Recovering files after disabling UAC virtualization

We're finally getting around to moving our software's documents out of the program's own directory and into "My Documents". We're also adding a "requestedPrivileges" line to the manifest to prevent further trouble with virtualization.

However if we only did that then anyone who had been running the old versions in Vista/7 is likely to lose their work somewhere within the hid开发者_开发百科den VirtualStore directory after updating. So what's the preferred way of migrating into the 21st century?

Frankly I'm a little wary of copying files around, especially as I can't seem to find a programmatic way of getting at the shadow directory, but presumably plenty of other people must have had the same problem before us.

Don't add requestedPrivileges unless you legitimately need administrative rights in order for your program to work - nothing in your description suggests that you do. That should also let you simply copy the files on the first boot as if they were still in your program directory, because any virtualization would still be in effect.

However, if you absolutely must do the migration without UAC enabled, you can find your files in %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore\path\to\file. For example, if your file would have been stored in C:\Program Files\OurApp\, you'll find it in %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore\Program Files\OurApp\.

To get the path to %LOCALAPPDATA%, you can use SHGetSpecialFolderPath with CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA as the CSIDL parameter.