Some of you are probably involved in some sort of Windows 7 migration preparation activities and like with any operating system migration, application compatibility is one of the most important topics you will need to focus on. If you need to do a first pre-study on your application compatibility status, then I suggest you download the Windows 7 Application Compatibility List for IT Professionals and compare the content with the applications your company or client is using, this might allow you to do a first estimate on how much effort you will need to spend on Application Compatibility related tasks.

Additional Resources:

Windows 7 Compatibility Center
TechNet Application-Compatibility-Cookbook
TechNet Application Compatibility Forum

I’ve just spend an hour in gathering some additional information around Windows 7 Application Compatibility. Till now when we moved to a new operating system version a significant amount of effort was required with regard to application compatibility. So will companies that invested in Windows Vista Application compatibility have to do all that work again for Windows 7 ?

Unfortunately not, on almost any Microsoft source i found around Application Compatibility, the following statements are being made:

“The key is, if you are ready for Vista, you will be ready for Windows 7”

“if your application can run in Vista, it can run in Windows 7”

An updated version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) for Windows 7 will be released in the coming months, but according to a comment of one of the Springboard Series participants, it would only have one additional check related to Windows 7.

Those who took a look at the Windows 7 internal version number might have noticed that this is 6.1. This is important for application compatibility as well, since many applications would check for the major operating system version number (as seen when moving from Windows XP version 5.1 to Windows Vista version 6.0.

So the conclusion is that those companies who want to accelerate their desktop migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, could actually start testing their applications against Windows Vista and / or the Windows 7 Beta version.

Additional Resources:

Be ready for Windows 7: Application Compatibility Jay Paloma, Deployment Technical Specialist from the Microsoft Singapore Office explaining Windows 7 application compatibility.

Windows 7 Application Quality Cookbook

Springboard Series

Application Compatibility and User Account Control