The one or other might have already stumbled across the famous three words when using InstallShields’ LogonInformation dialogs: List is empty. This preferrably happens right after you finished creating your setup and befor you are about to deploy it to a customers’s server. You click on <Browse> to see a list of available Domains and get “The list is empty”. You enter a domain name for yourself and click on <Browse> for a list of users in that domain and Windows Installer tells you it can’t find the domain you entered. So what the hell is wrong with that thing?

The answer is easy but you will be less than thrilled.

One of the software developers of Acresso explained they were using the API function NetServerEnum. And if you look here you will find out that if it does not work, the reason might be that the ComputerBrowser service is not active.

In all test cases I tried, I was able to get the LogonInformation dialog to work with enabling the ComputerBrowser service. However, this solution has a major drawback: The ComputerBrowser service itself depends on File and Printersharing. All these services are disabled by default on a Windows Server 2008 for instance.

In most cases you won’t be able to tell your customers they need to enable and active several services only for your setup to work. So I guess the bad news is that you will need to find a work around.

What I did, by the way, is implementing a couple of own Custom Actions and replace the calls in InstallShields’ dialogs with my own ones. That works like a charm.

If you are trying to deal with Security Descriptors, Access Control Lists, permissions and all that funny stuff, you might have already thought about why the hell nobody implemented an easy to use managed library for it yet.

Well. Somebody did.

There used to be a sample called Microsoft.Win32.Security that was released for free on gotdotnet. When you are reading this, I bet you already know that and found out that GDN does not exist anymore and Microsoft somehow forgot to put the code up on MSDN.

Also you will almost certainly already have stumbled across this site, that newsgroup and in case you are actually searching for a way of playing with DCOM also across myITforum and maybe Acresso. 

If you also found out that the Assembly was built for .NET 1.1 and Microsoft already implemented an own (official) wrapper for .NET 2.0 and called it System.Security.AccessControl and if you also found out that it does not contain the features you needed, than read further.

Although you won’t find the official source of Microsoft.Win32.Security, there is at least one project still active that makes use of it and – fortunate for us – contains the complete sources. The project’s name is FlexWiki and you can download its sources easily with any Subversion Browser. Here is how:

1. Obtain and install the latest version of  TortoiseSVN from tigris
2. Create a folder on your harddrive and name it flexwiki
3. Right click that folder and use TortoiseSVN to check out the flexwiki source

For the last step you will have to enter the following URL: https://flexwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/flexwiki and simply check out the main trunk.

You will find the sources for the Microsoft.Win32.Security assembly right under flexwikicore/trunk/lib/Win32Security. In the bin subfolder there already is a compiled dll you can use right away.

Hope that this information if useful for someone. If so, please comment.

Did you ever get to know something that existed right in front of you for years but you didn’t notice (like… factory farming for instance)?

Then look at this:

The common answer to this topic may be rather doing without any custom actions whatsoever However, I believe that there is a strong request for running PowerShell scripts for configuration purposes at installation time.

Although there currently is no real native way of doing so, it is still virtually possible and I will show you how.

(weiterlesen…)

Einer der Vorteile (wenn nicht gar der einzige) von Energy-Drinks ist, dass alle Inhaltsstoffe auch auf deutsch angegeben sind. Nun, das trifft zwar auch auf alle anderen Getränke zu, aber nicht z.B. auf Kosmetika. Und Energy-Drinks haben mit dem Stillen von Durst und der Versorgung des Körpers mit Flüssigkeit ja bekanntlich in etwa genau so viel zu tun, wie Feuchtigkeitslotionen und Dusch-Shampoos.

Entschlüsseln wir nichts desto trotz heute mal die Inhaltsstoffe des Getränkes “High Quality Energy Drinks” Effect: (weiterlesen…)