Last May at TechEd US, I sat down for a six-minute interview with Matt Hester about the Windows Sysinternals Administrators Reference (the book I co-authored with Mark Russinovich ) and issues I see in my work with customers .  That interview, part...

My colleague Shelly Bird , a highly esteemed Architect in Microsoft Public Sector Services, has years of experience in desktop and server deployments.  She has seen what works and a whole lot of what doesn’t.  Now she is bringing her observations...

The correct ways to identify folder paths to store files depends on the programming technology you use. This blog post shows how to do it in C++, C# and VB. NET, PowerShell, Windows Script Host (VBScript and JScript), and as a last resort, environment variables.

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The venerable PrivBar toolbar for IE and Explorer now shows the Integrity Level of the current page.  (Helps mitigate the removal of the Protected Mode indicator from the IE9 toolbar.)

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We have a lot of really smart people at Microsoft, but among those there are a handful who are the most knowledgeable and the most helpful, the go-to people upon whom I can reliably depend for accurate and detailed answers to rarely-asked or never-before...

Many of you have long wished for comprehensive, detailed documentation of the Sysinternals utilities. It has finally arrived . Over two years in the making, the Windows Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference (written by Mark Russinovich and me) is now...

The two sessions I presented last week at Tech-Ed North America 2011 are now available for on-demand online viewing: Unintended Consequences of Security Lockdowns (which got an unexpected and appreciated plug from Raymond Chen ) is here: http://channel9...

I just posted a major update to IEZoneAnalyzer, my IE security zone analysis and comparison utility, over on the Microsoft FDCC/USGCB blog. Lots of new features, including saving settings so they can be viewed and compared later and on other computers...

Getting Law Manager v2.4 to run on Windows 7 Overview Several of my customers run old versions (circa 2003) of a legal case management application called Law Manager , since acquired by Bridgeway. These customers reported that their old versions of Law...

LUA Buglight 2.1.1 is attached to this blog post and replaces v2.1. It adds support for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. It also fixes a localization bug. Now that I've (pretty much) finished work on the Windows Sysinternals Administrators...

I'm presenting a couple of sessions at Tech-Ed in Atlanta (May 16-19, 2011) : The first is " Unintended Consequences of Security Lockdowns ", which was very highly rated when I presented it last month at TechReady, Microsoft's internal training event...

[Update May 17, 2011: this blog post has been republished as Microsoft Knowledge Base article 2526083 ] Applies To Windows Server 2008 (all editions except Server Core) Windows Server 2008 R2 (all editions except Server Core) Summary Under...

TechEd sessions are available for on-demand viewing. Here are some recent ones that Chris Jackson (The App Compat Guy) and I have delivered recently on Application Compatibility and more... What Everyone Should Know about Application Compatibility...

Many of our customers make Adobe Reader part of their standard desktop image, or at least have it on the majority of their systems. Because of its ubiquity, Reader has become a major target for cybercriminals, with a scary increase in the number of exploited...

I wish I had the time to write up proper documentation for LUA Buglight , the utility I wrote that identifies admin-rights issues in desktop applications. LUA Buglight is one of many "spare time" projects I work on, and for the past year and a half or...

Kind of late to be posting this, but better late than never. I'm presenting three sessions at Tech*Ed in New Orleans this week: WCL204: What EVERYONE Should Know About Application Compatibility (co-presenting with Chris Jackson ) WCL301: Case...

Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich’s recent post “ The Machine SID Duplication Myth ” confused many readers who didn’t understand the distinction between the two independent SIDs that belong to a domain-joined computer.  I’ll take a crack...

LUA Buglight 2.1, identifies admin-permissions issues ("LUA bugs") in desktop applications. New version supports Windows 7 (x86 and x64), Vista (x86 and x64), XP (x86 only) and corresponding Server OSes....

Because of my work with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration, I’ve published a set of three utilities that manage Local Group Policy.  The newest of these (ImportRegPol) parses registry.pol files and can convert their content to text.  I’ve...

Aaron Margosis appearing on a virtual round table this week about Windows 7 application compatibility, hosted by Mark Russinovich....

Sample code to demonstrate one way to start a program as the [non-elevated] desktop user from an elevated app....

A simple VB6 app to demonstrate "LUA bugs" - useful for testing tools and remediation techniques. Source code provided....

Second Preview Version of LUA Buglight 2.0 -- a utility to identify admin-permissions-required issues in desktop applications...

I'm on the schedule to speak at Tech*Ed EMEA in Barcelona the week of November 3-7. I've got three sessions listed below (sharing CLI08-IS with Chris Jackson ): Code Title Date/Time CLI403 Tools for Identifying...

PrivBar and MakeMeAdmin suddenly disappeared a few weeks ago. They're back, and PrivBar is now available for x64 too....