Installing a database to be written to by all users
I have searched on this topic but I still can't make head nor tail of it - I have spent a couple of hours again tonight surfing and reading microsoft papers. Many apologies if this has been explained many a time. I worked hard over the last two weeks to make alterations and its still virtualizing my files!
I use Visual Studio 2005 and its a fairly simple database driven app. At first I had all my data stored in the application directory. Then I came across some problem with users who had changed to Vista. Data went missing during an automatic app-upgrade. And so I was initiated into folder virtualization.
So I followed the Microsoft guides to write all user data as specified ..
'Write per-computer data to Users\All Users\Application Data:' which I put into the deployment project of vs as [CommonAppDataFolder]... ..which ends up in 'programdata' and this seems to be correct. There is other application data in here (Adobe, etc). However, this also gets virtualised which suprised me. The other applications data (Adobe) in this folder doesn't. Is there anyway I can stop this? I could make a copy of this data to the User application data folder when a user first runs the app. So for each new user login, a copy is made for that user if the data doesn't already exist in their 'own' app data (is that whatthis thread is suggesting?). Or I could move it to the public documents (as inthis post) but I don't really want users to be able to access or see the data (only administrators). I would really appreciate it if someone could point me in right direction. Many thanks, Jon.
