Making VisualStudio 2003 run on Vista

Posted on:October 30 2007

Visual Studio 2003 doesn't work correctly on Vista: It would crash every now and then. Instead of patching this, Microsoft obviously decided to show a message box with text like 'This program is known to cause problems in Vista jadajadaja'. If you open the Find/Replace dialog in VisualStudio 2003, it will crash nearly always, for example. A simple workaround is to disable the Aero Window manager in Vista: Visual Studio will then run like a charm, even (or maybe especially) without SP1 applied.
Which makes me wonder: What the hell are they doing in that Find/Replace dialog? Or what is Aero doing behind the scenes at that piece of code? Very strange.

Comments:

Hehe, exactly that message box caused quite a lot of amusement at my work. :-) Only because of the message itself, of course, not because of possible crashes. We run Vista in VMWare images, only, so probably that's the reason why we never actually experienced any crashes.

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2007-10-30 17:01:00

Yeah, discovered that myself a while ago. Find/Replace must be doing something really evil! (though IIRC it crashes in Find in Files... single-file Find is okay).

Aras Pranckevici

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2007-10-30 17:21:00

many apps which used some of the more quirky/interesting features of GDI don't work in vista, since GDI has been mostly deprecated. As for what the search box might do, I dunno, but I know I get wierd problems with VS2005 also if I don't patch it, and sometimes other apps too, vista can usually handle it via the annoying "a program is trying to display a message but can't" thing which bring up a GDI desktop in a compatibility mode so the program can get by.

buhatkj

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2007-10-30 23:50:00

Man if this keeps up im NEVER upgrading to Vista. I just don't see the point, and I can get all eye candy I want in CompizFusion too...

BlindSide

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2007-10-31 01:43:00

Heh, that's really interesting - I haven't installed 2003 on my Vista machine, only 2005, and for that disabling UAC was pretty much a requirement to avoid all the irritating crap it throws up. I also have Aero turned off anyway because it just heats up the laptop for zero practical benefit.

steve

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2007-10-31 12:24:00

Hah check out what happened the other day: http://qdb.us/113684

Blin

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2007-11-01 17:27:00

Err that was me before, I pressed post before typing my whole name in by accident. And yeah I got op privelages in #sparta on freenode.net ^^

BlindSide

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2007-11-01 17:46:00

How did you get front page extensions working for iis? Did you use that beta download?

A Nonymous

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2007-11-02 13:40:00

Why do You need Visual studio 2003 on Vista? Visual studio 2005 does it's well. It's fully compatible and more C++ compliant. I thought they published this product especially for new OS support. And there is free version. So don't bother old things don't work, the new one do.

Max

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2007-11-10 15:13:00