Vista, DEP, and F5 COM API

Below I will paste in a link to an article on MSDN about a change introduced in the Visual Studio compilers.

 

 

Last year I developed an application that uses the F5 Networks AppTunnel Type Library to establish and mannage tunnels. I developed this app with VS2005.

 

 

Now I find that this app (even the F5 sample app) when compiled under VS2008 gets the NX_COMPAT flag set, but the apps do not work correctly and cannot establish a session and tunnel.

 

 

If the flag is turned off on the binary, or the system-wide NX policy is changed to AlwaysOff with bcdedit, the apps work as expected.

 

 

Admittedly, this is new to me and I'm a little fuzzy on the meaning of it all, but I think it may mean that the F5 AppTunnel library is executing code from memory pages not marked executable.

 

 

Any thoughts? Comments? Anybody else run into this yet?

 

 

Here's the URL to the article: http://blogs.msdn.com/ed_maurer/archive/2007/12/14/nxcompat-and-the-c-compiler.aspx