For years, Mario Cardinal and I have been working on bringing To-Do.Studio to life. We have thought, experimented and pivoted many times, but are now certain that we are on the right track.
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I have a client for which I need to use some special vpn to get into their environment. Unfortunately, supposedly because of a bug in Windows 10, when i connect to the vpn i lose access to the internet, which means i can’t Bing or Google anymore… Not so good. (On a side note, the vpn software doesn’t work in Edge either, needed to install Chrome to get going).
My work around i figured was to connect to the vpn via a virtual machine, and the host would retain internet access, so i went on to install Hyper-V and then used the “Hyper-v Quick Create” tools to get a Ubuntu VM up and running :
I would have downloaded a Windows VM but other than a dev environment, i couldn’t find anything lightweight, and although I have the ISOs for Windows 10, i am really not sure how licensing works.. Linux is free, so let’s five it a try…
It took a few minutes to download the required 2 gigs, and then a few more seconds to get Ubuntu up and running. Since it was just a vm for me as work-around, i activated the AutoLogin feature (do not do that).
After that, Ubuntu restarted and the enhanced session stuff (high performance integration from VM to host) kicked in via XRDP. Unfortunately, here lies the problem, this enhanced session mode is not compatible with auto-login.
The way to fix it is to get into the tools “View” and unselect “Enhanced Session”, that will kick you into the normal un-accelerated graphics interface. Then you go into the settings app, then users and unselect the “Auto Login” feature.
Then logout from Ubuntu and reactivate “Enhanced Session” and voilà, your are good to go !
Now let’s install Chrome in there and see if the vpn works 🙂
Ever since Azure DevOps was created and Pipelines was created as an individual product, capable of building software housed elsewhere (let’s say Atlassian BitBucket Cloud), I’ve had the pleasure of using it on a few legacy softwares…
What did I learn – super easy to setup and use, very reliable.
I only ran into one problem once, which was that since I was not an “admin” on the BitBucket account, the WebHook could not be created and I was getting into an error… As soon as Microsoft support helped me figure it out, everything worked out fine.
I was writing some code into To-Do
My initial thought was : on startup i will launch git and try to get some information about branch and commit hash and then incorporate that into the configuration system and then show that in the footer…
Well, that sounded complicated and so it probably was… after a few seconds, I found this great Nuget called GitInfo that basically creates a partial class at build time that can be referred to in code, my startup code now looks like this :
public string GitVersion
{
get => string.Format($"V{ThisAssembly.Git.BaseVersion.Major}.{ThisAssembly.Git.BaseVersion.Minor}.{ThisAssembly.Git.BaseVersion.Patch} T={ThisAssembly.Git.Tag} {ThisAssembly.Git.Branch}[{ThisAssembly.Git.Commit}] {{0}}", ThisAssembly.Git.IsDirty?"Dirty":"");
}
...
Configure()
{
...
Configuration["GitVersion"] = GitVersion;
...
}
So I have been giving a lot of thought to Microsoft and their consumer clients.
Their business strategy is straight-on : Azure, Office 365, Microsoft 365, Surface Hubs… These all tell a good story for the enterprise.
As for the other Surface devices (Pro, Book, Go, Studio and Laptop), I imagine these devices are meant to offer one item in each product category from a consumer point of view. These are all excellent devices and the software they run (Windows 10) is the same and meant to bring them back to their business (or consumer) strategy.
As for the student & school story, I believe it still needs to be worked on before something interesting can be said.
Before i go on, for comparison, i believe Apple makes a really really good consumer story – I am not a big fan of their closed ecosystem but do love what they do. Google by comparison seems neutral (by that i mean that the devices and services are similar, but there is no end to end story) – nothing to report here.
Where to start…
ONE – as a consumer what services would interest me from Microsoft ? Skype is decent, Office365 (with 1tb OneDrive) is awesome. I currently use Microsoft To-Do and for some odd reason i use Microsoft Edge. I also use Windows itself because i have 20 years of experience there vs Mac or Linux.
TWO – the Microsoft devices are cool, they today announced the Surface GO with LTE and I will probably get one as i would like a tablet and an IPAD doesn’t make sens for me and a Android tablet would be a bigger phone when i need to be able to do light work on it. Nothing to report on on the media (Android TV or Apple TV) competitor either… (just like phones)
THREE – Microsoft still has no visible mobile vision, without a mobile plan i feel it has no chance in the consumer space and it i feel this jeopardizes it business strategy. For now Azure is safe, but if all my future employees know nothing of Microsoft why would i build a company around Microsoft technologies ?
The potential…
The way i see it, Microsoft is in the unique position to embrace Android and it’s ecosystem as well as become a challenger to the Apple ecosystem.
Make Windows run Android apps natively, instantly stop the app gap (though i am not sure it still exists anymore with the coming of PWAs) and become a part of the ecosystem itself.
Make surface hardware in the phone size space. Is it a PC ? is it an Android phone ? it’s Windows – it’s both.
Make Windows shine in the phone and tablet form factors, and really make these Windows devices work together. If you have a Android phone, you need to install the Android Phone companion. Otherwise things just work (the Appel Handoff technique) – There is no “your phone” app, cause the device doesn’t matter anymore. Work life – personal life – work life – personal life… should be the same devices and services…
Compete with Apple in hardware with the Surface line, in services with Windows. Compete with Android by embracing it and diluting the market by enabling every pcPCto do what phones do and making people have fun on PCs again.
Finally, these are my thoughts, all based on some frustration with these technologies. I know things can be better, for a simple few million lines of code… and 1-2 new hardware devices…
Skype has been through a lot of changes lately. On the
Check it out at http://preview.web.skype.com.
I find this quite interesting because it almost seems like a single source code for all of the different platforms out there, I think this is the kind of architecture that we must
Skype team, if you are listening! drop me a line so I can invite you to our local user’s group !
Microsoft released this year a new app for the Android platform: Edge for Android. It’s a browser meant to replace the Chrome app you use on your mobile platform. Other than the looks, it has one great power – it can sync your favorites from your Windows machine to your Android device. It’s a great
As most IT workers, I log into my Windows device with my Microsoft account. I then go on and add a few more work accounts to my device (Office365 accounts) for the different companies I own.
This is where it breaks – synching settings to the cloud seems to disable itself when you add a work account. Hence
Microsoft, I do hope you can fix this sooner than later, I would prefer to use Edge…
Every now and then I examine the tools I work with, the brands I use and how I work…
To me, phones are… still phones. I love them dearly with all their apps and potential, but since I spend 8-10 hours a day with a computer, I don’t need another 5 inch screen on my desk…
Tablets… these are an interesting topic for me. I find them very cool (to the point that I can’t for the LTE Surface GO to come out so I can grab one). I need them to be a middle ground and act like a computer so I don’t always carry have to carry my laptop and act like a big phone
I don’t expect to work on a phone so them being driven by apps and stuff is fine. I do expect more from a tablet and cannot adhere to
Here are my wishes for the Windows ecosystem for Redstone 6, I guess available around spring 2019:
The Azure CosmosDB system has the potential to be a great storage layer for your solution. It automatically scales to maintain performances by splitting the data into partitions. It can geo-replicate in order to minimize data transfer latencies and has multiple consistency models to suit your different needs.
But…
In CosmosDB you pay for two things within a data center.
1 – The storage you use, which is a flat fee per gigabyte.
2 – The amount of RUs you would like to provision per second for performance. An RU is an arbitrary unit meaning roughly “something similar to reading 1k”.
If you replicate your dataset to another data center for
Now for the trickiness, when you provision performance, let’s say 10k RU/sec, you are saying that you would like the entire dataset to be served with that performance level. Then arrives a more complicated subject: partitions. A partition is basically a split of your
For small datasets that might not be so dramatic as partitions might never occur… but for larger
With this understanding, you might think that CosmosDB is great because you pay the same amount per month for a given performance. But two scenarios might arise…
1 – Partitions might exhaust their part of the total RU/sec faster than anticipated due to bad partition keys or specific usage patterns. Your usage of CosmosDB must be resilient to that fact that the system is unavailable because RU/sec have been exhausted.
2 – There is a minimum amount of RU/sec required to host a partition. If the container splits to a point where a partition has less than 100 RU/sec (current value), then RU/sec will be added to your bill in order to guarantee that minimum per partition.
Hope that clears a few things up !
A long time ago, I was working with companies helping them create add-ons for Visual Studio. This was NOT an easy task. We had to write code, implement COM interfaces, figure out registration, packaging, development instances of VS… It was
Now a new beast is in town, Visual Studio Code. It is a code editor based on Electron, a Javascript system for packaging apps.
As it turns out, one of my clients needed to have an easy way to update data for his web site and so we created a JSON file that was in an accessible location. Next what we needed was an easy way to edit these files and so we thought, how about edit the file in Visual Studio Code with a custom addon.
The two commands required to start are (install yeoman, the generator and then create the base structure) :
npm install -g yo generator-code
yo codeThen you open Visual Studio Code in the directory and hit
Now go on and create something ! Here is a link to the docs !