Windows 7 Gadgets and Disabled UAC

For some reason Windows Gadgets don’t run in Windows 7 if you disable the UAC. Now I like windows gadgets and I am trailing Windows 7 but some of the software I was using was having a hard time with UAC so we turned it off and all of a sudden all my gadgets disappeared. after a bit of searching around I found the solution of the Windows 7 News blog.

<Quote>
The Windows 7 Sidebar and Gadgets do not work correctly if a user disables the User Account Control in Windows 7. There is however an easy way to make the gadgets and sidebar work again without having to replace system files (that was the way suggested in many forums).

All that needs to be done is to change one value of a parameter in the Windows 7 Registry to make the sidebar and gadgets work even with UAC disabled.

Open the Windows 7 Registry by pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [enter]. Now navigate to the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Sidebar\Setting and change the value of AllowElevatedProcess to 1.

Restart the computer or logout and login again to see if the changes work as intended. The Registry setting ensures that the gadgets and the sidebar are working in Windows 7 properly even if UAC is disabled.
</Quote>

On my machine that registry value was missing so I added a new DWORD to the setting. Logged out and back in and all my gadgets reappeared. Life is good again :)

NAV Web Services

So we have been doing some integration work between a custom piece of development and NAV2009. Our NAV Dev setup some code and exposed it as a series of web services. To test them a simple console app was written and everything was good.
Then they tried running the console app on a different machine to the NAV web service, all of a sudden nothing worked.
We went back over the config settings of the console app and confirmed that it was pointing to the correct URL for the web service, which it was, but for some reason when we ran it it kept trying to look for the service on the localhost. This turned out to be a setting in Visual Studio that by default embeds the URL of the web service when you register it, who knew..... well one of our .NET devs did thankfully. So by changing the GenerateDefaultValueInCode to False your solution will look to the Config file instead.

So after changing that and rebuilding the app we tried again. Still not working. After much testing with little joy we tried some simple tests on a different set of machines, on these we managed to get the following




Turned out that Windows firewall was blocking the port we were using, so after adding an exception to the firewall everything worked fine.
So next time we do some of this stuff we are going to make sure the server has the port unblocked and that we remember to tell Visual Studio not to imbed the web service URL (its default action) so we can control it with a config file.

Another Year Over

It's been an exciting one for me.

First up Dynamics CRM4.0 was released at the start of the year. We have done a number of installation of it now and the team have done some very interesting things with it.

Next Dynamics NAV5 SP1 was released, while not a major release it did bring some interesting things. Firstly it got rid of the highly confusing SIFT tables and replaced them with views. It also brought access to the Dynamics Mobile client.

Then December brought us Dynamics NAV 2009. This is a major release and brings us lots of fun stuff. The most obvious is the new Role Tailored Client(RTC). It also gives NAV web services out of the box, something we have been after for a long time. It supports SQL2008, also released this year. We have already started working with this latest version and have a number of upgrades and new installations lined up for the first part of next year.

Closer to home the Intergen Dynamics team had some significant growth with around a dozen new team members joining over the year.
Dave Roys in Christchurch was awarded Most Valued Person by Microsoft, this is a great honour as there are only a dozen or so MVP's for NAV worldwide and Dave is the only one in Asia Pacific.
Craig Keenan was made a Subject Matter Expert for NAV.
Intergen was involved in the Dynamics NAV Partner Advisory Board and with 7 attendees out of a total of 11 coming from Intergen I think it shows how involved in the future of NAV we intend to be.

Away from the Dynamics products. Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 were both released.
Intergen has been doing huge amounts of work with MOSS as well as its more traditional custom builds. We have also been looking at all the new stuff Microsoft announced at the PDC around Cloud Services, Windows 7 etc.

2009 should be a very interesting year, between all the new things that are coming and the current global economic situation there will be many challenges ahead. More and more I think companies will be looking at ways to work smarter and reduce their overheads. Hopefully that will mean that people like me will still be in demand.