Northcode Inc.

Launching Applications on Windows 7

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:59:50 GMT

In XP and earlier versions of Windows you always had privileges equal to the Administrator account which made launching applications a pretty simple procedure. Vista and Windows 7 introduced a new security model (User Account Control) that restricted access to applications that could modify the system. These applications would now require approval from the user.

In Windows 7, Microsoft updated UAC in several ways. One that affects your SWF Studio applications directly is that UAC does not prompt when certain programs included with Windows make changes requiring elevated permissions while other programs still trigger a UAC prompt.

The end result is that some solutions that worked in Vista not work in Windows 7. Even though Windows 7 does not prompt for elevation, the call will still fail if you don't have the correct privilege level. I recently ran across this when a customer reported problems launching odbcad32.exe on Windows 7.

Eliminating Norton SONAR False Positives

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:09:16 GMT

SONAR is a tool from Norton that examines the behavior of applications to decide whether they are malicious. Unlike anti-virus scanners that use signatures, SONAR evaluates hundreds of attributes of the program to determine whether it is malicious or not.

The main use of SONAR is to enhance detection of zero day threats but SONAR is well known for generating false positives and we've received several reports from SWF Studio users about this.

Save Data to a Local File in Flash

Thu, 12 May 2011 15:23:09 GMT

The FileReference class in Flash 10 allows you to save data to a local file in Flash BUT it has some major limitations. While necesary for security in online applications, these limitations make using the FileReference class impractical in standalone applications.

· FileReference.save() can only be called in response to user interaction (mouse or keyboard),
· FileReference.save() displays a dialog and lets the user select the location,
· The location of the saved file is not available to ActionScript, and
· FileReference.save() can only be made as an asynchronous (non-blocking) call.

Using ADO Data Sources in Flash Projectors

Fri, 06 May 2011 16:04:00 GMT

In this tutorial we're going to show you how to connect to a Microsoft Access database file but everything you learn here will apply equally to other data sources (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc).

To follow this tutorial you'll need to be familiar with ActionScript 3. You can use Flash, Flex or your authoring tool of choice, as long as it supports ActionScript 3.

You don't need to have Access installed unless you want to open the example database file. An ADO provider for Access ships with all recent versions of Windows and that's all we need to work with these files in SWF Studio.

Printing without a Print Dialog in Flash

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:56:12 GMT

If you've ever developed a kiosk application in Flash you've probably struggled with finding a way to suppress the Print Dialog so your users don't have to press the OK button.

Doing this in Flash, by itself, is impossible. The solution using SWF Studio is so easy you can have it working in under 5 minutes!