Goodbye RDCMan, hello IAP Desktop
Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) is gone, it and took the Google Cloud IAP for Remote Desktop plugin with it. But now there is IAP Desktop to supersede both of them. Continue »
Automatically joining a VM to Active Directory on Google Cloud
Cloud computing is all about being able to dynamically scale, provision, and decommission resources or entire environments on demand. But the idea that infrastructure is dynamic clashes with some assumptions Active Directory is built around, and creates a challenge if you run Windows workloads in the cloud. Continue »
Understanding Windows VM initialization on Google Cloud
On Google Cloud, a Linux instance boots in about 30 seconds while a Windows instance takes a full 2 minutes to turn up – why is Windows so much slower? Continue »
22 best practices for running Active Directory on Google Cloud
Twenty years have passed since Microsoft released Windows 2000 and introduced Active Directory to the market. The excitement about Active Directory has certainly ebbed since then – but at the same time, it is difficult to overstate the impact that Active Directory has had on the IT market. Continue »
Creating an image from an ISO file
If you have been an MSDN, TechNet, or Action Pack subscriber in the past, you probably remember the binders full of discs that Microsoft used to ship. Continue »
Installing Remote Desktop Connection Manager as limited user
Installing the Remote Desktop Connection Manager requires administrator privileges. That can be a problem in a corporate environment where you might not have local administrator rights. Fortunately, there is an easy way to overcome this limitation by performing an administrative installation. Continue »
Creating a PowerShell script that can install itself as module
Powershell advanced functions are a lightweight, yet pretty powerful way to extend the set of commands available in a Powershell sessions. Advanced functions look and feel almost exactly like proper cmdlets, but they are written in Powershell and therefore quick to develop.
By default, advanced functions are ephemeral though: If you run a script containing an advanced function, that function is going to be available for the rest of the Powershell session – after that, it is gone. To make an advanced function available permanently – like a cmdlet – you have to wrap it in a Powershell module, and install that module.
Continue »Windows Hotpatching: A Walkthrough
As discussed in the last post, Windows 2003 SP1 introduced a technology known as Hotpatching. An integral part of this technology is Hotpatching, which refers to the process of applying an updated on the fly by using runtime code modification techniques. Although Hotpatching has caught a bit of attention, suprisingly little information has been published about its inner workings. As the technology is patented, however, there is quite a bit of information that can be obtained by reading the patent description. Continue »
#ifdef _WIN32
When writing processor-specific code, the _M_IX86, _M_AMD64 and _M_IA64 can be used for conditional compilation – so far, so good. But sometimes code is not exactly processor-specific but rather specific to the natural machine word length (i.e. 32 bit or 64 bit). Fur such situations, there are defines, too – however there is a little catch: For ancient 16 bit code, there is _WIN16. For 64 bit, the WDK build environment defines _WIN64 by default. Continue »
Windows Hotpatching
Several years ago, with Windows Server 2003 SP1, Microsoft introduced a technology and infrastructure called Hotpatching. The basic intent of this infrastructure is to provide a means to apply hotfixes on the fly, i.e. without having to reboot the system – even if the hotfix contains changes on critical system components such as the kernel iteself, important drivers, or user mode libraries such as shell32.dll. Trying to applying hotfixes on the fly introduces a variety of problems – the most important being: Continue »
What a weirdo: How the /analyze switch changes its behavior depending on its environment
In Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS), the “ultimate” SKU of Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft introduced the /analyze compiler switch. When the /analyze switch is used, the cl compiler not only does its regular checks, but performs a much more thorough static code analysis. While /analyze is very useful indeed, it was only available in the top SKU – the Standard and Professional versions of Visual Studio lacked support for this compiler switch (this has changed by now, Professional now also supports this feature). Continue »
LTCG issues with the WIN7/amd64 environment of WDK 7600
Now that Windows 7 is out, we all sooner or later have to upgrade to WDK 7600. I am still reluctant to move away from WDK 6000⁄6001 because of the dropped W2K support, but this is a different issue. However, as one cfix user who has obviously already adopted WDK 7600 kindly pointed out to me, linking a kernel mode unit test against cfix using WDK 7600 and the WIN7/amd64 environment fails reproducibly with the following error message: Continue »
Mixing 32 and 64-bit components in a single MSI
Definetely one my pet peeves about Windows Installer is how it deals with instruction set architectures (ISAs). Looking at Windows NT history, supported ISAs have come (amd64, IA-64) and gone (Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS) – yet most of the time, there was more than one ISA being officially supported. Having to ship binaries for multiple ISAs therefore always has been on the agenda for many ISVs. Needless to say, supporting multiple ISAs requires special consideration when developing setup packages and providing separate packages – one for each ISA – has become common practice to approach this. Continue »
Writing Data-Driven Custom Actions
Whenever Windows Installer’s built-in actions do not suffice to perform a specific task, a Custom Action needs to be written. Needless to say, Custom Actions, can be a bit tricky – not only can they be laborious to write and cumbersome to debug, they also run the risk of interfering with Windows Installer’s declarative, transactional way of performing installs. It is not really surprising that Windows Installer therefore more or less discourages the use of Custom Actions unless it is absolutely necessary. Continue »
Overview on Designing High-Performance Windows Applications
Back in 2008, the Windows Server Performance Team Blog, which I came across recently, ran a series of posts on Designing Applications for High Performance: Designing Applications for High Performance - Part I Designing Applications for High Performance - Part II Designing Applications for High Performance - Part III If you are interested in developing server side applications for Windows, these articles are definitely worth reading. Continue »
More Context Menu Handlers for Everyday Use
Although Windows Explorer may actually not be the brightest spot of Windows, it is still, for most users, among the most often used pograms. Customizing it to speed up certain tasks is thus a natural desire. A while ago, I wrote about how to extend the context menu by new commands that allow MSI packages to be installed/uninstalled with logfiles being created. The registry entries I used were: Windows Registry Editor Version 5. Continue »
On Setup Bootstrap Loaders
Almost two years ago, I wrote about how to create multi-language MSI packages. Although using transforms to internationalize an MSI package is a viable solution, one drawback of this approach is that it may require a bootstrap loader. While it is easy to say that a bootstrap loader is required and many high-profile setups do indeed use bootstrap loaders, bootstrap loaders do have their issues. They not only add complexity to the setup package, there actually are several reasons why a bootstrap loader-free setup may be preferrable. Continue »
Effective Leak Detection with the Debug CRT and Application Verifier
Programming memory leaks in C or C++ is easy. Even careful programming often cannot avoid the little mistakes that finally end up in your program having a memory leak. Thankfully, however, there are plenty of helpful tools that assist in finding leaks as early as possible. One especially helpful tool for leak detection is the debug CRT. Although the leak detection facilities provided by the debug CRT are not as far-reaching as those of, say, UMDH, using the debug CRT is probably the most friction-less way of identifying leaks. Continue »
Effective Leak Detection with the Debug CRT and Application Verifier
Programming memory leaks in C or C++ is easy. Even careful programming often cannot avoid the little mistakes that finally end up in your program having a memory leak. Thankfully, however, there are plenty of helpful tools that assist in finding leaks as early as possible. One especially helpful tool for leak detection is the debug CRT. Although the leak detection facilities provided by the debug CRT are not as far-reaching as those of, say, UMDH, using the debug CRT is probably the most friction-less way of identifying leaks. Continue »
AuxKlibGetImageExportDirectory and forwarders
One of the newer additions to the DDK is the aux_klib library, which, among others, offers the routine AuxKlibGetImageExportDirectory. As its name suggests, AuxKlibGetImageExportDirectory offers a handy way to obtain a pointer to the export directory of a kernel module. There is, however, one issue that – at least in my opinion – renders AuxKlibGetImageExportDirectory pretty much useless in most scenarios: Dealing with forwaders. The primary motivation to call AuxKlibGetImageExportDirectory is to either enumerate the exports of a module or to find a specific export. Continue »