After creating a Windows VM on Google Cloud, users can use the Cloud Console or IAP Desktop to request login credentials. But what are the risks of letting users generate credentials, and is there a way to prevent them from doing so? Continue »
13 years ago, I wrote NTrace, a dynamic function boundary tracing toolkit for Windows NT inspired by DTrace. NTrace supported both user-mode and kernel mode tracing and, like DTrace, was able to instrument machine code on the fly. Continue »
If you frequently use Remote Desktop, then you might be used to creating .rdp files for the servers you connect to most often. IAP Desktop does not support .rdp files, but there is an alternative way to open IAP Desktop and connect to a server in a single click.
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Yesterday I released version 2.11 of IAP Desktop. This new version introduces multi-display support and more. Continue »
If you are a frequent SSH user, then you’ll be familiar with local port forwarding. Creating tunnels by using local port forwarding is useful, easy, but also not without risks. Continue »
Using Azure Pipelines to deploy Cloud Run applications has recently become a lot easier. Continue »
On Tuesday, I released version 2.10 of IAP Desktop, introducing proxy auto-configuration support, better AppLocker compatibility and more. Continue »
If you have done any modern GUI development on .NET, then you are probably familiar with the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and the joys of implementing that interface.
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When you automatically provision VM instances, you might need to know when the initialization has completed so that you can connect to the VM or initiate the next deployment steps. There are a few ways to determine when a VM is ready, so let us explore what these are. Continue »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 »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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »