This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Redirecting AppData from the user profile to a folder on the network may significantly improve logon speed. Is enabling AppData redirection a no-brainer, then? Not really, because it often comes at a price: performance.

Going to Windows 7 or Server 2008 (R2) means trouble. Let me use an analogy to explain why. You are in charge of moving people from their old houses to shiny new buildings. You have planned everything perfectly. The new homes are beautiful and located in a great neighborhood. But still, after moving house, people start to complain. They do not feel at home. You forgot to take all those seemingly unimportant things that make a house a home: pictures, plants, all sorts of personal stuff. Impossible, you say? People would never leave their personal belongings behind? I agree: when it comes to moving house, not taking at least most of the personal stuff is highly unlikely. But in IT it is common practice.

This is a summary of my experience with Active Setup combined with what I could find on the internet. The information applies to older and current versions of Windows, up to and including Windows 7, Windows 10, Server 2016, Server 2019.

As before this is mainly a condensed and beautified version of my twitter postings. You can get them unfiltered and without delay by following me. Office 2010 Here is a nice overview of the new Office suite by Mark Wilson. By the way: Although available as 32-bit and 64-bit versions, the 32-bit version is the default and recommended by Microsoft for the time being.

Selling little apps for little money is next to impossible - on Windows. It works great on another platform, though: the iPhone. Such an imbalance has consequences: Apple making it easy for developers to actually sell their programs creates a pressure that might well cause a “developer drain” on the Windows platform.

Finding good information on how to enable drag and drop for MFC applications is hard enough (why?). But just when you think you should have it working, you hit a very solid wall: UIPI (User Interface Privilege Isolation, a variant of UAC, User Account Control). Because of “security” reasons, UIPI disables drag and drop from medium integrity processes (Explorer) to high integrity (aka elevated) processes by filtering out most window messages, including those required for drag and drop. In essence drag and drop from Explorer to your elevated application does not work.

Would it shock you if 35% of all enterprises used roaming profiles on their desktop PCs? Well, that was the average I got when I asked via Twitter. But is that number correct? It might or might not be. It is based on the answers of only ten people, making it hardly statistically relevant. In the resulting discussion that was a topic, too. The obvious next step, suggested by Kimmo Jernstrom, was to ask more people. So here are the poll results.

If you create a C++ project in Visual Studio and configure it to “Use MFC in a Shared DLL” (the default) you need to make sure the C runtime (CRT) and the MFC libraries are installed in the correct versions on the end user’s computer. That can be difficult.

When migrating to 64-bit Windows, traditional “unmanaged” applications can pose challenges. That is because unmanaged binaries contain hardware-dependent CPU instructions - and the view on the hardware differs between 32- and 64-bit mode. But .NET? It should be unaffected of a system’s bitness since “managed” binaries contain instructions in a so-called intermediate language that is executed in a virtual machine at run-time and only then translated to machine language. But is it really? This article is about .NET programs that are dependent on OS bitness.

Citrix User Profile Manager is pretty well-known in the SBC space today. Five years ago, things were quite different. Citrix did not have a user profile solution, and neither did sepago. But we had an idea spinning in our heads we soon came to call Smooth Profiles. Slowly that idea became code, then was renamed to sepagoPROFILE, was acquired by Citrix and renamed again to User Profile Manager and then again to Profile management (with capital P and lower-case m!). You may have heard the latter part of the story. Here is a little something from the very beginning.

Let’s assume you have a C# project in Visual Studio. In that project, you reference an assembly (DLL) created by another of your projects. Because both projects are in active development, the version number of the referenced assembly changes frequently.

Installing a software that includes a driver may leave your system in an inconsistent state. If the install fails, parts may remain on the system. And if the remaining part is a driver, I get nervous - drivers are not the kind of stuff I want to have lingering around my system’s memory. Here is a way of identifying when a driver actually got installed.

Windows General Good info for troubleshooting DFS-Namespaces in the MS KB: Storage locations, inconsistencies and how to deal with them. Complex passwords and security guidelines for end users? No, thank you, says MS researcher. I agree.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. A popular misconception about mandatory user profiles is that they are deleted at logoff. I freely admit that I thought so, too, until I made some tests that proved I was wrong.

If you get weird errors in Visual Studio that basically state files like Windows.h cannot be found, the reason may be a missing or incorrect WindowsSdkDir variable. In my case, working with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (32 bit) on Windows 7 x64 (64 bit) everything was fine until I installed the Windows 7 SDK. After that, no SDK files could be found any more and nothing would compile. Uninstalling the SDK (which I did not really need anyway - I had installed it only to get at XPerf) did not help. After some research, I found out that the Visual Studio internal variable WindowsSdkDir (which is not an environment variable) was missing from the registry. After adding the following, everything worked like a charm again:

When you are publishing PowerShell code on the web, you soon discover that it looks much nicer with syntax highlighting - as did I. There are several ways to add syntax highlighting to your blog or web site, most of which rely on external (Wordpress) plugins or JavaScript on the page. I do not like that approach too much. I prefer to have the syntax highlighting embedded in the HTML code. That way I have full control over the appearance (and the highlighting also works in the RSS feed). The logical solution is to use a script that embeds HTML coloring tags directly into the script.

This article describes how to list all installed MSI packages. A more comprehensive listing of all applications displayed in Programs and Features can be obtained through our monitoring and analytics product uberAgent.

Update 2010-04-20: Thanks to Stefan Henseler the script now works correctly with multiple dependencies in a single file. Be sure to download the current version below. App-V’s Dynamic Suite Composition is a powerful feature in that it allows multiple “bubbles” to share the same virtual environment. In other words, package A can be made dependent on package B. But if DSC is used extensively, dependencies between packages tend to become difficult to manage - there seems to be no simple way of listing all packages’ dependencies. Well, I have written a PowerShell script that does just that.

Normally, finding the cause for high CPU utilization is easy - just start Task Manager. But what if the component consuming CPU cycles is a driver that runs in the kernel? In that case, there is no regular process Task Manager could attribute the usage to. You will see the “System Idle Process” at around 98%, but the “Performance” tab might indicate 50% CPU usage. How can that be?

This article describes a bug that dramatically reduces file copy performance on Windows systems. I cannot provide a fix (not having access to the Windows source code), but I have found a workaround.

I wish all my friends and readers a merry christmas and happy new year! I hope you like sepago’s annual Christmas comic. VXI: How a Customer With Real Scalability Problems Uses Virtualization(Click on the image for a full-size version)

Not sure where user profile management might be useful? Here is an example that should apply to almost everyone. The obvious new user interface feature of Microsoft Office 2007 is the ribbon. But there are numerous other UI enhancements over Office 2003. One of these are the Quick Access Toolbars. If you are not sure what I am talking about: the following screen shot should give you an idea (from a German version of Office, sorry):

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. This may seem like a silly question, but whether or not to include roaming user profiles in your enterprise backup solution may greatly affect both the performance and the cost of that solution. With that in mind, it is only logical to pose the question if the content stored in user profiles is valuable enough to be backed up.

Windows Beginning with Vista, when formatting a drive the entire disk is overwritten with zeroes. While this is good for end users who like to wipe all data prior to selling or throwing away a disk drive, SAN-based volumes should not be formatted like this. Perform a quick format instead. But if you want to make sure the data is really gone - no need for “secure erase” programs any more! The need for multiple overwrites is a myth.