In an earlier article I made a mistake. I told that Microsoft Vista x64 will only work with signed drivers and assumed (wrongly) that this means every driver has to go through the WHQL program for getting a signature of Microsoft’s driver quality program, which would be a quite costly process.
I now discovered an older (German) blog-article by Daniel Melanchton, in which he points out that only a digital signature with a certificate from a trusted CA is required. It seems that it is not required to go through the WHQL process, you just need a certificate. The trusted CAs seem to comprise most root authorities also accepted by Internet Explorer by default, so driver developers are not dependent on Microsoft for getting a signature.
While this still might be a problem for some established Open Source drivers, it is still an affordable and in my opinion useful approach, as digital signatures at least in most ways make the originator of a software known. Of course, this does not tell anything about the quality of the software nor if it is benign or malware. Microsoft’s approach seems to be that without force hardly any publisher will sign their drivers. Unfortunately, they might be true…
Update 2007-02-21: It seems that I still missed one point. The “Secure Media Path” depends on a valid Microsoft signature. Without this signature, drivers are supposed to disable the “Secure Media Path”, so that high-quality (e.g. HDTV, Dolby 7.1) multimedia content is rendered to lower quality.
Trac is a powerful web-tool for managing projects. It combines a Wiki, trouble tickets and repository browsing into one powerful package with stunning features.
Read more…
DWR is a really fantastic library for Java: it allows to write JavaScript applications in web browsers that will directly and almost transparently call Java-methods of objects that live in the Java-Servlet-Container (e.g. Tomcat) as part of the web-application.
Read more…
It is still considered good style to keep code-lines within a certain bound (e.g. 80 characters). IDEs like Eclipse offer to display a red guiding line at the chosen offset to help developers keep within this bound.
By modifying the registry a similar guide can be enabled for Visual Studio 2003 / 2005. Add a string value Guides to the key (VS.NET 2005, VS 2003 has version 7.1)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor.
Set the value to
RGB(128,0,0) 80
To have multiple guides (like in the screenshot), add the additional columns space delimited, e.g.
RGB(128,0,0) 80 100
Ackn.: This information has been provided by Hannes Pavelka in Microsoft’s newsgroup microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp, Message-ID: <e1jag7$qk7$02$1@news.t-online.com> (Article in Google Groups):
Just came accross this: seems like Microsoft has released some parts of the CLI under one of their “free” licenses.
Download details: Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 2.0 Release
Update 2006/03/26: As I just noticed at Mono’s “Contributing” page, they won’t accept any contributions from people who had a look at the download.
Just a quick note: NetBeans 5.0 has been released. I really think, Eclipse got a good competitor.
According to this Microsoft page and this Golem-Article (German), Microsoft is going to make driver signatures from Microsoft mandatory for any driver running in kernel space in Windows Vista x64. They claim security reason for this.While (faulty) drivers definitely can lead to serious (security) problems under Windows, they sometimes fulfill cruitial parts, especially in windows file system monitoring, for which there are many legitimate reasons. Having to go through the WHQL for every driver (and every minor patch) seems a little costly and time consuming to me…
Well, after all, for me it seems to be three things:
- Additional money through additional drivers going through WHQL,
- Anti Open-Source projects,
- Building up the infrastructure for an (almost unbreakable) Digital Rights Management system.
Update 2007-01-23: I have to revise most points of this, as I now learned something new about it. Vista x64 will accept digitally signed drivers, but they do not necessarily be signed by Microsoft. Read more in my updated article.
A nice project, everyone coming from Java and migrating to C#:
IKVM.NET Home Page
It is a JVM implemented in .NET, contains a .NET implementation of a lot classes from the Java class libraries (JDK), compliance of 1.4 almost complete and contains tools for interop between Java and .NET.
If you are using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000) you are supposed to decide if you are going to use “integrated windows authentification” only or if you are using “mixed mode authetication”. Latter is sometimes considered less secure but if you are developing ASP.NET applications it can be easier to use a non-NT user for the connection.
If you ever tried that you are surly familiar with the “login is not associated with a trusted connection” exception when trying to access the database. Today I had to install an ASP.NET application on a server with MSDE where mixed mode authentication was not available. A quick research on the net revieled a blog entry indicating how to change the authentication scheme of MSDE after the installation.
Unlike a comment on the page, value 0 will not work (at least it didn’t in my case).
Quite some time ago I stumbled upon an interesting article about the “version number problem” at NewsForge. I recommend reading the article to everyone publishing software.
I am Software Engineer and partly self-employed. I am currently focused around C++ and Java on Linux, but previously used to develop mainly for Windows on the Microsoft .NET platform, and sometimes Python and PHP for web applications. I consider myself being a Linux enthusiast. (