Category: development

Microsoft: Only signed drivers for Windows Vista x64

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.

IKVM.NET: Interaction between C# and Java

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.

Changing MSDE Authentication Scheme After Installation

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).

Java and OLE: Commercial Libary

COM and ActiveX components are still important technologies for interoperation on Microsoft Windows. One of the powers of the .NET platform is easy integration with existing code in the mentioned form. For Java-developers, the idea of COM and ActiveX seems strange at a frist glance as it obviously kills platfrom independence, one of the key benefits and the USP of Java most often cited. Still, when focusing on the Windows desktop, integration of existing technologies, especially Micosoft Office, is often an important requirenment. A commercial library promissing easy integration of COM and ActiveX components in Java Swing applications can be found here.

FAQ: Java Console Handling

As it is one of the FAQs on every Java newsgroup or Java Mailinglists: “How to handle console?”

I came across a nice library that supports console operations on Windows, Linux and Mac OS: JLine.

Check it out, if you really need to work with the console on the mentioned platforms. The libarary works using native features, but I find the handling quite nice: the required DLL for Windows for instance is dynamically extracted from the JAR and loaded, so there is no need for a special installation.

JLine does not provide curses features at the moment, but it is a good approach if you need to read a password from standard in.