James Finnigan : Vista

How to launch an un-elevated process from an elevated process

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:11:03 GMT

This question has come up a fair amount lately. The short answer is that you don't* - instead you should:

first launch an unelevated process
have that unelevated process launch an elevated process and wait for it to finish (or use some form of IPC)
have that unelevated process then do what you wanted the elevated process to un-elevate and do

OK, but why? When you elevated there's a good chance that you also changed users. If you simply had a way to generate the split token associated with the elevated user, then you would be running as the wrong user.

This is all documented, of course, in the Windows Vista Application Development Requirements for User Account Control Compatibility document (I hate sentence names).

* Caveat: There is still a way to launch a process as that original user with the split token - use task scheduler (see the linked document for the source code). I don't recommend using task scheduler (I recommend the process above), but there are times when your choices are limited.

RegNamespace sample up on codeplex

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:07:45 GMT

Scott, Jerry, Thayn and I have whipped up a sample of indexing the registry, as well as a shell folder (namespace extension) for viewing it. It's great to be able to search the registry via the index and it's great sample of how to create a shellfolder, protocol handler, and even an IFilter. So head on over to the codeplex site and check out the source code, or if you're more interested in having it than seeing how it's build, just download the binaries and enjoy!

This is something that we're looking to improve over time, adding features and generally fleshing it out to be a rich, complete experience. We're not yet to feature parity with Regedit, but it won't be too long.

If you're interested in samples related to shell programming also check out shellrevealed.

RE: How to get rid of that pesky Windows Welcome Center at FIRST boot

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:13:00 GMT

While reading blog comments about Welcome Center, I came across this entry on how to remove welcome center at first boot.

...

With a simple .reg file though, you can kill Windows Welcome Center dead on first boot — simply put the following into your .reg file and save it, run it, or add it to your scripts:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run] "WindowsWelcomeCenter"=-

...

That will do it. But if you run this command instead, you can avoid creating a file and the elevation prompt.

reg delete HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /v WindowsWelcomeCenter /f

Oh, and sorry about waiting until the second time you see it before displaying the checkbox - that wasn't my idea. (Welcome Center was a feature with a lot of input.)

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 05:40:00 GMT

I was just looking at the Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista video. Wow. It's gorgeous. It's nice to see people doing amazing things with Avalon/WPF. I was particularly impressed with the great flow and visual as you select the background color (pictured, but watch the video about 2/3rds in for the full effect).

I look forward to more luscious apps like this - looks like I may need to dust off my WPF skills and try making a few things myself (too many projects, too little time).

Bernie Klinder ♡ Guided Help

jamesfinnigan — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:55:38 GMT

From Bernie's review of Windows Vista's killer features...

Guided Help and Automated Diagnostics -- A large number of help desk calls are for simple technical issues that aren't difficult to resolve but are somewhat time consuming to explain to a remote non-technical user. Network issues, printing issues and device drivers are common scenarios that Windows Vista will automatically attempt to fix. Many other common issues are handled via a Guided Help menu that pops up when an error occurs – prompting users to resolve the issue themselves with help from the OS. For IT professionals, performance monitoring and task management tools are easier to use and provide more information.

Also in the list:

Integrated Search
Power Management
Network Management
Ad Hoc Wireless
Presentation Mode (AWESOME)
Previous Versions
Mobility Center
Document Previews
Guided Help and Automated Diagnostics
Aero

Thanks Bernie - glad you like it!

[via Developing for .NET]

Microsoft CES website - Group Shot pictures

jamesfinnigan — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 06:09:25 GMT

Here's Microsoft's CES website. There's a ton of interesting stuff on here. The one that will probably impact me the most is Group Shot. Not that the rest isn't incredibly cool, it's just that I have the groupshot problem a lot. :)

These two images becomes combined (source can be seen bottom left) to look like bottom right. How cool is that for group pictures (particularly those involving small children).

Sabarinath Nair reviews Guided Help, Vista

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 10:37:00 GMT

Sabarinath had this to say about Guided Help:

Guided Help

While this feature is still under beta, I believe this would be an interesting feature to have. In addition to having descriptive help files, Guided Help teaches you visually how to do the tasks. It also allows you to record steps, from which you can build your own guided help for your application.

Thanks for reviewing Guided Help and thanks for your desire to have Guided Help move from beta to product. Good news - Guided Help is no longer in beta. Guided Help has shipped both as part of Windows Vista and as part of http://support.microsoft.com/. There are lots of interesting next steps for Guided Help (it's not "done"), but we are out of beta and into customers hands.

Also, it's not generally intended for consumers to author your own guided help content (or even most ISVs - I talked about this in my first post about authoring guided help topics.). Still, this is definitely an interesting direction.

As for the rest of Vista - I have difficulty articulating how many new features there really are. Some of my favorites include Search, DVD Maker, Networking analysis, security improvements galore, ... really just tons of stuff. Just start exploring - the photo gallery stuff is great. Well, I'm a technology geek, but when my wife asked me to upgrade our other home computer to Vista it really showed me how much she appreciates that it's better (and not just the freecell game ;) ). Unfortunately, I declined because it's a bit of a gutless machine (900mhtz) that trudges along on XP and is only upgradable to 512 meg of RAM - XP is snappier at that level of memory than Vista. But Vista performs better in my experience above that threshold than XP.

Well thanks for taking the time to review Vista - I think it's a great product. I understand your frustration with increasing software demands on hardware, but there are a lot of improvements particularly in the area of security, reliability and graphics that lead to this. I would also like to see more work on improving the performance in the next version because I think that we can still do quite a bit better, but it's a complex problem.

Windows boot screens though time

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 08:56:13 GMT

Long Zheng shows off the progression in the screen that is both the first thing we see and the last thing we want to spend time looking at.

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Windows Vista Keyboard Shortcuts

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 07:02:36 GMT

Just came across this good listing of keyboard shortcuts in Windows Vista and thought I'd share them around. Some people refuse to use the keyboard for much besides email, but I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts (and love the ubiquitous search features in Vista)

Agile teams at Microsoft?

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 06:54:48 GMT

Well, I was just reading ex-MSFT guy Moishe Lettvin's entry about how the start menu put together. In brief, there was a lot of wasted time in meetings (my interpretation), waiting for code to arrive, thrashing due to dependencies, and not a lot of writing actual code. It sounds like the feature ended up missing the vision, too.

That's got to be a pretty miserable year.

There are big differences between different teams here at Microsoft in terms of culture, process, productivity, etc. Of course there are some shared advantages/pain points, as well. Making Vista has definitely spurred changes to a number of these areas, because there are real issues. Improving the speed with which changes are reflected in the builds is important (although there's a trade-off between things moving quickly and too many changes to investigate to understand a regression - I don't advocate a single branch for a team the size of Windows), and there are a number of process changes underway. These are issues that will affect every team to a varying extent. But there are a lot of other issues as well that individual teams can fix.

I worked on Welcome Center and we had a lot of people interested in what was happening in the feature (execs, etc). But most meetings involved two or three people. And I use the term meeting loosely. Basically, we called each other on the phone (most calls lasted under a minute). Initially, we had two or three meetings with most folks present but there were really only 3 people working on it (all of them part-time). I imagine that our PM had more work to do than I did, because there was a lot more deciding what to do than deciding the best way to do it. It's a pretty simple feature to implement.

So here are two examples of a simple feature: one with tons of overhead, and one that was run more efficiently. Were the features intrinsically different? Were the partner teams unduly burdensome? Something else?

(Yes, this isn't a discussion of Agile adoption at Microsoft, I just mean agile in the general sense)

Screencast: Video of a few Guided Help Topics running.

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:06:00 GMT

So Andrew, went through and put together a screencast of a few of the Guided Help topics in action. If you look carefully you can even see a few stupid ACW tricks - maybe I'll do a stupid ACW tricks screencast at some point. Anyway, I've included the soapbox version, but I'll probably try to also put up the full wmv because soapbox doesn't allow us the resolution that we'd like.

Video: Selected Guided Help Topics

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