Monday 26 January 2015

MapGuide on Windows 10

Since Microsoft released a new preview build of Windows 10, I'd thought I give it a spin on VirtualBox.

My first impressions are simply that I am so happy to see the return of the Start Menu!



The other pleasant surprise was to see that the command prompt was finally resizable!

But my main motivation for giving Windows 10 a spin was to see if MapGuide will run on it. So I downloaded the 3.0 preview release.

I ran the installer and got this.



Okay, this normally means I have to manually "unblock" the executable in the file properties before retrying, so I did exactly that.

Except unblock does nothing! Is this a bug?



So before I chew out Microsoft for their "UAC v2.0" over-zealousness with this SmartScreen feature, I decided to click the "More Information" link on the SmartScreen dialog to see if it does anything and lo and behold, it gives me the options to finally run the thing!


Terrible UX there Microsoft. The "Run Anyway" option should be visible IMO and not concealed in the "More Information" link.

Nevertheless, after negotiating this little obstacle the installer ran after the UAC prompt. I decided to try the IIS/.net install option since:

  • PHP and its MapGuide API bindings is installed regardless (it's why mapguide-rest will/should just work out of the box on any supported version of MapGuide), so we can also verify the PHP bits are working by loading a package through the Site Administrator
  • This is the configuration that we always want to confirm and verify when testing support for newer versions of windows. The Apache/PHP/Java configurations are mostly self contained and can be generally trusted to work on any windows platform where there is a matching Visual C++ runtime library and a working Java SDK/RE for it.
So after waiting the normal amount of time for a MapGuide install to complete.


The Site Administrator runs without issues, allowing me to load my sample data package. Firing up the AJAX viewer (that is bound to the .net implementation due to my installation choice), shows that it is indeed functional


So there you have it. MapGuide 3.0 works on Windows 10. 

Given its current Technical Preview status, we cannot realistically have Windows 10 as a supported platform for MapGuide 3.0, but should you want to try, chances are MapGuide should work as evidenced by this post.

6 comments:

Ivan Milicevic said...

Did you try Ajax Viewer@spartan browser?

Jackie Ng said...

Spartan doesn't seem to be in this build.

David said...

1. SmartScreen is a feature that was introduced with Windows 8 and is not new to Windows 10. This feature is on by default when installing Windows 8 or newer and can be configured in Control Panel -> System -> Action Center -> Security -> Windows SmartScreen. It is separate to UAC and can be configured separately to UAC.

2. The "Run anyway" link is deliberately hidden from users by design. People *never* *ever* read dialogs and placing the "Run anyway" button the dialog would completely defeat the entire purpose of SmartScreen. People wouldn't differentiate the SmartScreen dialog from an "Run program after downloading" dialog.

3. Spartan is not included in the public preview build 9926.

Jackie Ng said...

I was always under the impression that SmartScreen was the evolution of the "Unknown Executable" dialog on Windows 7 that is shown when you run any downloaded executable, that would go away when you unblock the executable in the File properties dialog. Thus my expectation around the SmartScreen feature lined up with how I expected this "feature" to work in Windows 7.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jackie.

I'm trying to install either MapGuide 2.6 x64 or MapGuide 3.1 Beta x64 on Windows 10 Enterprise, but with both I have the following issue.

When I get to the screen "IIS Configuration Settings" and choose .NET, I click on the button "Next" and it does not do anything. I have started the executable with "Run as Administrator" just in case.

Any suggestion.

Thank you very much in advance.

Diego

qwqwqwq said...

Hi Jackie\Diego,

Could you get MapGuide 2.6 x64 or MapGuide 3.1 Beta 2 x64 working on Windows 10 Enterprise ??
Am having the exact issue on Windows 10 Pro...

regards
Biju