I have written a small commandline tool that shows the Active Directory Property Sheet for a given account.

The Property sheet is what you get when you doubleclick an object in Active Directory & Computers. Basically this tool is meant to make it easy to quickly view or change properties without needing to start a GUI tool and looking up the account in the AD Tree.
(more…)

If you look into the registry in the key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\ProductOptions you will find several licensing related Values.

The ProductType and ProductSuite keys contain the OS Suite and Edition, but the ProductPolicy key is much more interesting. So let’s have a closer look at it, open RegEdit and DoubleClick the key, you will something like the screenshot below, a Binary Value:

As you can see the license names are there as a Unicode string and later on I will show you how we can read the values. But because I didn’t want to extract all the names manually I decided to see if I could reverse the used structure because it didn’t look very complicated. Using a Hex Editor I could determine the important part of the structure.

(more…)

My hoster has had some problems with the simulatesas.com domain that I use for SasLibEx enquiries. If you have sent mail to that has not been answered I kindly request you to send it again.

I would also like to briefly tell you about an upcoming new release of SasLib, version 2.0. There is so much I would like to tell you about it but I will limit it to a few highlights here and save the rest for the upcoming website on SimulateSAS.com.

• A new option to simulate Control-Alt-Delete with only user permissions (no need to be admin or even system).
• New Switch console function to reconnect closed RDP sessions for remote control.
• Supports Windows Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.
• Support for Delphi 2010, C++ Builder 2010 and will support MS Visual C++ 2010 once it reaches RTM.
• Native x64 support.

I feel especially good about 2.0 because further improvements were made to the code, again some highlights:

• Full documentation of all functions, parameters and known possible errors.
• 80% of the code was rewritten from scratch.
• Uses techniques like annotations to further reduce the chance of programing errors.
• Structured testing.

I never liked the new eventviewer that was introduced with Windows Vista. If you want to have the old eventviewer back (you can use the old and new one together) you need to follow the following steps:

1. Open a command prompt as Adminstrator.
2. Type Regsvr32 els.dll (if you get error code 0×80070005 then you didn’t run as Administrator).
3. Start mmc.exe and goto File | Add/Remove Snapin.
4. From the available Snapins choose “Classic Event Viewer”.
5. Right-Click Classic Event Viewer under Console Root and select New Window from Here.
6. Choose Customize from the View menu.
7. Deselect the Action Pane and Click OK
8. Now save the file with a name of your choice eg EventVwrC.msc.

It should look like this:

Doubleclicking an Event feels familiar as well:

Windows Vista introduced the Command Bar in Explorer which is sometimes also referred to as the Folder Band or the Task Band. The Command Bar is of course also present in Windows 7 and Server 2008 (R2).

This Command Bar shows possible tasks or actions depending on the active folder. I wanted to remove the “Uninstall or change a program” (in Dutch this is called “Een programma verwijderen of wijzigen”) button from the Computer view:

(more…)

I just installed my laptop with Windows 7 (x64) and I was curious how the new Windows XP mode worked (more on that topic later). After installing it I could no longer start any Virtual Machines in VMWare Workstation. The VM fired up but immediately halted with the following error: “VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)” “VCPU 0 RunVM failed: -2″.

(more…)