Deans Blog

On performing an installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, I was prompted with the application compatibility warning for both Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, which required user input in order to proceed.

In order to suppress the application compatibility warning for both the above applications I was required to modify the registry for the Program Compatibility Assistant and add the GUID for each application.

I obtained the GUID for each application by downloading and installing the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7352).

To determine the GUID from the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit you will need to perform the following steps:

1) Collapse the System Databases node.

2) Collapse the Applications node:

3) Browse the list of applications until you find the name of your application to which you require to suppress the application compatibility warning (in this case Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005).

4) Browse to the name of the file (in the case of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 this is setup.exe and for Visual Studio 2005 this is devenv.exe)

5) Right click the file and select Disable Entry this will create the registry key required to suppress the application compatibility warning in the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags

In this example I obtained the following GUID to enable the silent install of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 whilst suppressing the application compatibility warning as illustrated in the screenshot below:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (setup.exe) – {3d06c673-5e8a-41c0-b47f-3c3ca0a22e67}

Vistual Studio 2005 (devenv..exe) – {5f66dbae-cad3-468a-83d0-77ace8abc1f6}