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 0x80070005 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:

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This is more a note to self because I always forget. Explorer holds all it’s settings in memory so if you change a settings through the GUI (like in Folder Options) you cannot use a tool like Process Monitor to see what the corresponding registry entry is.

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I needed to add a printer connection to a Citrix server but the problem was that this printer had a buggy driver. I wanted to use an alternative driver such as the Citrx Universal Printer driver but on Terminal Server you might want to use the Terminal Services Easy Print driver.

So I decided to make something that could be used in both situations, the result is a small commandline tool called AddPrinter2 (sorry I am not good in finding original names).

It takes 2 parameters: the printername as unc path and the driver name. An example would be:

AddPrinter2 “\\server\printer” “Citrix Universal Printer”.

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A few days ago I noticed that an unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 5 was installing very slowly. When I looked at the various jobs and their installation time in the (Altiris) Deployment Server I saw that it was the Citrix Access Management Console that took almost 45 minutes to install:

It was clear that this wasn’t normal since the install job is taking installing OS components like IIS and all subcomponents, activating Application Server and reboot in around 9 minutes. The installation of Citrix XenApp itsself takes only 14 minutes.

I searched with Google and one of the first links was this knowledge base article from Citrix: Slow Access Management Console Installation on XenApp 5.0. The article clearly describes that the delay is occurred by failing checks for Publisher’s and Server Certificate Revocation (because there’s no Internet Connection) and suggests to turn these checks off. Indeed my servers do not have a direct internet connection so the cause and solution were clear.

And actually I had seen similar issues before in other (non Citrix) installations, some examples are Exchange 2007 (here and here) and SQL Server 2008 (the SQL Installer actually checks if there’s an internet connection in the prerequisites check).

The suggested, manual way, of turning of these checks is to clear the following checkboxes in Internet Explorer’s advanced settings Dialog:

But since I had to do this on many servers I decided it would be better to do it with a little VBS script.

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I was deploying an unattended installation of Citrix XenApp 5.0 with Altiris Deployment Server. The installation consists of several prerequisites, the installation of XenApp and finally the Citrix Management Consoles.

The installation is performed with a special account and not the Local System account because the install packages are located on the network.

When testing the deployment on a Windows Server 2008 I noticed that sometimes MSI based installations would fail with error code 1603 or 1601.

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I have found and tested some new functionalities which I will add to SasLibEx:

• Unlocking workstation without entering password
• Cancel UAC (User Account Control) request
• fully disable Ctrl-Alt-Del
• Cancel Ctrl-Alt-Del
• Switch between secure desktop (where the UAC prompt is) and the normal desktop.

Some people asked if SasLibEx works on x64 or Windows 7, the answer is yes. I tested on build 7000 of Windows 7 beta and also on Server 2008 x64.

This is part 3 of the TSAdminEx Features series. Today I will discuss the Process View. As usual we will start by comparing TSAdmin to TSAdminEx again. So let’s look at TSAdmin Process View:

And the one from TSAdminEx:

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Part1

Now that a TSAdminEx beta is ready I will be showing you some features. In this part I will show the Sessions View.

Let’s start again with a compare of TSAdmin and TSAdminEx:

As you can see TSAdminEx shows more details, it shows the following extra columns:

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