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Using Event Tracing
I was impressed with Darren Mar-Elia's article Internals: "Inside Event Tracing for Windows" (December 2003, InstantDoc ID 40707). I hope Darren can help me solve a problem.
My company has a client/server standalone application. Assume that this application has five functions and that these functions are dealing with five separate bank transactions. I'd like to know how I can monitor how long each type of transaction takes (i.e., from user request
to server answer to delivery of the answer to the user). Basically, I'd like to differentiate the five types of transactional data. Darren's article says that event tracing monitors data from providers. Can Performance Logs and Alerts also be used to monitor at the transactional level?
—Neil Camara
ronneil@restricted.dyndns.org
It sounds as though you can use event tracing for your application. You'll need to build the provider and instrument your application code to declare the start and end of a transaction. In your example, each of the five functions would call a start and end event on your provider, and these events would be logged to the event tracing system. You can then use the usual tools, such as Performance Logs and Alerts, logman, and tracerpt, to collect and report on the data. Your best bet is to check out the relevant Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation about event tracing, which includes examples for instrumenting applications. You can find this documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/perfmon/base/event_tracing.asp?frame=true.
—Darren Mar-Elia
Reg.exe to the Rescue
Mark Minasi's Inside Out: "Quick, Automated AD Setup" (December 2003, InstantDoc ID 40719) contained information about using reg.exe that I found particularly useful.
One of Microsoft's recent update patches caused trouble for my company's training facility. The patch kept usernames from being included in URLs. We discovered a registry edit to solve the problem, and because all the client machines in our training facility are Windows XP Professional machines and members of our AD domain, we used reg.exe to update our logon script. What could have been a long evening spent manually updating each and every machine was a simple fix using reg.exe and a logoff/logon cycle. Thanks!
—Bill Nichol
wnich2@yahoo.com
Controlling the Recent Documents Folder
I read Ed Roth's column Windows Client: "Managing User Profiles" (February 2004, InstantDoc ID 41405), then went back and reread his Windows Client: "Using IntelliMirror to Manage User Data and Settings" (July 2003, InstantDoc ID 39193). My company uses folder redirection for the Application Data and My Documents folders in our users' roaming profiles. Some of our users have a Recent Documents folder that's larger than 5MB, and I'd like to control that folder's size. Does a registry setting exist that will let me control the size of user shell folder\recent\%userprofile%\recent?
—Tim McClenahan
mcclenahans@sbcglobal.net
I don't know of a way to control the Recent Documents folder's size without enabling a quota on the entire profile. However, one Group Policy setting might help. If you enable User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Start Menu and Taskbar\Clear history of recent documents on exit, the contents of the Recent Documents folder will be deleted each time the user logs off. Enabling this policy won't affect the list of recently used files that the File menu in Microsoft Office applications displays, so your users can still rely on that list. Enabling this policy provides the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\ClearRecentDocsOnExt registry subkey with a REG_DWORD value of 1.
Another Group Policy setting looks promising, although it won't alter the contents of the Recent Documents folder. User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer\Maximum Number of Recent Documents will let you limit the number of documents that the Start menu displays.
One more option is to exclude the Recent Documents folder from roaming. You can specify folders for exclusion in Group Policy with the User Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\
User Profiles setting.
—Ed Roth
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