Retrieving the List of Installed Programs in Windows 7

The Programs and Features view in the Windows Control Panel does not provide a means to export the list of installed programs as a text file.

A quick web search brought up the information that the information about installed software resides under the registry key

HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

or, on 64-bit systems, under

HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

(Source: social technet, Scripting Guy, HowToGeek, SuperUser)

PowerShell kann enumerate the information under these keys using the Get-ItemProperty commandlet. You can retrieve the PS properties of this data using the Get-Member commandlet.

So the first PS command to retrieve this list is

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*

However, Control Panel does not display the registry entry if

• its DisplayName is empty or not set
• its UninstallString is empty or not set

which results in the command

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | 
where-object {$_.DisplayName -and $_.UninstallString }

To retrieve the programs directly in PowerShell ISE, we can simply use the Format-Table commandlet

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | 
Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -and $_.UninstallString } | 
Select-Object Publisher, DisplayName, DisplayVersion, InstallLocation, InstallDate, URLInfoAbout, UninstallString | 
Sort-Object Publisher,DisplayName | 
Format-Table

To output to a file for further processing in Excel, export to a .csv file like this

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | 
Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -and $_.UninstallString } | 
Select-Object Publisher, DisplayName, DisplayVersion, InstallLocation, InstallDate, URLInfoAbout, UninstallString | 
Sort-Object Publisher,DisplayName | 
Export-Ssv -delimiter "`t" -encoding "unicode" c:\temp\installed.csv

No Language Bar in Windows 7 Home Premium

If you add keyboard layouts in Windows 7 Pro, the Language Bar shows up in the Taskbar, after you enabled it in the language bar settings dialog.

However, I found that Home Premium does not automatically the language bar, even if all the required checkboxes are checked.

The first hint I found that partly fixed the situation was to manually start (Start|Run) the program ctfmon.exe.

Annoyingly, the tiny buttons in the language bar allow you to accidentally close it, and there is no straight-forward way to bring it back.

Changing the settings to disable the symbols

Language Bar settings

and adding ctfmon.exe to system start as sketched here finally solved the problem:

• start regedit
• navigate to
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
• add string key named “ctfmon”
• set its value to “C:\Windows\system32\ctfmon.exe”

 

Deploying ASP.Net MVC 5 on Windows Server 2008

Developing an MVC application in Visual Studio 2013 (Update 3), I needed to install a demo on a Windows 2008 server.

Since Server 2008 ships with .Net 3, we first need to install .Net 4.5.1, either from the Visual Studio download page, or from MSDN.

After the required reboot and setting up a web application in IIS, browsing to the new site resulted in HTTP errors 403 (refers to directory browsing) and 404 (when navigating to a specific controller action).

Luckily, this issue could be solved by re-adding <modules> to the <system.webServer> section (found on SO):

<system.webServer>
  <modules>
    <remove name="UrlRoutingModule-4.0" />
    <add name="UrlRoutingModule-4.0" 
        type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule" 
        preCondition="" />
  </modules>
</system.webServer>

After editing the web.config, the web application could be accessed, but all CSS and JavaScript requests, which are served using Bundling and Minification, would result in a 404.

Again, another module wanted to be included

      <remove name="BundleModule" />
      <add name="BundleModule" type="System.Web.Optimization.BundleModule" />

Finally, the web application looked as expected, so I logged in, and

No owin.Environment item was found in the context.

The internets are full of helpful tips to add

<add key=”owin:AppStartup” value=”[Namespace].Startup, [AssemblyName]” />

but that did not change anything. What really solved that last problem was to add the attribute

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />

in web.config.

In the end, the web.config section looks like this

  <system.webServer>
    <modules  runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
      <remove name="FormsAuthentication" />
      <remove name="UrlRoutingModule-4.0" />
      <add name="UrlRoutingModule-4.0"
          type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule" 
          preCondition="" />
      <remove name="BundleModule" />
      <add name="BundleModule" 
          type="System.Web.Optimization.BundleModule" />
    </modules>

Batch Unblock Files

If you download a file, or receive a file by email, and save it to disk, the file is marked as downloaded from an external computer, and cannot be executed or, depending on the application, opened. You need to open the file properties dialog, and click “Unblock” to resolve the situation.

The same is true for zip files and other archives: When extracting the archive, the “blocked” flag may be set on every extracted file, and the “Unblock” button is not available if you select more than one file and open the properties dialog.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution that I found in a comment on SO:

for /F %a in ('dir /r/b/s') do @echo .>%a:Zone.Identifier:$DATA

 

How I survived “S.M.A.R.T. Status: BAD. Backup and Replace”

My Windows 7 started to display the “Windows detected a hard disk problem” error message. While I first ignored it, I finally ran chkdsk /f /r on all disks just to make sure erroneous sectors would not cause the error to show again.

Unfortunately, this did not work out, and the error message became more persistent.

A look into the event log presented more and more warnings (Event ID 52, Source Disk)

The driver has detected that device <device> has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

and errors (Event ID 7, Source Disk)

The device, <device>, has a bad block.

(The Events and Errors Message Center does not even know these event IDs exist.)

Restarting the PC would stop the boot process with the message

S.M.A.R.T. Status: BAD. Backup and Replace
Press F1 to continue

I decided to finally bring myself to fix the situation, and asked teh internets how to do it. (I already fixed a dying drive once, but that was Ubuntu, and this is Windows, and it can get ugly.

The dying disk is a Seagate, so I tried the SeaTools (both Windows and DOS) because they might help resolve the errors, but they didn’t.

Fortunately, the new disk is also a Seagate, a different model but the same size as the old one, so I downloaded Seagate DiscWizard on my laptop to create a bootable CD. Unfortunately, DiscWizard setup requires Seagate disks installed in the PC, which the laptop does not have. Back to square one.

In the end, I mounted the new disk in the PC, installed DiscWizard, and started it. The selection of source and destination disks cause adrenaline levels to jump, but the selection dialog (of both disks) always displays the partitions of each selected disk, so the the likelihood of selecting both drives wrong due to poor UI is greatly reduced (see screenshots in the HowTo).

After disk copying completed, I disconnected the old disk and left the new disk connected on the same cable as during copying, booted, and, voilà, logged into my old new Windows 7.

Using ABCpdf in a Windows Service

One of my long-term projects is a web application which can generate PDF documents on the fly, but bigger PDFs can also be generated offline using a Windows service. Both the web application and the service use the same code base to invoke the ABCpdf library.

Recently, an update of Server 2008 to IE9 forced me to switch to ABCpdf’s Gecko engine, and this switch caused the service, which runs under the Local System account, to fail unexpectedly.

The Event Log contained various error entries:

Source ABCpdf

The following information was included with the event:
Failed to add HTML: Page load timed out.

Source Application Error

Faulting application MyService.exe, version 1.0.0.0, time stamp 0x4f883a56,
faulting module KERNEL32.dll, version 6.0.6002.18005, time stamp 0x49e037dd,
exception code 0xe0434f4d, fault offset 0x0003fbae, process id 0x%9, application start time 0x%10.

Source ASP.Net 2.0.50727.0

An unhandled exception occurred and the process was terminated.

After adding some logging, the following exceptions were reported

Exception: System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException

Message: Type ‘WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Spawntaneous.SpawntaneousException’ in Assembly ‘ABCpdf, Version=8.1.0.1, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=a7a0b3f5184f2169’ is not marked as serializable.

StackTrace:    at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.WriteObjectInfo.InitSerialize(Object obj, ISurrogateSelector surrogateSelector, StreamingContext context, SerObjectInfoInit serObjectInfoInit, IFormatterConverter converter, ObjectWriter objectWriter)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.WriteObjectInfo.Serialize(Object obj, ISurrogateSelector surrogateSelector, StreamingContext context, SerObjectInfoInit serObjectInfoInit, IFormatterConverter converter, ObjectWriter objectWriter)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectWriter.Write(WriteObjectInfo objectInfo, NameInfo memberNameInfo, NameInfo typeNameInfo)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.ObjectWriter.Serialize(Object graph, Header[] inHeaders, __BinaryWriter serWriter, Boolean fCheck)
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter.Serialize(Stream serializationStream, Object graph, Header[] headers, Boolean fCheck)
at System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels.CrossAppDomainSerializer.SerializeObject(Object obj, MemoryStream stm)
at System.AppDomain.Serialize(Object o)
at System.AppDomain.MarshalObject(Object o)

WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.PDFException: Failed to add HTML: Page load timed out.

   at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.GeckoCallback.MyCallback(IntPtr closure, IntPtr serializedOpts, UInt32 serializedOptsLen, Double widthInMm, Double heightInMm, String url, UInt32& outNumCommands, IntPtr& outSerializedData, UInt32& outSerializedDataLen)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.NDoc.N.AddImageUrlGecko_32(IntPtr doc, String url, Int32 width, IntPtr callback, String& outErr)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.AddUrl(Doc doc, String url, Boolean paged, Int32 width, String& err)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.AddHtml(Doc doc, String html, Boolean paged, Int32 width, String& err)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Doc.AddImageHtml(String html, Boolean paged, Int32 width, Boolean disableCache)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Doc.AddImageHtml(String html)

System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for ‘WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.GeckoCallback’ threw an exception. —> WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Spawntaneous.SpawntaneousException: Failed to generate worker process.

   at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Spawntaneous.ProcessGenerator.GenerateLocalInvoker(MethodInfo method, String filename, Platform platform, TargetFramework framework)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Spawntaneous.WorkerProcessExe.Init(String filename, Platform platform, TargetFramework framework)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Spawntaneous.WorkerProcessExe..ctor(String filename, Platform platform, TargetFramework framework)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.GeckoCallback..cctor()
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.AddUrl(Doc doc, String url, Boolean paged, Int32 width, String& err)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.AddHtml(Doc doc, String html, Boolean paged, Int32 width, String& err)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Doc.AddImageHtml(String html, Boolean paged, Int32 width, Boolean disableCache)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Doc.AddImageHtml(String html)

As you can see, the last two exceptions were caused by calling AddImageHtml(), which is the entry point to the invocation of the Gecko rendering engine, therefore my reasoning was that the Gecko engine required something that the MSHTML rendering engine did not need.

I remembered that on IIS, the AppPool’s “Load User Profile” needs to be set, so probably it had something to do with the service running as Local System which does not have a user profile?

As it turns out, setting the service to run under a local user in Control Panel/Administration/Services fixed the problem, and the service was again able to generate PDF files.

Windows Update killed my ABCpdf

An application I develop (dev environment: Win7 Pro, IE9, ASP.Net 3.5) suddenly showed problems running on Windows Server 2008: the web application could not create PDF documents anymore, and

• The browser only displayed a “Service Unavailable” message

• The browser user was automatically logged out of the web application

• The web request did not show in the IIS log

• No error in the Application events

• A warning in the System events (Event ID 5011) saying

A process serving application pool ‘MyAppPool’ suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was ‘2688’. The data field contains the error number.

The details tab displayed the following information:

ProcessID

2688

6D000780

---

Binary data:

In Words

0000: 8007006D

In Bytes

0000: 6D 00 07 80

Teh Internets wanted me to debug IIS and my .Net application with IIS Diagnostics Toolkit, and Debug Diagnostic Tool, and IISState, and awe-inspiring how-to instructions.

Instead, I chose to add logging statements to the code that was affected by the error, and found that cause to be the statement

int theID = doc.AddImageHtml(html);

As it turns out (thank you SO, also here), you need to activate the Gecko engine in ABCpdf to work on (some) IE9 machines (as I said, the code works ok on Win7Pro, and I had recently updated the server):

doc.HtmlOptions.Engine = EngineType.Gecko;

Trying out the Gecko engine, the next result I got was

WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.PDFException: ABCpdf cannot detect any printers. Gecko Engine requires a printer installed in the system. Usually, XPS Document Writer would suffice. Try also running the service as an interactive user. —> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The RPC server is unavailable
at System.Drawing.Printing.PrinterSettings.get_InstalledPrinters()
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.get_DefaultPrinter()
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.get_DefaultPrinter()
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.Preflight(Doc doc)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Internal.Gecko.DocAddGecko.AddHtml(Doc doc, String html, Boolean paged, Int32 width, String& err)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Doc.AddImageHtml(String html, Boolean paged, Int32 width, Boolean disableCache)
at WebSupergoo.ABCpdf8.Doc.AddImageHtml(String html)

After creating an XPS printer in control panel, the web application was finally able to generate PDF documents again.

According to the ABCpdf support page (6.29), the MSHTML rendering engine should be avoided for future applications:

Unfortunately with the official release of IE9 Microsoft released new documentation which says the IHTMLElementRender::DrawToDC function that was required has been deprecated. This is especially unfortunate given that there is no replacement for this function.

Given that Microsoft appears to be unwilling to support these interfaces we would strongly recommend that on new deployments you consider a move to the new Gecko-based HTML engine available in ABCpdf 8.

Test if Directory exists in Batch file (.cmd)

My previous post on testing network drives led me to further research the topic, and I came to quite surprising (at least for me) results: the result if a check with IF EXIST depend on whether

• the drive is a local drive or a mapped network drive or a UNC path

• the path contains spaces or not

• the path is quoted or not

• cmd runs in administrator mode or user mode

I wrote a small batch file that contains a couple of assignments of the form

set dir=c:\temp
set dir=c:\temp\with spaces
etc.

and executed these tests on each value

if exist %dir% echo exists
if exist %dir%\nul echo exists
if exist %dir%\. echo exists
if exist "%dir%" echo exists
if exist "%dir%\nul" echo exists
if exist "%dir%\." echo exists

These are the results

directory	%dir%	%dir%\nul	%dir\.	“%dir%”	“%dir%\nul”	“%dir%\.”
local	x	x	x	x		x
local (spaces)	–	–	–	x		x
mapped (non-admin)	x	x	x	x		x
mapped (non-admin, spaces)	–	–	–	x		x
UNC	x	x	x	x	x	x
UNC (spaces)	–	–	–	x	x	x

Comments:

Testing directory path containing spaces can only be performed using the quoted notation.

Mapped network drives can only be access in non-administrator mode (see these threads).

The only reliable way to test for directory existence is therefore to use the quoted “%dir%\.” notation.

To check whether cmd runs in administrator mode or not, use an admin statement such as ‘at’:

at >nul 2>nul
if errorlevel 1 echo you are not in administrator mode

Test if Network Directory exists in Batch file (.cmd)

The default way to check whether a directory exists in a Windows batch file (.cmd) is

if not exist "%directory%\nul" (
   echo %directory% does not exist
)

However, as this MS KB explains, the check for the NUL file does not work with directories on network drives mapped to a drive letter.

A working solution I found is to process the ERRORLEVEL value a DIR command sets

dir %directory% >nul 2>nul
if errorlevel 1 (
   echo %directory does not exist
)

or

dir %directory% >nul 2>nul
if not errorlevel 1 (
    echo %directory exists
)

Also note that mapped network drives are not available in administrator mode, as is discussed in these threads.

New (empty) Window in IE9

If you press Ctrl-N in Internet Explorer (e.g. IE9), it opens a new window with the same web page. So how do you open a new empty window?

This thread lists 3 methods to open a new IE window from the taskbar:

• Right-click an IE icon, and select “Internet Explorer”
• Shift + Left-click on an IE icon
• Middle-click on an IE icon

Of course, you can also select Internet Explorer from the Program Menu to get a new window.