In this MMS 2010 session Darwin Sanoy will be talking about the things you can do to take more control over packaging on Windows 7.  The discussion will cover of existing and new MSI functionality as well as some cool tricks of our own we've worked out.

If you attend my session and bring me a business card afterward, I will give you one of our premium Debugging Checklist Mousepads that looks like this...

Quite amazing.  After I was away from my computer for a couple hours I came back to the below dialog window (Figure 1) asking me “How safe is your computer?”  Regardless of how safe my computer is or isn’t, I wouldn’t expect this from a company trying to get my security business back.  So I set about reverse engineering how it got there…

This script code uses a fast and efficient method for determining whether the current session (process) has admin rights.  The compact code is provided in VBS (9 lines) and CMD/BAT (3 lines).  It works with XP / Server 2003 through Windows 7 / Server 2008.  It works with UAC (reports admin rights only if session / process elevated).  It uses passive methods to determine rights – in other words, it does not try to change anything on the target system.

Our Bginfo template has been updated to version 1.5.  The template content is the same, but the installer now handles XP, checking for a copy of bginfo.exe next to script, checking for elevated admin on Vista and later (Version 6 and later).  You can use the installer script to see a simple Shell (.BAT, .CMD) scripting method to check if someone is an elevated admin...