Friday, November 20, 2009

Lingvo 12 на Windows 7

Lingvo 12 не хочет запускаться под Windows 7: выдается такое сообщение:

"Нет доступа к файлу c:\ProgramData\ABBYY\Lingvo\12.0\Licenses\Licensing.bin"

Проблему можно решить, если выдать права на "Полный доступ" на указанный файл группе "Пользователи" (по умолчанию эта группа имеет доступ только на чтение).

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

How to open Outlook Developer Reference in Office 2007

If you are a developer working with Outlook, you will definitely need Outlook Object Model reference that ships with Outlook. Unfortunately, getting to it in Outlook 2007 is not exactly straightforward.
The standard way, apparently envisioned by Microsoft, is as follows. First, you need to enable Developer tab in Outlook. For this:
  1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
  2. On the Other tab, click Advanced Options, and then select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box.
Once that's done, you'll need to do the following:
  1. Open an old email or create a new one.
  2. In the email viewing/editing window, click on Developer tab
  3. Press Visual Basic button
  4. Once Visual Basic editor opens, select Help from the menu or toolbar.
Cumbersome to say the least! Fortunately, there's a quicker way. Just run the following command (in cmd window or through a shortcut):
c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\CLVIEW.EXE OUTLOOK.DEV Outlook
CLVIEW.EXE is Office 2007 help viewer. The path to it may need to be adjusted depending on the location of your Office 2007 installation.
This method of course works for other Office applicaitons: all you need to do is replace OUTLOOK.DEV with WINWORD.DEV or EXCEL.DEV in the first command line parameter. The second command line parameter is just window title, so it can be anything.

Friday, November 06, 2009

Delphi 5 on Windows 7

Delphi 5 may seem like an ancient tool nowadays, but some of us need to use it. Here are some pitfalls of running Delphi on Windows 7:

1. Delphi fails to compile a project with a type library (*.tlb file) with the following error:

[Error] RLINK32: Error opening file: "...tlb"
The message is in fact misleading, since the TLB file itself is perfectly accessible. Monitoring the compilation process with Sysinternal's Process Monitor revelead that Delphi tries to write a temporary file named dfwtemp.tlb to its bin folder (under Program Files), which under Windows 7 is not permitted unless you run Delphi as administrator.

To resolve the problem, grant full access on Delphi bin folder to the Users local group.

2. Windows 7 no longer opens old help files (hlp extension). For some reason Microsoft decided not to include WinHlp32.exe anymore, even though the one from Windows XP works perfectly. To be precise, there IS a file named WinHlp32.exe in Windows directory, but it DOES NOT open HLP files; instead it shows a message that this functionality is no longer available.

To read Deplhi's HLP files (or any other HLP files), copy winhlp32.exe from an XP computer to Windows directory. This is not going to be easy though, since Windows 7 is very fussy about overwriting anything in Windows directory. To overwrite the existing dummy file (which is owned by a pseudo-user TrustedInstaller), first take ownership of it, then grant yourself full access, then copy the file "as administrator".

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Administration under Windows 7

I received a new computer with Windows 7, and here are the first impression of doing system administration tasks from this new OS:

1. Windows Server 2003 admin pack no longer works, need to download Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 from here.

2. Even then, Dial-in tab is not available. There is an old workaround from Windows XP time that still works though. Its descrption can be found in many places, including here, but here's brief recap:

  • Copy/Paste the following to a Dialin.reg file:
    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    
    [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt]
    @=""
    
    [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt\CLSID]
    @="{B52C1E50-1DD2-11D1-BC43-00C04FC31FD3}"
    
    [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt.1]
    @=""
    
    [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt.1\CLSID]
    @="{B52C1E50-1DD2-11D1-BC43-00C04FC31FD3}"
    
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MMC\NodeTypes\{19195a5b-6da0-11d0-afd3-00c04fd930c9}\Extensions\NameSpace]
    "{B52C1E50-1DD2-11D1-BC43-00C04FC31FD3}"="RAS Dialin - User Node Extension"
    
  • Merge the Dialin.reg file with your Windows XP registry, or run regedit /s dialin.reg.
  • Copy 3 DLLs from a Windows Server 2003 domain controller's system32 directory to your computer's system32 directory: mprsnap.dll, rasuser.dll, rtrfiltr.dll and register rasuser.dll with regsvr32. This can be automated by the following sequence of commands:
    CD /D %SystemRoot%\System32
    copy \\ServerName\Admin$\System32\mprsnap.dll *.*
    copy \\ServerName\Admin$\System32\rasuser.dll *.*
    copy \\ServerName\Admin$\System32\rtrfiltr.dll *.*
    regsvr32 rasuser.dll
    

3. There's no Exchange System Manager for Windows 7 (at least for Exchange 2003). The one from Exchange 2003 doesn't work. The ESM for Vista works, but its installer fails to install it on Windows 7 (it strictly checks for Vista). Some generous soul has hacked the install to work on Windows 7 and made it available for download from this page: http://nwcalc.web44.net/Win7/. See the discussion here