Windows

As reported in most media, we would like to inform you about a global outage caused by a erroneous software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike today, on July 19th. This Endpoint security solution is used in many organizations, from hospitals to tech companies, education, airports and many other industries. Crowdstrike rolled out an update to its customers that caused Windows 10 computers to crash, see the CrowdStrike Statement on Falcon Content Update for Windows Hosts. The affected computers no longer start correctly, but instead produce a Windows BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). Such computers are getting stuck at the “Recovery” screen. See how to resolve this if your Windows computer is affected by the CrowdStrike update. ...

Sometimes it is useful to create a file of a specific size to test network or internet speed or to upload it to a specific application. This is how you can create a file with a specific file size in Windows and with PowerShell. Using the fsutil command line tool For the start, we can use fsutil** command with the file createnew option in a command prompt or in a PowerShell terminal for that purpose. ...

Recently, I stumbled across a strange behavior when running self-developed SPFx webparts in various browsers. When the SPO app was deployed, it worked well with Single-Sign-On, but in some browsers, the webpart was blocked. Instead, a grey box saying “login.microsoftonline.com refused to connect.” was displayed. I experienced that behavior in Chrome, and Edge, while FireFox, Safarai and Opera showed the webpart. Also, there was a different experience when working in the normal mode, or in the In-Private mode. If that happens to you, check out the solution here. ...

Yesterday, the Insider Dev Tour 2019 took place in our home town Vienna, organized from the community for the community. About 60 attendees joined us at this beautiful summer day in the Microsoft Office in Vienna. See some snapshots from the #InsiderDevTour event in our Sway here. Many thanks to the team and to Gerwald Oberleitner, Martina Grom, Thomy Gölles, Christoph Wille, Stefan Bauer, Martin A. Ullrich, Shehata Haroun, Andi Pollak, Christian Nagel and Christian Waha, Bernadette Welly and Georg Binder! Our special thanks to Gerwald Oberleitner from Microsoft for delivering the keynote and to our colleague Martin A. Ullrich for the organization support and for jumping in into the 2nd session! ...

Yesterday, on June 20th, the Insider Dev Tour (see insiderdevtour.com) took place in our home town Vienna. It’s a roadshow for software developers in the Microsoft universe delivering the latest news about Windows, Azure, Office, Graph, AI technology and more. I enjoyed being part of the event along with my fellow MVP colleagues and the Windows Development community. The content was more or less pre-defined and included demos and code-focused overviews of the new developer technologies coming out of Redmond. The topics included building native Win32/XAML apps and Progressive Web Apps, how to connect with new ecosystems using the Microsoft Graph and Windows Timeline (my session), how to add AI (Artificial Intelligence) into your projects, and how to bring your experiences into the next dimension through Mixed Reality and more. ...

In former versions of Microsoft SQL Server, the SQL Server Configuration Manager was an extra app for configuring the SQL Server services. Since this is gone since some versions, we often get the question where to find the configuration tool nowadays with the modern versions of SQL Server… Well, the answer is simple: For SQL Server version equals SQL Server 2016 (13.x) or higher, open the Computer Management (Ctrl + X and click “Computer Management” or run* %SystemRoot%\system32\compmgmt.msc /s *). In here, you find the “SQL Server Configuration Manager” where you can configure your local services with the snap-in(s). ...

We did it again.. attending this year’s Microsoft BUILD conference in Seattle. See some of our impressions here! This year, Microsoft BUILD conference took place from May 10th to 12th near Microsoft’s home in Seattle. In total, this was the 7th BUILD conference. After the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in the past and a break, the first BUILD started in September 2011 in Los Angeles, Anaheim, where Windows 8 was announced. The second BUILD end of October 2012 was interesting since it happened directly in Redmond at the Microsoft Campus with a big tent for the keynote (near the Conference Building 31) and Steve Ballmer himself presenting Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. From then on (2013 to 2016), BUILD had it’s location in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. I still remember what an expensive location Silicone Valley and SanFran was. In 2013, Windows 8.1 was announced. In 2014, Universal Apps and the Lumia phone got most attention (can you remember, there was a time when Microsoft wanted to participate in the mobile device market with hardware and software…). In 2015, “Cloud First” – Azure (which was renamed from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure in 2014 already) - took the stage, followed by Windows 10 that came in that summer. In 2016, it was time for the Cortana, Bots, Cognitive Services, Xamarin, and the Windows Windows 10 Anniversary Update. The Mixed Reality project “HoloLens” was announced in January 2016 at the virtual “Windows 10: The Next Chapter” event completely unexpected (although the Kinect project lead into that). ...

Your computer is still bound to your company’s local domain? How old school. Well, here’s a step-by-step guide how to join Azure Active Directory (AAD Join) with Windows 10. You must be administrator on your local computer, Your existing use profile (C:\Users[account name]) will continue to exist, but anyway, it’s a good idea to backup your local data if needed. Usually such “local” data should be synchronized to the cloud anyway, so it’s easy to restore (for example with OneDrive). ...

Today, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2017 in a two day worldwide online event. Now you can download the latest version of Visual Studio at www.visualstudio.com! There have been local community events (see here). I joined the usergroup event at the Microsoft office in Vienna today. See some snapshots here. Have a look at www.visualstudio.com to see what’s new in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Online! I stumbled about this article at Petri.com – check this out before installing Visual Studio 2017: Visual Studio 2017 Is Not Supported on All Versions of Windows 10 and at Visual Studio 2017 Product Family System Requirements ...

It has been a busy week when we’ve been at Microsoft Ignite conference 2016 which took place in Atlanta from 26th to 30th September. This was Microsoft’s second Ignite conference (the first one happened in Chicago in May 2015, see here) with more than 20.000 people attending and more than 1.000 sessions. For us, it was our first time in the US South (in Georgia) and we enjoyed it very much. ...