WMI Code Creator v1.0

Download details: WMI Code Creator v1.0

"The WMI Code Creator tool generates code that uses WMI to obtain management information or perform management tasks. You can use the tool to learn how to manage computers using WMI scripting and WMI .NET. The tool generates code that runs on the local computer, a remote computer, or a group of remote computers based on your selection from the Target Computer menu on the tool. You can also execute the generated code directly from the tool.

The tool is meant to help IT Professionals quickly create management scripts and to help developers learn WMI scripting and WMI .NET. The tool helps take the complexity out of writing code that uses WMI and helps developers and IT Professionals understand how powerful and useful WMI can be for managing computers.

Using the tool, you can query for management information such as the name and version of an operating system, how much free disk space is on a hard drive, or the state of a service. You can also use the tool to execute a method from a WMI class to perform a management task. For example, you can create code that executes the Create method of the Win32_Process class to create a new process such as Notepad or another executable. The tool also allows you to generate code to receive event notifications using WMI. For example, you can select to receive an event every time a process is started or stopped, or when a computer shuts down.

The tool also allows you to browse through the available WMI namespaces and classes on the local computer to find their descriptions, properties, methods, and qualifiers.

The code that creates the tool is also included in the download. The tool was created using WMI .NET, and the code for the tool can help developers understand how WMI .NET is used to create applications and manage information. Be sure to read the end-user license agreement that is included in the download."

This is a MUST have tool if you're doing any WMI related work or R&D. If you're not doing anything with WMI or have been hesitant to play with it, then you should check out this tool ASAP.

The 10 word answer is that this tool is a WMI C#/VBScript/VB.Net code generator.

But it's much more than that. First off it's executable without installing (assuming you have .Net Framework 1.1 installed). Second the C# source for the tool is also included. Thirdly it's not just a code generator, but all an WMI exploratory and browser tool. Fourth, it provides active links to the online MSDN doc's for the given WMI namespace. Fifth, you can code gen against not only your local machine and a single remote machine, but also a group of remote machines.

All the WMI namespaces can still be a little disconcerting. The next tool needed is a plain language wizard code generator, that helps users get over the initial namespace learning curve (or bypass it entirely). You wouldn't want to "wizard" every property/event/method/namespace but you could cover the most common...

(Of course the idea's are now coming to a boil... Use an XML file to store the wizard data, so the install is still simple. Have the wizard act as a front end to this utility, so while it makes it easy for the user to do what they want to do, it also acts as a learning tool, showing the user the namespaces, classes, etc that were used to do what they wanted to do.... Like a "kick start wizard"... Just enough to get them started... yada. yada, yada)

Battlefield 2 MOD Editor Open Beta Now... Open...

EA - Battlefield 2

"Battlefield 2 Editor Open Beta Release!

EA and DICE are pleased to announce that today, after two weeks of Closed Beta testing, we are releasing the first public version of the Battlefield 2 editor! Over the last couple of days you've probably seen some of the outstanding work that the Closed Beta teams have created using the tools, and now we're giving everyone else the chance to join the fun. Keep in mind that we are considering this release 'Beta' software, so it's still a little rough around the edges, though we've worked out many of the kinks. Also, though most core functionality is editable as of this release, there are several more advanced areas of the tools that are still being worked on. One example of of a tool to be delivered in a future update is the Single Player Editor. ..."

Cool...

It's nice to see more attention being given to single player play (cause I like BF2 but hate the many smack-tards on the public ranked servers).

Now if only there was better support for hosted/dedicated co-op play (yeah, you can do it now, but it's kind of lame and limited). We'll see...

VB.Net Code Sample for Burning Audio CDs

vbAccelerator - Writing Audio CDs

"This sample demonstrates how to burn audio CDs using the .NET IMAPI Wrapper from WAV files. Sample code is provided in both VB and C#.

Writing Audio CDs
The IMAPI Wrapper exposes both data (Joliet) and audio (Redbook) CD burning facilities. The design of IMAPI means that most of the functions to create a CD are common; the only difference between data and audio CDs is how you construct the image of the CD to be burnt on disc.

If you have not already, then read the article Writing Data CDs first, as that describes how to configure the library, respond to the events and perform an asynchronous burn operation which are all used in this sample. Rather than go over them again here, I'll just cover the differences in the image construction. ..."

I keep looking for just the right tool to get me into podcasting/blogcasting. I don't have an iPod, nor am I really jonesing for one...

What I want is a utility that will automatically download casts and then burn them to Audio CD's so I can listen to them in the car on the way to work. I want this utility to run during the night, so all I have to do is pick the already burned and ejected CD from the drive on the way out the door.

I've not seen anything that does this (but then again, I've not really looked all that hard either). So I keep thinking I might have to write something myself.

That is what sparked my interest in this "Write Audio CD" code sample...

Related Past Posts:
The Code Project - Aumplib: C# Namespace And Classes For Audio Conversion
BASS MP3/Audio DLL
Burn CDs right from your .NET code...

Panasonic RF-G77 Hand-Cranked Radio

Panasonic RF-G77 Hand-Cranked Radio : Gizmodo

"Waterproof and hand-cranked should be a feature of all modern electronics. Such is the case with Panasonic's new "RF-G77" AM/FM radio, which will still provide 213 hours of battery life with two AAs if you don't feel like cranking. For those of you that do, a good 1 minute crank will give about 30 minutes of playback time. ..."

Note To Self: Get one of these for my earthquake kit (or another hand-cranked radio as I can't see to find this for sale in the US...)

Hacking Elevators (Truth or Urban Legend?)

TheDamnBlog.com

"...

'The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you're in a hurry or it's a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into 'Express' mode by pressing the 'Door Close' and 'Floor' buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor. This seems to work on Most elevators that I have tried! Most elevators have the option for this to work, but on some of them the option is turned off by whoever runs them. This is a rather fun hack, so the next time you are on an elevator, give it a try, you have nothing to lose, And this concludes Hacking Elevators 101!

Elevators that have been tested and worked on:
Otis Elevators (All But The Ones Made In 1992),
Dover (Model Numbers: EL546 And ELOD862),
And Most Desert Elevators(All, But Model Numbers ELD5433 And ELF3655) ""

I don't have a chance to test this, so I can't say if this actually works or if it's just wishful thinking. But being a developer, I know I would put in some sort of shortcut if I were designing a like system... (come on... You know you would too...)

(Via LA Metroblog - Hacking Elevators...)

Speaking of Add New Search Locations...

Windows Desktop Search - Tech: Adding new search "locations" to Windows Desktop Search...

I’ve been hoping that someday I’d actually have a short post to make on my blog about something Windows Desktop Search (WDS) related… But today isn’t that day…

We’ve been hearing some requests that users would like to add new locations to the “All Locations” list in WDS.
...

And to be honest the real request we heard was for info about adding new desktop search locations but since we support the adding of both desktop and web search locations to the list I thought I’d unofficially tell you how to add both. As usual this isn’t an officially supported feature and is likely to change in the future. But when it does change we’ll most likely have a UI for adding these things but for now you’ll have to add them manually via the registry. So as a further disclaimer, be comfortable with modifying your registry before making any of these changes. I’d also recommend you make a backup of your registry settings before making any modifications to them. ...

This post will walk you through adding additional search locations to WDS via reg hacking...

(Via Brandon Paddock's Blog - Steve blogs about how to add custom search locations to WDS

It must be Sharepoint Application Template Release Day...

It must be Sharepoint Template day on MS Downloads. There are some interesting sounding templates, so I'm going to leach the RSS feed so I can find and review them later...

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Competitive Intelligence
The Competitive Intelligence (CI) Dashboard application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is designed to improve organization of CI-related materials, and communication about competitive issues among sales, public relations, marketing, product or service management, and executive personnel.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
The Employee Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides a central place for managers and employees scheduling.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Project Team Management
The Project Team Site application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides a central location for the project manager and team to collaborate during all phases of the project lifecycle from initiation to close-out.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Board of Directors
A Board of Directors or Executive Board may use this application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to manage tasks and information.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: HelpDesk Dashboard
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services features several tools to assist a help desk or customer service team in managing requests from customers and in improving team communication.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: IT Developer
The IT Developer Team Site application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides a central place for developers.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Employee Training
The Employee Training application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a central go-to site for employees to easily find and sign up for training opportunities related to their role or department.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Marketing Communications Campaign Site
The Marketing Communications Campaign application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a central site for marketing managers.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Employee Scheduling
Managers of businesses with hourly employees use this application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services for reviewing and approving timesheets, posting shift and schedule information, making announcements, storing key documents, and surveying their team for feedback on various issues.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Legal Document Review
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is for company legal departments to post legal documents and templates, communicate requirements and processes, and provide contact information.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Classroom Management
Using this application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, teachers may post all information about a single class including lesson plans, assignments, tasks, key contacts, grading forms and student information.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Meeting Management
The Meeting Management Site application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint services is a central place for meeting facilitators.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Change Management
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides a platform for managing the Change Order process related to a particular professional services project and serves as a mechanism for tracking past changes along with their reasons and impacts.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Loan Initiation Management
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is designed to help small brokers and banks track documentation and progress on home, car and other loans.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Professional Services Contractual Setup
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a single site for Professional Services organizations to manage the initiation step of a client engagement.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: HR InfoPath Forms
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a central site for employees to sign up, using InfoPath forms, for Human Resources (HR) programs and services such as: ID badges, Parking permits, 401K, Healthcare benefits, and more.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: RFP Management
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint services is a central portal for managing the Request for Proposal (RFP) process.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Event Planning
The Event Coordination application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a central site for managing the entire event coordination process.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Expense Report Portal
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is designed to manage the expense report process.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Room And Equipment
This application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides one go-to place for organizing conference room, conference call, and meeting equipment availability and for making requests to reserve them.

Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Competitive Intelligence

Download details: Windows SharePoint Services Applications Template: Competitive Intelligence

"The Competitive Intelligence Dashboard application for Windows SharePoint Services is designed to improve organization of CI-related materials, and communication about competitive issues among sales, public relations, marketing, product or service management, and executive personnel. It features automatic news feeds from MSNBC, placeholder for competitive graphics, a list for tracking competitive profiles and rankings, and discussions, surveys and document libraries related to CI."

That sounds kind of interesting... Worth a quick look at least.

It sounds more usefull than the CI emails I get...

Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction

Download details: Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction

"Redaction is the careful editing of a document to remove confidential information.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically.

Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.

Notes:
We recommend that you carefully review any documents redacted using this tool to confirm that all the information that you intended to redact was successfully redacted."

I sure hope MS did their homework and closely reviewed this. It would not be pretty for them if someone "important" released a redacted document and another party was able to remove the redaction. Redaction's on produced/delivered documents, by their very nature, have to be secure, permanente and inviolable.


Taking a quick 2 second pass at trying to break this, and so far it looks like MS did a good job.


What happens is that in the original Word document you mark sections/words/etc for redaction. Then you "Redact Document". This creates a new Word document with the redactions in place. During the Redact Document step, the Add-in appears to actually replace the redacted characters with ASCII character 124, aka the vertical pipe symbol, |


I focused on this new, redacted document to see if there was an easy way to get the original text back out.

First, can I select, cut and paste out the original text? Nope.

Second, using the Word Object Model/API can I get the original text? Nope (Tested via Office Spy)

Third, what about SaveAs *.txt? Nope, still can't get the original text.

Fourth, what about opening the DOC in notepad? Nope, the original text is not easily viewable

Finally, Track Changes. Turing track changes on for the original document, redacted some text, “Redacted Document”. Now in the new document, can I turn off/reject/view original text? Nope. Still redacted.


So while it looks like this is a good, workable tool if you are still concerned you might want to wait for forensic professionals to weigh in before using it.

BGInfo (Background Info from Sysinterals)

Sysinternals Freeware - BgInfo

"How many times have you walked up to a system in your office and needed to click through several diagnostic windows to remind yourself of important aspects of its configuration, such as its name, IP address, or operating system version? If you manage multiple computers you probably need BGInfo. It automatically displays relevant information about a Windows computer on the desktop's background, such as the computer name, IP address, service pack version, and more. You can edit any field as well as the font and background colors, and can place it in your startup folder so that it runs every boot, or even configure it to display as the background for the logon screen. ..."

I've seen BGInfo before, but it really didn't click as to how cool it was until I saw this WindowsITPro article, BGInfo, Keep an eye on system info (reg required to read the entire article).

In teaser portion of the article there's a screenshot of BGInfo in action.

Okay, NOW I get it. It's SO much more than a "This is the computer name" utility.

I live in Terminal Services, and at any given time I'm connected to 5-10 sessions (at one time I was baby sitting/running/kicking distributed processing on 50+ PC's all via terminal services). And without being careful I would sometimes get lost and forget what box I was on. So after a couple hard learned lessons I cheesed up some methods to keep from getting lost again.

When I first saw BGInfo and saw the initial screenshot, I thought a "This is the computer name" utility would be a cool and might help a little, but wasn't overwhelmed.

Knowing that it was from Sysinternals, I should have known better...

Then, like I said above, I saw this shot.

Playing with it now...

WHAT Did You Say? (Coding for Fun TTS-SAPI Article )

Coding4Fun: Giving Computers a Voice

"Most of us talk to our computers all the time. You wouldn't believe the things my wife says to her poor machine when something goes wrong. This article demonstrates how easy it is to enable managed applications to finally talk back using Microsoft's Speech API (SAPI). But don't worry: since you control what the application says, you can ensure it uses nicer language than my wife.

...

One of the best uses of TTS is for audio notifications. ..."

I like the idea of voice audio notifications... Sure we could, and have, used wave files, but that's so static. TTS is dynamic by its very nature. THAT's the cool part.

I have my headphones on all the time, listening to music on my PC, so I have a number of app audio notifications turned on. And I always have to remember what that DING or BOINK or BELL sound means... Then I have to go to the app and see what really happened.

For example, it would be nice if MSN IM would just TELL me who just came online. Getting the "someone just came online" sound does little for me (better than nothing, but still). I don't want to switch mental contexts unless it's someone I've been waiting to have come online, etc, etc, etc...

One point though, is that the voice notification MUST be related to the event causing the notification. Just having a, "You have new mail" voice prompt it worse than a DING. "You have new mail from Bill Gates", now that's cool... :)

Planet X

Caltech astronomer finds solar system's 10th planet - Yahoo! News

"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California astronomer has discovered what he believes is the 10th planet in our solar system, a group of NASA-funded researchers said on Friday.

The new planet, known as 2003UB313, has been identified as the most distant object ever detected orbiting the sun, California Institute of Technology astronomer Michael Brown said.
...
The planet is located about 9.7 billion miles (14.5 billion km) from the sun and is about 1 1/2 times the size of Pluto, the researchers said.

The new planet orbits the sun once every 560 years and is now at its farthest point from Earth, he said. In about 280 years, the planet will be as close as Neptune, he said.

Like Pluto, the object's surface is believed to be predominantly methane, but its size -- about 1,700 miles (2,700 km) in diameter -- qualifies it as a planet, Brown said. Earth is about 7,900 miles (12,700 km) in diameter.

..."

Don't these people watch TV, Movies or read science fiction?

It's the MOTHERSHIP! DUGH!

:|

(Via Los Angeles Metroblog - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars... 2003UB313

Talk about keeping you up at night... Free "Break-in" Utilities

Free Break-in Tools

"Many free (or nearly free) break-in tools are readily available on the Internet. You can easily find these utilities by searching the Internet with the keywords break-in tools.

You should take a quick look at the free break-in utilities for two reasons:
1. The quantity, general availability, and feature set of these tools should give you a wake-up call to physically secure your servers and defend against their potential use in your environment.

2. You might find some of these tools useful and wat to try them in a test environment.
Here's a sampling of free tools that will probably keep you awake at night: ..."

This post references five free utilities (well four with working URL's) that could help you break into Windows PC's (err... um... I mean, recover lost admin passwords... um... yeah).

Advanced Windows Password Recovery, Austrumi, Emergency Boot CD, Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, XP Password Cracker

I've used the Emergency Boot CD a number of times and it has always worked well for me.

I've not seen some of the other ones before... I'll have to check them out next time.

First you have to admit you have a problem...

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger - Depressed over your blog? Read this

Scoble posted What everyone should know about blog depression(PDF) from The Onionist yesterday.

As he said in his post, "... if you don't write a blog obsessively you probably won't see the humor in it." So true.

A couple points made me laugh (and sigh).

libcurl.NET 1.3

SourceForge.net: Project Info - libcurl.NET

"Libcurl.NET exposes the open-source cURL library to C# and VB.NET clients. Supported protocols include FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, File, Gopher, Telnet, DICT, and LDAP. Developers may particularly want to check out Libcurl.NET's support for FTP, since that protocol isn't expected to be included in Microsoft's standard system.NET classes until .NET 2.0 is released. The product may also have interest for developers who have worked with cURL and/or Libcurl under Unix or Linux. The product includes MSDN-formatted API documentation and a number of sample applications in C# and VB.NET. Version 1.3 is completely open source and has been updated to work with the latest version of Libcurl, 7.13. It is now distributed as a ZIP file."
Description from SoftwareDownloads.WS

The next thought I had was, what is cURL? Here's some more information about cURL and libcURL

In short, LibCURL is a library for transferring files via a number of URL based protocols like FTP, HTTP, etc...

I like that the included sames come in both C# and VB.Net flavors.