AnJ Inc's Weblog

The Evils of Some Programers

anjinc — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:44:38 +0000

Gmail Scam!!

Read article at TechCrunch

ProcessStartInfo anomalies

anjinc — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:18:57 +0000

I have found that trying to run an application as a different user in .Net is not as easy as I had thought. This has spawned off the fact that in my previous post, I had decided to start creating a Windows Service to autolaunch the billmind.exe application under the Administrator credentials.

Consider the following code:

With myProcess
    .UserName = "[insert user name here]"
    .Password = "[insert password here]"
    .UseShellExecute = False
End With

it looks correct except the myProcess.Password value has the following error:

Error 1 Value of type ‘String’ cannot be converted to System.Security.SecureString’

So I thought to myself, ok I will just create a new variable and declare it as a SecureString and pass that value.

Dim UserPassowrd As Security.SecureString
UserPassowrd = "[insert password here]"

Still no go, Security.SecureString will only accept a SecureString value. Trolling through the net finally netted the following code to convert a clear text string into a secure string.

''' 
''' Converts cleartext password into SecureString Password
''' 
''' 
''' SecureString Password
''' .Net SecureString does not accept standard string inputs
Function ConvertToSecureString(ByVal UserPassword As String)
 
    Dim retPassword As New SecureString
 
    For Each c As Char In UserPassword.ToCharArray
        retPassword.AppendChar(c)
    Next
 
    Return retPassword
 
End Function

So now, with the function in place the code can now convert a different users credentials and allow it to run.

Quicken 2008 Billminder issues

anjinc — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:01:58 +0000

So running Quicken 2008, I have encountered issues with the billmind.exe application. It does not run under my current user account despite being an Administrator. The only way of running it is to invoke a ‘Run As’ command and use the Admin account. Of course I had to log in as the Admin and point the Quicken profile for that account to use my data file.

Currently I am in the process of creating a ‘workaround’ service that will launch the billmind app automatically.

vsAmp2 – A Visual Studio 2008 audio player addin

anjinc — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:53:49 +0000

I have spent some time on trying to re-create a add-in that had existed in VB6 that would allow me to play audio and video files within the Visual Studio IDE while I code.

This project is based on the .NET 2.0 framework and is coded using the VSPackage integration process.

This code/solution has taught me a lot on how to write and modify the vsPackage information and how to utilized external assemblies to handle core processes of the ‘host’ application.

As a side note, I am including the source code, but you must make a base solution within VS to ‘link’ them all together. vsAmp2 requires the playlistEditor.dll from the PlaylistManager project.

Download Source code: vsAmp2.zip