Windows – Kristof's blog

Update on handedness (menu location)

A while back I wrote how to change the handedness (which seems to be the correct term, instead of the dreadful ‘Menu on the wrong side with a touch screen’).

I got a machine in my hands which exhibited the previously mentioned problem. However Tablet PC Settings weren’t installed, so we couldn’t open the tab.

After searching the bowels of the internet I found the following shell shortcut:

shell:::{80F3F1D5-FECA-45F3-BC32-752C152E456E}

Putting this in Winkey+R, or in the Windows 7/8(.1) search box will open the Tablet PC Settings, and if you don’t have a touch screen, will default to the Other tab, where you can change the handedness of your menus!

Have a good one,

-Kristof

Menu on the wrong side with a touch screen?

When you’re reading this you probably have a touch screen.

So, I never use my touch screen. Almost never. But I did notice that by default my menus in Windows (from a menu bar, not a ribbon) appear (when possible) on the right side of the clicked menu item.

Like this:

Menu appears on left side of the menu toolbar item.

Goosebumps. Something is off. It took me a while to realize this,

The menu expanded to the left!

So, what is this. I can’t remember what exactly I searched for, but the change you need to make is in Tablet PC Settings.

When your menus are expanded to the left you’ll see something like this:

This is different from the default that I’ve been used to since I’ve been using Windows 95.

Change it to ‘Left-handed’:

Hit apply, and restart any offending programs, open a menu and enjoy:

Menu appears on right side of the menu toolbar item.

I can easy again…

Make sure unattended.xml is not encrypted!

I was playing around with Sysprep using unattended.xml when I hit a weird issue with VirtualBox and Encrypted folders on the host.

Setup:

unattended.xml on the host, encrypted (with Windows EFS).
Virtual Machine, hosted in VirtualBox

I mounted the folder with unattended.xml (and other files) inside the VirtualBox and started sysprep (sysprep+shutdown.cmd just executes the sysprep with the unattended.xml from the location and copies a SetupComplete.cmd to c:\Windows\Scripts).

Windows Setup encountered an internal error while loading or searching for an unattended answer file.

When booting the VM I got the following error:

To investigate the error I hit up Shift+F10 and checked c:\Windows\Panther\setuperr.log, which had the following error:

[setup.exe] UnattendSearchExplicitPath: Found unattend file at [C:\Windows\Panther\unattend.xml] but unable to deserialize it; status = 0x80070005, hrResult = 0x0.

Googling for the error string didn’t help. Googling for the error code did help. It meant Access Denied. Now what could it be. I had a suspicion that it was the encryption. Let’s find out:

By using the command

cipher /s:c:\Windows\Panther

I saw this:

Notice the E, which means, Encrypted.

Executing

notepad c:\Windows\Panther\unattended.xml

confirmed my suspicion:

After removing the file with a Windows disk BEFORE the first boot (afterwards it doesn’t work it seems) the boot went fine, I sysprepped it again (with a non-encrypted unattended.xml) and all went fine.

So make sure you don’t copy unattended.xml to a machine that is encrypted. The keys are lost upon sysprepping!

Windows 8.1 Preview install: error 0x800705AA – 0x2000C

Yesterday I was trying to upgrade a VM to Windows 8.1. The VM had Windows 8 on it.

The host software I used was Hyper-V from Windows 8.1 Preview

By itself the VM worked fine, and I was able to install the package that allowed me to download the Windows 8.1 Preview from the store and install it through there.

However upon completion of the download and the subsequent reboot I was greeted with the following error:

VM upgrade error when upgrading Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 Preview on a VM in Hyper-V — Sorry we couldn’t complete the update to Windows 8.1 Preview. We’ve restored your previous version of Windows to this pc.
0x800705AA – 0x2000C

The full error is

Couldn’t update to Windows 8.1 Preview
Sorry we couldn’t complete the update to Windows 8.1 Preview. We’ve restored your previous version of Windows to this pc.
0x800705AA – 0x2000C

And the upgrade didn’t happen.

Googling on error 0x800705AA – 0x2000C didn’t help a lot. So I decided to investigate: I found out that I had set the Startup RAM of the machine too low. Because it had dynamic memory it wasn’t an issue WHILE running Windows 8, but it seems that during the installation of 8.1 something goes wrong and the VM thinks it doesn’t have enough RAM, hence the error.

So by setting the RAM of the machine to, say 2GB I managed to mitigate the problem. After that the upgrade went like a charm.

Have a good one,

-Kristof

Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller couldn’t contact the outside network

Network setup:

A private network (*.1, *.3, *.4, …)
A public network (other range)
One server in between to provide routing services (network card in both VLANs) from the private to the public (*.2 on the private)

In the private network there were multiple servers whose gateway (*.2) were all set to the router. They all could contact the public network.

Except for one, the domain controller.

We compared the network configuration, and all was the same. After investigating we looked at the routes, and it seemed that the domain controller had to routes with network destination 0.0.0.0 and netmask 0.0.0.0. On one the gateway was the *.1, on the other one the gateway was *.2,even though it should only be using the *.2.

The weird thing was that the server itself was the *.1. Because the route to *.1 was higher on the list (same metric though…), it couldn’t route it’s request, because it thought it was the router itself. We didn’t see this in the network configuration of its network card (weird²):

By deleting the route manually the request flowed as normal to the outside. (with netsh).

We think this had to do with the server initially having the *.2 as network address, then upgrading it to a DC, and then changing the IP to *.1.

Hope this is helpful.

-Kristof

Clear all event logs on Windows using PowerShell

I was bored with the vast amount of data in the eventlogs which were really not useful for me. So, in order to improve readability on my machine I decided to look for something to clear all of the eventlogs. Easy.

Since I always use the Administrative Events filter to view every warning and error I get a lot of junk (who cares for Kernel-Power warnings?)

Since I didn’t feel like doing the following steps for each frigging event log there is on my machine. You would need to go to the following steps:

Now this is an excerpt from the eventlogs I have on this machine:

Analytic
Application
DirectShowFilterGraph
DirectShowPluginControl
EndpointMapper
ForwardedEvents
HardwareEvents
Internet Explorer
Key Management Service
MF_MediaFoundationDeviceProxy
MediaFoundationDeviceProxy
MediaFoundationPerformance
MediaFoundationPipeline
MediaFoundationPlatform
Microsoft-IE/Diagnostic
Microsoft-IEDVTOOL/Diagnostic
Microsoft-IEFRAME/Diagnostic
Microsoft-IIS-Configuration/Administrative
Microsoft-IIS-Configuration/Analytic
Microsoft-IIS-Configuration/Debug
Microsoft-IIS-Configuration/Operational
Microsoft-PerfTrack-IEFRAME/Diagnostic
Microsoft-PerfTrack-MSHTML/Diagnostic
Microsoft-Windows-ADSI/Debug
Microsoft-Windows-API-Tracing/Operational
Microsoft-Windows-ATAPort/General
Microsoft-Windows-ATAPort/SATA-LPM
Microsoft-Windows-ActionQueue/Analytic
Microsoft-Windows-AltTab/Diagnostic
Microsoft-Windows-AppID/Operational
Microsoft-Windows-AppLocker/EXE and DLL
Microsoft-Windows-AppLocker/MSI and Script
Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-Applications/Admin
Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-Applications/Analytic
Microsoft-Windows-Application Server-Applications/Debug

And so on (for about 10 times as large). I’m not going to clear them by hand.

So let’s call Powershell to the rescue! (Play Thunderbirds theme song!)

First of all (and nothing to do with Powershell): wevtutil

We’re going to use this tool to display every available event source on this machine:

wevtutil el

The help states:

el | enum-logs          List log names.

Good, that’s what we need. Next up, we pass every line of this list to a command using a pipe and the Powershell Foreach-Object cmdlet

wevtutil el | Foreach-Object { … commands go here … }

The commands are going to be

wevtutil cl “$_”

The help states:

cl | clear-log          Clear a log.

And $_ is the current variable in the enumeration of Foreach-Object. I added the quotes since there are event sources with spaces and we need to have the full name in order to have wevtutil to be able to clear that log.

Now let’s add some diagnostics output to see which one we’re currently clearing:

wevtutil el | Foreach-Object {Write-Host "Clearing $_"; wevtutil cl "$_"}

Now just run it through Powershell, and bam, a clean event log.

Cheers!

Windows Phone 7 TextBox, binding and ApplicationButton

Consider a Windows Phone 7 application with a textbox and an ApplicationButton.

UI:

<Canvas x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1" Height="545" Width="480">
    <TextBlock Text="Enter text here" Canvas.Left="6" Canvas.Top="187" />
    <TextBox x:Name="myTextBox" Text="{Binding Test, Mode=TwoWay}" Height="69" Width="480" Canvas.Left="0" Canvas.Top="209" />
</Canvas>

Backend:

namespace WindowsPhoneApplication1
{
    using System;
    using System.ComponentModel;
    using System.Windows.Controls;
    using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
 
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage, INotifyPropertyChanged
    {
        private string _test;
        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            this.InitializeComponent();
 
            this.DataContext = this;
        }
 
        public string Test
        {
            get
            {
                return this._test;
            }
            set
            {
                if (value != this._test)
                {
                    this._test = value;
                    this.PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Test"));
                }
            }
        }
 
        #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members
 
        public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
 
        #endregion
 
    }
}

The textbox is bound to a property on the backend (two way binding) and when you click the bottom button the text is saved/send/encrypted/whatever.

Now the problem is that clicking the button doesn’t do a UI –> source binding update as it would do with a normal button.

I enter the text ‘test’ on the TextBlock and IMMIDIATLY click the ApplicationButton. I don’t do anything else. This is a common user practice, he changes something and clicks the save/send/whatsoever button.

This is the result:

Check the Watch 1. As you can see the value is still null. The value is not sent to the _test value. How do we solve this?

You can add the following line to the click event handler:

this.myTextBox.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty).UpdateSource();

So the result will look like this:

private void AppbarButton1Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    this.myTextBox.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty).UpdateSource();
 
    // handle save/send/encrypt/whatever here
}

There are 3 downsides I think:

You need to name your TextBlock which (I think) unnecessarily clutters your scope with otherwise unused variables (that’s why we use bindings too!)
Your UI and ViewModel (in my case) aren’t decoupled 100% anymore. In Windows Phone 7 this is no issue though, since WP7 has no ICommand and I have to couply my UI and ViewModel anyway 🙂
You need to remember to write this line! Which can be quite cumbersome with a lot of application buttons.

And items in a ApplicationBar.MenuItems (ApplicationBarMenuItem) have the same problem. The UI doesn’t push the update to the ViewModel.

I hope this will be fixed in the final version, and I will post this to Microsoft Connect. If anybody has a better solution please feel free to share it.

Windows Phone 7, adding and displaying icons.

Hi all,

I tried to display an icon in my Windows Phone 7 application:

<shell:ApplicationBarIconButton x:Name="appbar_button1" IconUri="/Images/appbar.feature.settings.rest.png" Text="Settings" />

By default, when you add an image to the solution folder it sets the build action as Resource, as shown below:

But when you run the application with the Build Action as Resource you will get a result looking like this:

While I really meant an icon looking like this:

How do we fix it?

Set the Build Action to Content!

And this is the result:

Small update on enabling shares in Windows 7.

Execute this line in the CMD as Administrator (start > type ‘cmd’ > hit control+shift+enter) and paste this line (rightmousebutton > paste).

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\ /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Be sure to DISABLE your Homegroup and to enable file sharing in the Network & Sharing Center

Format after BitLocker.

So yesterday I reinstalled my laptop because some beta driver was acting up, no big deal. I had both of my partitions secured with Bitlocker (and a BIOS password set up) so that my laptop is secure.

After formatting I noticed that my C drive wasn’t encrypted anymore (which is obvious, it was formatted).

But my D drive looked like this:

It was locked. Fortunately I printed my recovery key so I was able to unlock the drive.

Please print the keys, and keep them safe!