Smart Document do not work OOB in Vista

If you are into smart documents and you tried to port your smart documents to Vista you'll get this issue. A few days back I came to know about this issue from one of our customers. Where he says "We've developed a few smart documents and they were working with XP, but they stopped working in Vista"

When I asked him "Can you give me some sample code ? He said ..yes, but you can download Office 2003 Smart Document SDK for yourself and try". I paused for a moment.. (gulp) does he mean *all* smart documents are broken on Vista.?

On researching further, I found https://support.microsoft.com/kb/923920 which surely means at least managed documents created using VB 6.0 are broken on Vista.

I tried to run unmanaged smart documents on Vista..broken as documented.

Tried C# .NET 1.1 - broken

Tried VB 7 .NET 1.1 - broken

Tried VB 8 .NET 2.0 - broken

Tried VC+ - broken

:(

Found a few  bugs around it, but nothing exactly explained what is happening, this surely looked like a bug somehow linked with UAC. Tried fusion log (I'll explain about it in my next article ). Still didn't get any clue.

Then when I was trying it on my colleague's Vista box it worked without complain! That was strange! 

Checked the difference between his machine and my machine..realized that he has a .NET policy that grants trust to everything in "C:\" hmm .. interesting.. looks like I need to do some filemon-ing.

Which reveled the problem.. in Vista the ‘cache’ location is not the same the default setPolicy.bat from the SDK gives full trust to:

%UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Schemas\SimpleSample\*

but, on Vista the 'cache' location is different, so if we give full trust to :

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Schemas\SimpleSample\* 

It works like a charm! So, do you think this issue needs a doc? yeah..I think too, I am requesting for a KB

 

del.icio.us tags: Microsoft Blogger, Vista, Smart Documents, UAC

Technorati tags: Microsoft Blogger, Vista, Smart Documents, UAC

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2007
  Yep, Vista has funky new folder and registry "virtualisation" for compatibility, expect more issues revolving around this :)