C# / .NET – setting or clearing the Password Never Expires flag for a user

Recently, I had to change the “Password Never Expires” flag for some users on Windows systems.

In the past, there used to be a netuser tool available from WindowsITPro where you could use the pwnexp flag to set or clear that flag.
That tool seems to be vanished, so I was searching for alternatives.

Most alternatives I found depend on some  kind of scripting, or the use of the WMIC WMI command line interface: that was “out” because this particular setup is running on Windows XP Embedded, which is trimmed down very much.
The only C# example I found was on CodeProject, but it does

• not take into account the existing flags correctly,
• have  hard coded literals without any references where they are from,
• use bit flag arithmetic without letting the C# compiler do its magic with enums,
• use a call to the deprecated  InvokeGet method,
• use the Invoke(“Put”, … way of calling that so many people use (which actually should have been an – also deprecated – InvokeSet method),
• use COM Interop

Hence the solution below:
C#, with the proper ADS_USER_FLAG_ENUM enum from the MSDN documentation and no COM Interop, it also moves all literals to constants.

CodeRage 4 session material download locations changed – CodeCentral messed up

Somehow, CodeCentral managed to not only delete my uploaded CodeRage 4 session materials (the videos are fine!), but also newer uploads with other submissions.

Since I’m in crush mode to get the BASTA! and DelphiLive 2009 Germany sessions done, and all Embarcadero sites having to do with their membership server perform like a dead horse, I have temporary moved the downloads, and corrected my earlier post on the downloads.

I have notified Embarcadero of the problems, so I’m pretty sure they are being addressed on their side as well.
Edit 20090919: Embarcadero indicated that between 20090913 and 20090914 there has been a database restore on CodeCentral. Some entries therefore have been permanently lost.

When I get back from the conferences, and CodeCentral is more responsive, I’ll retry uploading it there, and correct the posts.
In the mean time, be sure not to save shortcuts to the current locations, as they are bound to change.

The are the new download locations can all be found in my xs4all temporary CodeRage 4 2009 download folder.

This is the full list of my CodeRage 4 sessions and places where you can download everything:

CodeRage 4: session replays are online too!

Embarcadero has made available the replays of the CodeRage 4 sessions.
You can find them in the CodeRage 4 sessions overview.

In order to download them from that overview, NOTE: To access this session replay, you must be logged into EDN. you can login or sign-up (which is free).

To make it easier to find all the relevant downloads, below is an overview of my sessions and their links.

Let me know what you use it for, I’m always interested!

Update 20090918: changed the download locations because CodeCentral messed up.

CodeRage 4: session “Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs” chat and Q&A transcripts

Not only can you download CodeRage 4 session on materials on Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs, but below you can also find the chat transcripts below.

VIP Room Transcript with Q&A

(9/11/2009 9:09:19 AM) The topic is: Session Room 2 – “Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs” by Jeroen Pluimers

Public Room Transcript

(5:52:14 PM) Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – “Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs” by Jeroen Pluimers
(9/11/2009 9:12:47 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: I got a bunch of 406 error messages in the jibber chat client, so I was afraid it lost the connection
(9/11/2009 9:15:45 AM) Jim_Ferguson: Jeroen, Have you been getting a bunch of internal errors when you get fancy with generics?
(9/11/2009 9:15:53 AM) Borland: BTW, DavidI, excellent internet radio choice of KPIG. Very good Blues.
(9/11/2009 9:36:43 AM) Mandy_Walker: http://etncaweb04.embarcadero.com/resources/technical_papers/Delphi-and-Unicode_Marco-Cantu.pdf
(9/11/2009 9:39:14 AM) Jim_Ferguson: Strings are getting fatter on the back end.
(9/11/2009 9:40:39 AM) Mandy_Walker: Sorry, for incorrect link from slide. Better http://etnaweb04.embarcadero.com/resources/technical_papers/
(9/11/2009 9:49:20 AM) Jim_Ferguson: TBYtes and pChar arent equivalt. TBytes is a dynamic array. Shouln’t be pByte instead of TBytes?
(9/11/2009 9:53:05 AM) Jim_Ferguson: Sounds like Intel needs to build Unicode into the processor. There is a lot of out board thinking when it comes to characters now.
(9/11/2009 9:57:19 AM) Mandy_Walker: http://it-republik.de/konferenzen/delphi_live/material/DelpiLive09_Cantu_Unicode.pdf
(9/11/2009 9:58:26 AM) Borland: Thanks Joroen, this was packed with great information sources.
(9/11/2009 9:59:09 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: http://en.wordpress.com/tag/coderage/
(9/11/2009 9:59:17 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: http://wiert.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/coderage-4-session-materials-available-for-download/
(9/11/2009 9:59:24 AM) Mandy_Walker: Thx, Jeroen
(9/11/2009 10:00:47 AM) Erwin_Mouthaan: Bedankt Jeroen. Leuke presentatie!
(9/11/2009 10:01:04 AM) jthurman: Jeroen is a marching band guy?
(9/11/2009 10:01:05 AM) M_L: Thanks!
(9/11/2009 10:01:21 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: http://www.wmc.nl
(9/11/2009 10:01:22 AM) Giel: Bedankt Jeroen!
(9/11/2009 10:01:32 AM) Robert_D_Smith: I played snare and bass drum, Jeroen
(9/11/2009 10:01:40 AM) jthurman: Jeroen: I teach high school marching band in the USA. We should talk sometime.
(9/11/2009 10:02:05 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: write me an email: jeroen@pluimers.com
(9/11/2009 10:02:09 AM) jthurman: Will do
(9/11/2009 10:02:45 AM) Robert_Evans: Thanks Jeroen. Great stuff!
(9/11/2009 10:03:11 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: you are welcome; let me know when you have questions or run into things that I might be able to help with
(9/11/2009 10:04:48 AM) Jeroen_Pluimers: talking about migration projects: we have done quite a few for clients; so if you need help with that as well, drop me an email
(9/11/2009 10:05:46 AM) Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – “New Features in the RAD Studio IDE” by Mark Duncan & Darren Kosinski

–jeroen

CodeRage 4: session “Practical XML in Delphi” chat and Q&A transcripts

Not only can you download CodeRage 4 session on materials on Practical XML in Delphi, but below you can also find the chat transcripts below.

Note the times are a bit odd: when the chat window refreshes, it sometimes uses the PST time zone, but new posts are using the local time zone.
Hence the sudden jump from 9 AM to  almost 6 PM.

VIP Room Transcript with Q&A

[5:46:28 PM] <davidi>

Q:	thomasgrubb asked: “Is there an implementation for XMLDocument (for Delphi Win32) that is file-mapped, e.g., the whole doc is not loaded into memory?”
A:	Not that Jeroen is aware of.

[5:46:54 PM] <davidi>

Q:	thomasgrubb asked: “Is there an implementation for XMLDocument (for Delphi Win32) that is file-mapped, e.g., the whole doc is not loaded into memory?”
A:	Not that Jeroen is aware of. Send Jeroen an email and he will blog about other solutions.

[5:47:20 PM] <davidi>

Q:	thomasgrubb asked: “For Embarcadero Technologies: Are you going to develop a better option for validating XML on the Win32 side in the future?”
A:	David I – replied – I will forward this to R&D and Product management

[5:53:14 PM] <davidi>

Q:	devtux asked: “are you using any XML test generator? Please, suggest one if yes”
A:	XMLSpy

[5:53:47 PM] <davidi>

Q:	richz asked: “I’ve been trying for weeks to find out how to have the Win32 Delphi IDE generate code to serialize/de-serialize my class properties to an XML file. Is there anything in the IDE to do that?”
A:	From Delphi 2010 on – you can use DBX support for JSON!

Public Room Transcript

[7:58:58 AM] * Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – Next Session”Practical XML in Delphi” at 8AM PDT

[8:02:15 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> Starting livemeeting

[8:03:59 AM] * Jeroen_Pluimers is wondering why LiveMeeting is always asking for email/company. Does it suffer from Korsakov’s disease?

[8:07:34 AM] <Christine_Ellis> It asks because we tell it to.

[8:08:22 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> but it never remembers, even if you start it with the same session parametes.

[8:08:41 AM] <Christine_Ellis> live meeting doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t know who you are

[8:08:47 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> ok.

[8:09:29 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> can we do a quick audio test?

[8:12:48 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> I mean: fro my current Microphone; it works with sound recorder, but wonder if Live Meeting will get it today as well.

[8:15:55 AM] * Christine_Ellis has set the topic to: Session Room 2 – “Practical XML in Delphi“

[8:35:37 AM] <Peter_Wolf> a lot of memory = usually 10 timer more than the size of XML file bytes

[8:36:27 AM] <Peter_Wolf> … the size of XML file in bytes

[8:39:14 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Peter: that totally depends on what you use to read that XML. The MSXML and Internet Explorer are notorous memory hogs. But .NET is much more efficient on memory usage.

[8:40:15 AM] <Peter_Wolf> i ment MSXML which is default for most users

[8:41:17 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Peter: yup, that’s why I mentioned that as the first one. Most of the Win32 users will use MSXML, because that is the default for Win32.

[8:43:45 AM] * Jeroen_Pluimers warns: be carefull where you press ESC in IE: it can unload your chat window.

[8:47:29 AM] <Scott_Hollows> my brain hurts

[8:48:57 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> Scott: let me know later on if I can make it more clear to you.

[8:50:27 AM] <Ryan_Ford> Will this presentation be available for download?

[8:51:05 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Ryan: yes it will.

[8:52:59 AM] <Ryan_Ford> Its so nice to run 8GB for development

[8:52:59 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> @Ryan: the session materials are available for download here: http://wiert.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/coderage-4-session-materials-available-for-download/ The replays will be available for download after the conference.

[8:58:56 AM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> My VIP room died.

[9:00:08 AM] <AbsaLootly> … you have to hate it when that happens…

[9:01:46 AM] <Ryan_Ford> What alternatives for MSXML are there for WIN32

[9:02:22 AM] <Peter_Wolf> it also takes forever to open really big XML files wh MSXML

[5:45:31 PM] <AbsaLootly> I saw one developer try to put an entire database in one xml file… it took several hours to load it.

[5:51:59 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> MSXML

[5:52:03 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> ADOM XML

[5:52:05 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> Xerces

[5:52:56 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> That straight from the Delphi 2010 TXMLDocument.DOMVendor property

[5:53:25 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> XMLSpy can generate test ML

[5:54:16 PM] <Rich__> Thx

[5:54:51 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> https://newsgroups.codegear.com/message.jspa?messageID=150113

[5:55:17 PM] <Jim_Ferguson> Can you briefly describe JSON?

[5:55:27 PM] <Jeroen_Pluimers> http://blogs.embarcadero.com/adrian/2009/08/19/json-types-for-server-methods-in-datasnap-2010/

[5:56:02 PM] <Jim_Ferguson> what tool do you use transcribe your chat?

[5:56:23 PM] <Jon> it’s called a keyboard

–jeroen

CodeRage 4: session materials are available for download« The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff

My CodeRage 4 session materials are available for download:

• Practical XML in Delphi
• Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ
• Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs

CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. while I write this
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).

Let me know if you download, and what you are using the sample code for.

–jeroen

Manually call the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog — HotSwap! – hot eject and hot insert SATA hard-drives – practical use with ICY BOX 266StUSD « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff

I forgot to explicitly mention that the normal “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the system tray notification area sometimes disappears.

Today, I bumped in such a system, so I was glad I had a reference explaining how manually call the “Safely Remove Hardware” dialog to solve it.

But now I had this dumb icon:

So here are the full steps, including icon.

1. Add a shortcut with this command line:

[script sourcecode='cscript']
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
[/sourcecode]

2. Change the icon to take icons from this DLL:

[script sourcecode='cscript']
%SystemRoot%\system32\hotplug.dll
[/sourcecode]

3. Name the shortcut “Safely Remove Hardware”

So, now you have a nice shortcut with the correct.
This shortcut works, even when it is gone from the system tray:

BTW: Rob van der Woude has a nice page with rundll32 scripts.

–jeroen

Formatting drives with FAT32 – works well with: HotSwap! – hot eject and hot insert SATA hard-drives – practical use with ICY BOX 266StUSD « The Wiert Corner – Jeroen Pluimers’ irregular stream of Wiert stuff

Every once in a while, you want to exchange lots of information with systems that only have FAT32 in common.

Exchanging such large amounts is easiest with an external drive, especially because you should not underrate the bandwidth of your harddrive. Especially if you can connect them with (e)SATA, and HotSwap them. But even USB usually is fast enough to compete with a gigabit network connection.

For that, it would be easy if you could format an external drive with FAT32.

However, the built-in FORMAT (using format /FS:FAT32 X:) barfs if your disk is larger than 32 gigabytes.
Since it is hard to get such small drives anymore, you seem to be stuck.

fat32format comes to the rescueue!

It formats any drive, as long as it has a driveletter:

fat32format X:

You can assign driveletters to drives using diskmgmt.msc

There is even a GUI version!

–jeroen

CodeRage 4: sessions recorded; Delphi 2010 migration was a beeze; samples/slides will be uploaded soon

I just finished recording my CodeRage 4 sessions:

• Practical XML in Delphi
• Reliable Communication between Applications with Delphi and ActiveMQ
• Using Unicode and Other Encodings in your Programs

CodeRage 4 is a free, virtual conference on Embarcadero technologies with a lot of Delphi sessions.
It is held from September 8 till 11, 2009, i.e. next week
If you want to watch sessions live, be sure to register through LiveMeeting (the technology they use for making this all happen).

This week, I found some time do migrate all the sample projects to the release versions of Delphi Win32 2010 and Delphi Prism 2010.

Delphi Win32 2010 works like a charm: it is much faster and has a much smaller footprint than any other Galileo based IDE.
In fact, it feels almost as fast as the pre-Galileo based IDE’s.
With the added benefit that all the new features make me much more productive, not the least because it has not yet crashed on me this week once.
Crashing has been a frequent thing on me since Delphi 4 (maybe I should not even mention that number ), for most IDE’s at least a couple of times a week, so this is good.

Delphi Prism 2010 works really nice too, it is rock solid, and the language as some great features not found in other .NET languages.
But it still needs a tiny bit more polishing on the Visual Studio IDE Integration part.
There are a few things not as smoothly integrated as I’m used to in C# and VB .NET (for instance when adding assembly references; C# and VB.NET allow you to do that from multiple places in the IDE; Delphi Prism from only one).
I know it is nitpicking (the same holds for the Team Foundation System integration in the Visual Studio IDE: ever tried to add files or folders? There is only one icon that allows you to do it. Ever tried to move files or folders around? No way you can drag & drop, in fact you can move only 1 file or folder at a time, and then the folder tree leaves you at the target).

The Embarcadero folks have worked hard on developer productivity in the Delphi Win32 2010 IDE.
(Did I mention the F6 key? It is an awesome way of directly jumping into configuration dialogs a zillion levels deep.
Did I mention the Ctrl-D key? It instantly reformats your source code to your formatting settings).
So maybe it is now time to put some of that effort into the Prism side as well.

Back to my CodeRage sessions: the recordings are done, they will soon become available as downloads together with the samples/slides.

Keep watching

–jeroen

.NET – Delphi Prism – How to generate wrapper classes code from XSD file

I do a lot of .NET work; most in C#, but also some in Delphi Prism (which like C#, VB.NET and other languages integrate in the Visual Studio Shell).

Both Visual Studio and the .NET Framework SDK include a nifty tool called XSD.EXE.

XSD.EXE allows you you to generate the code for wrapper classes from your XSD or other schema definition file, both for regular classes (that you can use for XML Serialization) as well as for typed dataset classes.

You need to specify the Oxygene language to generate Delphi Prism code.

A sample batch-file is here:

xsd /classes /language:Oxygene /namespace:xokumClasses xokum.xsd
rename xokum.pas xokumClasses.pas

xsd /dataset /language:Oxygene /namespace:XokumDataset xokum.xsd
rename xokum.pas xokumDataset.pas

Thanks to Peter Nowotnick who posted this answer at Stackoverflow!

–jeroen