If this is your first visit, take your time and look around. Here are some things you might be looking for:

• SasLibEx: a library that can simulate the Secure Attention Sequence (Ctrl-Alt-Del) but it can even unlock a workstation or session without entering or needing the user’s credentials (and many more things).
• Who locks my file?
• Patch 32 bit Windows to use the full 4 GB (and even more) memory
• Patch Terminal Server to allow more Concurrent Sessions: 2003, Windows XP X64, 2003 X64, 2008, Vista
• Some of my freeware tools such as LaunchRDP, RDP Password Encryption, Active Directory Excel Addin, RDP Clipboard Fix (well this list can go on and on, see also the Downloads section).

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After changing AWS accounts I resetup my API key so I could use the AWS PowerShell CmdLets.

However even though I was sure I configured everything correctly I couldn’t call any EC2 cmdlet. More about that further below but let’s refresh how to setup an API key for PowerShell:

The procedure to do this is quite simple:

First you create an IAM user (go to Services | IAM) then in the left treeview select Users or use this direct link.

Click Add users or use this direct link, give the user a name and select “Access key – Programmatic access”

In the next screen select the appropriate permissions, in this screenshot I’m using AdministratorAccess but this of course means you’re giving this user the permissions to do absolutely anything.

So have a good look at the minimum permissions that you actually require.

Click Next on the Add tags screen and the Review screen should look something like this:

On the next screen you will get the Access key ID and the Secret access key. Note that this is the only time you will get to see the Secret access key so use the copy button or Download the .csv file (but delete it from disk when you’re done of course).

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post but it does feel good so I’m expecting to pick up blogging in a more regular cadence soon!

This one is a quicky though, as I had an annoying issue with Ubuntu 22.04 VM’s running on VMware workstation.

Every time I attempted to paste a (larger) file from the host it would crash Ubuntu’s File Explorer (Nautilus):

click video above to play

Fortunately I found a workaround:

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I had a strange issue today: I couldn’t open any webpage in the Edge browser on my Windows 10 machine:

The network icon was showing that there was Internet access and a quick check on the command prompt showed that the connection (including name resolution appeared to work fine):

Other browsers such as Firefox (my default browser) and Chrome also worked fine but some other Microsoft applications also didn’t work such as the Microsoft Store:

I had a strange error today using the Desktop App Converter with the parameters given from the Store for Business.

The conversion would fail with the following error:

I’m not sure why this fails as the PackageName is provided by the store and should be valid. An answer on stackoverflow suggested to use a different value for the PackageName parameter and then edit the manifest.

I don’t like this method as manual modifications of the manifest often leads to errors when submitting the application to the store.

So let’s have a look and see why we’re getting this error.

I searched for E_MANIFEST_USE_DEFAULT_VALUE_FAILED in the DesktopAppConverter folder and found 1 occurence in ManifestOps.ps1.

From a look at the code it wasn’t immediately clear where the validation failed so I decided to debug it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was trying to sign an .appx package that I created with the Desktop App Converter. However signtool returned the following error: Sign returned error: 0x800700C1
For more information, please see http://aka.ms/badexeformat

Sadly signtool doesn’t return more detailed information, even when passing the debug switch:

So what’s going on?

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Recently I installed a new Windows 10 machine (version 1709 aka Fall Creators Update).

After a while I noticed a problem with the Task Scheduler: when I wanted to open the “Schedule Tasks” option from settings I received the following error message:

The Task Scheduler MMC snapin was empty:

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When using the Desktop App Converter there’s no need to sign the resulting .appx packages with your own code signing certificate when you submit them to the Store.

However if you want to test the package on a different machine or distribute it to test users you may want to sign the .appx with a certificate.

One option is to use the -sign parameter, in this case the Desktop App Converter generates a code signing certificate and signs the package with it. Although easy to use, it’s not very convenient if you want to distribute the .appx as you need to add the certificate to the Trusted People certificates store (for each user). See Run the Packaged App in the documentation.

If you want to sign the .appx package with a trusted certificate (e.g. issued by a trusted certificate authority such as DigiCert) you need to make sure that you pass the subject (the CN) from your code signing certificate to the Desktop App Converter (using the -Publisher parameter).

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Just a very quick note here (mostly a note to self) but I had a couple of folder from previous Windows 10 installations named Windows.old Windows.old(1), Windows.old(2) etc.

These folders should be removed when you use Disk Cleanup and select the “Remove previous Windows Installation(s)” option.

However I already did that and for some reasons a subfolder named C:\Windows.old\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw
5n1h2txyewy\LocalState couldn’t be deleted and therefore the parent folder couldn’t be deleted.

I couldn’t delete them with Windows Explorer nor via the cmd prompt or PowerShell. Then I tried to use the \\? prefix and that worked:

I have been working with Microsoft’s Desktop App Converter a lot recently. Even though there’s an option to autosign the resulting package with the -Sign switch I prefer to sign APPX packages myself using signtool.

The reason is that I can send UWP packages to testers for sideloading without requiring them to import the auto generated certificate (which is different on each (re)build).

However I always forget the exact path to signtool.exe (this comes with the Windows SDK).

The Windows 10 SDK is installed by default in C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10.

Signtool.exe will be in the folder<sdkpath>\bin\<version>\<platform>\signtool.exe.

As there are multiple version of Windows 10 there are multiple version of the SDK and you can install those concurrently.

But then I found the PowerShell cmdlet Resolve-Path which “Resolves the wildcard characters in a path, and displays the path contents”.

This does exactly what I need:

Wow, Resolve-Path is a perfect example of the many hidden gems in PowerShell!

So I decided to wrap signtool.exe in a PowerShell cmdlet as PowerShell also makes it easy to locate the correct code signing certificate from the certificate store. Read the rest of this entry »