That's why all good installers have a simple "Create Start menu shortcuts" checkbox... :)

I am using Startdock Start 10 to replace the ugly, disorganized abomination called Windows 10 Start Menu. I was sick and tired of applications that keep adding shortcuts to my nicely organized Start Menu without asking for permission or providing a simple user-friendly checkbox giving me the option to not add shortcuts so I denied write privilege to Administrator group to my Start Menu. In general this accomplished exactly what I wanted but what I discovered along the way totally blew me away! Apparently, there are developers/companies who think that failure to add a useless Start Menu shortcut is a sufficient reason to fail the entire installation and roll it all back. A program would install and run just fine but after it failed to add the Start Menu shortcut it would display an error and when you click on the OK button it would roll back the entire installation and remove the program. The offenders so far are NordVPN, Boxcryptor and Quicken. I am totally flabbergasted and cannot comprehend how could supposedly intelligent developers decide that if their completely useless Start Menu shortcut cannot be created, already installed and fully functional program must be uninstalled. Can someone try to explain how could anyone, ever, think it is somehow a good idea and it is acceptable to not provide users with the ability to skip adding Start Menu shortcuts and on top of that fail the entire installation if shortcuts cannot be created? What in the world are these people thinking?

I'm pretty sure he knows how to access the old Control Panel in Windows 10. The problem is that it could be gone without a trace with the very next update and the "Metro" Settings will be all that is left...

Windows 10 UX gets much better with inexpensive enhancements from Stardock (Start10, Fences, Groupy...) and DeskSoft Window Manager... highly recommended.

The whole "Metro" idea is a complete failure. It feels like going back to the good old days of Norton Commander on DOS. As a matter of fact I think Norton Commander looked better and was a much more functional UI... total disaster after the slick and (mostly) consistent Windows 7 UX.

So you are accusing me of starting the topic in some kind of plot to drive traffic to SO... did I get that right?

Life itself turns to Jon Skeet when it has questions.

Jon Skeet is now an SO millionaire... your thoughts? Thanks a Million, Jon Skeet! - Stack Overflow Blog[^]

How about a system which will allow us to flag people who are submitting high rating votes to what is clearly a poor quality article and filter their votes out of overall article rating?

There was nothing racist about my question. I said "authors from India" as in country of India not Indian race and that was clear to any unbiased reader so why did you not react to his post accusing me of racism?

So I raise a legitimate question about something that is clear to anyone reading the articles and you immediately accuse me of racism!? Last I checked India was a country, not a race and there is nothing racist about my question.

Are you guys planning on doing something about the fact that any article, no matter how bad it is, written by an author from India, gets tons of 5 star votes from other members from India just because author is from India, which skews the article score and misleads other members?

I am willing to bet that most of the IT managers in big companies do not even know what TDD stands for and I doubt that all of them will by 2022...

Thanks, I'll look into that option... any other ideas?

Hi there, Thanks for your reply but as I mentioned in the first sentence of my question I'm dealing with a winforms application deployed with Clickonce and app.config, not web.config file...

I have a Clickonce .NET 2.0 winforms application located on a network share within our company intranet. I'm trying avoid having to deal with other departmens in setting up an AD group, managing users etc. because it is too much of a hassle eventhough I would love to use the integrated windows security... As far as I can tell the only other solution is to create a SQL server user with appropriate permissions on the database my program is connecting to and have my program use that SQL server user account to access the database but if I do that the connection string will be just plain text anyone can read... unless it is encrypted. Placing the connection string within the code is not acceptable since with the .NET code it would be easily accessible using MSIL or Reflector. Placing the conneciton string within the app.config file and encrypting it (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/89211k9b(VS.80).aspx[Securing Connection Strings]) seemed like a good idea but it turns out the connection string must be encrypted/decrypted by the computer that will be running the program (The connection string can only be decrypted on the computer on which it was encrypted.) so it looks like the connection string would have to sit unencrypted on the network share and than my program would encrypt it during installation... having an unencrypted conneciton string on a network share that must be available to eveyrone to read from in order to support the Clickonce deployment doesn't sound like a good idea to me... Anyway, does anyone know a good solution for this problem other than using integrated securtiy and having to deal with a 72 hour turnaround for any changes to the AD group? TIA

Hello everyone, Here is a scenario: Front End: MSVS2005 - C# - DGV Back End: MS SQL Server2005 - Stored Procedures On the backend the main table contains a column named "OfficeID", tinyint, and in another table named "Offices" there are three coulmns "OfficeID", tinyint (PK); "OfficeName", nchar; and "OfficeAbb", nchar. In my SELECT stored procedure I do an INNER JOIN of "OfficeID" columns in these two tables and display the OfficeAbb string on my front end DataGridView when I call the SELECT stored procedure instead of that tinyint stored in the main table. This works great and DGV displays the Office Abbreviation based on the tinyint stored in the OfficeID column of the main table. However, when I try to call my UPDATE stored procedure to update the main table I get "Failed to convert parameter value from a String to a Byte" because the DataSet now holds that two letter string office abbreviation and apparently the DataAdapter is not smart enough to lookup the Offices table and replace the string with the OfficeID tinyint for me. I guess I either have to use some method of the DataAdapter to instruct it to translate the string into the tinyint based on the Office table values or to change the UPDATE stored procedure to where it would accept the string and than do the value translation for me. I suspect both options are possible but was unable to Google this out despite this being such a common scenario. Any help is appreciated. Thanks for reading, Dean