Frequently asked questions
Does Arisan work on a 64 bit OS?
Is there an interface to ARIS Business Architect, too?
Problems with Arisan, .NET3.5 and Windows Vista.
Does Arisan work on a 64 bit OS?
Yes, it does, but you should notice the following: Since ARIS itself is a 32bit application und Arisan communicates with it via P/Invoke, Arisan has to run in the 32bit .NET CLR as well. To guarantee compatibility, your application has to run in the 32bit CLR, too. Note that the default settings in Visual Studio is "AnyCPU", which causes an application in a 64bit OS to run in the 64bit CLR. So it is necessary to switch the platform target in the project settings of your application to "x86". This setting has no effect in a 32bit OS, so we highly recommend to switch to "x86" in any case.
Is there an interface to ARIS Business Architect, too?
With ARIS7 the ARIS Toolset and the ARIS Business Architect share theirs databases. So accessing the databases via Arisan means accessing the databases that of ARIS Toolset and ARIS Business Architect.
There are rumours that the ARIS toolset will run out in a future version and that there will be no similar access to the Business Architect databases. We are still in contact with IDS Scheer working on a solution. The solution that comes with the Business Architect is based on Java and doesn't provide the same power as the C-Api. Other technically possible ways to access the databases are technically fishy and not interesting for us, because they are prohibited by the licence agreement of ARIS.
We fully trust in IDS Scheer to find a good solution and hope IDS will still provide a generally accessible interface to ARIS databases. We will adapt Arisan as soon as possible to that solution.
Problems with Arisan, .NET3.5 and Windows Vista.
Using Arisan with Windows Vista you may experience a problem when trying to create a platform or when calling methods that create a platform theirselfs, like all overloadings of EasyOpenDatabase().
Background
(Skip this part if you are only interested in a quick solution)
Those problems are caused by an unfortunate interaction between ARIS, .NET and the Vista security feature UAC.
In order to protect your system against malicious software Vista is able to run processes in a mode called "virtualization". Processes that run virtualized are slightly seperated from the main system. They use a copy of the registry, write to a special parts of the HDD drives etc. Nowadays most applications not designed especially for Vista run virtualized and so does ARIS Toolset.
To run an application non-virtualized (or "UCA-compatible") the applications needs a win32manifest. This manifest is compiled directly into the executable file and tells Vista that the application is safe and complies 100% to UAC. With .NET 3.5 you are able to produce such applications. Moreover this is the default for newly created projects in Visual Studio 2008.
With that default setting your application (using Arisan) runs in compatible mode while ARIS Toolset runs virtualized. When both processes try to exchange data Vista interferes, because that is exactly the sort of action UAC is designed to prevent.
Since a win32manifest can only be part of executables we weren't able to solve this issue in the arisan.dll at all. But the solution to this is rather easy:
Solution
You just need to switch off the win32manifest. Just go to your application properties/ Application/ Resources/ Icon and manifest/ Manifest and choose "Create application without a manifest" (see figure 4). That's it.
If you are new to Visual Studio 2008 here is a step by step explanation.
Do not turn off UAC
It may seem another solution to turn off UAC entirely. Doing so solves this problem as well but we do not recommand this solution. UAC is a useful feature that is designed to protect your data and shouldn't be turned off.