I recently needed to create a local user account for a project which involved using the Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics eConnect product.  eConnect product uses some COM+ components and needs to have a user account during installation to properly setup the components.  I decided the simple thing to do was to create a user named econnect just for this purpose.

The Problem

You can see when I go to User Accounts the new account shows up.  I expect the account to show up here :

Everything works just fine but can be a bit of an annoyance when booting up and logging into Windows 7 where I have the option of logging into my regular account or my new econnect user account.  I don’t want this behavior, I just want to be shown my normal enter password textbox as I am familiar.  Since this is a service account and no on will ever log in to it, I don’t want the option of seeing it.

It turns out there is some registry hacking that one can do to provide a list of users you want to hide from the system.  Be warned that you could possibly add your own account to the list and be locked out of Windows 7 completely.

Hiding a User Account

The process is actually pretty simple, you need to fire up regedit to get started.  Once regedit is running traverse to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\

Once you have found the path in regedit the steps are pretty simple:

1. Create a new key named SpecialAccounts.  Find the Winlogon key, right-click with the mouse and select New->Key and name it SpecialAccounts.
2. Next you want to select the SpecialAccounts key you just created, right-click with the mouse and select New->Key and name it UserList.
3. Finally, select the key just created which is named UserList, right-click and select New->DWORD Value or New->DWORD (32-bit) Value on 64-bit systems and name the value the name of the user you want to hide.  In my case, econnect is the user I am trying to hide.  The value should be 0 to hide the user or 1 to not hide user.

It should look something like this:

You can repeat step 3 above for each user to hide.

And that’s all there is too it.  If done correctly, the user will not show up on a logon screen or even when managing user accounts.

I have been working on a project recently which requires me to integrate with QuickBooks Online, in this case from a web application.  I have had the pleasure (strong word) working with integrating with QuickBooks in various capacities in the past and although it is not trivial, it does work.  I ran into an interesting problem recently with an error that baffled me.

While attempting to connect to QuickBooks online from my ASP.NET C# application, I received the following COM Exception:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3C801F08-CDC5-4129-AAE8-CCC4F116B5BE} failed due to the following error: 80040154.

Searching the various Intuit Developer Forums led me nowhere.  I was thinking it may be the fact I am funning on Windows 7 and figured it might be an incompatibility with Windows 7 and the COM components from Intuit in their QuickBooks SDK.  After various Google searches I picked up a few clues to the source of the problem, which in hindsight should have been a bit more obvious to me.

64-Bit Friend and Foe

The root of the problem was not really Windows 7 but the fact I am running 64-bit and Visual Studio 2008 defaults the Platform Target to “Any CPU” when building a project.  So selecting Project-> {project name} Properties show the following dialog with Any CPU selected:

By changing the choice of the Platform Target to x86 and rerunning my application, the creation of the session to QuickBooks Online works fine.  The idea should have probably been more obvious to me, knowing the DLL’s from Intuit are 32-bit COM-based and the interop to my 64-bit operating system could cause some problems.

If anyone wants to add the technical details as to why this behaves as it does, I will update this post with those technical details.  I hope this helps someone else with the same problem so they won’t waste the time that I did.

I have been running Windows Vista 64-bit as my main .NET development system for quite some time now and pretty happy with the results.  I put each client I have in a VMWare virtual machine (VM) and install the necessary operating system, this keeps things isolated and clean from my Vista host.

I decided to upgrade my Vista host to the Windows 7 RTM, to get some of the niceties I have enjoyed while testing out Windows 7 in a VM.  The upgrade went very smooth but only later did I realize there was a problem upon starting a couple of my client VM’s.  I was greeted by this error:

After a bit of searching the web I stumbled upon a blog post by Andreas Heil titled Broken VMware Workstation Network Adapter, which described my problem and the solution almost completely.   I won’t repeat his solution here, but it turned out Bridging was not enabled on my VMNet1 adapter.  My virtual adapter looked liked this:

Checking the box next to VMWare Bridge Protocol fixed the issue of not having network connectivity in all of the effected VM’s.

I have wanted to be a Windows Vista user and developer since before it was released, but there always seemed like something didn’t work or some application I used kept crashing.  The pure pain of the performance of Vista alone was not worth the "upgrade" from Windows XP.

I have tried both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista and had a horrible time, consistently running into problems trying to get the iPhone working with iTunes under Vista as well.  I wrote about some issues before giving up.

• Windows Vista x64 and iTunes like Oil and Water
• ASP.NET Development Server Problems Under Vista
• Relieving the Headache of the iPhone on Windows Vista with iTunes

Once Vista Service Pack1 was released I decided to update a couple of my virtual machines (VMWare, no Virtual PC here) and was a bit disappointed by my observations, the VMs were not noticeably faster.  I had heard SP1 was significant performance improvements over Vista RTM, but this was not so.

I had the opportunity to get my hands on a Vista disk with SP1 already part of the install, this way you don’t to install Vista and then install the service pack later.  I did this first in a fresh virtual machine with 1G of RAM, the install was clean and the VM runs amazingly fast on VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro with 4G of RAM.

Since Vista ran so well in a VM on my Mac I decided to go for it and replace a flaky Windows XP installation on my main development system.  The installation went very smooth and I did not have to install any third party drivers for my Asus motherboard. 

Setting out to install all the necessary software packages like Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005, iTunes and a ton of other packages has resulted in a very fast and stable platform.  All of my issues with the iPhone and iTunes as well as the ASP.NET development server are gone.  One of my biggest complaints, speed, seems to be a non-issue for me today. 

After a few days of pretty heavy use I have to say I am pleased with Vista at this point.  It shouldn’t matter installing Vista and the service pack later but it certainly seems to be better doing it this way.

If I look back to the days of Windows XP it did take Microsoft a couple service packs for users to adopt XP and be happy with it.  There were performance complaints, stability issues and compatibility problem that were all overcome.  I think this may be very much the same.

I think Vista is very good at this point and I have to admit it took me a lot to say it. I have been down on it since the release and all of the troubles I have faced.  I have given a good deal of razzing to the Microsoft consultants I work with, they get paid to love Vista and poking at them has been a lot of fun.

I have heard over the past year or so rumors about Microsoft buying Yahoo and it never seemed to materialize. You know how rumors get started, it is a good story against the monster Google. Strictly from a shareholder’s point of view this is good news. It’s good news if you are a Yahoo shareholder because you just gained about $9/sare over its recent close. If you are a Microsoft shareholder you stand to gain in the long term with the added value of Yahoo to the Microsoft portfolio. I am a Microsoft shareholder and have been for a while, the announcement gave me an opportunity to pick up some more Microsoft with it being down $2/share on the announcement. The more important aspect of this potential merger is what it means for customers of both companies. Yahoo has a huge base of customers for both search and it’s portal, which is number 1 in Alexa. As everyone on the internet knows, Microsoft bid $44.6 billion dollars for Yahoo. This is a true reflection how determined Microsoft is to purchase Yahoo. My take on the merger is a huge upside for Microsoft and for Yahoo, who is losing value by the day. Microsoft will gain much needed gain in both search and advertising revenue. I feel this is the real value for Microsoft’s bid. If it goes through Microsoft will have bought a huge boost in traffic and advertising revenues. This will be a great boost for Microsoft shareholders for years to home. So, what happens to the open source properties such as Flickr? I don’t think they will be shutdown, but will continue to be run as they are now. I doubt Microsoft has any intentional goals to shut them down. I read on Twitter how people said they would create their own Flickr and Del.icio.us because Microsoft would either shut them down or change them. Come on, those properties are not of any value to Microsoft and they will just remain as they are. The outcome of the proposed merger is a long ways off. Google will have to put in it’s 2 cents, trying to get the merger rejected. I think for only Google is this a bad deal, they are arrogant and don’t respect Microsoft, which will be their downfall. The first thing that needs to happen is Yahoo needs to give it’s nod to the deal and the Security and Exchange Commission needs to approve it. It will take many months if and when Yahoo agrees to the deal. They would be stupid not to, they have nothing in the pipeline and are losing value daily. I hope the deal is approved and a better Microsoft is the result.

Windows Writer Zone has announced Windows Live Writer is finally out of beta and available now and is free.

Windows Live Writer is the tool I use to write this blog as well as craft the articles I write for InfoQ.  I used several tools over the past couple years that I have blogged and none are as smooth and easy to use as Windows Live Writer.   I think the user interface is what makes the product so nice to use.

More information can be found at the Windows Live Writer web site.

I recently decided to dump Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 in favor of VMWare’s Workstation 6.0.  Why?  The primary reason is VPC is a pretty lousy virtualization environment, has lousy support for anything but Microsoft and no one outside of Microsoft creates any virtual machines for it.   Yes, I sound bitter.  I think it’s because I am, I have had enough of all the  jumping through hoops to get Linux distributions running on Virtual PC. I decided to download the VMWare Workstation 6.0 30-day trial to see how well it works.  I was a long-time user of VMWare products before Microsoft purchased Virtual PC.  I didn’t really make a decision to switch other than VMWare kept upgrading and the cost was too much for a poor developer and the price was right for Virtual PC, so I switched. Apparently VMWare did not sit back and fold after losing me as a customer.    VMWare has a great following of dedicated users who create tons of virtual machines you can just download and just boot-up.  VMWare Workstation also does a great job of supporting many different vendors as the guest operation system, which work right out of the box without having to pour through forums like you do with Microsoft’s VPC.  Try getting Ubuntu Linux 7.04 to work on VPC without jumping through hoops. I have installed Ubuntu, Fedora Core 5, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista on VMWare without a hitch.  When setting up a new virtual machine in VMWare you are given many different operating systems to choose from, Virtual PC is primarily focused on Microsoft operating systems.  It’s understandable but it says a lot about the value of non-Microsoft OS’s. The only drawback to VMWare’s product is the price, $189 for a single user versus free for Microsoft’s VPC.  Of course I have to think to what my father has always said, you get what you pay for.  VMWare’s products are so much more mature and the development much more focused. I purchased my copy VMWare Workstation 6.0 from Programmer’s Paradise.   VPC was uninstalled faster than it ever booted Vista.

Technorati Tags: VMWare, VPC, Virtual PC

I recently had the opportunity to configure our new web servers running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and IIS 6.0. These servers are to be used in our development and production environments and will use Microsoft's Network Load Balancing to handle server load. This configuration allows an administrator to take an individual server off line for maintenance or add an additional server without interrupting service to our clients. We are running ASP.NET 2.0 and one of the features we are taking advantage of is running a State Server in a seperate machine. In order for a web farm to manange session state between web requests a few things need to be done in order for the user to have the same session between these requests. The problem lies in the fact that in a web farm the user is not guaranteed to come back to the same server between requests and session must be maintained. The detail which I find poorly documented is a machineKey needs to be added to each member of the web farm needing to share session. These keys MUST be the same on all servers in the web farm. As you can see below the key is a very large hex number, but don't worry you won't have to make it up. The section below is put in the machine.config on each server this will take care of the problem. This key could just as well been put into the web.config but I chose the machine.config file so when we add applications to our web farm I won't have to mantain multiple web.config files with this information in it. <machineKey validationKey='8ED2CDBA742675EB1EDB2C650245CD179998786C2F74D2EF56BE488519BAE 55B26717CF76A5348DC83D34F3E3F079DECAD2075FF278BD927C06F784923F59DD1' decryptionKey='B134B1E055D415013E31DECBF84B80492E8A8F1623F7332E' validation='SHA1'/> A great online utility to generate the key for you and give you the section for the .config file is available here. Technorati Tags : ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft

I am sure I am not the first person to report this and I won’t be the last but yes…Virtual Server is now free.

It’s not earth shattering news since VMWare is giving away their latest virtual server environment.  The real nice thing here is how well Virtual Server works and what you can do with it.

It runs on Windows 2003 Server and allows Windows to host other operating systems inside itself.  You can host other Windows 2003 Servers, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and even Linux (now supported).  I understand it will also run on Windows XP SP2 for testing purposes as well.

The possibilities are endless really.  If you are an ISP you can now host virtual servers and allows clients to almost have a dedicated server without needing an actual dedicated server.

If you are a developer you can host a bunch of different operating systems that allow you to test your application, deployment or whatever.  I think this is a step in a great direction to allow people more flexible systems without having a ton of servers for all different purposes…just virtualize them.

I have used Microsoft Virtual PC in the past and use it on Windows XP all the time to test various operating systems and such.  I just started using Virtual Server and from what I have seen so far it works better than Virtual PC, handles memory better and better hardware integration to maximize performance.

Technorati Tags : Virtual Server, Microsoft

I just found this interesting so I thought I would share.  Did anyone notice this little knock at Microsoft?  Check out IE7.com, I wonder how long it will take for a lawsuit.