joeware - never stop exploring... :)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970789/en-us

A folder that is created under the root of the system drive is missing entries in its security descriptor, which may cause some application failures on the English version of Windows 7 Release Candidate 32-bit Ultimate

In the English version of Windows 7 Release Candidate (build 7100) 32-bit Ultimate, the folder that is created as the root folder of the system drive (%SystemDrive%) is missing entries in its security descriptor. One effect of this problem is that standard users such as non-administrators cannot perform all operations to subfolders that are created directly under the root. Therefore, applications that reference folders under the root may not install successfully or may not uninstall successfully. Additionally, operations or applications that reference these folders may fail.
For example, if a folder is created under the root of the system drive from an elevated command prompt, this folder will not correctly inherit permissions from the root of the drive. Therefore, some specific operations, such as deleting the folder, will fail when they are performed from a non-elevated command prompt. Additionally, the following error message appears when the operation fails:

Access is denied.

Furthermore, the missing security descriptor entries protect non-admin file operations directly under the root.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd695919.aspx

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Man, That C Is Sharp

For the majority of my fifteen year career at Microsoft, I’ve been a systems and drivers developer. My language of choice and necessity has been a fairly bare bones C++. I rarely get to use runtimes like MFC and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Until recently, I couldn’t have even spelled STL much less made use of it.

That’s my day job. But in my off time I love playing around with C#. Mostly I write little apps for my Windows Mobile devices and occasionally for my PC. C++ doesn’t treat me as badly as it does many native developers, but I still I get a little giddy when I write in C#. You can get a lot done with very few lines of code. I swear, C# is so much fun they should make it a controlled substance.

In the fun category, XNA Game Studio is like C# on steroids. The team over there has done an amazing job of making game development easy. The framework is straightforward, the hard stuff is largely handled for you, and they’ve released a ton of samples aimed at teaching you the various aspects of game development.

Start at creators.xna.com. From there you can download the free XNA Game Studio 3.0. If you already use one of the various incarnations of Visual Studio 2008, XNA Game Studio will integrate with it. If you don’t have Visual Studio 2008, don’t fret. XNA Game Studio also works with the free Visual C# Express Edition. (In other words, although I mention Visual Studio, you can substitute Visual C# Express Edition if that’s what you’re using.)

The creators.xna.com Web site is also full of great information to get you going. Click the Education link at the top of the page to find beginner’s guides, samples, and how-to’s. The “Beginner’s Guide to 2D Games” is especially good, as is the documentation that gets installed with XNA Game Studio. In some cases, the installation documentation has information that’s not on the Web. In Visual studio, you can get to that documentation by selecting Help | Contents and setting the filter to XNA Game Studio 3.0.

XNA Game Studio lets you write one code base and deploy it to Xbox, PC, and Zune. Everything I do here will work on all three platforms. The free downloads are all you need to develop for PC or Zune, but Xbox development requires a Premium membership that costs a yearly fee.

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I got this from Tony and I wanted to post it, looking at the site and trying to send email to the list it appears their ISP already chopped the lines…

 

Hi all

The ISP that we have been using to host ActiveDir.org for the past 8 years is shutting down and we are preparing to transfer the site to another hosting service.  The mailing list subscription and site user account information will remain the same and no action is required on your part.

A potential fly-in-the-ointment is that we understood the hosting termination notice period from our ISP was 30 days from Monday 27^th April.  Now we understand that the ISP has requested the termination from their upstream provider AT&T and that cut-off is expected “within 30 days”.  Needless to say, this has put us in some difficulty and we are doing our best to transfer the site to our new provider asap.

There may be some disruption to service during this time.  We ask for your patience and apologise for any loss of service.

Cheers

Tony and Matty

Another discussion recently popped up on AD Org about indexing the objectClass attribute. Don Hatcherl (previously mentioned on this blog multiple times – short and sweet, when he talks about AD, I and everyone else with any sense listens…) said the following about indexing objectClass…

…An early version of ESE (the one shipped in Exchange 4.0, and that never shipped with AD) had perf problems indexing highly non-unique values.  We handled this during development by inventing the ObjectCategory concept and creating a climate of fear to prevent people from indexing ObjectClass.  Both of these were, in retrospect, stupid ideas.  By the time Windows 2000 shipped ESE’s perf problem (ok, ok, this particular ESE perf problem) had been fixed, but by then there was too much organizational inertia around ObjectCategory to get rid of it.  It took until Windows 2008 to do the correct thing.

You should do two things:

1) index ObjectClass

2) accept my apology for the confusion

DonH

Thanks Don!