OEM Ready

TC5 and Full Page Heap

There are applications that by nature and design use a lot of memory. Examples are virtual maps or drawing applications. Those applications become unusable when you use the Full Page heap feature of Application Verifier. They slow to a crawl or use all available memory. In those situations it is acceptable to use Normal Page instead of Full. You can go in to Application Verifier, open up the Basics node in the tree, right-click Heap and select properties. Unchecking the box on the top will turn Full Page heap off.

This will make it more difficult to find heap corruption since the NA page is not there. See the AppVerifier help on Full Page heap for more details.

posted Tuesday, December 02, 2008 2:26 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

TC4 Uninstall Key

We frequently encounter confusion over testcase 4: The Uninstall Registry key. Question is to what does it apply? The answer is that it applies to your product (or application suite) as a whole. Where the other tests are about the individual executables and drivers, this one is about the whole product. An example would make it more clear.

If you install Office, individual applications are installed: Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. You would test Word and Excel for TC5 (Application Verifier) and TC7 (Restart Manager). The Uninstall key needs to be there for the product as a whole - in this case Office - and not for the individual executables.

Maarten

posted Thursday, November 20, 2008 9:24 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

OEM Ready HOL from PDC

Pat built a HOL for PDC. You can find it here.

posted Monday, November 17, 2008 6:05 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

TC7 rmtesttool and short-lived applications

I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago too. We were talking to group of a large ISV last week and there seemed to be some confusion about TC7 (Restart Manager). If you test applications that only last for a short time (converters, command line tools that change some settings then exit, etc) the OEM Ready tool will give you this error in the test log:

 WARNING: The executable C:\Program Files\MyApplication\TheApp.EXE is NOT pinned to either the desktop or the start menu. Hence, it can be ignored.

This is expected. The OEM Ready automation kicks of your application, then starts to look for it. When it finds the process, figures out if it isi a service or a regular app, it will send it a message. If by then the process has terminated, the target is gone hence the error. You can set the result of the test to Pass. Please explain in the comment session that your app is short lived.

posted Monday, October 20, 2008 1:46 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

Leaking Critical Sections and AVRF

Just posted a blog about leaking Critical Sections and how to analyze with Windbg.

posted Wednesday, October 15, 2008 10:20 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

TC7 Restart Manager and Services

rmtesttool will send a Windows application a message to shut down. If your application is a Service, it will just use the normal service APIs to shut down your service. Basically no different than issuing a "net stop " command. If your service does not implement SERVICE_ACCEPT_STOP, rmtesttool can't shut down your service. You will fail this test case.

posted Wednesday, October 15, 2008 3:25 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

Grace period for old tool

When the new OEM Ready tool becomes available later this month (slated for October 15th), there will be a period when we still accept submissions generated with the old tool. For now that will be 30 days from the moment the new tool goes live.

posted Monday, October 06, 2008 2:29 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

TC1: UAC manifest parsing error

Pat blogged about an issue with our tool when it tries to parse the sigcheck output: http://blogs.msdn.com/patricka/archive/2008/09/10/oem-ready-test-case-1-incorrectly-fails-with-a-utf-8-manifest.aspx.

posted Monday, October 06, 2008 2:28 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

TC7 and the idle state

If you have an application that really only runs for a short amount of time, the automated test in the OEM Ready tool, might and will most likely miss it. What I mean is that the OEM Ready tool will launch your app. Then it will start looking for your application's process to send it an RM message with rmlogotest. By the time it sends the message, your application might have accomplished its task and quit. Now rmlogotest flags your app as failing. You can override the test result and set it to pass. Please specify a reason in the comments section. That way we know why there is a discrepancy between the result and the test log once we receive your submission package.

posted Monday, October 06, 2008 2:27 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

Submission rejections

When we look at submissions, we will automatically reject them if they have test cases set to Fail, Pending or Exempt without a Excemption number. As an ISV there is really no point in submitting an application if not all test cases are either set to Pass or N/A. Maarten

posted Monday, October 06, 2008 2:26 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

OEM Ready technical blogging

This will be a place where we post information we find while handling submissions and when helping OEMs, ISVs with their OEM Ready efforts.

posted Monday, October 06, 2008 2:23 PM by maarten | 0 Comments

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