Internet Explorer Plugins and Vista

So I’ve recently got a new machine that came pre installed with Windows Vista.  And now I’ve got the fun task of trying to make everything work again with my plugin

 

There are a number of places where I’ve found some good info on this, which I will enumerate here for your and my benefit.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista-security/PMSurvivalGuide.aspx - A Developer’s Survival Guide to IE Protected Mode

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc138019.aspx - Inside Windows Vista User Account Control

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250462.aspx - Understanding and Working in Protected Mode Internet Explorer

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/09/528963.aspx - Protected Mode in Vista IE7

A couple of key things if you’re relying on the compatibility shims: (described in a little more detail in the 4th link)

Registry Accesses (to HKCU software) are moved to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\InternetRegistry\REGISTRY\USER\[User security identifier - SID]\Software\[my key]

File accesses (to acceptable locations) are moved to 

 %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Virtualized\{system drive letter}\Users\{username}

I hope to update more this as I dive further into updating my plugin and making it work in both XP and Vista.

IE BHO: Including local images in a remote page…

I’ve been writing an IE plugin (or BHO) and ran across a problem when I tested it under IE 7.  When I included images off of the local harddrive, most didn’t show up under IE7 (but worked fine under IE 6).  However, I noticed that one image I was using did work.

The difference was that this image was a CSS style background.  So I was able to work around this problem by simply converting all of my images to be spans/divs with the style.backgroundImage=”url(‘path to local image file‘)”.

Of course the caveat is that this behavior is probably not something they intended, and may fix it at some point.  But until then, it’s an easy change (compared to using the res protocol or a custom protocol – mentioned in the BhoWiki ) to get the job done.  Also, I’ve heard that the IE7 is slightly different under Vista as compared to XP.  I have been testing IE 7 under XP using the Microsoft Virtual PC testing images they have freely available for download (Info about it here and download page actually has XP with IE6 (if you have upgraded to IE7 already) and XP with IE7 (in case you still are running IE6 or Vista).  The article links to an older version of Microsoft Virtual PC, but you can use the latest one here (I’ve noticed it fixed some issues I saw under the old version).

Intro

Occasionally when coding, I run across something I think is particularly spiffy, or spectacularly painful. Especially when I run across the painful things that I haven’t had much luck searching for solutions, I thought it would be a grand idea to create a blog of my own to detail these in for future use by myself and others, as many times when I do find a good solution, it is in this type of forum.

Happy coding!