nu5500

Having maintained both JavaScript SPAs and Blazor apps for the past 4 years, I disagree with the article's point about Blazor being more complex. I've had way more issues keeping JS tooling running and having to spend time fixing issues when I upgrade packages. Things really get fun when you have to produce an SBOM for security audit. You can generally get by with way fewer dependencies in a Blazor app and the build process starts simple and can get as complex as you want it to be. Another point not mentioned in the article is that Blazor can also run directly on local hardware - desktop or mobile. This doesn't use WASM or web sockets and runs at full native speed. This is a big deal where I work since we can run the exact same UI on kiosks as well as on a web site, with essentially the backend swapped out.

It is nothing like Web Forms (I've built dozens of Web Forms and Blazor apps so I know), and WASM is just one delivery vehicle for it. You can also render it server side or locally in-process in a full .net runtime (no WASM needed). The debuggability for the WASM runtime has improved alot as well since .net 7.

That is not true. There are certain APIs only applicable to commercial users, but the same Graph API calls (for example against OneDrive or Excel) can be used across both.

I feel like Tyranny is greatly under rated. There are rough edges for sure, but the story line and atmosphere sucked me in in a way that I haven't experienced in a long time. Really fun combat system too.

I remember fondly "back in the old days" spending a couple of years doing Java servlets (for reference, this was right when JSPs were becoming a thing) where we implemented a nice compact MVC approach. The performance was very good at the time. When I moved over to ASP.NET I felt baffled by all of the heavy WebForms templating, but soon discovered that you could set up an almost identical framework as we had with servlets by implementing HttpHandlers and some light-weight views with all the ViewState stuff turned off (it was probably most similar to something like NancyFx now). I feel like many of the frameworks now are doing the same stuff that worked well 15 years ago, but it is fleshed out better. And of course there is a ton of open-source work, which was missing back then.

It'll most likely be using the German regulated version of Azure/Office 365: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-about-Office-...

Similar to what China does.

It should also be noted that W10 Mobile was a slow running, bug ridden mess when it was released and took well over a year to become usable. It was also not compatible with most of the existing Windows Phone handsets in use, and at the same time, Microsoft killed off their phone hardware (nothing released since 2015) and pulled them out of stores. So anywhere that Windows phones were gaining traction in were guaranteed to be short lived.

Actually, it is (was) available on the web. But yea, no marketing...

https://music.microsoft.com/

Hard to tell, but I don't think it would have worked out since Google did not support their services on Windows Phone and, at the time, there were not good alternatives. (Although, personally I actually preferred alternate services such as Here Maps)

Yep, sorry poor grammar there. I've edited so hopefully it's clearer now.

From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches.

Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort)

While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has)

What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.

Really? You're more concerned about the software being provided to you by Microsoft, who is at least presumably trying to keep you as a satisfied customer and provide a secure operating system then you are for faceless hackers connected to the Internet who's whole objective is to either out right steal people's money, disrupt people's lives, or else subvert your computer in order to launch attacks on other users?

I am not sure that it's really feasible to decouple feature and security updates though. With Microsoft releasing two major feature updates a year, how many variations of this can they support if anyone along the way decides to freeze their current set of features and only get security updates for them? Regardless, as a heavy Win10 user across several machines I've found the whole "disruptive" / "spyware" / "crapware" FUD being pushed by some HN posters to be way overblown. Yea, there have been a few annoyances such as the OneDrive ad that showed up a month or two ago, but these are all extremely minor compared to the mountains of advertising and tracking crap we get hit with every day from web sites, apps, and search engines.

I am curious what your resistance is to OneDrive. Personally, I try to put as much in there as I can as I frequently switch machines that I am working on. I keep my work code in there as well (Git repo and all) and it's convenient when switching between VMs or when needing to wipe my workstation and start fresh.

I encounter many co-workers though who like to do things "the old way" and just email copies of documents around and then spend time merging them back together instead of sending a link to their OneDrive. Just more files for me to juggle on my computer. No thanks.

I have Windows 10 Pro AND an Office 365 subscription and the damn thing showed up for me. While I use and enjoy quite a few Microsoft products, I feel like there are just some baffling, ill thought out, and ham-fisted mistakes going on there with how these ads are being pushed out. They look tacky and I can only imagine they're doing more harm than good.

For example, the ads for Edge that now show up touting that you can stream longer with Edge. Really? I don't know anyone that that would convince to stop using Chrome. How about maybe something more basic like changing the logo, since every non-technical user that I know just thinks it's Internet Explorer and it's been pounded into their brains for years (and for good reason) to use Firefox or Chrome instead.

Right, I am not saying that these dialogs did not exist, were not terrible, and some people did not take the time to read them and inadvertently scheduled an update...

However, I am interested in how this happened to an entire business and they did not simply roll back the upgrade? Instead, they chose spend thousands of dollars trying to work around software issues for apparently no gained benefits.

How was this upgrade forced on you? I use several machines that are still happily running Win7 and 8.

There is this: http://scriptcs.net/

I find the trackpad to be quite good compared to most other Windows PCs, but it is on the small side. I haven't tried the SP4 keyboard yet where it is slightly larger.

The touch capability is interesting in that I've found that I've begun using it along with the pen more and more over time. The pen has really grown on me as I've discovered more ways to put it to use. For the first year that I owned my SP3 I rarely used the pen, but now I use it almost every day. Being able to switch from full on tablet and pen back to keyboard and mouse mode is pretty killer and I plan to continue using this form factor for the foreseeable future.

Yea, that probably wasn't a great example. I think at a basic file storage and sharing perspective the products offer about the same.

However, IMO comparing SharePoint to Google Drive is apples and oranges (and really OneDrive consumer is the appropriate comparison) SharePoint uses metadata and a content type model to organize everything, which is indexed so it can be searched on and have custom filters, views, and forms built off of it. It's a double edged sword though in that as much as it helps organize lots of documents, it also has a lot of maintenance overhead (and a lot of special nuances that people need to learn). It also supports a lot of features that are aimed at implementing simple business processes like workflows, versioning, and document templates.

More recent updates have been trying to gloss over a lot of the complexity and simplify the UI, to make it look more like a consumer level product I guess.

And if you have something like a Surface, the native apps have great inking support. Just open up a Word doc, sign it and send it back. The web apps are nice in a pinch, but I find that they have these (probably intentional) shortcomings that make them fall short of doing real day-to-day work. For example, no format painter in Excel Online. That doesn't make any sense to me and these features should at least be available to paying customers.

The client that I am using (which you can download from https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...) keeps all conversations in one window with people listed down the left. I've never seen it starting new windows.

Totally agree. I haven't owned a Pebble, but I have been wearing a Microsoft Band 24/7 for over two years and really depend on its functionality now. Quickly scrolling through email, texts (and occasionally replying), calendar, stocks - all from a quick to use interface is a real time saver. It also tracks my sleep every night and wakes me up in the morning in an unobtrusive way that my partner appreciates (no more alarm clock/phone alarm). I also track my steps, heart rate, and workouts every day, but the fitness stuff is a bonus to me and I would still find the Band very useful without it. Unfortunately, it looks like the Band has been abandoned by Microsoft, so like you I'm a little bummed out and will have to start looking at alternatives (once my supply of Bands runs out anyway...)

Sounds like you have a lemon then and should have it replaced. I'm on a SP3 right now that I bought two years ago... since then upgraded to Win 10 and then to the Anniversary Update. Other than the battery drain issue that struck earlier this year, it's pretty much been flawless and I bang on it every day. I for one am sold on this form factor.

Compared to what that has the same functionality?

I think these changes are all commendable and I am greatly looking forward to them. However, as someone who spends a lot of time in Visual Studio every week, I generally will keep the same instance running for days and don’t even switch between projects too often. Load time doesn’t factor in too much, but I guess it's nice for demos. For quick one-off files, I’ve always used something light weight like Notepad++ and now more frequently VS Code.

What I am really looking forward to would be anything around speeding up install and patch times. These are excruciatingly slow in VS 2015.

I have a $99 10" tablet with 32GB, 2GB RAM and Z3735F CPU running Anniversary Update just fine (surprisingly well I would say)... but the only way that AU would install was from a 8GB USB stick built with the Windows Media Creation tool. A clean install of AU left 17GB free of 28.4GB. I don't think this is anything a general consumer would go through though, so probably most of these devices will effectively be left on the November update from last year. But, I wanted to point out that saying the AU update is too large for 32GB devices is factually incorrect.