Help improve app compatibility in Windows 7

Microsoft is working more active than ever to improve application compatibility in Windows 7. Recently two Swedes announced Microsoft’s willingness to help improve application compatibility in general but also for non-English applications.

First Jesper Holmberg, working with localization at Microsoft in Redmond, announced the face that Microsoft actively wants applications in non-English languages to test with Windows 7. Second Danwei Tran, a new IT evangelist at Microsoft Sweden, offered everybody to send emails to a specific address to report compatibility issues with applications. Microsoft will then contact the developers to see how they can resolve the problems, to everybody’s benefit.

These two actions will of course make compatibility for Windows 7 superb, but never to forget, compatibility for Windows Vista will improve as well as a direct result of these actions.

Just a final note, Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 got released yesterday, more about this later on.

Gain access to Operations and Application Management in SharePoint in SBS2008

Some time ago I migrated a client’s Small Business Server 2003 to a Small Business Server 2008. When migrating their WSS 2.0 SharePoint from the old server to the new one I ran into some problems. I just could not get access to the Operations or Application management in SharePoint Central Administration, with the  below event logged.

Log Name:      Application
Source:        ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
Date:          2009-02-26 13:23:42
Event ID:      1314
Task Category: Web Event
Level:         Information
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      CONTOSOSRV02.Contoso.local
Description:

Event code: 4007
Event message: URL authorization failed for the request.
Event time: 2009-02-26 16:21:50
Event time (UTC): 2009-02-26 15:21:50
Event ID: 0087e3fc2a3440178e6a801602c514f7
Event sequence: 113
Event occurrence: 6
Event detail code: 0
 
Application information:
    Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/1899589246/ROOT-1-128801351457937683
    Trust level: WSS_Minimal
    Application Virtual Path: /
    Application Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\4721\
    Machine name: CONTOSOSRV02
 
Process information:
    Process ID: 7888
    Process name: w3wp.exe
    Account name: CONTOSO\Administrator
 
Request information:
    Request URL: http://contososrv02:4721/_admin/operations.aspx
    Request path: /_admin/operations.aspx
    User host address: ::1
    User: CONTOSO\tempadmin
    Is authenticated: True
    Authentication Type: Negotiate
    Thread account name: CONTOSO\tempadmin

After doing som troubleshooting I got everything working by editing the web.config file of the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\ADMIN directory. I simply added the line below to the file, saved it and then I could access the Operations and Application Management of SharePoint Central Administration.

<allow roles="CONTOSO\WSS_ADMIN_WPG" />

Case closed!

Updating Apple Boot Camp – not an easy task!

Recently I have had experience with a customer running Windows Vista on an Apple Macintosh computer. Quite interesting configuration setup and totally unsupported from Microsoft, and to be honest I have never seen so many errors and problems with hardware and drivers as with this machine. Anyway, trying to upgrade BootCamp to the latest version turned out to be a nightmare. Applying the latest BootCamp patch resulted in an instant error message: “Error applying transforms. Verify that the specified transform paths are valid”.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that this was caused by not using a system which is “all-American” but finding out exactly what to change took a bit longer. I soon learned that one have to edit the registry and making sure that the language code set there is changed to the US English code.

You do this by looking up the registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installera\Products \82654E0F812156845A61E8A84572A2CD and then changing the value of the REG_DWORD setting named “Language”. To be able to install Apple BootCamp update this setting must be 0×00000409 (1033).

Vista detects that the system is working slow

The other day when I was running a couple of virtual machines in Virtual PC in my computer I got a warning looking like the picture below. Vista detected that the machine was working very hard and offered me to switch to the Windows Vista Basic color scheme. This is the first time I’ve seen this in Vista since I started testing a couple of years ago. Have you seen this or anything similar?