Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

I’ve been playing with Windows 7 for quite some time and the internal deployment at the company i work for is also coming along quite nicely. A few machines are still on the RC and our branch office is still running on Vista, but this should be resolved until the end of the next month.

However, we’re also an ISV. DIAS-iS has been running on Windows Vista since the release – thanks to the efforts of our developers, who fixed everything during the beta phase of Windows Vista. As such, our software ran on Windows 7 since the beginning.

During the past few weeks, i did all the necessary administrative work to get our Software certified with the “Compatible with Windows 7″ Logo.

Doing this isn’t that hard, but it requires you to jump through quite a few hoops.

Here’s a basic rundown of steps:

• Obtain a MS Authenticode certificate from Verisign. Note that other code signing certs won’t work (e.G. Thawte)
• Create a WinQual Account here
  • You’ll need to sign a sample .exe with the code signing cert from step one
• Download the Software Logo Toolkit
• Download the Windows 7 Logo Requirements Document
• Both of these packages contain all the documentation you need – most of the requirements are easily satisfied if you have an application that behaves nicely, uninstalls correctly, works in TS environments
• Create an empty Windows 7 x64 VM. Note that it must be x64.
• Install the Software Logo Toolkit on the machine
• Start the GUI, start the Session Server in a second session on the same machine
• Run through all the phases, make sure the report says “Pass” or “Pass with warnings” (verify that the warnings are not real errors)
• Submit the .xml through the WinQual account. You’ll immediately get certified

So it’s not that hard.

The key point to delivering a good user experience is to ensure that your application uses standard installation technology like .MSI, that it doesn’t require administrative privileges, that all configuration is stored in the userprofile (Registry or %APPDATA%) and that it’s multi-session capable.

And that’s all the “Compatible with Windows 7″ logo verifies – so if you already have a well-behaving Windows application, getting that logo is easy as pie. It does not cost anything directly – the only costly requirement is the fact hat you need a Verisign Authenticode certificate. This will set you back 400$. Microsoft does not want any money from you for this Logo – and it can be great in Marketing your competitiveness and readiness as a software vendor.

Windows Server 2008 R2 was released to MSDN today, and of course i want and installed it on a machine that did something more or less useful – a Fax server. Which is of course an internal system and not really in production.

I’m using a Diva BRI-2 2 Channel PCI-E Card, which already has support for Windows Server 2008 R2, and installing the Diva Software went without any issues.

Installing the Fax service was also easy, but there was no Fax printer to be seen anywhere.

I’ve followed the TechNet documentation for creating Fax printer on Windows Server 2008 R2, but it didn’t work – at first i received a “Permission denied” error message, after which i started Windows Fax & Scan using Administrator privileges.

This didn’t help that much – i could now go through the wizard, but no Fax account and no printer was created. This seemed strange.

Now, this really seemed like a permission issue. So i disabled UAC, rebooted the server, and tried it again. Everything worked – i was able to create the Fax printer, and after sharing it faxing worked as it should.

So, what now? Why doesn’t this work with UAC? I’ve been running our WS08 servers with UAC disabled (our Vista client were UAC enabled, and so are our Windows 7 clients), and thought WS08R2 should also work well with UAC enabled. But apparently, that wasn’t a good idea.

So Windows 7 RTM is out. So i’ve tried playing with XP Mode, which didn’t work for me on the RC version, and after a bit of debugging didn’t find the issue.

So, with a fresh newly installed laptop and the new release candidate of Windows XP mode, i gave it a whirl again. But it failed with the same sequence of completely intelligible error messages, namely “Integration features have been disabled” and the even more helpful “Parameter is incorrect”.

So i installed it on my desktop as well, where it worked without a hitch. The major difference between my desktop and my laptop is that the laptop is joined to the corporate domain and the desktop at home obviously not.

I dug a bit deeper into the event log, and drilled down to Microsoft\Windows\Virtual PC\Admin, where i found this error message:

Could not enable the Integration features for ‘Windows XP Mode’. The current mode is – 0. Last Channel start Value – 0x800700B7, Last Disconnect Reason – 0x300001B, Last Extended Disconnect Reason – 0×0, GHI State of the guest machine – 0×1

Now, this whole “disconnect” thing sounded strange until i remembered that Windows Virtual PC used RDP to deliver the screen – and at that point i thought about the RD Gateway server that’s being pushed by a GPO.

So for a quick test, i set the following key in the registry to zero:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services\UseProxy

And tried starting Virtual PC again. It worked! Setting the key back to 1 predictably led to the same error message.

So next i excluded Windows 7 users from this GPO using a simple WMI filter, which will be a temporary measure to mitigate this issue.

This seems to be a bug somewhere, as those settings shouldn’t break Virtual PC. I’m not sure where i should report this to, but i’ll have a look at that. At least now people with the same issue should get this solution through Google.