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Evaluating Applications for Windows 7 Compatibility : The Application Compatibility Toolkit (part 1) - Choosing an ACT Architecture

5/3/2013 6:10:16 PM

Microsoft provides the free-to-download Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) to help you get legacy applications working on Windows 7. Using it, you can go through the process of identifying your legacy applications, test them, track your progress, and even create shims to fool those applications into believing that they are running on Windows 7. You will now learn how to plan for ACT, install it, and use it to resolve application compatibility problems.

1. Choosing an ACT Architecture

To plan for ACT, you will need to understand how it works. There are two basic ways to use ACT. It contains a number of tools for creating shims to mitigate application compatibility issues. A simple, quick installation of ACT allows you to do that. However, to make the most of ACT, you will probably use the Application Compatibility Manager (ACM) tool.

ACM allows you to deploy an agent called a data collection package (DCP) to selected PCs, or even all of them, to gather information about the applications and application versions that are out "in the wild." The DCPs will create periodic data files and send them to a file share of your choosing. A central ACT installation, the Log Processing Service, will process the files from this file share and store the information in a SQL database. Administrators and engineers can use ACT to connect to the SQL database. This allows them to generate reports, connect with Microsoft to download up-to-date information on compatibility issues, and track the progress of the project. Finally, ACT contains tools that can be used on test and development machines to create shims to enable otherwise incompatible applications to work on Windows 7.

ACT is pretty flexible, and you can architect your configuration to suit the project and the organization you are working in. The configuration can vary from the all-in-one-machine installation to a multisite setup that allows dozens of people across continents to collaborate on a corporate solution.

Figure 1 shows the most basic architecture that you might use while learning the product or while working in a small organization.

Figure 1. Basic ACT architecture

All of the ACT components are installed onto a single machine with this basic installation, labeled as ACT Workstation. This can be a single server, PC, laptop, or even a VM. Using the latter option offers some advantages. Virtualization obviously reduces costs for the organization. Consultants can even build a VM with no data and reuse it in different customer sites, minimizing the time required to start working on the solution for their customers.

The SQL installation that you use for the single-machine and single-user architecture can be the free SQL 2008 Express. Only local users and applications can use this database, and the database is limited to 4 GB. You will need to use one of the paid-for editions of SQL Server 2008 if you need to use the database remotely or if the database will be larger than 4 GB.

With the installation illustrated in Figure 1, the administrator is doing all the testing and development work on a single machine. That's not an ideal solution because you never know if one application will contaminate the computer and affect the work you do with other applications. It's for this reason that you should consider using a number of test machines, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. ACT with multiple test machines

There are a few ways you can approach having test machines. A cost-effective solution is to use virtualization. Microsoft's Virtual PC for Windows 7 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 are free products that you can use for this purpose. Virtualization allows you to create a sample or template machine that you can redeploy for every application solution that you work on. This is a speedy solution too. Alternatively, you can use machines that are typical of the organization. It's important to do this if you are working with applications that integrate with the hardware.

Larger organizations may seek a different solution. It may be necessary to have a large database and to allow many administrators to work on it at once. Figure 3 shows how you can achieve this goal in a single network.

Figure 3. ACT with multiple engineers

A paid-for edition of SQL is used to host the ACT database in this scenario. It is possible to place the file share on the SQL server or on a different machine. There's a good chance that you will use an existing SQL server for the ACT database. The owners of that machine probably won't like the idea of a file share being created on it, so you can use another file server for this role.

The DCP that you deploy to the desktops and laptops on your network will upload a file to the file share on a configurable periodic basis. This file contains information about the applications on the network. This process could cause an issue for your wide area network (WAN). The files may be small, but few network administrators will be thrilled about additional frequent traffic using up the WAN bandwidth. You can create agents for each collection of machines that you wish to target for data collection. This approach allows you to specify a local file share in each branch office. You can see this in Figure 4.

All that remains now is to get the data back to the central file share from the local file shares for processing by ACT. You could use some file replication mechanism such as Distributed File System Replication (DFS-R), schedule copy tasks during off hours using a tool like Robocopy, or even burn a few weeks' worth of data on a DVD and send it by courier.

Consider how the organization and the application compatibility project will be run. Then choose the most suitable ACT architecture. The great thing about ACT is that it is very modular and will allow you to adapt to changes in the project. We're now going to show you how to install ACT using the architecture shown previously in Figure 2.

Figure 4. ACT on the wide area network

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