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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Many Windows Programmers still have trouble when it comes to sessions, window stations and desktops. They frequently get mixed up and we can see a lot of question on the Internet about e.g. how to spawn processes in all logged-on user desktops (rather than sessions).  Hence, I have listed some articles that you can read to get a better understanding of such things like a Terminal Sessions.

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In my last article “Jwscl and FreeAndNil” there were some great comments on the source design. Oliver told me to use a guarded memory page so the memory is always invalid. With his information I wrote a source code that creates a pointer which always triggers an access violation.

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There is a lot of talking about the usage of FreeAndNil in destructors. I’ve never thought about it before so I used it quite often even in destructors. Although I don’t use it as a universal remedy function, it still seems to be a bad design: a thought shared by many leading Delphi experts.  Thus I refactored the destructors in JWSCL to accompany them.

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I had some free time that I used to put together all the features JWSCL provides currently. There are some more features that are implemented by other tool classes or functions that I left out in favor of a good overview. A complete overview of all classes, methods and more gives you the documentation at http://jwscldoc.delphi-jedi.net.

So here are the feautures (You can look up the class names on the documentation page):

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I had some trouble writing these lines because usually I do not want to publish criticism. But Oliver told me that it would be a good idea and I don’t want to disagree .

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I had some trouble with this rather complicated COM structure called ACTRL_ACCESS. So I post a diagram to show its design. Otherwise it would be a pity to leave it on my private hard drive.

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I’m writing this article because I want to share programming habits with you. What habit did prove to be a good one for you? Share yours then, please. Read the rest of this entry »