wintellect-blogs|Jan 5, 2008

New Year’s Resolution: PowerShell

Besides eliminating war and solving world hunger, another of my New Year’s resolutions was to use PowerShell as my command window. While you’re probably thinking using PowerShell is not much of a resolution, for me it’s huge. I do nearly everything related to software development in a command prompt. While I’m not writing my code…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 31, 2007

How to Disable the UAC Prompt for a Specific Application

While I like User Account Control (UAC), there’s always that one application that you need to run that requires admin rights. This is especially problematic if you need to automate that application from a batch file, scheduled task, or code build. While I guess you can hire someone to click on the Continue button, it’d…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 31, 2007

PowerShell Symbol Store

A while ago I wrote about Aaron Leerch‘s Symbol Server Transaction Manager, which put a nice front end on managing your Symbol Server. As I have been harping for years, if you don’t have a Symbol Server set up, you’re not doing development. Aaron’s been busy and has outdone himself with a major update, that’s…
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security|Dec 23, 2007

Security Implications Of Services Impersonating Callers

In my last post (Caller Impersonation for WCF Services Hosted Under IIS Appears Broken), I laid out my rationale for why I felt that the security of services impersonating a caller when hosted under IIS was broken. To be responsible, I feel it necessary to follow-up my previous assertion by noting that such a configuration…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 20, 2007

Code Signing – It’s Cheaper and Easier than You Thought

One of the things I’ve always wanted to do, but never got around to, is to figuring out how to sign my code. Like most developers, I never really worried about code signing until Vista came along. Maybe it’s just because I’m completely anal retentive, but I always felt a little guilty when my applications…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 18, 2007

Catching Up During the Holidays

It’s been a while since I found time to write a blog post. I’ve been occupied with a heavy teaching load, customer visits, and all the business stuff that’s necessary around year end. I usually try to use December to catch up. This year it’s been harder than usual because so much has happened around…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 16, 2007

Caller Impersonation for WCF Services Hosted Under IIS Appears Broken

There is a security feature of WCF services hosted under IIS that I find poorly implemented. In all honesty, it appears to be broken and non-compliant with its intended purpose. If you’re developing services for use in the intranet environment, then it’s quite reasonable for you to expect that a service can impersonate your Windows identity…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 10, 2007

Cumulative Patching with WiX 2.0

Sometimes I wonder if Windows Installer will be the death of me. While I’ve successfully shipped device drivers, debuggers, and all sorts of bizarre products, I have to say that trying to get something installed on Windows is one of the more frustrating things I have encountered in my career. I can’t be the only…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 2, 2007

MSBuild Debuggers!

It looks like I’m not the only one who wanted a debugger for MSBuild projects. When the MSBuild team asked everyone to spend $100 to prioritize features, the runaway winner was a debugger. Reading the comments to my original post (as well as the MSBuild team’s posts), Partho Das from Microsoft has released a Visual…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 2, 2007

PARAFFIN 1.02 – Numerous Bug Fixes

Very special thanks to Darren Stone for reporting several bugs and suggestions for PARAFFIN, my tool for assisting with maintaining Windows Installer XML (WiX) installations. I’ve posted a fixed version for your enjoyment. Here’s what’s new: Added -Win64 switch, which adds Win64=”yes” to all components. Updated the Id naming to keep all values in the…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 26, 2007

An Evening with Hannah Montana

I’m in Redmond for a few days teaching two days of advanced ASP.NET, followed by a day of ASP.NET AJAX and a day of Silverlight (the first Silverlight course offered here at Microsoft internally). The weather is cold and rainy and I’m fighting off an awful cold. Still, I’m having a heck of a good…
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wintellect-blogs|Nov 24, 2007

Adding Additional Internal Drives to Vista on a Mac Pro

I’ve written before about installing Vista x64 on a Mac Pro and how it’s the best Windows machine money can buy. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who wanted to beauty, stability, and lack of vendor crapware on my computer as my post is one of the biggest trafficked items on the whole Wintellect…
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