Posts by Tim Anderson

DORA explorers see pandemic boost in numbers of 'elite' DevOps performers

Re: Re: Dup?

There was just one State of DevOps report prior to the 2018 Google acquisition of DORA, and yes there is common ancestry.

Re: Dup?

You may be thinking of the Puppet State of DevOps report which is different, hence this one is known as the Accelerate or DORA State of DevOps :-)

Microsoft Azure deprecations: API changes will break applications and PowerShell scripts

Re: Depreciate != Remove

I think the answer is they are currently deprecated and they will be removed - except in the case of ADAL where it is heading for a curious intermediate state called "unsupported"!

Flatcar Linux takes the 520, drives up to Redmond: Microsoft acquires Kinvolk

Re: Connected with Microsoft's own Linux for Azure/WSL?

AWS Linux is rpm too. Said to be based on Fedora.

X.Org says it's saving a packet with Packet after migrating freedesktop.org off Google Kubernetes Engine

Re: Are the numbers correct?

The quote is correct. Regarding the savings, my assumption is that this was the saving from the last stage of the migration process as otherwise you are right, it doesn't add up. Presumably had no action been taken at all, the $6K per month bills would be continuing, as that was the peak.

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: Mixed messages.

It's the ecosystem (support) companies providing these commits, not the non-playing users, sorry for the ambiguity!

Tim

Visual Studio 16.9 Preview 3 brings Chromium WebView debugging, noisy tests for visually impaired, and more

Rick Strahl has done some blog posts going into detail on WebView2 and how it compares to the old one. See:

https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2021/Jan/14/Taking-the-new-Chromium-WebView2-Control-for-a-Spin-in-NET-Part-1

Plans for Entity Framework Core 6.0 revealed as Microsoft admits it is unlikely to match Dapper for performance

Thing is, EF does much, much more than Dapper. Whether that is or is not a good thing is up for debate, but Dapper is not "better" overall simply because it performs better. There's no chance Microsoft will abandon it, EF is deeply embedded in the platform now.

The answer is Anthos, cries Google's OnAir videogasm. But what is the question?

Anthos unpicked

Thanks, we think we have it mostly figured out but yes we plan to bring you more on this topic soon :-)

Tim

Microsoft pulls dust covers off Dataverse*: Low-code data access from Teams

Thanks, the other piece which we need to spell out is the difference between Dataflex and Dataflex Pro which is obscure in the announcement posts. Will add an update.

OOP there it is: You'd think JavaScript's used more by devs than Java... but it's not – JetBrains survey

According to the analyst, about 40% of the respondents were not JetBrains customers so our of 19.5K that's about 7,800. The difficulty is that all these dev surveys have some sort of bias; it seemed to me that the company was being straight about this. StackOverflow is biased towards SO users; GitHub is GitHub users.

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

Re: Re: Newest prefixes and units to the rescue

Thanks and apologies, we'll correct it :-)

Tim

Re: Newest prefixes and units to the rescue

We're quoting from his talk which is in the embedded video, it's about 10 mins in I think.

Tim

Just cough into here, please: Cambridge-developed app slurps the sounds of COVID-19

Re: Rec-captcha

problem is, reCaptcha 3 doesn't work like that. You don't type an answer or click an image, instead it looks at the data around the interaction - including, I suspect, what is entered into a form - and uses AI to score the result. So it grabs a lot of data.

Rethinking VPN: Tailscale startup packages Wireguard with network security

The admin screenshot was supplied to us as part of a press kit.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

This is a good solution if you have a corporate laptop to give out. There's an issue if you have lots of staff usually on desktop PCs suddenly working from home, and haven't got kit to hand out, as VPN from home PC is not so good. From Android, iOS or Chromebook probably fine. But there are lots of ways to do this and this isn't meant to be telling anyone how to do it, more to highlight potential licensing snags.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: Progman Error

You are correct; and really we should have used windows 3.11 for the screen grabs (ran out of time), my only excuse is that in this instance Explorer is being used like Program Manager - this is what happens if an installer designed for Windows 3.x runs on Windows 95.

Tim

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

That's true if the software on the OS does not change. If there is stuff like the Adobe service that automatically updates though, or you install new applications, that is when the problems occur.

Oi! You got a loicence for that Java, mate? More devs turn to OpenJDK to swerve Oracle fee

Re: TeamCity

TeamCity 5% in this survey, just below GitLab.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

Re: Artificial Neural Nets aren't all there is to AI.

Correct, yes.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Re: Really?

Different rules apply when it is installed before you upgrade to Catalina, result being it is trusted.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

Re: Some applications will run...

We're trying to get clarification on this and will report back.

Tim

Re: author conflates Win32 and 32 bit applications

Hopefully you are right (about being able to run 64-bit "win32" apps). I do see the terms still used especially when Windows on ARM (which exists today) is restricted to 32-bit "win32" only.

Tim

Re: Am I confused, or is the author?

Apologies, what I mean by native is that it runs on the Windows 10X OS without requiring a container that provides the full Win32 API.

Tim

Microsoft hikes cost of licensing its software on rival public clouds, introduces Azure 'Dedicated' Hosts

Or other open source software :-)

AWS goes live with Windows containers... but contain yourselves: It's going to be niche

Re: Is this new?

GA is new. Was previously a preview.

The Java release train is moving faster, but will developers be derailed?

Swing is not going away!

Swing is not going anywhere, not sure where that idea came from but it is not in the article.

Tim

Windows 10: What is it good for? Microsoft pitches to devs ahead of Creators Update

Re: "UWP does solve long-standing Windows problem, safely & easily installing & removing apps"

Not really. What has changed is that when first conceived, a WinRT (basis of UWP) app was sandboxed so that the system prevented it from misbehaving. Now the policy is to open up the whole Windows API to UWP apps so that is no longer the case. Microsoft argues that since you can still install desktop apps, the security benefits of locked down WinRT apps are illusory. However UWP apps are still designed to be easily and cleanly installed and removed, which is the feature I am referencing here.

Tim

SELECT features FROM bumf... What's new in MS SQL Server 2016

Re: Umm...

Added prices now.

Tim

Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell on the future of C#

Re: Bullshit !!!

You need to look here https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/10365 where there is a lot of discussion and a fix (thanks to @drpizza on twitter for pointing this out)

Embrace, extend – and kill. Microsoft discontinues RoboVM

Re: Passive tense?

Fixed - many thanks :-)

Tim

Microsoft Office 365: You don't need 27 floppies, but there is desktop friction

Re: People need to be warned that Office 365 is not the same as Office 2016 ...

> No you don't. Just install it and it will remove / update the old version automatically.

Sorry, doesn't work in this case. I believe the problem is that the plan change meant a downgrade to a version of Office without Access and probably other differences. Anyway, the documented migration specifies that you must remove Office from Control Panel.

Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows: The spirit of Clippy lives on

Re: Excel Co Authoring or not?

No real-time co-authoring in Excel. Apologies for confusing wording, this refers to the feature in Word, PowerPoint, OneNote.

Tim

Windows 10 Mobile Build 10512 rolls out, but progress is sloooow

Re: It does what it says on the tin...

Yes it is a preview; but there is not much point in trying stuff out if you do not report honestly on the experience. I like Windows Phone / Mobile etc and would love for Microsoft to get this right and revive the platform somehow. At the same time it is fair to say that Microsoft's media player efforts have a long history of not working right - Windows Media Player has always been slow and prone to throwing up obscure errors - and this stuff is important to the user experience. Streaming your own stuff from OneDrive is a great feature but only if it works reliably.

Tim

Parallels Desktop 11 brings Windows 10 and Cortana to Mac

Re: Not an emulator

Thanks, oversight corrected.

Tim

MORE Windows 10 bugs! Too many Start menu apps BREAK it

Re: idiotic attitudes all round

It's any shortcut, not just Metro apps

If Microsoft made laptops, it'd make this: HP Spectre x360

Re: So close!

The back panel does come off and you can easily upgrade the SSD.

Tim

Microsoft to Windows 10 consumers: You'll get updates LIKE IT or NOT

Re: Sure of your interpretation?

The EULA specifically refers to "system and app updates".

Tim

Re: I went and saw if there was anything about WSUS and Windows 10

I hope you are right, but my guess is that WSUS will not let you off the hook here. Win10 is different from W7 and W8 since "Windows as a service" means that the OS is being incrementally upgraded. Now, how does MSFT make security patches for every possible variant of Win10 since first release? Likely answer is that it will not. It will make security patches for every variant over the last n months, where n in this case appears to be 8. So if you have WSUS and Win 10 Pro, and block all the feature updates, then after n months it won't be possible to apply security patches because the OS is in effect unsupported. Or maybe some security patches will work and others not.

If you want to avoid this, LTSB is the only official solution and that means Enterprise.

Tim

Testing Windows 10 on Surface 3: Perfect combo or buggy embuggerance?

Re: Write about your subject

Fair point, the rationale is that Surface was created to work properly with Windows 8 and I wanted to bring out that context.

Tim

New Windows 10 Build 10122 aims to fix file association hijacking

Re: Control Panel

True :-) but it still seems to me that a search in the Start menu should find it.

Tim

A good effort, if a bit odd: Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi 2

Check the FAQ: "True “console” apps aren’t really going to be supported for the IoT core OS, headless or not. You can still deploy and run a standard win32 console app here, it just won’t be connected to any on-device console. When running headless you should just get that black screen. When running headed the only supported UI is via the UWP UI stacks (XAML, HTML, DirectX)."

http://ms-iot.github.io/content/Faqs.htm

Tim

Should be HDMI, apologies for the typo!

Tim

Old, forgotten, lonely? SQL Server 2016 will sling you into Azure

Re: Haha!

I think the idea is that your active data is always local so that perf is maintained. Microsoft also says "As core transactional tables grow in size, you may need to archive historical data to lower cost and to maintain fast performance" so I guess shunting stale data to the cloud could help with that.

Tim

JetBrains releases CLion - new cross-platform IDE for C/C++ users

Re: Promotional feature?

Nope, I wrote it because new commercial C++ IDEs are uncommon, plus the JetBrains tools are pretty good IME.

Tim

Microsoft and Dell’s cloud in a box: Instant Azure for the data centre

An url that works

More info on this is now available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/cloud-platform-system/

Tim

Influential scribe Charles Petzold: How I figured out the Windows API

Re: Hungarian notation

There was, but couldn't fit it in. Just for you though: "there was a style of identifying variables known as Hungarian notation that I imitated and perhaps propagated more than was desirable (laughs)." Almost a confession :-)

Bigger, fiddly to manage: The second coming of Windows Server 2012

Re: "Most" enterprises "want" hybrid cloud??

Another way of putting this is that enterprises are not busy closing their datacentres. So to the extent that they have any interest in public cloud, it is hybrid.

Tim

Windows 8.1: A bit square, sure, but WAIT! It has a Start button

Re: Right click admin options

OK, so you are beating me up because you can right-click the bottom left corner in Win 8.0 too for the admin menu (or press Win-X).

True, but the reason I mention it is that I most often right-click the Start button in Win 8.1 for the "Shut down or sign out" option which was added - it is not in Win 8.0.

The right-click menu is also more discoverable in Win 8.1, which does not matter once you have discovered it, but that discoverability is improved is also important.

There is another thing you should know about this review. After discussion we agreed not to repeat everything that we had already said about Windows 8.1 Preview, which was reviewed here last month:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/12/windows_eight_one_review/

Hence the focus on some of the business features. We should have included a link to the earlier piece though, so apologies for that.

Tim