It’s fairly simple, a bug

is a fault in software, or hardware for that matter, which breaks something. For example, if you make software which links my Microsoft Calendar to my Google Calendar, and your software duplicates all my calendar entries, it’s a bug.  Not an undocumented feature.

An undocumented feature, is a feature which is undocumented.  Such [...]

InstallRunner v1 is almost done.

I rebuild my work PC every 3 –> 4 weeks.  The main reason I do this is build testing.  Aka “Dog fooding”.  Oh, and that the current PC image is so darn good, that it makes reinstalling Windows very easy.

But I need to add about 4 hours of effort to install all [...]

“A referral was returned from the server”

As I finish up version 1 of InstallRunner, I went to set the UAC setting for “Require Administrator Privileges”.  I did that, and got this error:

A referral was returned from the server

Doing some research*, the cause of the error was that I did this:

Application Mainifest - uiAccess True

By default, uiAccess is false.  I changed it to true.  I’m not sure why, ignorance perhaps :-)

What does uiAccess do anyway?

(Click here to continue reading “A referral was returned from the server”)

Useful programming how-tos I’ve stumbled across.

Event handling in VB.Net

Getting the item under mouse cursor in a Listview control

Add ListView column and insert ListView rows The Java2s site doesn’t look like much, but it’s helped me with understanding several pieces of Visual Basic code.

How to use a ContextMenuStrip with a ListView control

Timeouts on the HttpWebRequest (and [...]

Programs which lie about successfully installing.

When you install a program, particularly via an install script (VBscript, PowerShell etc.), it’s always good practice to check the Exit Code the program returns.

Just in case the program didn’t install probably, or even, the user has pressed cancel.

Much to my annoyance, here’s a list of programs which return 0 (Zero ie. [...]

“The BackgroundWorker is currently busy and cannot run multiple tasks concurrently”

*sigh*  One step forward, five steps back. 

As in the words of one forum poster:

BackgroundWorker is pretty much "Threading for Dummies" in that it’s an excellent tool to teach a new programmer how to run work on a second thread and is great for simple tasks; but with it’s simplicity [...]

So where is that “Break all processes when one process breaks” option?

Not in Visual Studio 2008 Express, that’s for sure.

  It’s a VS 2008 Professional option only, and it looks like this:

You need the “Break all processes when one process breaks” option when you are trying to step though a background process.  I want to use background processes as I need [...]

Grumble grumble – revisiting the WMI fix

I work with some clever people, such as Mark W., who pointed out this Microsoft blog post WMI Troubleshooting Tips, which advised against deleting the WMI Repository.

Rebuilding the WMI repository is a destructive operation that can lead to data loss, applications breaking, and a whole host of slow to appear, difficult to diagnose [...]

WMI has stopped working on some remote computers.

And I don’t know why.  My strong guess is that it is related to one of the 10+ recent Microsoft security patches I’ve deployed to the fleet.  (I’m looking at you .Net Framework 2.0)

The fix so far? Rebuild WMI and repair the SMS client.

I do this by:

copying wmirebuild.bat and runrepair.vbs to [...]

PowerShellPack

Last Tuesday I blogged about the great free scripting tools from Sapien.  Well here’s another set of free tools/modules/call them what you will, from Microsoft.

The Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack!  From the Microsoft MSDN Code Gallery:

About the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack

The Windows 7 Resource Kit PowersShell [...]