Finally, here comes the Windows 8 port for my Windows Phone 8 (and 7) currency converter published 3 weeks earlier.

There was no real need for it, excerpt for the Microsoft’s challenge to create an application and get 100 installations by the end of September (so I still have a week!). Anyway, the result is good and even useful, which is quite unusual for Metro apps.

I have to operate 3 currencies on a daily basis, and therefore I have to use converter. But I wanted to get rid of advertisements and privacy issues. For example,  the XE Currency converter, apart from usual advertisement, has a problem with privacy. For some reason it sends to its server a lot of irrelevant information, such as the model of my notebook. Why? I have no idea, but I didn’t like that.

So, when I had to create the first Metro app, the topic of choice was very obvious and not very original - the currency converter.

The saga of certification and myth busting (remember the “just copy your code to another platform and it works!” fairy tale?) will follow soon, but for now - Ladies and Gentlemen, you are very welcome to install and use the brand new free currency converter for Windows 8.

Here is the link to Windows Market: https://byte.lv/Z

Continuous Integration is extremely important part of software development process, but is also the least used at the same time. Even at relatively big software shops, the continuous integration usually is something, that everyone heard of, but that’s it.

Among all the things you can do to shift the focus of your software developers to what they really have to do instead of what they have to do now, the continuous integration is perhaps the most rewarding. More...

It finally happened - I am releasing my first application for Windows Phone 8. And Windows Phone 7.1, for a change. Taking into account the average (in all meanings of that word) quality of applications in Windows Phone Store, I should be proud of myself.

If, by chance, you own a Windows Phone device, and in need of a currency converter for Windows Phone, I highly recommend this app, as it’s the most advanced one in the store at the moment, and will become even more useful in time.

Here are the few images of it that you can also see at the store:

I really like how it looks and works so far. Planning to release its Windows 8 analogue in a few days.

If you are planning to give it a try, let me know what you think and what else you’d like to see in it. Your feedback is important!

As a note to system administrator – what to do, when your one and only administrators account is locked on your SQL Server.

You need to perform 5 quick steps. More...

The Perils of Playing Russian Roulette With Windows Updates

Let's talk about a high-stakes game that you may be unknowingly playing in your server room. It lurks under the innocuous name "automatic Windows updates", but if you've been in the trenches long enough, you know it better as Russian Roulette.

Windows Updates: A Necessary Evil

Ever second Tuesday of the month, our friends at Microsoft bequeath us a fresh batch of patches for Windows. These patches — necessary to keep our machines secure, efficient and bug-free — often require a restart to take effect. But not all of these 'restarts' are equal. You see, sometimes, during the reboot process, instead of simply restarting, the machine shuts down. And sometimes, it won't even shut down gracefully. It's a gamble, a flip of the coin, a spin of a bullet chamber — it's Russian roulette.

The Danger in The Server Room

Now, this game of chance may seem insignificant, just another quirk of the IT industry. But consider this: in many cases, production servers have the "Install updates automatically" setting turned on. A server going offline without warning? That's the stuff of nightmares for any business. It can lead to unanticipated downtime, loss of productivity and worst of all, loss of revenue. Not to mention the chaos it wreaks on your IT team's peace of mind!

Morale of the Story: Let's Be Safe Out There

So, what's the solution? It's simple: Do not enable automatic installation of updates on production servers or any machines that you can't easily power back up. The minor inconvenience of manually installing important updates far outweigh swiftly falling into the pitfall of unexpected system shut downs.

In the world of IT, unexpected surprises are rarely welcome. Let's keep Russian roulette out of our server rooms and ensure consistent, reliable operation for our businesses. And remember, a mindful approach to updates is the mark of a truly professional system administrator.

So, you have a pond. Now, what to do if the fish is lazy to breed? Here is the answer from LinkedIn.

First, let’s see if Bob was looking for Alice in Wonderland. Let’s say, there were 20 different Alices, but not the one he was looking for. Let’s wait for about a month and send invitation from random Alice from the previously displayed list to Bob, and from Bob to Alice. They both will think that they initiated the invitation. But first we need to make sure, that they can’t ask questions before accepting the invitation, so let’s remove that feature.

Yeah, that’s how it works in LinkedIn now. Now let’s hope that Alice is not ex-wife of Bob, or his ex business partner, or even better – a partner of his ex wife.

This is a CPU usage graph of a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, with all latest patches applied, and Internet Explorer 10 left opened for a few days. It had only two pages opened, both are Microsoft’s own support pages with no active content.

Remote session (RDP) was opened for about 5 days, and every hour Internet Explorer process took more and more memory and CPU, until it took most resources from server.

More...

A few weeks ago I had to install very old software on very old server. And it turned out, that a few libraries for Visual Basic 6 were not found anywhere in the net. The company which made them doesn’t exist for many years, their website was abandoned and purchased by squatters since then. There were some binaries posted at some ancient pages, but most of them led to 404 (file not found) and the authority of the files that I managed to find, couldn’t be verified. I mean – I wouldn’t install such file at production server.

And if you think that such ill fate is only for small and unknown companies – you couldn’t be farther from truth. One of such companies is Sheridan, if you remember such name. They were quite famous in the era of Visual Basic 4, 5 and 6. But the point is – any binary of any company can be virtually lost or extremely hard to find in 10 years from now – at least the specific version of it.

That’s how I came with the

Idea

What if, just like the NuGet Package Manager, we would be able to get the binaries from a simple and never changing link, and be sure that this file is not infected and won’t disappear?

More...

Last year I visited event at Dublin’s Aviva stadium, where Microsoft’s principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Bill Buxton, presented a keynote about design. Microsoft Windows Apps team was generous enough to share this video with the world, and I highly recommend it to everyone who wants to understand the concepts and reasons behind the design shift we experience today.

It’s almost 90 minutes, but they might well worth it, despite the quality.

I had two problems with my Windows Me 8. At least two which were clearly bugs in operating system and not a usual Dell hardware failure. And seems like both of these problems had the same solution, which potentially should be able to fix some other issues with Windows 8. More...