Longhorn pre-reset VoteNow/Self-Host Vote summary

[DiskingRound]

Hello everyone. For those who don't know/don't care/don't know/care of the Longhorn.ms article about it:

As you guys may know, I (and many people here) are interested in Longhorn. So today, I installed Longhorn 4033 in VMware and see what goodies it offered that haven't been found/posted before. One rather obscure application in b4033 is VoteNow.exe. In this post I will try to explain it the best I can. All info was gathered via a deep scroll through of VoteNow.exe in Notepad, so if I made any (spelling) errors, please feel free to correct them.

Self-Host Vote, also know as VoteNow, was an internal application meant for Longhorn developers and was included intermittently in Longhorn. The builds that are leaked and have this application are 4033, 4039, 4042, 4053, 4084 and 4093. The application is located in the %SystemRoot%\System32\ directory and is named VoteNow.exe and is also set to start up with Windows.

On first glance, opening the application does nothing and using Resource Hacker to view anything inside it shows only version info. But upon further investigation it appears to be a rather complex application. 'cl_VoteYourTestBuild' in the executable appears to mean that this application is used for testing builds. 'GetLAB' is used to check 'HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\BuildLab to check if it's a valid build lab for voting (Lab01, Lab02, Lab03, Lab04, Lab06, Lab07). Interestingly, there's a Lab21. I have no idea what this lab is for, neither have I heard of it before. If the lab is main, the application stops with 'BadLab'. 'IsLegalVoter' checks the user domain environment variable to see if he is a legal voter: in this case valid user domains are NtDev, WinDeploy, Redmond, SeGroup, Africa, Corp, Europe, MiddleEast, NorthAmerica, SouthAmerica, SouthPacific, Interactive, WinGroup, Xred, Xcopr, WinSE, Phx, and Sys-WinGroup.

After further investigation in the executable, I found, contains a registry key in HKLM\Software named 'VoteNow' with 'VotedOn' in it. Interestingly, there is also a message saying "User has not voted before" but I am not sure what it means.

After a specified period of time, VoteNow will check everything mentioned before, if correct, will pop up a notification saying "You have been using this Longhorn build for a few hours now. By using the Vote Now button below, you can vote to let us know what you think of it. To learn more, click this text." with two buttons, "Vote Now", and "Later". The notification uses the ThumbsUp.png button found in the system32 folder.

Clicking "Vote Now" in the notification would open up IE and navigate to an internal web page:

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http://winweb/selfhost2/?ballot=3&lab=", lAB, "&build=", str"

, in which lAB is the lab returned by GetLAB and str is the value found in the registry as mentioned earlier. As an example, the URL opened after clicking VoteNow's notification in 4033 would be

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http://winweb/selfhost2/?ballot=3&lab=main&build=4033.030717

. Clicking "Later" in the notification would reset VoteNow's timer starting at 0. Clicking the notification itself opens another internal web page,

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http://longhorn/selfhost/

, which contained more info about voting. While none of these pages work anymore and they haven't been archived anywhere the URLs are still nice to have for informational purposes.

VoteNow.exe's file version is 0.0.0.0.

UltraWindows (Nick) has made a GitHub page regarding this executable: https://github.com/nickurt/lh-votenow

Many thanks to Melcher and Ultrawindows for providing most of this information.

I hope someone will find this information useful.

[johnleakedfan]

MajorSky17, on his Build 4042 Video on Youtube, mentioned what Builds have this, he probably got his info from Longhorn.ms, I think

Also good information

[Lukas Marsik]

What is the point of posting a reworded version of our article with a few more obvious notes?

[hounsell]

This might be more useful if you hadn't ripped this off somewhere else and then proceeded to rewrite it in a way that makes it clear you have no fundamental understanding of what you're writing about.

You also might want to check ultrawindows' "GitHub page about the executable". Surely someone who has so carefully studied the votenow.exe of Longhorn (in Notepad, nonetheless) might be able to spot some important differences between it and what the "GitHub page" is actually about.

(Also, learning what GitHub is might be helpful, because you don't seem to understand that either)

[wasabilee]

I'm just interested what lab 27 was
everything else Melcher already wrote nicely on their page

[user99672]

This is a really crummy post, not only do you have absolutely no understanding of programming, you merely reshacked an executable, and demonstrated no skill, or knowledge whatsoever. You also copied 3/4ths of someone else's article to boot.

[hounsell]

I'm just interested what lab 27 was

There was actually quite a few transient minor labs. There was definitely a Lab10_N as well at some point. Dunno what any of them are for.

[wasabilee]

mmm would be nice to list them ALL
on your sites Tom & Melcher
just for archive purpose

[AlphaBeta]

All info was gathered via a deep scroll through of VoteNow.exe in Notepad

[esc1010]

Common knowledge 10-ish years later.