Vista and Sheet Metal Applications first created 23/02/07 - last modified 07/05/07 Page Author: Ty Harness
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All new PC's will come pre-installed with MS Vista from March 2007 but most people will probably not upgrade from XPSP2 on existing machines. It has become important to design software for Vista. I've installed all the Sheet Metal Applications on MS Vista RC1 (pre release beta see figure 1). There are some issues with running the software on Vista but the results are promising. I've also upgraded my PC to Vista Home Basic and tested the sheet metal software.

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Figure 1 - Screen Capture form Vista using the Sniper Tool that comes with Vista RC 1


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Figure 2 - Screen Capture form Ctrl PrintScreen and Paste into Paint (Sniper does not come with Home Basic)


Here are some basic test results and issues when running Ty Harness Sheet Metal Applications on Vista.
Hardware

AMD Athlon 64bit 3200 CPU, 512MB PC3200 DDR RAM, ECS Elitegroup K8M800-M2 onboard VGA, and 80GB SATA Maxtor HDD

TestVista RC1 Vista Home Basic
InstallationPASS PASS
First RunPASS *1 PASS
Application OpeningPASS PASS
SavingPASS *2 PASS
LoadingPASS PASS
Help FilesFAIL *3 FAIL *3
Print SimplexPASS PASS
Print ComplexPASS PASS
AppearancePASS *4 PASS *4
UsabilityPASS *5 PASS *5
Application ClosingPASS PASS
Un installPASS PASS
Issues

1)

One of the conditions of running the sheet metal applications is the start code checks for a printer to get the paper dimensions for scaling and also to allow nag printing as a condition of running the free version. By default RC1 has installed a printer called Microsoft XPS Document Writer and the application reported a strange error about inserting the disc to continue. I installed my laser printer as the default printer and the error messages were not seen on first run again. If you can not install your printer on Vista then install the Generic print to file printer (or even better a virtual PDF writer) and then the software should run as expected.

2)

By default the application saves files in the output folder which is in the program path. When you navigate to c:\program file\thc\stor\output\ using explorer you can't see any file created but if click compatibility files then they all appear. At this stage I don't understand why this is the case.

3)

I had a preference for using the older style help files made by the Microsoft Help Workshop which are no longer supported by Windows Vista.
All the help files are online and are more up to date than the help files distributed with the applications.

4)

The icons for the applications and documents look a little blurry because they were designed for 32x32 pixels and the Default Theme has stretched them to 64x64. The application window quality is good and better than expected.

5)

If you're running Vista then the PC is fairly high spec. so in general the performance is good but you may be using a larger screen resolution than 1024x768 and I've noticed a drop in usability at high screen resolutions. This is mainly an inefficiency with my algorithm that redraws the screen when the scene changes. Because it's not the sort of application that needs to be maximized I suggest running the application in a normal window of up to the size of 1024x768 which gives a good usability. I'm looking to improve the interface over the coming year and address this issue.
References

Vista and Windows are a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.