Microsoft announces the “Art of Teamwork” digital curriculum to teach teams how to practice the five key attributes of successful teamwork and shares success stories from Microsoft Teams customers.
The post 5 attributes of successful teams appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
The next wave of analytics is here with Azure Synapse Analytics! Simply unmatched and truly limitless, we're excited about this launch and want to share the highlights with you. Please join us for the Analytics in Azure virtual event on Tuesday, December 10, 2019 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time. Be among the first to see how Azure Synapse can accelerate your organization’s time to insight. Sign up for the live stream today for reminders, agenda updates, and instructions to tune in live.
Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources at scale. Build end-to-end analytics solutions with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs, with blazing speed.
Join us for this virtual event and find out how to:
You’ll hear directly from Gayle Sheppard, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Data, and John Macintyre, Director of Product for Microsoft Azure Analytics, who will dive deep on Azure Synapse. Other Microsoft engineering and analytics experts will join the event with insights, demos, and answers to your questions in a live Q&A. Don’t miss your opportunity to ask how Azure Synapse can enable the growth and evolution of your business.
There’s never been a better time to embrace technologies that allow you to unlock insights from all your data to stay competitive and fuel innovation with purpose. Register today for the Analytics in Azure virtual event on December 10th. We hope you can join us!
Today’s question and answer style post comes after I had the chance to sit down with Bryan Heymann, Head of Cloud Architecture at Finastra, discussing his experience with Azure Site Recovery. Finastra builds and deploys technology on its open software architecture, our conversation focused on the organization’s journey to replace several disparate disaster recovery (DR) technologies with Azure Site Recovery. To learn more about achieving resilience in Azure, refer to this whitepaper.
We think of our cloud journey across three horizons. Currently, we're at “Horizon 0” – consolidating and migrating our core data centers to the cloud with a focus on embracing the latest technologies and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO.) The workloads are a combination of production sites and internal employee sites.
Initially, we went through a 6-month review with a third party to identify our datacenter strategy, and decided to select a public cloud. Ultimately, we realized that Microsoft would be a solid partner to help us on our journey. We moved some of our solutions to the cloud and our footprint has organically grown from there.
All this is the enabler to go to future “horizons” to ensure we continuously keep pace with the latest technology. Most importantly we’re looking to move up the value chain – so instead of us worrying about standing a server up, patching a server, auditing a server, identity on a server… we’re now ingesting and deploying the right policies for the service (not the server) and taking advantage of the availability, security, and disaster recovery options.
Disaster recovery is front and center for us. We work closely with our clients to regularly test. At this point we have executed more than 50 test failovers. Disaster recovery and backups are non-negotiable standards in our shared environment.
We used just about every tool in our data centers and always had mixed results. We thought that Azure Site Recovery might be the same, but I was glad that we were wrong. We have a strong success rate and even wrote special dashboards to track our recovery point objective (RPO) for a holistic view on our posture! We were skeptical that Site Recovery would be point and click capable, and whether it would be able to keep up with the amount of change we have, when failing over from the East coast to the West coast. Our first DR test in Azure, over two years ago now, was actually wildly successful. We did not expect the low RPO that we saw and were delighted. I think this speaks volumes to Azure’s network backbone and how you handle replication, to be that performant.
There wasn't any heavy onboarding, which is a good thing as it really wasn’t needed. It was so intuitive and easy for our team to use. The documentation was very accurate. The point and click capabilities of Site Recovery and the documentation enabled us to onboard and go. It has all been in line with what we needed, without surprises.
All of our virtual machines (VMs) across North America are using Site Recovery, everything from our lending space, to our payment space, to our core space. These systems support thousands of our customers, and each of those have their own end customers which would number in the millions – Site Recovery is our default disaster recovery mechanism across the whole fleet.
Actually, it was our very first application for which we deployed Azure Site Recovery – and it’s all Linux. Linux support for Site Recovery has been fantastic. We failover every six months, without any issues. The ease of use and the amount of times we have tested now has significantly increased. We pressed on our normal RPOs to get them down to very, very aggressive levels. Some of our Linux based applications are complex, but Site Recovery has worked without any issues.
The experience has been seamless and simple. The application itself may have some configurations that need to be considered during DR drills, such as post-scripts, but those are hammered out quickly. We try to do drills every six months, but at least once every year.
I love that I can fail across regions. I also love the granular recovery point reporting. It allows us to see where we may or may not be seeing problems. I'm not sure we ever got that from any other tools, it’s very powerful and it’s graphical user interface based – and any Joe could do it, it's not hard to select a VM and replicate it to another region. I especially like the fact that we are only charged for storage in the far side region so, financially, there's not an impact of having warm standbys and still we are able to hit our RPO.
I would have liked to get our knowledge base and plans in place for a month longer before implementing it. It's just so easy that we were able to blow through most of it, but we did miss a couple of simple things early on which were easily fixed later on our journey. We found out quickly we didn't want standard hard drives, we wanted premium for example.
We recently used Azure Site Recovery to move a customer in our payment space from on premises to Azure – we will now get those machines on Site Recovery across Azure regions, we're not going to rebuild the entire platform. It's obviously the de facto to get us out, and it is the standard for regional disaster recovery for VMs there. There is no other product used.
People ask me what keeps me up at night, there are really two things. “Are we secure?” and “Can we recover?” – I call it the butterfly effect. When you come in each morning, are you confident that if you cratered a datacenter, you could come up in a different one? I can confidently answer that with yes. We could fail out to another region, with all our data. That's a pretty nice spot to be in, especially when you're sitting in a hyperscale cloud. I know that I have storage replication. I know that I own the network links. To allow somebody to run this stuff on our behalf was a mindset change, but it has really been a positive experience for us.
Historically, data has been protected at rest through encryption in data stores, and in transit using network technologies, however as soon as that data is processed in the CPU of a computer it is decrypted and in plain text. New confidential computing technologies are game changing as they provide data protection, even when the code is running on the CPU, with secure hardware enclaves. Today, we are announcing that we are bringing confidential computing to Kubernetes workloads.
Azure is the first major cloud platform to support confidential computing building on Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). Last year, we announced the preview of the DC-series of virtual machines that run on Intel® Xeon® processors and are confidential computing ready.
This confidential computing capability also provides an additional layer of protection even from potentially malicious insiders at a cloud provider, reduces the chances of data leaks and may help address some regulatory compliance needs.
Confidential computing enables several previously not possible use-cases. Customers in regulated industries can now collaborate together using sensitive partner or customers data to detect fraud scenarios without giving the other party visibility into that data. In another example customers can perform mission critical payment processing in secure enclaves.
With confidential computing for Kubernetes, customers can now get this additional layer of data protection for their Kubernetes workloads with the code running on the CPU with secure hardware enclaves. Use the open enclave SDK for confidential computing in code. Create a Kubernetes cluster on hardware that supports Intel SGX, such as the DC-series virtual machines running Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 18.04 and install the confidential computing device plugin into those virtual machines. The device plugin (running as a DaemonSet) surfaces the usage of the Encrypted Page Cache (EPC) RAM as a schedulable resource for Kubernetes. Kubernetes users can then schedule pods and containers that use the Open Enclave SDK onto hardware which supports Trusted Execution Environments (TEE).
The following pod specification demonstrates how you would schedule a pod to have access to a TEE by defining a limit on the specific EPC memory that is advertised to the Kubernetes scheduler by the device plugin available in preview.
Now the pods in these clusters can run containers using secure enclaves and take advantage of confidential computing. There is no additional fee for running Kubernetes containers on top of the base DC-series cost.
The Open Enclave SDK was recently open sourced by Microsoft and made available to the Confidential Computing Consortium, under the Linux Foundation for standardization to create a single uniform API to use with a variety of hardware components and software runtimes across the industry landscape.
Try out confidential computing for Kubernetes with Azure today. Let us know what you think in our survey or on GitHub.
Azure HB v2-series Virtual Machines (VM) for high-performance computing (HPC) are now in preview in the South Central US region.
HBv2-series Virtual Machines are Azure’s most advanced HPC offering yet, featuring performance and Message Passing Interface scalability rivaling the most advanced supercomputers on the planet, and price and performance on par with on-premises HPC deployments.
HBv2 Virtual Machines are designed for a variety of real-world HPC applications, from fluid dynamics to finite element analysis, molecular dynamics, seismic processing & imaging, weather modeling, rendering, computational chemistry, and more.
Each HBv2 Virtual Machines features 120 AMD EPYCTM 7742 processor cores at 2.45 GHz (3.3 GHz Boost), 480 GB of RAM, 480 MB of L3 cache, and no simultaneous multithreading. A HBv2 Virtual Machine also provides up to 340 GB per second of memory bandwidth, up to four teraflops of double-precision compute, and up to eight teraflops of single-precision compute.
Finally, a HBv2 Virtual Machine features 900 GB of low-latency, high-bandwidth block storage via NVMeDirect, and supports up to eight Azure Managed Disks.
HBv2-series Virtual Machines feature one of the cloud’s first deployment of 200 Gigabit per second HDR InfiniBand networking from Mellanox, which provides up to 8 times higher bandwidth and 16 times lower latencies than found elsewhere on the public cloud.
With HBv2 Virtual Machines, Azure is also introducing two new network features to support the highest sustained performance for tightly-coupled workloads. The first is adaptive routing, which helps optimize Message Passing Interface performance on congested networks. The second is support for dynamic connected transport (DCT) which provides reliable transport, and enhancements to scalable, asynchronous, and high-performance communication.
As with HB and HC Virtual Machines, HBv2 Virtual Machines support hardware-based offload for Message Passing Interface collectives.
Customers come to Azure for our ability to support their largest and most critical workloads. Energy companies have been among the first and most eager to embrace our advanced HPC capabilities, including for their core subsurface discovery workloads. Advances in subsurface computing support more accurate identification of energy resources, as well as safer extraction of these resources from challenging areas such as beneath thick deposits of salt in the Gulf of Mexico.
As part of our work with one of our strategic partner operators energy exploration customers, today we are sharing that Azure recently supported what is believe to be one of the largest cloud-based seismic processing workload yet.
Powered by up to 468 Azure HB Virtual Machines totaling 28,080 AMD EPYC first generation CPU cores and more than 123 terabyte per second of aggregate memory bandwidth, the customer was able to run imaging jobs utilizing a variety of pre-stack and post-stack migration, full-waveform inversion, and real-time migration techniques.
Seismic imaging is as much about data movement as it is compute, however, to support this record scale customer workload Cray provided the supercomputing firm’s vaunted ClusterStor storage system. Announced earlier this year, Cray® ClusterStor™ in Azure is a dedicated Lustre filesystem solution to accelerate data processing for the largest and most complex HPC and AI jobs run on Azure, and can optionally be connected to Azure H-series Virtual Machines. Not only does Cray ClusterStor in Azure leverage the same technology that powers many of the fastest HPC filesystems on the planet, it also is among the most affordable on the cloud. Over a typical three-year reserved instance period, Cray ClusterStor in Azure can cost as little as 1/10th of Lustre offerings found on other public clouds.
The combination of the Azure HB-series Virtual Machines and Cray ClusterStor provided a highly scalable solution as delivering an 11.5x improvement in time to solution as the pool of compute virtual machines was increased from 16 to 400.
The Cray ClusterStor in Azure storage solution, whose measured performance peaked at 42 GB per second (reads) and 62 GB per second (writes) also delivered significant differentiation for the customer by driving a 66 percent improvement in application performance as compared to an alternative, high-performance network file system (NFS) approach.
Azure HBv2-series Virtual Machines are currently available in South Central US, with additional regions rolling out soon.
How three inspiring entrepreneurs found success in today’s marketplace—plus helpful tips from their teams.
The post 3 small business stories to celebrate National Entrepreneurship Month appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Today, we released a new Windows 10 Preview Build of the SDK to be used in conjunction with Windows 10 Insider Preview (Build 19023 or greater). The Preview SDK Build 19023 contains bug fixes and under development changes to the API surface area.
The Preview SDK can be downloaded from developer section on Windows Insider.
For feedback and updates to the known issues, please see the developer forum. For new developer feature requests, head over to our Windows Platform UserVoice.
We have stood up a NuGet feed for the flighted builds of the SDK. You can now test preliminary builds of theWindows 10 WinRT API Pack, as well as a microsoft.windows.sdk.headless.contracts NuGet package.
We use the following feed to flight our NuGet packages.
Microsoft.Windows.SDK.Contracts which can be used with to add the latest Windows Runtime APIs support to your .NET Framework 4.5+ and .NET Core 3.0+ libraries and apps.
The Windows 10 WinRT API Pack enables you to add the latest Windows Runtime APIs support to your .NET Framework 4.5+ and .NET Core 3.0+ libraries and apps.
Microsoft.Windows.SDK.Headless.Contracts provides a subset of the Windows Runtime APIs for console apps excludes the APIs associated with a graphical user interface. This NuGet is used in conjunction with
Windows ML container development. Check out the Getting Started guide for more information.
In this release api-ms-win-net-isolation-l1-1-0.lib has been removed from the Windows SDK. Apps that were linking against api-ms-win-net-isolation-l1-1-0.lib can switch to OneCoreUAP.lib as a replacement.
In this release irprops.lib has been removed from the Windows SDK. Apps that were linking against irprops.lib can switch to bthprops.lib as a drop-in replacement.
In this release we have moved ENUM tagServerSelection from WUAPICommon.H to wupai.h and removed the header. If you would like to use the ENUM tagServerSelection, you will need to include wuapi.h or wuapi.idl.
The following APIs have been added to the platform since the release of Windows 10 SDK, version 1903, build 18362.
namespace Windows.AI.MachineLearning {
public sealed class LearningModelSessionOptions {
bool CloseModelOnSessionCreation { get; set; }
}
}
namespace Windows.ApplicationModel {
public sealed class AppInfo {
public static AppInfo Current { get; }
Package Package { get; }
public static AppInfo GetFromAppUserModelId(string appUserModelId);
public static AppInfo GetFromAppUserModelIdForUser(User user, string appUserModelId);
}
public interface IAppInfoStatics
public sealed class Package {
StorageFolder EffectiveExternalLocation { get; }
string EffectiveExternalPath { get; }
string EffectivePath { get; }
string InstalledPath { get; }
bool IsStub { get; }
StorageFolder MachineExternalLocation { get; }
string MachineExternalPath { get; }
string MutablePath { get; }
StorageFolder UserExternalLocation { get; }
string UserExternalPath { get; }
IVectorView<AppListEntry> GetAppListEntries();
RandomAccessStreamReference GetLogoAsRandomAccessStreamReference(Size size);
}
}
namespace Windows.ApplicationModel.AppService {
public enum AppServiceConnectionStatus {
AuthenticationError = 8,
DisabledByPolicy = 10,
NetworkNotAvailable = 9,
WebServiceUnavailable = 11,
}
public enum AppServiceResponseStatus {
AppUnavailable = 6,
AuthenticationError = 7,
DisabledByPolicy = 9,
NetworkNotAvailable = 8,
WebServiceUnavailable = 10,
}
public enum StatelessAppServiceResponseStatus {
AuthenticationError = 11,
DisabledByPolicy = 13,
NetworkNotAvailable = 12,
WebServiceUnavailable = 14,
}
}
namespace Windows.ApplicationModel.Background {
public sealed class BackgroundTaskBuilder {
void SetTaskEntryPointClsid(Guid TaskEntryPoint);
}
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementPublisherTrigger : IBackgroundTrigger {
bool IncludeTransmitPowerLevel { get; set; }
bool IsAnonymous { get; set; }
IReference<short> PreferredTransmitPowerLevelInDBm { get; set; }
bool UseExtendedFormat { get; set; }
}
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementWatcherTrigger : IBackgroundTrigger {
bool AllowExtendedAdvertisements { get; set; }
}
}
namespace Windows.ApplicationModel.ConversationalAgent {
public sealed class ActivationSignalDetectionConfiguration
public enum ActivationSignalDetectionTrainingDataFormat
public sealed class ActivationSignalDetector
public enum ActivationSignalDetectorKind
public enum ActivationSignalDetectorPowerState
public sealed class ConversationalAgentDetectorManager
public sealed class DetectionConfigurationAvailabilityChangedEventArgs
public enum DetectionConfigurationAvailabilityChangeKind
public sealed class DetectionConfigurationAvailabilityInfo
public enum DetectionConfigurationTrainingStatus
}
namespace Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer {
public sealed class DataPackage {
event TypedEventHandler<DataPackage, object> ShareCanceled;
}
}
namespace Windows.Devices.Bluetooth {
public sealed class BluetoothAdapter {
bool IsExtendedAdvertisingSupported { get; }
uint MaxAdvertisementDataLength { get; }
}
}
namespace Windows.Devices.Bluetooth.Advertisement {
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementPublisher {
bool IncludeTransmitPowerLevel { get; set; }
bool IsAnonymous { get; set; }
IReference<short> PreferredTransmitPowerLevelInDBm { get; set; }
bool UseExtendedAdvertisement { get; set; }
}
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementPublisherStatusChangedEventArgs {
IReference<short> SelectedTransmitPowerLevelInDBm { get; }
}
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementReceivedEventArgs {
BluetoothAddressType BluetoothAddressType { get; }
bool IsAnonymous { get; }
bool IsConnectable { get; }
bool IsDirected { get; }
bool IsScannable { get; }
bool IsScanResponse { get; }
IReference<short> TransmitPowerLevelInDBm { get; }
}
public enum BluetoothLEAdvertisementType {
Extended = 5,
}
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementWatcher {
bool AllowExtendedAdvertisements { get; set; }
}
public enum BluetoothLEScanningMode {
None = 2,
}
}
namespace Windows.Devices.Bluetooth.Background {
public sealed class BluetoothLEAdvertisementPublisherTriggerDetails {
IReference<short> SelectedTransmitPowerLevelInDBm { get; }
}
}
namespace Windows.Devices.Display {
public sealed class DisplayMonitor {
bool IsDolbyVisionSupportedInHdrMode { get; }
}
}
namespace Windows.Devices.Input {
public sealed class PenButtonListener
public sealed class PenDockedEventArgs
public sealed class PenDockListener
public sealed class PenTailButtonClickedEventArgs
public sealed class PenTailButtonDoubleClickedEventArgs
public sealed class PenTailButtonLongPressedEventArgs
public sealed class PenUndockedEventArgs
}
namespace Windows.Devices.Sensors {
public sealed class Accelerometer {
AccelerometerDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class AccelerometerDataThreshold
public sealed class Barometer {
BarometerDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class BarometerDataThreshold
public sealed class Compass {
CompassDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class CompassDataThreshold
public sealed class Gyrometer {
GyrometerDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class GyrometerDataThreshold
public sealed class Inclinometer {
InclinometerDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class InclinometerDataThreshold
public sealed class LightSensor {
LightSensorDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class LightSensorDataThreshold
public sealed class Magnetometer {
MagnetometerDataThreshold ReportThreshold { get; }
}
public sealed class MagnetometerDataThreshold
}
namespace Windows.Foundation.Metadata {
public sealed class AttributeNameAttribute : Attribute
public sealed class FastAbiAttribute : Attribute
public sealed class NoExceptionAttribute : Attribute
}
namespace Windows.Globalization {
public sealed class Language {
string AbbreviatedName { get; }
public static IVector<string> GetMuiCompatibleLanguageListFromLanguageTags(IIterable<string> languageTags);
}
}
namespace Windows.Graphics.Capture {
public sealed class GraphicsCaptureSession : IClosable {
bool IsCursorCaptureEnabled { get; set; }
}
}
namespace Windows.Graphics.DirectX {
public enum DirectXPixelFormat {
SamplerFeedbackMinMipOpaque = 189,
SamplerFeedbackMipRegionUsedOpaque = 190,
}
}
namespace Windows.Graphics.Holographic {
public sealed class HolographicFrame {
HolographicFrameId Id { get; }
}
public struct HolographicFrameId
public sealed class HolographicFrameRenderingReport
public sealed class HolographicFrameScanoutMonitor : IClosable
public sealed class HolographicFrameScanoutReport
public sealed class HolographicSpace {
HolographicFrameScanoutMonitor CreateFrameScanoutMonitor(uint maxQueuedReports);
}
}
namespace Windows.Management.Deployment {
public sealed class AddPackageOptions
public enum DeploymentOptions : uint {
StageInPlace = (uint)4194304,
}
public sealed class PackageManager {
IAsyncOperationWithProgress<DeploymentResult, DeploymentProgress> AddPackageByUriAsync(Uri packageUri, AddPackageOptions options);
IVector<Package> FindProvisionedPackages();
PackageStubPreference GetPackageStubPreference(string packageFamilyName);
IAsyncOperationWithProgress<DeploymentResult, DeploymentProgress> RegisterPackageByUriAsync(Uri manifestUri, RegisterPackageOptions options);
IAsyncOperationWithProgress<DeploymentResult, DeploymentProgress> RegisterPackagesByFullNameAsync(IIterable<string> packageFullNames, RegisterPackageOptions options);
void SetPackageStubPreference(string packageFamilyName, PackageStubPreference useStub);
IAsyncOperationWithProgress<DeploymentResult, DeploymentProgress> StagePackageByUriAsync(Uri packageUri, StagePackageOptions options);
}
public enum PackageStubPreference
public enum PackageTypes : uint {
All = (uint)4294967295,
}
public sealed class RegisterPackageOptions
public enum RemovalOptions : uint {
PreserveRoamableApplicationData = (uint)128,
}
public sealed class StagePackageOptions
public enum StubPackageOption
}
namespace Windows.Media.Audio {
public sealed class AudioPlaybackConnection : IClosable
public sealed class AudioPlaybackConnectionOpenResult
public enum AudioPlaybackConnectionOpenResultStatus
public enum AudioPlaybackConnectionState
}
namespace Windows.Media.Capture {
public sealed class MediaCapture : IClosable {
MediaCaptureRelativePanelWatcher CreateRelativePanelWatcher(StreamingCaptureMode captureMode, DisplayRegion displayRegion);
}
public sealed class MediaCaptureInitializationSettings {
Uri DeviceUri { get; set; }
PasswordCredential DeviceUriPasswordCredential { get; set; }
}
public sealed class MediaCaptureRelativePanelWatcher : IClosable
}
namespace Windows.Media.Capture.Frames {
public sealed class MediaFrameSourceInfo {
Panel GetRelativePanel(DisplayRegion displayRegion);
}
}
namespace Windows.Media.Devices {
public sealed class PanelBasedOptimizationControl
public sealed class VideoDeviceController : IMediaDeviceController {
PanelBasedOptimizationControl PanelBasedOptimizationControl { get; }
}
}
namespace Windows.Media.MediaProperties {
public static class MediaEncodingSubtypes {
public static string Pgs { get; }
public static string Srt { get; }
public static string Ssa { get; }
public static string VobSub { get; }
}
public sealed class TimedMetadataEncodingProperties : IMediaEncodingProperties {
public static TimedMetadataEncodingProperties CreatePgs();
public static TimedMetadataEncodingProperties CreateSrt();
public static TimedMetadataEncodingProperties CreateSsa(byte[] formatUserData);
public static TimedMetadataEncodingProperties CreateVobSub(byte[] formatUserData);
}
}
namespace Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer {
public sealed class DownloadOperation : IBackgroundTransferOperation, IBackgroundTransferOperationPriority {
void RemoveRequestHeader(string headerName);
void SetRequestHeader(string headerName, string headerValue);
}
public sealed class UploadOperation : IBackgroundTransferOperation, IBackgroundTransferOperationPriority {
void RemoveRequestHeader(string headerName);
void SetRequestHeader(string headerName, string headerValue);
}
}
namespace Windows.Networking.Connectivity {
public enum NetworkAuthenticationType {
Owe = 12,
}
}
namespace Windows.Networking.NetworkOperators {
public sealed class NetworkOperatorTetheringAccessPointConfiguration {
TetheringWiFiBand Band { get; set; }
bool IsBandSupported(TetheringWiFiBand band);
IAsyncOperation<bool> IsBandSupportedAsync(TetheringWiFiBand band);
}
public sealed class NetworkOperatorTetheringManager {
public static void DisableNoConnectionsTimeout();
public static IAsyncAction DisableNoConnectionsTimeoutAsync();
public static void EnableNoConnectionsTimeout();
public static IAsyncAction EnableNoConnectionsTimeoutAsync();
public static bool IsNoConnectionsTimeoutEnabled();
}
public enum TetheringWiFiBand
}
namespace Windows.Networking.PushNotifications {
public static class PushNotificationChannelManager {
public static event EventHandler<PushNotificationChannelsRevokedEventArgs> ChannelsRevoked;
}
public sealed class PushNotificationChannelsRevokedEventArgs
public sealed class RawNotification {
IBuffer ContentBytes { get; }
}
}
namespace Windows.Security.Authentication.Web.Core {
public sealed class WebAccountMonitor {
event TypedEventHandler<WebAccountMonitor, WebAccountEventArgs> AccountPictureUpdated;
}
}
namespace Windows.Security.Isolation {
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironment
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentActivator
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentAllowedClipboardFormats : uint
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentAvailablePrinters : uint
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentClipboardCopyPasteDirections : uint
public struct IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentContract
public struct IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentCreateProgress
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentCreateResult
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentCreateStatus
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentFile
public static class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentHost
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentHostError
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentLaunchFileResult
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentLaunchFileStatus
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentOptions
public static class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentOwnerRegistration
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentOwnerRegistrationData
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentOwnerRegistrationResult
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentOwnerRegistrationStatus
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentProcess
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentProcessState
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentProgressState
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentShareFolderRequestOptions
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentShareFolderResult
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentShareFolderStatus
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentStartProcessResult
public enum IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentStartProcessStatus
public sealed class IsolatedWindowsEnvironmentTelemetryParameters
public static class IsolatedWindowsHostMessenger
public delegate void MessageReceivedCallback(Guid receiverId, IVectorView<object> message);
}
namespace Windows.Storage {
public static class KnownFolders {
public static IAsyncOperation<StorageFolder> GetFolderAsync(KnownFolderId folderId);
public static IAsyncOperation<KnownFoldersAccessStatus> RequestAccessAsync(KnownFolderId folderId);
public static IAsyncOperation<KnownFoldersAccessStatus> RequestAccessForUserAsync(User user, KnownFolderId folderId);
}
public enum KnownFoldersAccessStatus
public sealed class StorageFile : IInputStreamReference, IRandomAccessStreamReference, IStorageFile, IStorageFile2, IStorageFilePropertiesWithAvailability, IStorageItem, IStorageItem2, IStorageItemProperties, IStorageItemProperties2, IStorageItemPropertiesWithProvider {
public static IAsyncOperation<StorageFile> GetFileFromPathForUserAsync(User user, string path);
}
public sealed class StorageFolder : IStorageFolder, IStorageFolder2, IStorageFolderQueryOperations, IStorageItem, IStorageItem2, IStorageItemProperties, IStorageItemProperties2, IStorageItemPropertiesWithProvider {
public static IAsyncOperation<StorageFolder> GetFolderFromPathForUserAsync(User user, string path);
}
}
namespace Windows.Storage.Provider {
public sealed class StorageProviderFileTypeInfo
public sealed class StorageProviderSyncRootInfo {
IVector<StorageProviderFileTypeInfo> FallbackFileTypeInfo { get; }
}
public static class StorageProviderSyncRootManager {
public static bool IsSupported();
}
}
namespace Windows.System {
public sealed class UserChangedEventArgs {
IVectorView<UserWatcherUpdateKind> ChangedPropertyKinds { get; }
}
public enum UserWatcherUpdateKind
}
namespace Windows.UI.Composition.Interactions {
public sealed class InteractionTracker : CompositionObject {
int TryUpdatePosition(Vector3 value, InteractionTrackerClampingOption option, InteractionTrackerPositionUpdateOption posUpdateOption);
}
public enum InteractionTrackerPositionUpdateOption
}
namespace Windows.UI.Input {
public sealed class CrossSlidingEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class DraggingEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class GestureRecognizer {
uint HoldMaxContactCount { get; set; }
uint HoldMinContactCount { get; set; }
float HoldRadius { get; set; }
TimeSpan HoldStartDelay { get; set; }
uint TapMaxContactCount { get; set; }
uint TapMinContactCount { get; set; }
uint TranslationMaxContactCount { get; set; }
uint TranslationMinContactCount { get; set; }
}
public sealed class HoldingEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
uint CurrentContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class ManipulationCompletedEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
uint CurrentContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class ManipulationInertiaStartingEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class ManipulationStartedEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class ManipulationUpdatedEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
uint CurrentContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class RightTappedEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
}
public sealed class SystemButtonEventController : AttachableInputObject
public sealed class SystemFunctionButtonEventArgs
public sealed class SystemFunctionLockChangedEventArgs
public sealed class SystemFunctionLockIndicatorChangedEventArgs
public sealed class TappedEventArgs {
uint ContactCount { get; }
}
}
namespace Windows.UI.Input.Inking {
public sealed class InkModelerAttributes {
bool UseVelocityBasedPressure { get; set; }
}
}
namespace Windows.UI.Text {
public enum RichEditMathMode
public sealed class RichEditTextDocument : ITextDocument {
void GetMath(out string value);
void SetMath(string value);
void SetMathMode(RichEditMathMode mode);
}
}
namespace Windows.UI.ViewManagement {
public sealed class UISettings {
event TypedEventHandler<UISettings, UISettingsAnimationsEnabledChangedEventArgs> AnimationsEnabledChanged;
event TypedEventHandler<UISettings, UISettingsMessageDurationChangedEventArgs> MessageDurationChanged;
}
public sealed class UISettingsAnimationsEnabledChangedEventArgs
public sealed class UISettingsMessageDurationChangedEventArgs
}
namespace Windows.UI.ViewManagement.Core {
public sealed class CoreInputView {
event TypedEventHandler<CoreInputView, CoreInputViewHidingEventArgs> PrimaryViewHiding;
event TypedEventHandler<CoreInputView, CoreInputViewShowingEventArgs> PrimaryViewShowing;
}
public sealed class CoreInputViewHidingEventArgs
public enum CoreInputViewKind {
Symbols = 4,
}
public sealed class CoreInputViewShowingEventArgs
public sealed class UISettingsController
}
The post Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 19023 available now! appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.
Today, we are releasing the .NET Core November 2019 Update. These updates only contain non-security fixes. See the individual release notes for details on updated packages.
NOTE: If you are a Visual Studio user, there are MSBuild version requirements so use only the .NET Core SDK supported for each Visual Studio version. Information needed to make this choice will be seen on the download page. If you use other development environments, we recommend using the latest SDK release.
The latest .NET Core updates are available on the .NET Core download page. This update will be included in a future update of Visual Studio.
See the .NET Core release notes ( 2.1.14 | 2.2.8 | 3.0.1 ) for details on the release, including issues fixed and affected packages.
.NET Docker images have been updated for today’s release. The following repos have been updated.
Note: Look at the “Full Tag Listing” under the Description in each repository to see the updated Docker image tags.
Note: You must re-pull base images to get updates. The Docker client does not pull updates automatically.
The post .NET Core November 2019 Updates – 2.1.14, 2.2.8, and 3.0.1 appeared first on .NET Blog.
Today, we are releasing the November 2019 Preview of Quality Rollup
This release contains the following quality and reliability improvements for .NET Framework for Windows 8.1, Server 2012 R2, Server 2012, Windows 7 SP1, Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Server 2008 SP2. Following this recent announcement, there are no optional non-security updates for Windows 10 as part of this release.
Addresses a race condition when using WCF TCP Port Sharing where a client which disconnects part way through the session establishment handshake can result in the WCF Service no longer being able to accept new connections.
When an IIS worker process has many WCF TCP web services using TCP Port Sharing and the worker process crashes while under high CPU load, a race condition during TCP Port sharing reinitialization can result in some endpoints not being able to accept client connections. Added an AppSetting to enable retrying initialization when this happens.
1 Common Language Runtime (CLR)
2 Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
3 Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
The Preview of Quality Rollup is available via Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services, and Microsoft Update Catalog.
You can get the update via the Microsoft Update Catalog.
Note: Customers that rely on Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services will automatically receive the .NET Framework version-specific updates. Advanced system administrators can also take use of the below direct Microsoft Update Catalog download links to .NET Framework-specific updates. Before applying these updates, please ensure that you carefully review the .NET Framework version applicability, to ensure that you only install updates on systems where they apply.
The following table is for earlier Windows and Windows Server versions.
| Product Version | Preview of Quality Rollup | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 | Catalog | 4524743 |
| .NET Framework 3.5 | Catalog | 4514371 |
| .NET Framework 4.5.2 | Catalog | 4514367 |
| .NET Framework 4.6, 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.7, 4.7.1, 4.7.2 | Catalog | 4524420 |
| .NET Framework 4.8 | Catalog | 4531181 |
| Windows Server 2012 | Catalog | 4524742 |
| .NET Framework 3.5 | Catalog | 4514370 |
| .NET Framework 4.5.2 | Catalog | 4514368 |
| .NET Framework 4.6, 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.7, 4.7.1, 4.7.2 | Catalog | 4524419 |
| .NET Framework 4.8 | Catalog | 4531180 |
| Windows 7 SP1 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 | Catalog | 4524741 |
| .NET Framework 3.5.1 | Catalog | 4507004 |
| .NET Framework 4.5.2 | Catalog | 4507001 |
| .NET Framework 4.6, 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.7, 4.7.1, 4.7.2 | Catalog | 4524421 |
| .NET Framework 4.8 | Catalog | 4531182 |
| Windows Server 2008 | Catalog | 4524744 |
| .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 | Catalog | 4507003 |
| .NET Framework 4.5.2 | Catalog | 4507001 |
| .NET Framework 4.6 | Catalog | 4524421 |
The last few .NET Framework Monthly updates are listed below for your convenience:
The post .NET Framework November 2019 Preview of Quality Rollup appeared first on .NET Blog.
Organizations face challenges when it comes to extracting insights, finding meaning, and uncovering new opportunities in the vast troves of content at their disposal. In fact, 82 percent of organizations surveyed in the latest Harvard Business Review (HBR) Analytic Services report say that exploring and understanding their content in a timely manner is a significant challenge. This is exacerbated because content is not only spread over multiple systems but also in multiple formats such as PDF, JPEG, spreadsheets, and audio files.
The first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) was designed for narrow applications, training a single model to address a specific task such as handwriting recognition. What’s been challenging, however, is that these models individually can’t capture all the different attributes hidden in various types of content. This means developers must painfully stitch together disparate components to fully understand their content.
Instead, organizations need a solution that spans vision, speech, and language to fully unlock insights from all content types. We are heavily investing in this new category of AI, called knowledge mining, to enable organizations to maximize the value of their content.
Organizations can take advantage of knowledge mining today with Azure Cognitive Search. Organizations can now easily glean insights from all their content through web applications, bots, and Power BI visualizations. With Azure Cognitive Search, organizations can not only benefit from the industry’s most comprehensive domain-specific models but also integrate their own custom models. What used to take months to accomplish can be realized in mere hours without needing data science expertise.
The same Harvard Business Review report describes how our customers across industries are benefiting from knowledge mining in ways that were previously unimaginable.
And we’re just getting started. You can expect even deeper integration and more great knowledge mining experiences built with Azure Cognitive Search as we continue this journey. I encourage you to take a look at Harvard Business Review’s survey and findings and hear their perspective on the landscape of knowledge mining.
Microsoft is now the primary maintainer of the CMake Tools extension for Visual Studio Code. The extension was created and previously maintained by vector-of-bool, who has moved on to other things. Thank you vector-of-bool for all of your hard work getting this extension to where it is today!
The CMake Tools extension provides developers with a convenient and powerful workflow for configuring, building, browsing, and debugging CMake-based projects in Visual Studio Code. You can visit the CMake Tools documentation and the extension’s GitHub repository to get started and learn more.
The following screenshot of the extension shows a logical view of the open-source CMake project bullet3 organized by target (left) and several CMake-specific commands.
We recommend using the CMake Tools extension alongside the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code for IntelliSense configuration and a full-fidelity C/C++ development experience.
Download the CMake Tools extension for Visual Studio Code today and give it a try. If you run into issues or have suggestions for the team, please report them in the issues section of the extension’s GitHub repository. You can also reach the team via email (visualcpp@microsoft.com) and Twitter (@VisualC).
The post CMake Tools Extension for Visual Studio Code appeared first on C++ Team Blog.
Change feed support for Microsoft Azure Blob storage is now available in preview. Change feed provides a guaranteed, ordered, durable, read-only log of all the creation, modification, and deletion change events that occur to the blobs in your storage account. This log is stored as append blobs within your storage account, therefore you can manage the data retention and access control based on your requirements.
Change feed is the ideal solution for bulk handling of large volumes of blob changes in your storage account, as opposed to periodically listing and manually comparing for changes. It enables cost-efficient recording and processing by providing programmatic access such that event-driven applications can simply consume the change feed log and process change events from the last checkpoint.
Some scenarios that would benefit from consuming a blob change feed include:
To enroll in preview, you will need to submit a request to register this feature to your subscription. After your request is approved (within a few days), any existing or new GPv2 or blob storage accounts in West US 2 and West Central US can then enable the change feed feature.
To submit a request, run the following PowerShell or Microsoft Azure CLI commands:
Register-AzProviderFeature -FeatureNameChangefeed-ProviderNamespaceMicrosoft.Storage
Register-AzResourceProvider -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Storage
az feature register --namespace Microsoft.Storage --name Changefeed
az provider register --namespace 'Microsoft.Storage'
Once you’re registered and approved for the change feed preview, you can then turn it on for your storage accounts and start consuming the log. For more information, please see change feed support in Azure Blob Storage and process change feed in Azure Blob Storage. As with most previews, this feature should not be used for production workloads until it reaches general availability.
Change feed pricing is currently in preview and subject to change for general availability. Customers are charged for the blob change events captured by change feed as well as the data storage costs of the change feed log. See block blob pricing to learn more about pricing.
We will continue to improve our feature capabilities and would like to hear your feedback regarding change feed or other features through email at AzureStorageFeedback@microsoft.com. As a reminder, we love hearing all of your ideas and suggestions about Azure Storage, which you can post at Azure Storage feedback forum.
Our goal with Bing is to provide quick and easy ways to find the information you need to make informed decisions from across sources and content. This election season we want to provide a single destination for the 2020 U.S. presidential race that delivers comprehensive information about candidates and issues. Today, we’re launching an expanded Bing elections experience in Beta.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election is right around the corner and it can be difficult to find information on candidates and issues in one place. You might have to search across various news sources, candidate web sites, government sites or look through a voter’s pamphlet – piecing together information.
To provide a single destination for the 2020 U.S. presidential race that helps users find comprehensive information about candidates and issues, we're sharing our expanded Bing elections experience in Beta.
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Throughout the 2020 election cycle, Bing aims to help people understand the issues at the heart of political discussions. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive view with the most relevant, accurate and timely information. This includes a holistic overview and introduction to key issues, with a range of news sources and opinions, and key legislation that impacts the issues.
The candidate experience leverages data sources from news articles, official candidate sites and non-partisan partners such as VoteSmart.org. When searching for a particular presidential candidate, we present all of that information into a simple experience where people can find the latest news, upcoming events, and explore each candidate’s stance on the issues, in their own words, from various sources. The experience also provides a summary of each candidate’s voting record on congressional bills.
Today, the Beta experience begins with a focus on the U.S. presidential candidates and related issues. Over time, as we learn and hear feedback from customers, we will look to expand this experience to .
This work is part of a broader effort across Bing and Microsoft News to provide people with the most relevant and timely information to help you make decisions.
We’ll continue to refine and improve this experience over time and we welcome your feedback as we continue on this journey.
-The Bing Search Team
As SQL Server 2019 continues to push the boundaries of availability, performance, and data intelligence, a centrally managed, enterprise-scale backup solution is imperative to ensure the protection of all that data. This is especially true if you are running the SQL Server in the cloud to leverage the benefits of dynamic scale and don't want to continue using the legacy backup methods that are tedious, infrastructure-heavy, and difficult to scale.
We are excited to share native backup for SQL Server 2019 running in Azure Virtual Machine. This is a key addition to the general availability of Azure Backup for SQL Server Virtual Machine, announced earlier this year. Azure Backup is a zero-infrastructure solution that protects standalone SQL Server and SQL AlwaysOn configurations in Azure Virtual Machine without the need to deploy and manage any backup infrastructure. While it offers long-term retention and central monitoring capabilities to help IT admins govern and meet their compliance requirements, it lets SQL Admin continue to exercise the power of self-service backup and restore for operational recoveries.
In addition to this, we are also sharing Azure Backup general availability for:
Adding to the list of enhancements is the key capability of Restore as Files, now restore anywhere by recovering the backed-up data as .bak files. Move these backup files across subscriptions, regions, or even to on-premises SQL Servers and trigger database restore wherever you want. Besides aiding cross-subscription and cross-region restore scenarios, this feature helps users stay compliant by giving them greater control over storing and recovering backup data to any destination of their choice.
Under the Restore operation, you will see a newly introduced option of Restore as files. Specify the destination server (this server should be SQL Server Virtual Machine registered to the vault) and path on that server. The service will dump all the .bak files specific to the recovery point you have chosen to this path. Typically, a network share path or path of a mounted Azure File share when specified as the destination enables easier access to these files by other machines in the same network or with the same Azure File share mounted on them.
Once the restore operation is completed, you can move these files to any machine across subscriptions or locations and restore them as a database using SQL Server Management Studio. Learn more.
After all the recent travel, I finally got to spend this week at home and recharge. It was a much-needed break, and I got to enjoy Chicago, even though the winter decided to arrive early this year. So we can make a fresh cup of tea, and enjoy some community posts on code security and mobile development!
How to reuse your Azure DevOps pipeline between your projects
Code reuse has been a best practice for decades. But when we got into deployment automation, we seemed to forget how many issues can be caused by duplicating and maintaining the same implementation in multiple places. Can we reuse Azure Pipelines, and make sure that all of our future changes are applied across the board? Yes, and it gets easier with YAML! This article from Damien Aicheh shows us how to break down and reuse our Azure YAML pipeline across multiple projects, using an Android app as an example. Thank you, Damien!
Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps
Speaking of Android apps, Visual Studio 2019 recently got updated to support the recent versions of mobile development environments. Unfortunately, the update may have broken the hosted builds for some folks. This post from James Montemagno shows the updates needed in Azure DevOps to make sure your Xamarin builds are running successfully. Thank you, James!
99% of code isn’t yours
As mentioned earlier, code reuse helps us be more productive and less error-prone. Hence, it is mostly great news that we are, according to some reports, sharing the vast majority of our code today. This, however, means that we need to be extra careful about the packages we consume. In recent years, there’s been a ramp-up in supply chain attacks, when someone infiltrates your system through a third-party dependency, injecting malicious code into that dependency. This post from Jesse Houwing covers one of the potential ways to prevent such an attack in .NET projects. Thank you, Jesse!
Prevent “shadow-IT” Azure DevOps organizations
When you create a new Azure DevOps organization using your work email, it gets automatically tied to your Azure Active Directory (AAD). The benefit of this is that you can easily add your coworkers to the organization. The downside, however, is that large enterprises might not be aware of all the organizations created under their AAD. Read this post from Jasper Gilhuis to learn how you could set the policy to restrict permissions for creating new organizations using the company AAD.
Microsoft Security Code Analysis for Azure DevOps – Part 3 BinSkim
As security is top of mind for everyone, we recently released a new set of security tools for Azure DevOps called Microsoft Security Code Analysis. In this post, Gregor Suttie covers the tool called BinSkim, an open-source tool that validates the compiler/linker settings. Check out Gregor’s other posts in the series to learn about what else is in the toolkit!
If you’ve written an article about Azure DevOps or find some great content about DevOps on Azure, please share it with the #AzureDevOps hashtag on Twitter!
The post Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2019.11.22 appeared first on Azure DevOps Blog.
I've got a lot of different sound devices like USB Headphones, a formal Conference Room Speakerphone for conference calls, and 5.1 Surround Sound speakers, as well as different mics like a nice Shure XLR connected to a PV6 USB Audio Mixer, as well as the built in mics in my webcams and other devices.
There's lots of great audio apps and applets that can improve the audio switching situation on Windows. I like Audio Switcher and the similarly named https://audioswit.ch/er, for example.
You can also automatically change your audio inputs automatically depending on the app. So if you always want to record your podcast with Audacity you can tell Windows 10 to always set (lie) the audio ins and outs on an app by app basis. The app will never know the difference.
But I need to change audio a lot when I'm moving from Teams calls, recording Podcasts, and watching shows. I've got this Elgato Stream Deck that has buttons I can assign to anything. Combine the Stream Deck with the lovely NirCmd utility from NirSoft and I've got one click audio changes!
The icons are just PNGs and there's lots available online. I created a bunch of batch files (*.bat) with contents like this:
nircmdc setdefaultsounddevice "Speakers" 0
and
nircmdc setdefaultsounddevice "Headphones" 0
The last number is 0, 1, or 2 where that means Console, Multimedia, or Communications. You can have one sound device for apps like Netflix and another for apps like Skype that identify as Communications. I just change all defaults, myself.
You can also add in commands like "setsubunitvolumedb" and others to have preset volumes and levels for line-ins. It's ideal for getting reliable results.
Then just use the Stream Deck utility to assign the icon and batch file using the "System | Open" widget. Drag it over and assign and you're set! If you can't figure out what the names of your sound devices are, you can call nircmd showsoundevices.
It just took a few minutes to set this up and it'll save me a bunch of clicks every day.
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My colleague Tara and I were working on prepping a system for Azure IoT development and were using WSL2 on our respective machines. The scripts we were running were long-running and tedious and by the time they were done we basically had a totally customized perfect distro.
Rather than sharing our scripts and having folks run them for hours, we instead decided to export the distro and import it on n number of machines. That way Tara could set up the distro perfectly and then give it to me.
For example, when using PowerShell I can do this:
C:UsersScottDesktop> wsl --export PerfectWSLDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar
Then I can share the resulting tar and give it to a friend and they can do this! (Note that I'm using ~ which is your home directory from PowerShell. If you're using cmd.exe you'll want to include the full path like c:usersscottAppdataLocalPerfectDistro)
mkdir ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro
wsl --import PerfectDistro ~/AppData/Local/PerfectDistro ./PerfectWSLDistro.tar --version 2
You can list our your WSL distros like this:
C:UsersScottDesktop> wsl --list -v
NAME STATE VERSION
* Ubuntu-18.04 Stopped 2
WLinux Stopped 2
Debian Stopped 1
PerfectDistro Stopped 2
It's surprisingly easy! Also, make sure you have the latest version of the Windows Terminal (and if you've got an old version and haven't deleted your profile.json, it's time to start fresh) it will automatically detect your WSL distros and make menu items for them!
Also be sure to check out my YouTube video on developing with WSL2!
Sponsor: Like C#? We do too! That’s why we've developed a fast, smart, cross-platform .NET IDE which gives you even more coding power. Clever code analysis, rich code completion, instant search and navigation, an advanced debugger... With JetBrains Rider, everything you need is at your fingertips. Code C# at the speed of thought on Linux, Mac, or Windows. Try JetBrains Rider today!
Multi-language speech transcription was recently introduced into Microsoft Video Indexer at the International Broadcasters Conference (IBC). It is available as a preview capability and customers can already start experiencing it in our portal. More details on all our IBC2019 enhancements can be found here.
Multi-language videos are common media assets in the globalization context, global political summits, economic forums, and sport press conferences are examples of venues where speakers use their native language to convey their own statements. Those videos pose a unique challenge for companies that need to provide automatic transcription for video archives of large volumes. Automatic transcription technologies expect users to explicitly determine the video language in advance to convert speech to text. This manual step becomes a scalability obstacle when transcribing multi-language content as one would have to manually tag audio segments with the appropriate language.
Microsoft Video Indexer provides a unique capability of automatic spoken language identification for multi-language content. This solution allows users to easily transcribe multi-language content without going through tedious manual preparation steps before triggering it. By that, it can save anyone with large archive of videos both time and money, and enable discoverability and accessibility scenarios.
The multi-language transcription capability is available as part of the Video Indexer portal. Currently, it supports four languages including English, French, German and Spanish, while expecting up to three different languages in an input media asset. While uploading a new media asset you can select the “Auto-detect multi-language” option as shown below.
Our application programming interface (API) supports this capability as well by enabling users to specify 'multi' as the language in the upload API. Once the indexing process is completed, the index JavaScript object notation (JSON) will include the underlying languages. Refer to our documentation for more details.
Additionally, each instance in the transcription section will include the language in which it was transcribed.
Customers can view the transcript and identified languages by time, jump to the specific places in the video for each language, and even see the multi-language transcription as video captions. The result transcription is also available as closed caption files (VTT, TTML, SRT, TXT, and CSV).
Language identification from an audio signal is a complex task. Acoustic environment, speaker gender, and speaker age are among a variety of factors that affect this process. We represent audio signal using a visual representation, such as spectrograms, assuming that, different languages induce unique visual patterns which can be learned using deep neural networks.
Our solution has two main stages to determine the languages used in multi-language media content. First, it employs a deep neural network to classify audio segments with very high granularity, in other words, very few seconds. While a good model will successfully identify the underlying language, it can still miss-identify some segments due to similarities between languages. Therefore, we apply a second stage for examining these misses and smooth the results accordingly.
We introduced a differentiated capability for multi-language speech transcription. With this unique capability in Video Indexer, you can become more effective about the content of your videos as it allows you to immediately start searching across videos for different language segments. During the coming few months, we will be improving this capability by adding support for more languages and improving the model’s accuracy.
For more information, visit Video Indexer’s portal or the Video Indexer developer portal, and try this new capability. Read more about the new multi-language option and how to use it in our documentation.
Please use our UserVoice to share feedback and help us prioritize features or email visupport@microsoft.com with any questions.
Last month we shared our vision for dual-screen devices, designed to help people get more done on smaller and more mobile form factors. Today, we are going to share how developers can unlock this new era of mobile creativity. There are two stages to optimize for dual-screen devices:
1. Your websites and apps work
2. Embrace dual-screen experiences
Your code is important, and you will not have to start anew on these devices. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for your existing websites and apps to work well on dual-screen devices.
Windows 10X is an expression of Windows 10 and will be available on dual-screen and foldable PCs, including the Surface Neo and devices from several partners. Developers will be able to use existing investments and tools for Web, UWP, and Win32 on these devices.
The Surface Duo will bring together Android apps, OS, and Surface hardware. Your current websites and Android apps will continue to work and run on a single screen. You can also stay in your current workflow and continue to use the same tools you do now.
The excitement for this new device category creates a great opportunity for developers to innovate and reach new customers – enabling them to be more productive and engaged while on-the-go. We are in the process of identifying key postures and layouts across dual-screen and foldable PCs so that you can take advantage of both.
For native app developers, our goal is to develop a common model layered onto existing platform-specific tools and frameworks for Windows and Android. Of course, APIs to access this model will be tailored to the developer platform for each operating system. For example, you can use APIs to enhance your apps to use dual-screen capabilities and features like the 360-degree hinge.
Web will continue to follow the standards-based model. And we are committed to building the right web standards and APIs to allow web developers to take advantage of cross-platform dual-screen capabilities. Web developers can use the browser or web-based app model of their choosing to take advantage of these capabilities.
We are excited to start working with developers, and for those who want to adopt early please reach out to dualscreendev@microsoft.com to learn more. Thank you for your continued support and interest in this new device category. We cannot wait to share more details with developers in early 2020.
The post Developing for the new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.
We, the Azure DevOps team, work hard to ensure that your code is protected while enabling you to have friction free access. Until now, we’ve offered customers the ability to use Alternate Credentials in situations where they are connecting to Azure DevOps using legacy tools. While using Alternate Credentials was an easy way to set up authentication access to Azure DevOps, it is also less secure than other alternatives such as personal access tokens (PATs). As such, we believe the use of Alternate Credentials authentication represents a security risk to our customers because they never expire and can’t be scoped to limit access to the Azure DevOps data.
Azure DevOps will stop supporting Alternate Credentials authentication beginning March 2, 2020. The deprecation process will start by disabling and hiding this feature for organizations that are not using Alternate Credentials beginning December 9, 2019. Then starting March 2, 2020 we will gradually turn off this feature for the rest of the organizations, which means that individuals using Alternate Credentials have until then to transition to a more secure authentication method to avoid this breaking change impacting their DevOps workflows.
For each organization you belong to, in order to check if you have Alternate Credentials configured, go to the Azure DevOps portal. In the top right corner, open the User Settings menu 
, then click on the Alternate Credentials menu item.
If you have Alternate Credentials configured in Azure DevOps, you will see it listed. In this case, you should move to another form of authentication by March 2, 2020. We recommend PATs. If you are using Alternate Credentials with Git (this is the most common usage scenario), then follow these instructions to set up Git with PATs.
If you see ‘Secondary Inactive’ or a message stating that Alternate Credentials were disabled for your organization, it means you don’t have Alternate Credentials set in Azure DevOps. There is no action item for you.
If you have any questions, please open a developer community item with the tag [AltCreds] in the title. For faster service, please search for [AltCreds] in the developer community forum first, as your question might already be answered. You can reach out to us on Twitter at @AzureDevOps too.
Q: As a user, what happens when Azure DevOps disables Alternate Credentials?
A: The tools that you use to connect to Azure DevOps using Alternate Credentials will stop working.
Q: As a user, how do I know in what scenario I am using Alternate Credentials in a specific organization?
A: We will email you the user agent (if we have it) and the identity that is using it, starting mid-December 2019.
Q: As a user, should I delete my Alternate Credentials for a specific organization?
A: You are not required to, but this is a way to test if anything is broken if you remove them. You can re-enable your Alternate Credentials after completing the test. Save the username and password somewhere before deleting it, just in case.
Q: As an administrator, how do I know if there are active users of Alternate Credentials in my organization?
A: We will email you this information, along with the user agents (if we have this information) and the identities that are using Alternate Credentials, starting mid-December 2019.
Q: As an administrator, should I turn off the alternate Credentials policy?
A: If you want to get this change faster, you can turn the policy off. Turning the policy off is reversible until December 8, 2019. After that, you won’t be able to turn the policy on from the portal. You would need to contact us to do that. (contact info above).
Q: Will this change apply to Azure DevOps Server?
A: No, because we already do not support Alternate Credentials in Azure DevOps Server.
The post Azure DevOps will no longer support Alternate Credentials authentication appeared first on Azure DevOps Blog.
