Which Applications Work on Windows Vista?
What is probably the most common question I get regarding application compatibility? Can you just give me a list of all of the applications that work on Windows Vista?
Sounds easy, huh? Well, it’s not quite that easy.
First of all, there is the obvious problem of claiming that any software works at all. If anybody can come up with a full proof way of proving that any piece of software at all is bug-free, then that person is going to be very rich indeed. Even if we fully test software as we would use it, that doesn’t mean we use it how you would use it. If I use some CAD software to design houses again and again and it works flawlessly under a huge amount of testing, what happens if the bugs exist when you use it to design something very small (like a screw) or something with a lot more vertices, such as a piston engine? We just don’t know.
You would be surprised at how many “compatibility problems” I have investigated where, after uncovering the root of the problem, I can say definitively that the software could have never worked on any operating system. Sure enough, we run it on their current operating system, and it doesn’t work there either.
Since you can’t effectively just have people imagine how to use something and test it that way, our idea was to enhance any testing and bug submissions that we investigate with a community feature, which we added to the Application Compatibility Toolkit. But it turns out that this was harder than it seems. Why?
To learn more please read the entire article at its source: Evolving the Software Organism : “The List” – Which Applications Work on Windows Vista?
Tags: application, cad_software, community_feature, compatibility_problems, Operating system, windows vista
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