HOW TO: Getting Certified for Windows Vista logo
Hurray! The product we have been developing for one of our customers successfully passed Microsoft’s “Certified for Windows Vista” 
logo testing (in fact we already have two applications passed it by this time). Since the product itself doesn’t require deep interaction with the system, we expected that preparing it for the submission would be a piece of cake but it wasn’t that simple. Actually it wasn’t simple at all. It took 3 weeks and two working weekends to put it together and submit for testing with confidence.
We started by getting Vista iso from MSDN downloads and installing it under VMWare Server. We used VMWare to have “physical” (as opposed to Remote Desktop) access to that system from different workplaces. That was the simple part yet we found that it won’t install from iso directly but rather needs to be burned on real DVD (the iso is 2.5 Gb) and installed from there. It is reported that the reason is VMWare’s bug causing problems handling large iso images. Anyways, we get it installed and working (oh by the way it’s still working exactly on the same processor, which fed this web-page to you — both Linux, running this webserver and our test Windows Vista are running under VMWare on the same physical server — isn’t it amazing?)
The application was correctly installed and working fine at the first glance however the second revealed that Open file dialog doesn’t show up and you can’t load any project files from inside the application. It was an interesting effect especially considering that the dialog we use is the standard one. Next we noticed that file extension, which should be associated with our program wasn’t registered so project files couldn’t be opened that way either. Urgh… and all that even before we started reading Vista test cases! Metalink » How to: Getting Certified for Windows Vista logo