I went to a fairly good talk this morning on the topic of managed/unmanaged interop issues when programming for VISTA. The core problem is that many of the development tools you'd use to program for this platform won't be ready by the time of release, and so some of the fancy .Net tools and short-cuts we're accustomed to won't be available. As a result, certain situations may require interop to the native APIs of the platform. Cases discussed included:
- UAC-aware applications
- User Access Control
- Windows VISTA desktop search,
- Integrated into the client experience in many ways
- CommandLinks
- The new "button" that's available in Windows VISTA giving allowance for a more descriptive text region.
- Common File Dialogs
- Presenting the new file dialog interface to clients.
...and so forth. The actual points made, however, wasn't of special interest to me as I believe I could find my way around them if I encountered them, but the fact that I may have to do interop to catch up to certain user interfaces was the most important "point" I took away from the talk.