Windows 7 gave us some nice and useful little eye-catchers in the taskbar. Those are available using the Windows shell interfaces ITaskbarList3 and ITaskbarList4.
But alas, how can a Delphi developer incorporate these in his applications?

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I got a bug from someone who told me that he had problems with the TRegistry method DeleteKey on his 64bit Windows. It just didn’t delete a 64bit key* from the registry although he used the KEY_WOW64_64KEY flag in desired access parameter of  TRegistry.Create.

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As you maybe have heard already. There is a shell exploit that is executed when Windows shows just the icon from a link file. MS works on it but currently you can only remove the icon handler key from the registry to be “safe”. See this link. It also tells us the impact of the action. However, on Windows 7, I think this prevents me from working efficiently with the Windows Explorer. Read the rest of this entry »

Assarbad wrote this script some time ago to compile and link C++ projects on the command line easier. I adapted the cmd script for VC++2010 and also for C++ Builder 2009/2010 and now I have been using it for quite some time. So I wanted to give it back to the community.

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This article describes some ways how to set the security on a folder using JWSCL. Usually, we want to add some rights for a particular user to a folder so she gets access. I can say that is a heck of work to do with WinAPI. But still with JWSCL we need to consider some things. Read the rest of this entry »

As you maybe already know, the old news server for JEDI related questions crashed some time ago. Unfortunately, the old host could not undo the crash and thus some JEDI members created a new server (Thanks you!). The new server location is: news.delphi-jedi.org

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If you are accessing the Embarcadero Forums and such through an Offline Reader like Mozilla Thunderbird, you probably have had a connection problem for some time now. I don’t know what the reason is. However, as a solution instead, use the address forums.embarcadero.com and don’t forget to activate SSL. I couldn’t make a connection without it.

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A long time ago I wrote an article about this strange WinAPI function called GetEffectiveRightsFromAcl. There was a problem that I showed how to solve (see my article and the comment in the MSDN doc). However, this function has never been a good way for retrieving the possible access mask. It seems that MS has changed the MSDN article of this function and instead wrote an example that uses the MS Authz API. I translated the example but using JWSCL. You can see yourself how different it looks…

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If you are interested in the history of Windows, as I am, you should read the article The Secret Origin of Windows by Tandy Trower the product manager of Windows 1.0. This article gives a deep insight into the journey Tandy and his developers had to endure to bring a product on the market that should change the world (although it took a while).

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This article is about how to retrieve the owner of a file. If you are experienced with some of the WinAPI security function this can be pretty easy. There are some problems that needs to be addressed though. The first one is the size of the security items like the SID name of the owner. Secondly, there is the possibility that a SID cannot be resolved to a human readable name at all. And thirdly, we need to check all the result values.

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