RunAsAdmin Explorer Shim / News: Recent posts

At last the new beta is here, contains new features and bug fixes, please see detailed list below.

Enjoy!

IMPORTANT!!! This release has a new installer which currently unable to detect and cleanup installations of RAA prior to Beta8!
Please REMOVE any previous version of the software prior to Beta8!

Vista users!!! Sorry but could not find during earlier testing that the current version of RAA still not fully supports Windows Vista. On that OS ShellExecuteHooks not supported anymore, so the policy could not be applied automatically on files started from the shell via ShellExecute(Ex) :( We have to find another method to get notified about a file startup from the shell.... read more

We had to release a quick fix for bug #1892584 (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1892584&group_id=127612&atid=708978) in Beta9.
You can download it from here http://downloads.sourceforge.net/runasadmin/RunAsAdmin.2.0.Beta.9.Fix_1.zip
You can find the installation instruction in the Readme.txt inside the archive.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

We are happy to announce the new beta which contains a lot of new features and bug fixes, please see detailed list below.

IMPORTANT!!! This release has a new installer which currently unable to detect and cleanup installations of RAA prior to Beta8!
Please REMOVE any previous version of the software prior to Beta8!

Sorry but the new beta still has not been fully translated to all the supported languages, except Hungarian, Catalan and Spanish.
*** We are looking for translators to the languages supported earlier yet and an English corrector also! ***... read more

You can find it at http://runasadmin.wiki.sourceforge.net/.
Currently only members can alter it. Later we'd like to let it be edited by everyone.

We released a quick hotfix for Windows Server 2003
users.
Please download RunAsAdmin.2.0.Beta.8.Fix_1.zip. After the Beta8 setup finished unpack the updated explorer.exe contained in the fix into the installation directory of Beta8 %SYSTEMROOT%\Shim and overwrite the original Beta8 file!
(without that your shell won't start at next login)
Do not forget to logoff and logon as the setup suggests.

Finally we release the new beta which mainly contains bug fixes, but has some new features also please see detailed list below.

IMPORTANT!!! This release has a new installer which currently unable to detect previous installations of RAA!
Please REMOVE any previous version of the software prior to install the new Beta8!

Sorry but the new beta has not been fully translated to the supported languages, except Hungarian.... read more

The next beta8 version of RAA needs translations in the following previously supported languages:

Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

Please help us if you have ability and time to contribute.

Thank you!

We started to fill up the F.A.Q. forum section. Please visit https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=543633

(PLEASE DO NOT POST into F.A.Q., continue using Open Discussion!!! It's required to keep F.A.Q. entries as short as possible and to keep only the required informations of a given quiestion on the given place. Thank you!)

New release with many bugfixes and enhancements.
Give it a try, worse it ;)

Changes in v 2.0.0.Beta7

In RAACommCtrl
- BUG FIX: #1455711 temporaly fix: Dialog items reordered and replaced to fit into a 800x600 box. TODO: we have to make the dialog tabbed.
- BUG FIX: #1455948 fixed, added new option PerfomanceOptions::AllowPriorityAdjust via RAA could maintain priority of itself and Windows Explorer.
- BUG FIX: #1475406 fixed, added new option PerformanceOptions::AllExplorerInstances to allow automatic priority adjust of every running Windows Explorer instances.
- BUG FIX: Fixed bug and prevent OptionDialog to modify other user's settings. If OptionDialog called from (e.g. ShellExt of) impersonated processes the caller should not have to allow OptionDialog to be used (like RAAShellContextMenu does now)
- Added modeless dialog implementation of About and Option dialog. It eliminates the problem of modal dialogs does not handle RAA global events, therefore a lot of functions failed while modalboxes run.
- About dialog now has active url links.... read more

The project source has been moved to SVN, thanks to the SFNet team for the huge work they made on SVN support!!!
You can find the source at https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/runasadmin in the feature. The lates beta6 branch is here https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/runasadmin/branches/Beta6

CVS access now is read only and will be turned off completely in a few weeks.

Hofi

So the new beta release is here. We have made a lot of bug fixes and improvements, please check the change log below.

v 2.0.0.Beta6
Global changes
- Added privileg level display in window captions and customizable option of it in OptionsDialog (a feature similar to Keith Brown's and Aaron Margosis's PrivBar. Thanks for both of them for the idea and the sample code!)
- BUG FIX: Corrected memory leak (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1371217&group_id=127612&atid=708978)
- Added multiple changes to improve C++ compatibility and to resolve possible issues reported by code analyze, boundary checking and code coverage... read more

We have some problem with the installer so please remove any previous version of RAAExplorer Shim before install the new version!!!

Change list:
- Dutch translation added, Thanks Kamiel!
- Added better detection if windows explorer started at RAA startup.
- Added implementation of new options
- 'Run as normal user dialog' hotkey
- Interactive startup only if CTRL+SHIFT held down while starting up
- Possible config change detection rewritten
- Corrected the bug #1339199 WIN + E no more worked after intalling RAAShellExt... read more

Because of two ugly bug in beta3 we decided to release a quick new beta4 version.
Bugs fixed:
- Registering ExecuteHook.dll failed on machines RAA have never installed prior.(thanks for Jared Parsons pointed out that)
- Startup option 'non interactive fully trusted' mode did not work
Sorry for the bugs!
Bests
Hofi

A lot of changes, bugfixes made sorry for the sort description, may be i'll be able to add a detailed list later.
- We have a lot of options in the code that we planed to let be user configurable, added a few of them to the options dialog.
- Options dialog itself can be called up both from RAAExplorer and RAAShellExt (and from any future module, f.e. RAAPolicyEditor)
- In RAAShellExt added new context menu feature 'Copy path to clipboard' (keeping CTRL down would also double quotes the path on the clipboard, note: Path copy will be shown only when single file/dir selected)... read more

Ive uploaded new beta version of RunAsAdmin.

Changes are:
Last week we decided to name new version of RunAsAdmin as 2.0 (instead of 1.1) because of massive differences it has when compared to version 1.0.
Changes in this release:
We have done lots of testing/debugging/corrections.
Hofi added his Shell Ext.
From RunAsAdmin side - we integrated Shell Ext Unrestricted start with simple addition of a VB script function to policy that Asks user whether (s)he wants to start that program with Unrestricted level of rights. The script and policy change is just for debugging purposes. Final version should have setup that allows choosing policy capabilities at install. Additionally, in the final version we should probably add a Policy Agent that handles tasks like verifying Shell Ext signal and asks the user instead of the script that we have in beta version, but for now script works more than just fine :-).... read more

Last Saturday I took my Sony handycam and filmed a demo of RunAsAdmin 1.1 beta. I think demo is quite interesting (if you dont mind my broken English and lousy camera man job of course :-) ). Im showing how RunAsAdmin stops the virus that Ive received in e-mail just few hours before I filmed the demo, as well as I explain how to setup Run As policy which gives admin rights to three third-party programs, but restricts everything else to Normal user. Filming was an easy part Ive just put my handycam on tripod, pressed record button and only once Ive used zoom-in, zoom-out button (it probably would have been better if Ive done it several times more :-( ).
Copying film from handycam to computer was more difficult, but you can read all about it in my yesterday's blog post.
Finally Ive managed to do that (copying the film), even so it was not exactly as I wanted it to be it is split in 5 wmv files. But you can watch RunAsAdmin demo from my blog:
http://www.harper.no/valery/PermaLink,guid,c24dac84-e76e-4ad8-8117-48551cbd753c.aspx... read more

Last week Ive finished implementation of RunAsAdmin policy checker component and did some debugging and testing. Source code of Policy Checker component is now in CVS, together with policy xml schema, supporting components and policy documentation. I believe that RunAsAdmin policy is extremely flexible and allows easy implementation of whatever policy scenario you need. It allows you to use embedded scripts and/or any COM/COM+/Net components during evaluation of policy rules while as requiring bare minimum interfaces implementation (simply to implement any IDispatch-based interface of your choice). I've put detailed description of "RunAsAdmin policy: request for comments and invitation to participate" in my blog: http://www.harper.no/valery/PermaLink,guid,7ec0abdb-fcf3-4fda-82fd-67577c8ab7e7.aspx.
Please, chime-up and tell me what you think could be done, should be changed/improved about current implementation of RunAsAdmin policy. ... read more

Many thanks to Juansa ("Juan Salvador Llopis Ibiza"<j_llopis at mvps dot org>) for his kind help with translating RunAsAdmin to Spanish and Catalan!

From the other news - I was quite busy during last ten days, so I had no chance to spend some time for RunAsAdmin v1.1 beta, but Hofi did some programming and added couple of cool things to the beta, thank Hofi! I had plans to implement drop target during this weekend, but didnt manage due to unexpected wrangle with my wife - she means that I'm using too much time in front of my computer :( Hopefully I'll manage to finish drop target during coming week and after that we will start with the policy...

Many thanks to Salvatore Meschini(http://smeschini.altervista.org) and Kim Grsman (http://www.winwonk.com) for their kind help with translating RunAsAdmin to Italian (Salvatore) and Swedish (Kim)!
Version 1.0.0.9 with support for Italian and Swedish is now online.

From the other news - we started beta 1.1 branch for the next version of RunAsAdmin. Right now we are ready with several usability enhancements of RunAsAdmin.
For the version 1.1 we are planning to introduce RunAs policy, secure IPC and installer (in addition to eventual usability enhancements like support for more documents types allowed to be started from RunAs dialog, RunAs history, DragDrop support and others).

Polish MVP Tomasz Onyszko (http://www.w2k.pl) translated it to Polish, thanks Tomasz! Messages.mc and resources.rc are already updated in CVS to version 1.0.0.8 (with Polish language suport). Binary will be added soon.

We are inviting everyone to participate to that project. We are sure we can succeed creating ultimate administrator&#8217;s shell experience if we get right people in this project (and if you can help with some of tasks that I&#8217;ve outlined below, or if you can suggest another good task for that project &#8211; you are the right person!).

Main idea is to create some kind of user friendly and configurable &#8220;Administrator dashboard&#8221; with convenient menu system and plugins/parts (similar to SharePoint Portal&#8217;s webparts) that should allow administrators easily to perform their everyday tasks while as running Windows shell with reduced privileges providing them with safe web-browsing and e-mailing experience. I believe it could become very cool project - ultimate administrator&#8217;s shell experience!... read more