I am running my development environment Windows XP. I need access to the function SHGetKnownFolderPath. My team proposes that I simply update my shell32.dll with theirs and update my header files.
The function is documented here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb762188%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Now, understand that the focus of this question is on the viability of overriding/updating the shell32.dll manually via copy-paste. Please do not respond with workarounds/alternatives to the function mentioned above. That is not the point of this question.
Is it safe to simply take the Windows 7 version of shell32.dll and paste over mine (in XP)? I am afraid to test that for fear of murdering my entire operating system. I do not know all of Windows' library inter-dependencies and whether this would even be compatible. It sounds incredibly unstable, but that is what is being proposed I do.
You should not change a Windows DLL manually. A Windows 7 DLL will have dependencies that will not resolve on XP. Even if this worked (very unlikely), next time you install a patch from Windows Update it may either break due to dependencies or replace your Windows 7 DLL back to XP version.
UPDATE: This just won't work. The Windows 7 DLL has dependencies on API sets which did not exist in XP.
Copying manually the dll via copy-paste will not work, because WFP will kick in and restore the original dll. IIRC only digitally-signed updates from Microsoft are allowed to replace system dlls on a running system to avoid messes like this. You should replace the file offline (e.g. from another copy of Windows/BartPE/Linux/...), or disable/workaround WFP in some way. So, it's not practical.
Taking a system dll from another version of Windows and copying it there seems like a terrible idea. The shell changed a lot from Windows XP to Windows 7, I'm sure that there will be a lot of missing dependencies. Even if you managed to copy every file of the Windows 7 shell to Windows XP, these files would depend from newer user32/gdi32/ntdll/... functions added in Vista and 7, so it would not work anyway.
So, I think that the most probable consequence of replacing shell32.dll would be the failure to load almost any non-core component of the OS: failing shell32.dll to load due to missing dependencies, almost any GUI executable that links against it would fail to start. So, it's not safe.
Other than being a problem from a technical standpoint, I strongly suspect that it's also illegal. Having a license for both Windows XP and Windows 7 would not help, I think that this is considered "modification of the software product", that is explicitly disallowed by the Microsoft EULAs. So, it's not legal.
If you want backwards compatibility with XP just use SHGetFolderPath instead of doing all this mess.
Is it safe/practical to manually update shell32.dll in
Windows XP?
No.
shell32.dll is a core operating system file. I would expect that minus the other dependencies underneath the Windows 7 version you would have all sorts of unexpected behaviors. It would be better to test within a VM a complete Windows 7 environment rather than copy over a part of another version of an operating system.
Bigger questions: Do you think anyone at Microsoft every tested this exact combination? If you run into issues and you call support do you believe that you will find that your configuration is a supported one for your efforts? Having worked for MSFT in the past I would think that the answer to both is likely not.
Probably they know what they're saying. Anyway I would suggest you creating a system restore point and, just in case, downloading a minimal linux distribution so that, in extreme cases (i.e. windows can't boot), you simply restore their shell32.dll with yours.
I don't think so...
But if still want to try, then i suggest you install a virtual machine and try it there. this way much safer.
Related
I was tasked to set up an open-source icap-server to scan files that are uploaded in one of our web applications.
The files base64-encoded withing the upload method and this seems to lead to the fortigate not being able to scan it properly.
Now I managed to set up an icap-server using "c-icap" and tested it with "clamav". So far it seems to work, at least EICAR files are detected.
Now the problem is, that my boss is basically a "Windows-only" person who says that any open-source AV can´t be trusted enough.
He wants me to try to have the requests/uploads sent to the c-icap server, but scanned with Windows Defender. ß Is there any - useful - way to accomplish this? Also, since I am super new to ICAP - are there any restrictions regarding which icap-server can be used?Like, is there any way to force requests to be handled with a metadefender-icap only, and not any other icap server?
Sorry if these questions are a bit unspecific and basic, but just started with ICAP yesterday!
Thank you!
Check out this link: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/metadefender-icap-with-windows-defender-antivirus-world-class/ba-p/800234 to see what Microsoft offers regarding Defender+ICAP.
I have used commercial ICAP solutions in the past (like Bluecoat) that allow plugging in multiple commercial virus engines (Kaspersky, Sophos, ...).
These are appliances, and you don't need to tell your boss their internals are probably some sort of Linux ;-)
You can probably also set up a commercial antivirus solution on your Linux system and use that.
Looking at this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/microsoft-defender-atp-linux it may even be possible to run Microsoft's Defender on Linux. I haven't tried it myself though.
Unlike your boss, Microsoft realizes software shouldn't be made to just run on Windows anymore (even MS-SQL Server now runs on Linux).
Basically I have some C/C++ code that I need to build and debug on a Linux machine. Unfortunately, my windows laptop doesn't have enough free hard space to install some Linux dist nor does it have enough free RAM to comfortably run VM.
Until now, I dealt with it rather comfortably using WSL, but the scale was rather small. It was easy to edit and debug 2-3 .c files through CLI and gdb, but it became really annoying on a large scale projects.
I want something simple as "edit code in windows IDE [X], compile it on remote Linux/WSL (the project uses Makefiles), and preferably debug it via gdb".
VS has something close to what I want, but it can't deal with existing Linux projects. It needs to create a new configuration which is alien to the project's Makefile.
I know this question is a bit old, but I think the solution is to make a symlink between your WSL folder and the Window's folder. This is how I handled it for a Ubuntu-20.04 WSL:
Access PowerShell in Administrator mode
Type cmd.exe in the PowerShell
Once cmd.exe is opened, type mklink /d C:\<path_to_your_Windows_folder> \\wsl$\Ubuntu-20.04\home\<your_user>\<path_to_your_WSL_folder>
EDIT
This was tested under Windows 10 Version 2004 with WSL2
I'm unsure about C and C++ but it sounds like this is exactly the same as how i work in node and javascript every day.
I checkout my code using git inside WSL to a location like /mnt/c/code/myproject. Then using sublime/VS code/webstorm i edit the files in windows in the location c:\code\myproject this works really well and have been doing this every day for over a year.
Things to be aware of are that you need to ensure that your editor of choice saves files with linux line endings and that all command line operations are done inside WSL.
Please see this article to see the differences between windows and linux files and how this works inside the WSL.
I want something simple as "edit code in windows IDE , compile it on remote linux/WSL
You will have something as simple as that.
Only with Windows 19.03 though:
See "Updated WSL in Windows 10 version 1903 lets you access Linux files from Windows"
Microsoft's Craig Loewen says:
In the past, creating and changing Linux files from Windows resulted in losing files or corrupting data. Making this possible has been a highly requested and long anticipated feature. We're proud to announce you can now easily access all the files in your Linux distros from Windows.
So how does this work? He goes on to explain:
To put it briefly: a 9P protocol file server facilitates file related requests, with Windows acting as the client.
We've modified the WSL init daemon to include a 9P server. This server contains protocols that support Linux metadata, including permissions.
There is a Windows service and driver that acts as the client and talks to the 9P server (which is running inside of a WSL instance).
Client and server communicate over AF_UNIX sockets, since WSL allows interop between a Windows application and a Linux application using AF_UNIX as described in this post.
Warning:
The old rules still apply, you should NOT access your Linux files inside of the AppData folder!
If you try to access your Linux files through your AppData folder, you are bypassing using the 9P server, which means that you will not have access to your Linux files, and you could possibly corrupt your Linux distro.
I am learning C and I want to install MinGW on my laptop. The MinGW installer is a web-installer, it requires the computer to have access to the internet when installing. But the problem is that my computer's not connected to the internet. So it can't be installed.
So I am thinking of downloading the complete offline installer on my smart-phone and transfering it to my PC through blue-tooth.
I have already tried TDM-GCC, but even that requires me to download somthing.
So is there an offline installer to MinGW? If yes where can I get it?
I did not find an offline installer for MinGW,but instead I found a better Windows port; which is MinGW-W64
From http://mingw-w64.yaxm.org/doku.php:
Mingw-w64 is an advancement of the original mingw.org project, created to support the GCC compiler on Windows systems. It has forked it in 2007 in order to provide support for 64 bits and new APIs. It has since then gained widespread use and distribution.
Now to answer this question: it has to be mannually installed by downloading the zip file. It won't require additional download.
You can download it from link : https://github.com/jonasstrandstedt/MinGW
You need to extract the MinGW folder in C:\ eg: c:\MinGW . Then what you need to follow the steps given in the link above. In CodeBlock IDE go to settings>compiler>Tochain Executables. There you need to click on auto detect or specify the folder manually.
The most direct answer to the question "Is there an offline MinGW installer?" is "maybe, but it would be a snapshot from the past, and it's almost certainly not up-to-date with the latest available released versions." The individual packages are made available (almost) as soon as they're released, so capturing everything in a self-contained installer is a moving target.
But, you can use the standard installer offline with a bit of prep work if you use MSYS2's pacman, which manages dependencies and grabs all the right versions for you.
The details are given in an answer to another question (https://stackoverflow.com/a/46791235/).
I have a legacy VB6 system which is installed in C:/Program Files/IronDuke
In the past it has written some files into this directory. I understand that these files are hidden away if the application is installed under Vista or a later OS, but not if they were written under XP or earlier OS.
How can I retrieve a copy of these 'hidden' files when written under Vista or Windows 7 or 8?
You are looking at a feature called UAC Virtualization, this blog posting gives a pretty good rundown on what is happening and where the files are located.
From above article:
For example, if an application attempts to write to C:\Program Files\Contoso\Settings.ini, and the user does not have permissions to write to that directory (the Program Files), the write operation will be redirected to C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Contoso\settings.ini. If an application attempts to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Contoso\ in the registry, it will automatically be redirected to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\Software\Contoso or HKEY_USERS\UserSID_Classes\VirtualStore\Machine\Software\Contoso.
so in your case if you are trying to find the files you need to look in:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\IronDuke\
You cannot write to Program Files under Windows 7 / 8 - system security prevents programs running as regular users from doing so. One option for you is to write these files to the user's profile folder (you'll have to update the VB6 program for this, although the changes should be pretty small if the program is otherwise well-written). This would be your best option since the updated code would work well in the future without more changes.
You amy be able to get the program running using Compatibility Mode but I doubt it - on my Windows 8 system I don't even get 'Windows XP' as a compatibility option anymore. All other options will likely enforce security.
You can try running your program as administrator but I'd only do this if you don't have the source to make the changes - it's poor practice to run programs with all privileges since it opens up the system for attacks.
I am trying to install BDE Engine by executing the following command line from my installation program as follows.
ShellExecute(0, nil, 'regsvr32.exe', 'BdeInst.dll', nil, SW_SHOW);
It pops up with a message requesting permission to install BDE Engine at a particular location. When you click okay button, it pops up another a message as follows.
I did verify that I have plenty of free space in my hardrive. When you click on Yes button, it installs the BDE engine successfully.
I don't know why. Plus, there is not much information online about this.
Any input will be greatly appreciated.
First of all, the BDE is deprecated, and you should better avoid using it, even with other versions of Delphi.
You have third party components around able to connect directly to DBs without using the BDE. See e.g. DevArt, SQLDirect, DASoft (its FreeDAC is free), and a lot of other components like Zeos or our SynDB Open Source libraries.
You reached the well known "2GB rounding error". The BDE installer suffers from it, but applications using BDE also.
BDE installer is buggy.
It just does not work with newer versions of Windows.
You have other installers around, like interbase and BDE on windows 7 or Bde Installer on these Embarcadero days
BDE used in applications will suffer from the same 2GB limitation, linked to the GetDiskFreeSpace improper use.
There is a work around available on Embarcadero CodeCentral which is worth to be included in your application code.
The BDE is an old piece of software that has now been deprecated for a few years. While people do still have it running, I believe it was originally 16bit software and may never have been changed. I have a feeling the message is coming from some piece of software that can not understand your large hard drive. I don't recall if BDEInst.dll is the BDE installer from Borland, but the message may be coming from that. You also mention an "Installation program is being developed ...".
It should install to XP, and I would get it working there first. Win 7 and 8 introduce more issues. However, if at all possible, reconsider if you want to install BDE at this point in time.
The bdeinst.dll uses the Win32 API function GetDiskFreeSpace, which can report a completely misleading value when executed against a drive that is larger than 2GB - see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/202455 for a developer-based workaround.
The reason I know this is because I've been hit by it before and examined the imports for the bdeinst.dll binary which indicates that it uses GetDiskFreeSpaceA (this is the ascii version of function).
If you have to use the BDE, then you just have to accept that you may see this error when you attempt to install the app