MS Suggests Using Shims For XP-To-Win7 Transition

eldavojohn writes "Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser. Vista & Windows 7 have fixed that and implemented The Correct Paradigm. But what about the pre-Vista applications written to utilize superuser privileges? How do you migrate them forward? Well, running a virtualized instance of XP in Windows 7 is an option we've talked about. But Microsoft is pushing the idea of using 'shims,' which are a way to bypass or trick the code into thinking it's still running as user/superuser mode in Windows XP. This is an old trick that Microsoft has often employed, and it has brought the Windows kernel a long ways, in a duct-tape sort of fashion. At the TechEd conference in LA, Microsoft associate software architect Chris Jackson joked, 'If you walk too loudly down the hall near the [Windows] kernel developers, you'll break 20 to 30 apps.' So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, shims are your suggested solution."http://developers.slashdot.org/slash...9/05/22/157245
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
</img>
</img>


More...