Well, after painstakingly working with the Vista UAC team at Microsoft to ensure Macro Scheduler would be Vista compatible, and lots of testing with the Vista betas I was happy to report a while back that Macro Scheduler ran well under Vista beta 2. Recently Vista RC1 was made available under our MSDN subscription so we installed it. Guess what? Well, unfortunately it seems things have changed again and there are now a few things that fail to work under the default restricted user account. I’m pretty sure we just need to make a few tweaks and everything will be hunky dory again in due course. But I’m somewhat annoyed that after our efforts to ensure the software worked with beta 2 it seems lots has changed in RC1.
I’m resisting the urge to turn UAC off. I’m only leaving the default settings intact so that I can be sure Macro Scheduler will install and run under the default configuration. But oh how annoying it is! Try just copying and overwriting a file in the program folder – something power users will do all the time. What a nightmare. Honestly – how many dialogs are really needed for a simple file copy!?
Sometimes I feel like Microsoft’s security philosophy with Vista is analogous to building a house with no doors and windows. Utterly secure and impenetrable but also completely unusable! OK, that’s a bit unfair, it’s more like a door with 15 locks. Very secure, and just about usable … but frustratingly unfriendly!
Update: Ok, I may have ranted too soon. Turns out the problem with Macro Scheduler under Vista RC1 was due to a change we’d inadvertently made, rather than a change in Vista. Looks like we have it sorted!
