Most of us are local administrators on our machines. However, the UAC (User Access Control) feature of Windows 7 annoys us every time there is a need to run an application as an Administrator. You are probably familiar with the darkening screen, the beep and the “Do you want the following program to make a change….” message popping out of nowhere when choosing “Run as Administrator”. Don’t know how about you, but it just freaks me out.
Fortunately, there is an easy solution, that doesn’t require turning off the great UAC feature. All you need to do is to change the local policy.
Click the Start button, and start typing “Local Security Policy” at the command prompt:
Now, in the Local Security Policy Screen expand Local Policies and choose Security Options. In the list of the security options look for User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode, which will be enabled by default.
Double click it, and change to Disabled. After a reboot, you are the real administrator – no more UAC annoyances.
This is the message I’ve got while troubleshooting Windows 2008 R2 Server wireless LAN: 
Isn’t Windows Server meant to be a server operating system aimed for IT professionals, that are supposed to know how the Ethernet cable looks like?
And BTW, the Israeli telephone connector is actually larger then the Ethernet connector.
IIS SEO Toolkit is a free and powerful module of the IIS7 Web Platform, helping developers and web site administrators to improve their site’s relevance for the search engines, such as Google or Bing. The module is, basically, crawls through any given web site, downloads all of its content to the local hard drive, analyzes the content for SEO issues and gives a detailed report, including many different details, such as words count, or URLs leading to a certain resource of the analyzed web site.
The toolkit includes many useful capabilities, which can be leveraged to do some interesting stuff, for example, to find easily the Easter Egg, hiding on one of the pages of the Typemock’s site, and maybe win a desired Typemock Isolator license.
Note: I’m publishing this AFTER the draw. Sorry folks, you’ll be able to use this technique only the next time someone announces something similar. The purpose of this article is not to show how to hack web sites, but to demonstrate the power of the IIS SEO Toolkit.
So, the first thing we need, is of course the IIS7, which comes with Windows Vista/2008 or IIS 7.5, which comes with Windows 7/2008 R2. Then, we’ll install the SEO Toolkit. The simplest way to install the both, is by using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. This amazing free tiny utility from Microsoft installs the all components of the MS Web Platform in a snap. Just select the components and click “Install”:
After installing the SEO toolkit, you’ll find a “Search Engine Optimization” icon under the “Management” Section of the IIS Manager. Make sure you’ve selected the server name and not one of the sites, otherwise you’ll be able to only analyze the selected site.
Clicking the icon brings the SEO main page. Choosing the “Create a new analysis” link will bring the “New Analysis” screen. Type in anything you want for the analysis name, and the Typemock’s web site URL as a Start URL.
Now I click “OK”, and go grab a cup of coffee. Depending on the internet connection and the site load, the crawling may take between couple of minutes and half an hour. Anyway, no intervention is required or desired from my side now. It took about 5 minutes to finish.
By the end of the crawling and analysis, the analysis report dashboard will appear:
I’m not really interested in the site’s SEO violations. What really interests me in the content of the site. Now, my guess is, that we’re supposed to look some resource, containing the word “easter”. I’ll click on the “Query” button on the toolbar, and then choose the “New Query” option from the drop-down menu. In the Query widow, I will enter the query details and click the “Execute” button. My guess now is that I’m done.
I bet, the second result (the HTML page) will lead me directly to the web page, where I need to enter my details to participate in the draw. Right-clicking the row and choosing “View in Browser…” indeed leads me to the desired page.
But I’m curious where the Typemock folks have really hidden the egg. My guess is that the third resource is probably the Easter Egg image. I’m going to double-click the row to open the resource details window. Voila, there it is! The egg image appears in “Content” tab of the resource details window:
Now, there is one thing left – to discover where this egg is hiding. To do it, I’m going to open the “Links” tab, which with no doubt will provide me the URL that contains this image:
This time, I can open the web page selecting the row, and choosing “Show in Browser…” from the “Actions” menu on the top-right corner of the screen.
To summarize, in this particular case it is probably much easier to just surf the web site and find the egg. However, it is much cooler (or geekier) to do this automatically. Anyway, as I’ve written before, I have no intentions whatsoever to show you how to hack web sites. My only intention was to demonstrate the IIS SEO Toolkit, which is an extremely powerful and free tool by Microsoft. It can be used not only for improving your web site relevance to search engines, but also to eliminate different problems with your web site, such as broken links, or heavy pages.
This tool helped me a lot in numerous tasks, I needed to perform lately. I’m sure it will help you with yours.