Native apps on Vista (was Re: D, Java? To D or not to D?)

[Julio César Carrascal Urquijo]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Guest wrote:
>> Carlos Santander Wrote:
>> I'm sorry for my long reply time.  I've read a couple of articles on 
>> running native apps in Vista and they have all said that it will be 
>> ran in a box that supplies imense security features to protect the 
>> user.  It will abort the app as soon as it starts looking suspicious.  
>> That's the box I'm talking about.  So really you should use a .NET 
>> language on Vista because the .NET already has the security and won't 
>> be ran in a box.  I've also read the box will severely limit your 
>> programs access to resources (such as: files,hardware,etc.).
> 
> I find that a bit hard to believe. Consider what fraction of high-end 
> PCs are used for games, which are almost exclusively native apps. 
> Microsoft cannot afford to alienate that market.
> 
>> I wish I wrote the url's down of those web pages so I could directly 
>> link them to you and when I start reading up on vista again.  I will 
>> re reply with a list of url's you may visit.
>>
>> Guest
>>

It is mostly true. Vista has a new "feature" called User Account 
Protection (UAP) that can be defined as a sandbox since it prevents an 
application from executing certain operations that are considered "for 
administrators only".

Current versions of most programs won't work (Even .NET ones) directly 
and have to be modified and programs that use system devices will be 
specially affected. (Most burning programs and anti-virus will need to 
be updated, for example).

The performance hit isn't as bad as one can imagine as most safeguards 
are placed at operations that already are relatively slow... like disk 
access, changing video modes, opening ports, etc...

A famous WTF related with UAP is that Visual Studio 6 will run perfectly 
while Visual Studio 2002, 2003 and 2005 will present "some problems":

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa964140.aspx

Still from the new Vista "features" the one I worry about it's the DRM 
integration for HD content because it will hurt us even if we only use 
Linux or MacOSX. For more information read:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt