Patrick Cauldwell's Blog - Firefox and Sharepoint

Patrick Cauldwell's Blog - Firefox and Sharepoint

"...how to get Firefox to do NTLM, which means I don't have to deal with the authentication dialogs, thereby reducing my dependence on IE

...

It's not at all obvious how to make it work, and it took me a few tries. You have to go to your Firefox address bar and type about:config. This will bring up the internal config editor, which allows you to set all kinds of properties that influence Firefox's behavior. Look for the key called network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris. Set that key's value to a comma separated list of servers you want NTLM auth for. So if your internal SharePoint sites are on servers called Larry and Mo, use "larry,mo". You can also add the same value to the key network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris. It's unclear to me if that second one is required, but I set it, and everything works. Now SharePoint works like a champ, and authenticates automatically."

Something to try when I return to the office....

(via Paul Schaeflein's SharePoint Experience - Configure Firefox to support NTLM authentication)

Read Blogs with Outlook 2003 (Niobe Framework) [IPattern.com (Maxim V. Karpov)]

Read Blogs with Outlook 2003 (Niobe Framework) [IPattern.com (Maxim V. Karpov)]

"Sometime ago, I downloaded and used Niobe Framework, which is open-source project that provides with managed API for programming against Microsoft Outlook 2003. VS.NET 2005 will include API's for all office products including Outlook, but it is possible to develop powerful apps in managed code today with Niobe SDK! Anyway, I my post is not about how to use the SDK to develop Add-Ins, but rather how to install it and use sample Add-In for that allows to read RSS feeds inside of the Outlook 2003.
The download comes with a sample code for RSS Add-In that allows reading RSS feeds inside of the outlook. It comes with complete source code and easy to install and use.

First, Niobe Runtime 0.9.1476.21389 has to be installed before you can take advantage of the API's. Add-in development Niobe SDK 0.9.1476.21389 must be installed on the developer box in order to compile sample code. Next, I launched RSSAddIn sample and compiled it in release mode.

When, I restarted my Outlook Niobe Framework added the following menu item for Tools menu..."

Something I have to look into this coming year... I've blogged about this a million years ago (http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2004/02/niobe-home.html) but now maybe it's time to look at it again?

theSpoke - Learned more about Windows and the Win32 API this week than ever...

theSpoke - Learned more about Windows and the Win32 API this week than ever...

"... porting one of my projects from Linux to Windows in order to test and compare (and also market on both platforms once we finish commercialization!) but in order to do so I had to learn a lot about the Win32 API...and I'm talking some intense stuff, like Access Control Entries (ACE), Desktop API, Windows Services, default system policies and how to programmatically change them, differences in API behavior between Win XP and Server 2003, Discretionary Access Control Lists (DACL), impersonating another user in order add some ACE's to the DACL, accessing logon SID, using .NET Interop in order to import a Win32 dll and API functions into my C# project, all the different variants of .NET Remoting, and a bunch of other arcane things.
...

Basically for one of the parts of my app, I wanted to remotely launch processes that would display on the user's desktop. Sounds easy, right? Not really. I originally was using MPICH for windows, which is traditionally used for things such as parallel processing on clusters or super computers, however the windows version is less than satisfactory, somewhat buggy, and it wouldn't display my gui elements remotely. It would launch the process, yes, and could do non-GUI/console stuff fine, but I eventually figured out that the security mechanisms of Windows didn't allow it to do what I wanted, for good reasons. But I'm going to be working in a trusted environment, and I need to do that. So it took some research.

Plus I wanted to use the .NET platform, which has further security restrictions and other hurdles. In the end it will pay off though.

The final solution was 80% C#, 15% C++, 10% chewing gum in the middle, and about 25% caffine. That adds up to 130%, which about matches up with the 55 hours I put in to accomplish it.
..."

There's some interesting information in this post. I've done a Proof of Concept for something a little like this. The info here goes beyond my PoC and covers a number of problems/solutions with a good bit of detail.

(via MSDN Student Flash - Ever wanted to port an app from Linux to Windows (.NET)?)

INI File Redirection When Running Non-Admin

INI File Redirection When Running Non-Admin

"One of the things that I've noticed running non-admin is all the apps that work, but not always correctly. Two interesting ones that you may not have noticed are the Windows Calculator (calc.exe) and Character Map (charmap.exe).

... is that both apps persist their state information into the WIN.INI file. Yes, you heard me right, the Windows INI file. This is leftover from the old days of Windows 3.x. Since INI files are located in your Windows installation directory (typically C:\WINDOWS), the app can't write to them because your non-admin account doesn't have write privileges for files in that folder.

But thanks to the wonderful folks on the nonadmin alias (an internal list for discussing non-admin issues and techniques), I now know of a way around this problem. It turns our that since Windows NT, when the registry was introduced, we have had the ability to redirect INI files into the registry. (See Knowledge Base Article 102889 for the details of how this works.)

So, armed with this information, you can redirect those two apps into your HKEY_USERS registry hive with the following entry. (To use this copy-paste it into Notepad, save it with a .reg extension, and double click on it. You will have to be Admin to make this change!!!!)

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\win.ini]
'SciCalc'='USR:Software\\Microsoft\\SciCalc'
'MSUCE'='#USR:Software\\Microsoft\\CharMap'

..."

I have this feeling that I might need this information someday...