Microsoft has released a white paper pertaining on “how to develop UAC compliant applications for Windows Vista”, The following document contains the subjects or topics below.

This white paper includes details many aspects of designing and building applications that will work well with User Account Control (UAC) on Windows Vista.

At a high level, it describes the following steps to use when designing applications for Windows Vista:

1. Test Your Application for Application Compatibility
2. Classify Your Application as a Standard User, Administrator, or Mixed User Application
3. Redesign Your Application’s Functionality for UAC Compatibility
4. Redesign Your Application’s User Interface for UAC Compatibility
5. Redesign Your Application’s Installer
6. Create and Embed an Application Manifest with Your Application
7. Test Your Application
8. Authenticode Sign Your Application
9. Participate in the Windows Vista Logo Program

In addition, it describes some interesting setup-specific considerations. Windows Vista includes some logic to automatically prompt for elevations for processes that it believes are likely to be installer processes. For example, it will check for strings like setup, install, update and others in the name and file properties of a file.

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