Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2003/5 and Front Page Extensions!

shawson — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:54:14 +0000

We recently got new machines at work with Vista installed, allowing us to use IIS7, which has the added benefit of being able to run more than one site on the local IIS (unlike our previous IIS6 Win XP boxes)

When installing the various incarnations of visual studio to enable me to support some of our legacy app’s I came across a problem when installing Visual Studio 2003. One of the pre-requisites is front page extensions which are no longer shipped with Windows in Vista- the solution was a version of the extensions made by ready to run software which is actually linked to from the Official IIS Site (the article is named “FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions for IIS 7.0″ incase you have to use the site search, after another of microsoft’s random url switch around’s they’re so fond of) -you can grab the install from here : http://www.rtr.com/fpse/

Once you’ve run the installer, make sure you execute the following from the command line to activate them for your default website otherwise the .net installer still won’t recognise that you have them installed;

 owsadm.exe –o install

Removing stored log in credentials for network shares in Windows XP

shawson — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:35:39 +0000

At work we run Windows XP and recently had a big security review where all the passwords were changed. This complicated things for me as our Source Safe database is held on a central server which I access across the network. When trying to access the share I was prompted for a password, so I entered the new one yet it refused to let me in. It seems this is because even though Windows asks you for a password, it doesn;t actually bother using the value you enter as the credentials are all cached!

A quick google later and it turns out you can force windows to clear this cache from the command line (but it also nocks out your network drives so you will need to re-map these!

net use /d *

It will ask you if you’re sure- just say yes and it will wipe out your mapped drives and any saved credentials – so make sure you note down the list of drives you currently have mapped which it will show you, so you can set them up again!