[DUG] First Vista tests

[John Bird]

I tried my first brief Vista tests today on a friends laptop (Vista Home
basic).

To avoid installing and hitting UAC I just copied a working folder of
programs off a USB drive.

The good news is everything I have from BDS 2006 ran perfectly (well almost
perfectly - see below).  Including a quite complex program with many forms
and controls, which resizes itself automatically to the screen and uses Rave
reports.

Vista itself looked nice, and familiar in the main - most things were in the
same place.

Even some 15 year old DOS software (non Delphi) ran perfectly, basically the
same as or even better than on XP.  I was wondering about that, as it uses a
lot of environmental variables and the ANSI screen driver and starts up
using a very complex batch file.

I did find a couple of oddities:

1 - The Delphi program font seemed just a little blurry.  That may be a
setup issue on the Vista itself - as some of the other menus and programs
also looked a tad blurry.  I remember that IE7 introduced a new setting that
often does something similar (IE7/Tools/Internet options/Advanced/use Clear
Type fonts for HTML)  This got turned on by IE7 - its supposed to improve
the screen display for LCD screens and often makes the screen look worse
rather than better.

2 - The screen was a wide screen.  Circular shapes on the screen are no
longer circular.  I got rather worried about my analogue clocks somewhat
squashed shape until I noticed the sidebar widget was the same....this may
be relevant for other forms if the wider screen means the pixels are not as
high as they are wide....is this a horrible kludge from the PC screen maker
or is this a general feature with wide screens?  I cannot imagine Apple
would have this "feature".

3 - UAC (User Access Control) was no hassle - from years running Unix
programs is almost a relief to finally have to consider ownerships and
access to folders - I just manually altered a couple of data folders to full
control to make sure I had no problems.

The shortcut I created manually on the desktop has a UAC shield added to it,
and asks everytime I run it if it is a trusted program - How do I
permanently get rid of that?

4 - Inno setup 5 install did NOT work.  The install ran fine,  but the
startup program complained of access violations - as far as I could tell it
was from something from the install as the same program copied manually onto
the PC worked.

5 - One program (BDS 2006) using the XP manifest displayed some rather odd
behaviour:  It starts with some radiogroups and buttons disabled (to avoid
screen clutter it starts with them disabled unless these options are turned
on for advanced users).  These controls did not paint at all - they were
just blank, but on mousing over them they magically appeared.....

Now I just have to find a PC to install my new Vista Ultimate onto (courtesy
of the Microsoft technical briefing).  My working PC only takes 1GB memory
maximum, so I don't think that's enough....

John