The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Porting WinNT software to Win2003 Server

Porting WinNT software to Win2003 Server

Does anyone now any good site about porting Win NT software to Win 2003 Server? Any general advice would also be great to get.

Thank you,
Erik Marnung

Erik Marnung
Thursday, January 22, 2004

I have helped some organizations in doing just that. It's a large topic, but here are some of the most common things I have come across.

1) If your software writes to any area of the disk other that the user's profile directory, consider changing that. Windows Server 2003 is very strict about file permissions.
2) The same applies to the registry. If you write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, consider changing that. Windows Server 2003 allows only Administrators and LocalSystem to write to HKLM.
3) A less obvious result of this tightening of security is sometimes you can fail to open a file or a registry key for just reading. This is because while using APIs like RegOpenKey, people commonly use the most "allowable" operator for the rights-desired parameter, such as KEY_ALL_ACCESS. Big name applications have made this mistake. In general, do not try to open anything with exclusive locking if your are opening it for reading.

Raj Chaudhuri
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Would need more details on what kind of software. Say you were porting web apps from IIS on NT4 (forget the version back then) to Win 2003. Warning: the security model for all CGI, ISAPI and related stuff is completely different, so any funky stuff like impersonation you might use will be broken. Bad.

But without details on the type of server app you're talking about... this is just conjecture on my part.

dir at badblue dot com
Thursday, January 22, 2004

Thanks a lot guys. Those were the early comments I wanted to have.

It is a rather complex (1m loc) business application written in VB5 that uses an Oracle 7 database. We are now scoping for this porting project and no decisions have been made. We will though as a first move assure that the VB app runs on Win2000 and then upgrade the database to Oracle 9i.

Erik Marnung
Sunday, January 25, 2004