Question about clarion version.

[arrigob]

Hi There,

We produce accounting software and still use Clarion 5. We have started having a problem with our application freezing and receives not responding error and our application then closes out.

We have been researching this and found a post from lindersoft about this. It talks about how clarion 6 and under can't handle the UAC controls and prevents our program to write to the win.ini among other things.

It then says that we need to use a UAC aware installer programs, luckily for us, we use Setup Builder.

I was just wondering if you had heard this as well and if you had any link on what to add to our installers to help this. Anything would be huge for us, this problem is getting tiresome.

Thanks as always for the excellent support.

Brandon Arrigo
Automated Accounting Systems, INC

[linder]

Hello Brandon,

The first question that comes to mind: is your application itself UAC-aware (and Win7-compliant)? If you are using SetupBuilder 7, then your setup.exe is by default UAC- and Win7-aware. But is the same true for your Clarion 5 app?

The following is a very brief description of how to make an application "UAC-aware"

-- Standard Application:

1. Embed an UAC manifest into your main application (.EXE). A manifest basically tells Windows how aware the program is about the recent Windows versions (and disables "Virtualization"). You should include a manifest for Windows 7 (it's fully backward compatible with all previous Windows versions).

SetupBuilder 7 Developer Edition can embed such a manifest into your executable.

2. Request "asInvoker" execution level privileges through the manifest for your application.

3. Code-sign all your application files (e.g. .EXE, .DLL). SetupBuilder 7 Developer Edition can handle this for you.

4. Your application should not depend on any administrative APIs.

5. Do not write per-user information or user-writable information to Program Files or Program directories.

6. Do not write to any other protected Windows area (e.g. the OS drive root folder, the "Windows" folder tree, etc.).

7. Do not write to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or any other protected registry key.


-- Standard Installation:

1. Use an UAC-aware installation system. By default, installations run elevated.

2. Install applications per-machine (all users) and store per-user data in different locations.

3. Do not install Quick Launch shortcuts.

4. Never write to per-user locations from the elevated running installer. That means, never write to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry key or to per-user file locations.

5. Launch applications non-elevated at the end of the installation process.

6. Code-sign the installer.

Note: if you have to install "per-user" data, install it to a common location and as a "first run" action of your main application, copy the data from the common location into a per-user location.

Respect the recommended (default) locations for applications and data files, but provide users with an option to select another installation location for both. A true "Mixed User Application" should work elevated and non-elevated.

Does this help?

--
Friedrich Linder
Lindersoft
www.lindersoft.com
+1.954.252.3910

SetupBuilder is Windows 7 installation -- "point. click. ship"

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