Capi's Corner » registry-hack

WinXP: How to Deactivate the “Windows Genuine Advantage Tool”

Martin Carpella — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:27:44 +0000

To remove Microsoft’s new “Windows Genuine Advantage-Tool”, which in the current version will check the system’s license every day against a Microsoft database, simply remove the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\ CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Notify\WGALogon

VisualStudio.NET: Text-Editor Guide at 80

Martin Carpella — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 12:54:55 +0000

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: (Article in Google Groups):

Changing MSDE Authentication Scheme After Installation

Martin Carpella — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 13:38:07 +0000

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.

Stop the MSDE service
Search the registry for

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSSqlserver\MSSqlServer

(for unnamed instances) or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Instance Name\MSSQLServer\

(for named instances)
Change the key LoginMode to value 2.

Unlike a comment on the page, value 0 will not work (at least it didn’t in my case).