management tools under Windows Vista. System modifications can be made without significantly disrupting a user's work or causing a loss of data.
Application stability is improved by eliminated application failures due to blocking I/O operations by providing enhanced mechanism for I/O management.
State separation – a platform agnostic method for specifying application information storage – allows users the freedom to configure their systems as they wish by enabling developers to remove hard coded path dependencies. .
Built-in accessibility features and the streamlined, programmatic user interface access promote the most efficient development of accessibility-enhanced applications.
New feedback-reporting APIs allow developers to specify data they need to continuously improve the quality of their products.
Microsoft has also invested in the Windows Quality Online Services (WinQual) program (winqual.microsoft.com). This developer portal is a free service to registered ISVs that enables developers to participate in aggregating user feedback.
This will provide application developers with direct insight into those issues that cause the most significant problems for their endusers.
Windows Shutdown and Restart
A high quality application must be able to handle a restart of the operating system. For more information, see Windows Shutdown and Restart.