Category: Windows

Transition Drivers to New Windows Installation

Over the Thanks Giving holiday, I took advantage of the extended time off from work and projects to reinstall Windows on newer, larger drives. When reinstalling Windows finding all of the drivers has traditionally been a pain point for me. This time around someone gave me a bit of information that made handling the drives much easier. After performing the installation, I didn’t have sound. I checked the device manager and found there were a lot of devices that were not recognized.

I initially started with trying to figure out what these devices were. Opening the properties of a device and viewing the hardware ID gives a hint. There are two hexadecimal numbers for a vendor ID and a device ID. Most of the vendor IDs I saw were 8086, which is the vendor ID for Intel (a reference to the 80×86 family of processors).

A lot of these warnings were for features related to the Xeon processor in the computer, some sound drivers, and a few other things. While I was able to find drivers for these online, I could not get them to install.

I was able to find drivers on the manufacturers’ sites for many items, but I ran into problems getting the drivers to install. While speaking of this challenge, someone asked me if I still had access to three specific folders from before I had installed Windows. All of these folders are child folders of c:\Windows\System32. The folder names are drivers, DriverState, and DriverStore. I did have access to these files; this was a hard drive swap. I went back to the device manager, selected an unrecognized device, and selected the option to update the driver. When prompted for a driver location, I pointed to these folders and let the process search. SUCCESS! The driver was found! I continued this process for the other devices.

This was a lot of devices, but it moved me in the direction of success. Some time later, all of the devices except one had their drivers installed. the remaining device, an Inten device with the ID 0x2F9C, remains unidentified. My carry away from this is that if I reinstall Windows on another computer, these folders should be included in the data that is backed up before performing the Installation.

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Epic Games and Administrative Access

I tend to be suspicious of applications that request administrative access to perform a function that I don’t think requires admin access. For the computers that my family use that I manage, I don’t give them administrative access. This has saved me from many headaches since it limits the amount of damage that can be done if they are a bit too trusting with items from the Internet; when they receive the admin prompt, they alert me and I can make a judgement on whether or not it is something that may be harmful.

The Epic Games application is another matter. Unlike Steam Games, which installs games in the user’s application folder, Epic Games installs games in the system Program Files folder. Every time there is an update to a game or an attempt to install another game an Administrative prompt is produced. This was particularly annoying when there were a few releases of Fortnite (or patches for it) over a relatively short period of time. I finally did something about these annoyances this weekend.

When the Epic Game installer is asking for administrative access, it is doing so because it is trying to access the Program Files folder. There are two ways to make these prompts unnecessary. But they both amount to the same thing; have the installer use a folder that the user has access to. For one method, you can simply have the installer use some alternative folder when it is originally installed. Make a folder somewhere on your drive, ensure that non-admin users have access to it, and have the installer work from there. The other method is to modify the permissions on the existing Epic game folder or sub-folder. Granting permission to user that plays the game no the Epic game folder will allow them to install anything from the Epic store without an Admin prompt. If you don’t want to grant the user this ability, but want them to be able to update existing games, then the permission can be granted on each sub-folder for each game instead.

To grant the permissions for the user to install any game, open the file Explorer to c:\Program Files\. Look for the Epic Games folder. If you right-click on the folder and select “properties” a window opens. Under the “Security” tab of this window you will see some users listed. Click on “Edit.” Then click on “Add.” Type the user name that will have permission to install games and click on Okay. When you click on the user’s name in the list, the permissions that the user has are listed. Check the boxes laveled “Modify”, “Read&Execute”, and “Write.” The user will now be able to install any Epic game.

If you only wanted the user to be able to update games that were already installed, you will see folders for each game inside of the Epic Games folder. Instead of performing the above procedure on the Epic Games folder, perform it on the subfolders for the specific games that you are targeting.

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Future of Microsoft Edge

Faster Updates, Cross Platform, 4 Channels

Edge

 

Microsoft had made an announcement some time ago stating that they were adopting Chromium as the foundation of the Edge browser. They are making more information available about their plans. A computer will be able to have up to 4 Edge. In addition to the general release version there will be a beta , development, and canary channel where canary is the most experimental channel.

Microsoft is going to make a web view control available. This is a feature I wish had been available a couple of years ago. I worked on a project in which it was necessary to insert a Chromium based web view and that required making modifications to the Chromium source. Compiling Chromium can take hours!

Microsoft Edge is the only browser that has achieved a 100% score in accessibility evaluation. Microsoft is planning to make contributions to Chromium which should help improve the scores of Chromium based browsers across the board.  One example of a change coming from Microsoft is a media query for detecting when a user has turned on high contrast in either their computer or browser. The web developer can choose to change the appearance of a page accordingly.

Windows Biometric sign in is also going to be available to web sites (see navigator.credentials.get). This allows for a more secure way of logging in that doesn’t require a password. Edge also has a hardware backed feature named “Play Ready” that allows for secure playback of premium media.

The user agent-string for Edge Chromium will be Edg (that’s not a type, there is no E on the end). Note that the non-chromium version of edge uses the user token Edge instead. But it is recommended that instead of using the user agent string for enabling or disabling functionality in a web page it is better to use feature detection; new features are being added to browsers all the time and relying on the user agent alone can lead to a page not using a feature that was actually available within a browser.  Edge gets supports for module import and much better much better speech synthesis.

Obtaining the Connection String for a Provisioned Windows IOT Device

Playing with the code that I was using to get data from my car and stream it to the cloud I did something that I knew was a no-no; I hard coded the connection string in the code. There’s a number of reasons to not do this*; it’s less secure as someone can potentially extract the connection string and use it for unauthorized access and if the connection string ever needs to change then code needs to be recompiled and redeployed.

When a Windows IOT device is provisioned there is a connection string that is managed by the device; your application can take advantage of this and need not worry about the details of how it is stored. To make use of this there are a few libraries that you need to add to your UWP project. These include the followings.

  • Microsoft.Azure.Devices
  • Microsoft.Azure.Devices.Client
  • Microsoft.Devices.Tpm

With the classes in these libraries you can obtain the ID of the device and then use that ID to request an Azure DeviceClient class that is initialized with the connection string that the device is managing.

Here’s the code to do this.

DeviceClient _deviceClient;

void InitClient()
{            
    TpmDevice tpm = new TpmDevice(0);
    string hostName = tpm.GetHostName();
    string deviceId = tpm.GetDeviceId();
    string sasToken = tpm.GetSASToken();            
    var client = DeviceClient.Create(
        hostName, 
        AuthenticationMethodFactory.CreateAuthenticationWithToken(deviceId, sasToken),
        TransportType.Mqtt
    );
}