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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

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Installing the Microsoft Store version of Windows Terminal via the winget command-line

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/26

In the continuing series of Chocolatey/Scoop/winget related posts, this one is about Windows Terminal.

There are basically two ultimate sources you can install it from:

You can configure the Microsoft Store to automatically install updates as per [Wayback/Archive] Turn on automatic app updates (on my system this was the default):

Microsoft Store - Auto-Updates is turned on by default

Microsoft Store – Auto-Updates is turned on by default

  1. Select the Start ⊞ screen, then select Microsoft Store.
  2. In Microsoft Store at the upper right, select the account menu (the three dots) and then select Settings.
  3. Under App updates, set Update apps automatically to On.

As a backgrounder, here some articles on Windows Terminal, ConPTY and the Windows Console from the [Wayback/Archive] DevBlogs – Microsoft Developer Blogs:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Windows Command-Line: Backgrounder | Windows Command Line Tools For Developers
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Windows Command-Line: The Evolution of the Windows Command-Line | Windows Command Line
  3. [Wayback/Archive] Windows Command-Line: Inside the Windows Console | Windows Command Line
  4. [Wayback/Archive] Windows Command-Line: Introducing the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPTY) | Windows Command Line
  5. [Wayback/Archive] Windows Command-Line: Unicode and UTF-8 Output Text Buffer | Windows Command Line

More on (pseudo)terminals in general containing [Wayback/Archive] “ConPTY” – Search results – Wikipedia:

More on using the Windows Terminal:

My related blog posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Chocolatey, ConPTY, Microsoft Store, Power User, Scoop, Windows, Windows Terminal, winget | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10 and 11: installing WSL2 does not require winget, Chocolatey or Scoop

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/18

After using Chocolatey for a long time and writing about it, I have written a few articles on other Windows package managers like winget and Scoop.

Part of the reason was that I wanted to install new systems in a semi-automatic way including WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2).

As I have spent quite some time getting treated against metastasised rectum cancer, I missed part of the evolvement of WSL into WSL2 and of the winget evolvement.

The good news is that this simplified the scripted installation of WSL2 a lot, as over time, this got very easy, as confirmed in these posts/messages I found via [Wayback/Archive] winget wsl2 – Google Search:

I even found back this was announced when I was still in hospital: during the Build 2020 conference. A summary is at [Wayback/Archive] The Windows Subsystem for Linux BUILD 2020 Summary – Windows Command Line describing the introduction of wsl.exe --install and that it defaults to install WSL 2 as back-then already most Windows Insider build users using WSL had switched from WSL 1 to WSL 2.

Back to installing

Yesterday, in  Windows “equivalents” for bash backticks in cmd and PowerShell, I showed how to get the wsl.exe information:

C:\temp>PowerShell -Command "SigCheck "$((Get-Command -CommandType Application wsl).Path)""

Sigcheck v2.82 - File version and signature viewer
Copyright (C) 2004-2021 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

c:\windows\system32\wsl.exe:
        Verified:       Signed
        Signing date:   09:24 15/10/2021
        Publisher:      Microsoft Windows
        Company:        Microsoft Corporation
        Description:    Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux Launcher
        Product:        Microsoft« Windows« Operating System
        Prod version:   10.0.19041.1320
        File version:   10.0.19041.1320 (WinBuild.160101.0800)
        MachineType:    64-bit

This was on one of my Windows 10 systems with version 21H2.

The installation progress was as follows and took ome 3 minutes on a 50 Mibit/s fiber connection:

C:\temp>wsl.exe --install
Installing: Virtual Machine Platform
Virtual Machine Platform has been installed.
Installing: Windows Subsystem for Linux
Windows Subsystem for Linux has been installed.
Downloading: WSL Kernel
Installing: WSL Kernel
WSL Kernel has been installed.
Downloading: Ubuntu
The requested operation is successful. Changes will not be effective until the system is rebooted.

Time to play around (:

–jeroen

Posted in Batch-Files, Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget, WSL Windows Subsystem for Linux | Leave a Comment »

Getting the human readable Windows 10 version from the registry (via Super User)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/15

[Wayback/Archive] powershell – How to get the windows version with command line? – Super User (thanks [Wayback/Archive] harrymc!)

The value can be found under registry key Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion inside the value named DisplayVersion.
The following PowerShell command will get it:
(Get-Item "HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion").GetValue('DisplayVersion')
This seems to have been introduced in version 2004 (20H1).

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Disabling the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/11

I finally got annoyed enough to figure out how to disable the Windows 10 news (and weather) feeds.

At first I thought the solution in this post worked for Windows 11 as well, but re-testing in Windows 11 it does not or does not (or not any more: given so many new Windows 11 releases with ever changing functionality I’m not surprised).

Disable Windows news feeds for current user

Failure: just disabling the news feed will automatically get it reset by explorer.exe

Based on the below sources, I made this small batch file:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Registry Files, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Restart Windows explorer with an UAC administrator token

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/10

Sometimes, you want to restart the Windows explorer. This is already an exception case which you want to do when explorer hangs (for instance when taskbar icons do not respond any more), or has files locked which need to be modified. I described the latter in Inno Setup: Program Folder not showing up In Start > All Programs , with this very simple restart script:

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start explorer

Even more exception is wanting to run explorer with a UAC elevated administrative token. I sometimes do this when moving around stuff from other users on the same computer without having them logged on (as that would lock the files or directories to be moved around).

The risk of running explorer under UAC elevation, is that any program you start will also start UAC elevated, so beware what you ask for…

This is how you start explorer under UAC elevation:

pwsh.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

or if you run an older Windows version of PowerShell:

PowerShell.exe -nol -noni -nop -w hidden -c "taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer -v runas -a /nouaccheck"

These command-line options and verbs are used:

Time to explain a few:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Batch-Files, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 | 1 Comment »

I dug into scoop a tiny bit: some thoughts and links

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/05/09

Last month, I wrote Need to take a look a Scoop (as a long time Chocolatey user).

So I did, and started with a list of my Chocolatey installs grouped by functionality in order to expand the table towards winget and [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ScoopInstaller/Scoop: A command-line installer for Windows.

This was a good way to start learning, and by already doing this, got learned this:

  • Whereas Chocolaty has a global searchable community package index at [Wayback/Archive] Chocolatey Software | Packages  which is moderated too.
  • Scoops works differently. There are many buckets you can get your applications from, and there is no Scoop maintained index of them.

Let’s focus on the latter for a bit:

From the above, I got a feeling that Scoop is way more like the Linux Package Managers than WinGet and Chocolatey are.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chocolatey, Development, Power User, Scoop, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development, winget | Leave a Comment »

Need to rethink which Windows package managers to use

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/24

Triggered by last week’s post Need to take a look a Scoop (as a long time Chocolatey user), I need to re-think which Windows package managers to use and in what order.

Basically there are two challenges:

  • User level (scoop) versus system level (winget and chocolatey) installations
  • Availability of packages in each package manager

Since I hardly used winget, I need to get started at Windows Package Manager – Wikipedia.

A good example of unavailability is at [Wayback/Archive] Scott’s Ultimate Tools via Winget – DVLUP (which has the ID values for winget or chocolatey of [Wayback/Archive] Scott Hanselman’s 2021 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Scott Hanselman’s Blog)

–jeroen

Posted in Chocolatey, Power User, Scoop, Windows, winget | Leave a Comment »

Towards a work setup on a hardened host and doing everything in VMs

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/21

SwiftOnSecurity posted this interesting tweet in 2021: [Archive] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “Lenovo P1 Gen3 with 12core Xeon, 64GB RAM, two 1TB M.2 SSDs. Running Windows Server 2022 with the Hyper-V role. All hardening applied to host OS, almost nothing happens here except managing guest VMs. On the second SSD I then have Win10 VMs joined to the corporate domain.” / Twitter.

I wonder if a similar setup can be done using an Apple M1 based machine as host and running all work in virtual machines.

Swift had some issues getting cameras and microphones to work: [Archive] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “The problem here is Teams. If I want to pass through my webcam and microphone that could get a bit dicey, despite HyperV Enhanced Session being essentially an RDP session. For now I’m using my phone for Teams microphone. Also I’m not sure how well thermal management will work….” / Twitter

This resulted in some answers and interesting links:

Some more interesting tweets in that thread:

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, M1 Mac, Mac, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Need to take a look a Scoop (as a long time Chocolatey user)

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/06

Based on

So:

Related blog posts:

–jeroen

Posted in Chocolatey, Power User, Scoop, Windows, winget | Leave a Comment »

Need to take a look a Scaleway

Posted by jpluimers on 2023/04/05

Based on

I need to take a look at Scaleway, at least at thee links via [Wayback/Archive] scaleway instance – Google Search:

Related blog post: Dave Anderson on Twitter: “Cool minor @Tailscale moment: I’m recommissioning a server that got moved from a different network, so all its network config was wrong, and generally I couldn’t get at it over the network, only IPKVM console. But then my ping over Tailscale started working?!” / Twitter

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Power User, Scaleway, Scoop, Windows | 1 Comment »

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