3VSoft Docking Windows

Discovered recently that Windows XP has really good support for WebDAV. This command will map an unused drive letter to a folder shared via HTTP:


It's that easy. Hosting a WebDAV folder is also really easy on any machine with IIS. Just add a virtual directory, point it to your chosen local path and make sure it is browsable.

I haven't used much of the built in data binding in .NET yet, preferring to keep things under my own control. However, the current project is using it heavily and I really should get up to speed before it's too late. Here is a small tip that was easy to miss on some of the project's earlier code:

In my current project we expect to need to integrate scanning documents into our database. I thought I should do a quick preliminary search on how to control a scanner from a .NET WinForms application. Here are a few links other may find useful:

• How to use Windows Image Acquisition from .NET
• Scanners supported by Windows Image Acquisition
• How to use TWAIN from .NET

Windows Vista is expected at the end of the year and security enhancements are one of the biggest talking points about Vista at the moment. One enhancement receiving a lot of attention in particular is the idea of running the system under a Limited User Account (LUA) by default.

I've always like the idea of limited permissions for improved security but it has always seemed too hard to achieve when I have tried in the past. Since then, the information, tools, and push to develop LUA-safe software have become much more popular and it is definitely where most systems are heading. Considering this, I have decided to jump onboard and attempt to use my primary Windows XP machine for all my daily tasks with a non-Administrator, non-Power User, Limited User Account.

I have read several forums and blogs discussing many different aspects of using LUAs but ultimately the replies and comments turn into a list of reasons why people don't like running without their beloved admin rights. I would like to try to use this blog to present a consistently optimistic view toward running with a LUA and look at the problems encountered and how to work around them. Maybe this will be useful to others who are interested in putting their Administrator hat aside for a while or maybe for good.

Writing this article I have been running my notebook as a limited user for one week now. I use my notebook from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday at the office and I take my notebook home at night and on weekends and use it almost every waking hour. It is the only computer I use. At the office I am .NET developer, using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 to write enterprise Windows Forms applications. At home I like to play with the latest software and mess around with new hardware. I definitely consider myself a power user and I didn't begin this expecting it to be an easy endeavour.

However, I may have an unfair advantage. I have had my notebook running with an account with admin rights since I bought it six months ago and in that time I have installed and configured all my regular programs the way I like them. I have now simply removed my account from the Administrators group and continued with my existing profile.

Logging in for the first time as a limited user, my first experiences were very good. All my documents and dev projects were still fully accessible and my regular applications (MSN Messenger, Outlook, and Firefox) worked perfectly. To my surprise Visual Studio 2005 and the SQL Server Management Studio worked fine too.

I am very satisfied with the LUA support in most Microsoft programs so far and I expect most problems will usually be due to bad third-party software. However, Microsoft Backup is an interesting one, as a limited user I don't have access to all my system files so I cannot perform a complete backup. Windows defines a security group called Backup Operators to solve this problem but I am not sure whether adding my normal account to this group would be a good idea. I guess it depends on whether this group only grants access to special file backup APIs or if it grants all access to any file operation. I think I will just login as a special backup user for performing my backups and avoid any potential problems.

Using a notebook PC means that I have a plethora of OEM applications running to "support" all the non-standard features. The power management software is the first of the bad third-party software to fail under an LUA. It simply doesn't run and as a result when my I unplug my notebook and it switches to battery power, the software isn't there to auto-adjust the LCD brightness and other power-saving options. I don't use battery power often so for now I run the power management software as Administrator whenever I need it but I will have to look into this further and maybe start hassling Acer to fix it.

My RSS aggregator, Omea Reader, refused to start, citing an error about class registration or some such thing. A quick search on the newsgroups suggested clicking the Omea "Clip and Edit" toolbar button in Internet Explorer and sure enough the software has worked fine ever since. Also, Nero Burning Rom denied access to my DVD writer, but having encountered this before I logged in as Administrator, ran the NeroBurnRights.exe tool (hiding in the Nero folder), added my account to the Nero group, and that problem was solved too.

Another minor annoyance was the inability to use one of my favourite shortcuts - double-clicking the clock in the system tray to see a quick calendar. As a limited user I cannot change the system time so that dialog is unavailable and I now resort to using my Outlook calendar (which is normally running anyway).

A very handy tool that I must recommend for LUAs is MakeMeAdmin from Aaron Margosis. This tool uses some neat batch file tricks to temporarily promote your current account to an Administrator for certain programs. The benefit of this over RunAs is that with MakeMeAdmin you still maintain your profile, user folders, and environment. I use this tool for installing new programs and for occasionally starting or stopping a service.

So far I am very happy working as a limited user (Luser) and I expect I won't be changing back to Administrator again. I am even becoming more organised with new files that I create or download because I don't have permission to dump them all in the root of my second partition anymore. I will try to keep you up to date with my progress as my LUA experience continues.

The project I am currently working on involves the new SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. So far, other members of my team have been responsible for the reporting modules but I know I will be working with it soon so I decided to do some preliminary research.

I believe in keeping my blog as a source of positive information and I prefer to post about problems where I have already found a solution I can offer to the community. However, a particular problem I have encountered with Reporting Services does not seem to have a solution, so I hope this post will bring more attention to the problem and perhaps a solution will eventually be provided by Microsoft. This is assuming that this problem is not a result of my inability to find the right documentation.

I am referring to the ReportParameter class in the Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms namespace. This class is used to pass parameters to the Report Server for determining the contents of the report produced. The problem is that the ReportParameter only seems to support String typed parameters. Considering many reports will be based on the results returned by stored procedures in SQL Server I would expect Reporting Services to be using a very similar structure for its input parameters.

With the current structure I cannot pass NULL to a ReportParameter. I would need to use special values such as -1 maybe for an int parameter and the stored procedure would need to be changed to understand that. If I want to be able to distinguish between an empty string and a NULL string I have to go to more effort to choose a special value that won’t be used in my data.

Another filter that I will commonly use for reports is a date filter. The user should be able to choose a start and end date and generate a report with data within that range. With standard Stored Procedure calling, ADO.NET will handle all the necessary converions for passing DateTime parameters in the correct format for the database. With Reporting Services I need to convert the DateTime to a String manually by considering the locale of the user’s computer and the Report Server.

ADO.NET has been built to provide a base level of data classes to suit all types of features and capabilities found in various database engines. There is no reason why Reporting Services should not have been developed the same way, especially considering this is now the second release of the product.

I am interested in reading the comments of others on this topic and if I am wrong about all this can someone please point me in right direction.

With Windows XP, I find I don’t need to reinstall my system as often as I did with previous versions. As a result there are large gaps between each installation of Visual Studio and my memory fades during this time.

One of the decisions to be made when you run a fresh install of Visual Studio for the first time is how you want the environment to be configured: General Development, Visual Basic, Visual C#, etc. Your choice here will determine default window positions, menu and toolbar items and keyboard shortcuts among other things. Each time I am faced with this decision I am not sure what I chose last time. Should I use the Visual Basic settings to suit my preferred language or should I use General Development settings so the environment is ready for me to jump around between languages and project types?

When I installed Visual Studio 2005 in November I chose Visual Basic and I have since been annoyed by the difficulty in finding the Build Configuration Manager and the quick Debug/Release chooser on the toolbar. I had assumed that this was a simple change in the UI for VS2005 so I customised the menus and toolbar to include the missing items. I intended to blog about this problem when I first noticed but it was delayed until now.

I was reminded the other day when, wandering through the .NET documentation, I stumbled across a couple of articles about hidden debug commands in the IDE. I was shocked to read that the build menus and toolbars are limited only when Visual Basic is chosen for the environment configuration. Considering in VS2005, Microsoft brought the VB language much more into line with C# and introduced low-end Express Editions for beginners, I was surprised they decided to take a step backwards and hide build configurations from VB users in the Professional version. Just when I thought Visual Basic had been promoted to a first-class language in the .NET range!

For anyone else who was baffled by this change in the new version, here is the MSDN article explaining how to get control of your builds back.

While I am now doing some serious .NET work I am finding myself blogging more about non-programming topics. I subscribe to many RSS feeds, including the aggregation provided by .NET Developers Blog. I read a post yesterday by Andre Cruz about software for monitoring system temperatures.

 I was accustomed to this kind of system monitoring software being provided with the motherboard drivers for all my desktop computers but my laptop did not include anything like this. Looking at the laptops of different brands used by my colleagues this seems to be a common oversight by laptop manufacturers.

Thankfully, the MobileMeter software mentioned in the blog provides the perfect solution. It utilises ACPI to display all the temperatures available from the system which includes processor and hard drive on my laptop and also several others on other laptops. It also shows current processor speed (I was surprised how low it drops on some of my battery power modes) and even the current battery charge or discharge rate in Watts.

The best feature however is that I can not only set the MobileMeter window to be always on top and very transparent, it will also allow all mouse operations on the window to pass through to underlying objects as though the window wasn’t there at all. This is the best system tool I have encountered since Sysinternal’s Process Explorer.

This post isn’t about .NET programming directly but it is about the tools I use when programming. I am quite fond of using batch files to execute common maintenance tasks like archiving source files or performing custom builds. However, sometimes the target folders of the actions within these batch files are located on network shares that are not mapped to a network drive. Most batch commands will happily accept UNC paths as arguments on the command line but the command prompt (cmd.exe) does not support setting the current directory to a UNC path.

I don’t like to map network drives for infrequently accesses shares and I especially don’t like mapping network drives to the hidden x$ administrative shares. A common technique is to call NET USE at the beginning of the batch to temporarily map the share until a call to NET USE /DELETE at the end of the batch cleans it up. Even better though, I found some articles on Microsoft support describing easier methods to achieve the same result.

Knowledge Base article 156276 specifies a registry key that can be changed to enable a UNC path as the current directory but this didn’t seem to work all the time for me. Article 317379 describes the more portable method of using the PUSHD and POPD directory stack commands that will automatically map an unused drive letter to the UNC path and remove it when done.

I also discovered recently that Windows XP has a built in VPN Server feature accessible from the Network Connections folder in Control Panel. Run the New Connection Wizard, select “Set up an advanced connection”, and follow the prompts. It’s scary that I am still discovering new features when I have been using Windows XP since release.