After launching the newly installed RAD Studio XE for the first time it tried to install something. This failed because I didn’t run it elevated which makes Windows 7 fire the Program Compatibility Assistant:

It would be better for Embarcadero to detect if we run elevated and only run the installer when we are (or request elevation).

Maybe it’s time for Embarcadero to use Jwscl which make such things very easy?

Just noticed this is my Start Menu after installing RAD Studio XE:

Luckily Clicking Delphi XE launches 2010…

RAD Studio XE has (just?) been released, see http://www.embarcadero.com/rad-studio-xe-preview

While browsing through my old projects folder I found a little commandline tool that I wrote about a year ago. I needed to detect a certain published application on a Citrix environment in the loginscript.

The tool detect the current Citrix published applicationname or if you are running Terminal Server aka Remote Desktop Services the Initial Program name and stores this in an environment variable (APPNAME).

There are no parameters and there are no special dependancies (such as MFCom).

I have installed a new rating plugin that gives you, my readers, a convenient and fast method to give feedback. So please do so, let me know what posts you find interesting!

I have also added a Contact form in case you have any questions, article suggestions or maybe even consultation requests. The contact page is an attempt to streamline the e-mails I get from this blog so I hope this will work 🙂

Today just some fun stuff with ASM, probably not the most recommended way to do things but for sure the most geeky way 😛

Get the Current Session Id:

Get the Current Console Session Id:

And… if we can read it we can also write it?

and

You can safely try it since it of course affects the current process only, so don’t worry.

And perhaps more usefull

I needed to obtain the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for a given NetBios domain name. Eg from MYDOMAIN to dc=mydomain,dc=local.

I did some tests with the TranslateName API and if you append a \ to the domain name it returns the FQDN.

Here is a short example:

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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.

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Again a about post about using the Virtual TreeView component (did I mention it’s brilliant?), this time I will talk about memory leaks.

I often use Records to hold the treedata, and usually the record holds some string data (eg a caption) and an (a reference to) an Interface or Object(List) that holds more data.

If you are familiar with Virtual Tree then you know that you must can the NodeData in the OnFreeNode event.

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When working with the Virtual TreeView component the most optimized way of adding (or removing child nodes is by changing the ChildCount.

I often make the mistake of change the ChildCount of a Node using:

If you look into the source you will see why this will not work, the proper way is:

This is mainly a note to self since I tend to forget it all the time 😉