Transoft Developers

Under Vista, Microsoft has added a new security feature, “Service hardening” includes a number of modifications to windows services. This impacts on the TCA Component Broker.

One aspect of this is “Session 0 isolation“. This means that services are unable to interact with the desktop in the manner that was available under XP (there is the strangley named ‘Interactive Service Detection Service’, but microsoft’s intention is to do away with this at an unspecified date).

Under normal usage, there is no requirement for a service to interact with the desktop, but when debugging components, it may be necessary to interact. One example is the MicroFocus COBOL call CBL_DBGBREAK. This call will invoke the debugger from a running program.

To enable the use of debugging features such as this, TCA 3.30 has been modified so that when a registry setting is in effect, it will create components with the CreateProcessAsUser call instead of the CreateProcess call. The setting is the string value ComponentOnConsole under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Transoft\TCF_Server\<tcf_server_name>.

Once this setting is in effect, new components will be created in the context of the logged-on console user, rather than the service user for the Component Broker (note that unfortunately, this means that the debugging features will only be available at the console, and not available via a Terminal Services session)

Remember this is a debugging feature, and should not be used in production environments.