Why is there a warning every time user starts my application.

[IanS]

My application/executable is signed with my thawte digital certificate.

A user has copied the executable to a mapped network drive X: and now each time he tries to run the application from that folder he gets the warning message about "Applications from the internet" etc. You know the one you get when you download something from the web and run it for the first time.

Because it's signed with the thawte certificate the message is not the 'bad' one - it's the more passive one saying the the certificate is OK showing company name and links to my site etc but, from the user's point of view, it's still annoying seeing that every day.

How do I stop that appearing ? Is it just an option the user has to set to make his X drive be part of his trusted zone ? or what ?

Thanks
Ian

[techgnome]

"A user has copied the executable" -- from where?

-tg

[IanS]

"A user has copied the executable" -- from where?

-tg

From where ? Why is that relevant?

Sorry, I thought I'd explained that clearly - OK, here's the long story.

By default the applications installs into the user's Program Files folder.

In this case though he has copied the executable from the default location and placed it on a server on his network. The folder has been mapped as drive letter X:

So, instead of the application being at:-

c:\program files\MyAppName\myApp.exe

it is now located on a shared folder at:-

X:\SomeFolder\myApp.exe

[dilettante]

This sounds like a Persistent Zone Identifier was added to the file when it was downloaded via IE. This info is stored in an NTFS Alternate Data Stream named :Zone.Identifier. Most likely the Zone is set to 3 (downloaded from the Internet).

The user should be able to open the file's Properties in Explorer and click on the Unblock button.


This is pretty old stuff, been around since XP SP2.

[techgnome]

That's what I thought too.. which is why I asked about where it was copied from... the user is copying the file from the Program Files folder after it has been installed.

Does the same error happen when they run it from the originaly installed folder?

Also I know I've seem discussions about .NET getting cranky when the app is run from anywhere other than the local file system.

-tg

[dilettante]

It's a bad idea to run from a network drive, or even from removable media. For native code you can set flags in the PE files to cause Windows to cache the code locally but I don't know if it applies to .Net code.

[techgnome]

It's less about code being cached, and more about the JIT... compiling as it goes, on demand... if your network resource suddenly isn't available... well... I'm you've seen what happens to an engine when you lose oil. Eventually it all goes south.

-tg

[dilettante]

If you set the "run from network" bit Windows will load a copy of the EXE (and DLLs if also so marked) into local swap disk and run it from there. That's the caching I was referring to. This saves network traffic, improves performance, and avoids certain kinds of "segment load timeouts."

Programs are not loaded into memory monolithically once when run, pieces and parts are fetched from disk as needed and freed when not needed.

However it is probably only noticeable when the network is slow and/or busy and the local machine is tight on RAM.

[IanS]

User doesn't see an unblock button.