Menu
From a desktop application developer point of view, is there any difference between developing for Windows XP and developing for Windows Vista?
899
While the architecture of Vista is a little better, Vista adds a lot of overhead to support quite a bit of new and sometimes questionable functionality. Vista is a lot more complex than Windows XP. It's probably more secure, but it still needs a raft of third-party security software and hardware.
Windows Vista was the updated version of Windows XP, however the visuals in Vista were better designed and graphics made for a good experience for the users. The Vista came with better security features, speedy file search, built in Web services and better multimedia features.
The reason is that Vista makes major changes to the way Windows draws on the screen. Vista handles graphics more in the manner of video games, using a software library called DirectX designed to exploit hardware-accelerated graphics. DirectX is also used in Windows XP, but Vista uses it throughout, not just for games.
Yes, Windows XP is good enough for programming as a whole (albeit there might be OS specific functions that can't be tested in later versions of Windows).
Most programs written for Windows XP also work in Windows Vista, but some older programs might run poorly or not at all. If a program written for an earlier version of Windows doesn't run correctly, you can use the Program Compatibility Wizard to change the compatibility settings for the program.
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft.
User Interface
Looking at the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines you can see that they have changed many UI elements, which you should be aware of. Some major things to take note of:
64-bit
Vista has a 64-bit edition, and although XP did too, your users are more likely to use Vista 64 than XP 64. Now you have to deal with:
UAC
User Account Control vastly affects the default permissions that your application has when interacting with the OS.
New APIs
There are new APIs which are targeted at either new methods of application construction or allowing new functionality:
Installers
Because installations can only use common runtimes they install after a transaction has completed, custom actions will fail if your custom action dll requires the Visual C++ runtimes above the VS 2005 CRT (non-SP1).
87
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
