filePro and Vista

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenneth Brody" <kenbrody at bestweb.net>
To: <mschw at athenet.net>
Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2006 3:09 PM
Subject: RE: filePro and Vista


> Quoting Mike Schwartz (PC Support) (Sun, 26 Nov 2006 12:41:18 -0600):
> [...]
>> > filePro works just fine in this situation.  User 2 is properly locked
>> > out of updating a record being updated by user 1, and when user 1
>> > saves the record, user 2 sees the changes as soon as the record is
>> > re-read by entering update mode.
>> >
>> > Where did you see that this might be a problem?
> [...]
>>     In the hands-on training portion of the Microsoft "Vista - Ready to
>> Rock Roadshow", one of the exercises we had to go through was to update
>> a record in a Quicken-like application as user "Lisa".  It appeared to
>> us that Vista was allowing this "legacy" database to be updated just
>> like normal.  The files looked like they had been updated and the totals
>> on the screen correctly displayed that we had added a new record to the
>> database.
>>
>>    However, when we went in through Windows Explorer and looked at the
>> original database file, it had not been modified (same byte length and
>> date).  The instructor pointed out that Vista had created a "virtual
>> update" to the file, which resided inside Lisa's "Application Data"
>> subdir.  This file logged the changes that we made to the master file.
>>
>>    The bad news came when we logged off as user "Lisa", and logged in on
>> this same laptop as user "Ralph".  Ralph saw the original, unmodified
>> file without Lisa's changes.  We were told that if Ralph had modified
>> the file and then Lisa logged back in, Lisa would have seen only her
>> changes applied to the original file and NOT seen any of Ralph's
>> changes.  In a husband and wife checkbook scenario, this would have been
>> a perfect way for both of them to spend the same money that was in the
>> checkbook!
>>
>>    The strong message presented was to make sure if you install
>> applications like pre-Vista versions of Quicken or Quickbooks that you
>> have to make sure all the data files get stored in the special "shared
>> data" folders, or else Vista will go into this "virtual file creation"
>> mode.
> 
> Well, I don't know what this sample application did to cause a "virtual
> file creation" to take place, but it's obviously something that filePro
> doesn't do.  I created a c:\appl directory, and placed fp and filepro
> within that.  I did nothing special with these directories.  I simply
> used mkdir to create them and xcopy to copy the tree from a my XP box.
> 
> Both the first user (an admin account) and the second user (a "normal"
> account) are sharing the \appl tree, as expected.
> 
> Perhaps this is only a problem with the "\documents and settings"
> directory?  (Which Vista aliases as "\user", so you can access the
> tree from "\documents and settings\ken" and "\user\ken".)  If I get
> a chance, I'll do some searching on this.

I'm sure glad to here that.
I hope my other message turns out to be "the sky is falling"

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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