It's finally here the new Windows Virtual Desktop

Here we go Virtual Desktop General Availability as of Sept. 30, 2019

"Today, we’re excited to announce that Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is now generally available worldwide." Windows Virtual Desktop is the only service that delivers simplified management, a multi-session Windows 10 experience hosted in Azure. This means many users can log into to same Windows 10 machine.  Moreover, WVD optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus ( a popular enterprise request) and you can connect to using standard Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. 

With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes.

Get the low-down on WVD see videos below;
 




Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/09/30/windows-virtual-desktop-generally-available-worldwide/

How to create a single self-contained exe using dotNET core 3.0

Once you converted your project into new .csproj format you can copy these lines into your Visual Studio project file. This exe is total self contained. 

Published trim, new feature trims out all assemblies from .Net Core to shrink the exe. But this is still experimental feature, it can trim to much out. 

1 2 3 4 5

<PropertyGroup> <PublishSingleFile>true</PublishSingleFile> <RuntimeIdentifier>win-x64<RuntimeIdentifier> <PublishTrimmed>true</PublishTrimmed> <PropertyGroup>

Here's the .NET Conf 2019 (Sept 23, 2019) talking point about single exe feature

Microsoft Visual Studio Team just opened sourced the C++ Standard Library (aka STL)

What is the C++ STL ?

The STL (Standard Template Library) was developed separately, and then submitted to the C++ standard committee for consideration, giving them the option of adopting it into the language. But it was not developed as part of the C++ standard, and for this reason, it is designed in a style that is very different from the rest of the C++ standard library. 

The STL at it's code provides the most fundamental functionality you expect of a standard library: The ability to store sequences of data, and the ability to process these sequences.

Every other language has a Collections/Containers part of its standard library, containing implementations of dynamic arrays (known as arraylists in Java, List in C#, and vectors in C++), linked lists, dictionaries and other common data structures.

They also typically provide some mechanims for traversing these structures. (Enumerators or iterators, for example)

The STL provides the same functionality in C++, but does it in a unusually elegant way, and with some interesting abstractions.

Press Release

Today (Sept 16, 2019) at CppCon 2019, we (the MSVC team) announced that we’re releasing our implementation of the C++ Standard Library (also known as the STL) as open source.

https://github.com/microsoft/STL is our new repository, containing all of our product source code, a new CMake build system, and a README with more information.

Sources: 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/827236/what-is-the-stl
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/open-sourcing-msvcs-stl/

MakeCert.exe Error: CryptCertStrToNameW failed => 0x80092023 (-2146885597) fix

If you getting the following error using makecert.exe ? 

Error: CryptCertStrToNameW failed => 0x80092023 (-2146885597)

Make sure the default location for makecert.exe  c:\windows\System32 or your output directory does not contain the same .cer or .pvk file you are trying to generate. makecert.exe does not overwrite those files.

PowerToys for Windows 10 Released

Power Toys for Windows 10 is now available!

Power Toys was originally released for Windows 95 but is now being re-developed for Windows 10. 

https://insider.windows.com/en-us/articles/announcing-the-first-preview-and-code-release-of-powertoys/ provides information on the first two features included in Power Toys:  FancyZones and Shortcut Guide.

Another open source Microsoft Project at https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases


Also, hot of the press and just released my Clipboard Plaintext PowerTool!

Windows Registry Type Frequency Counts

How many Windows Registry Types are there and what are their counts? 

Here's a Windows Registry Types frequency counts for a typical old Win7 machine with Office installed.

These are all the windows registry types that appear in .reg file; 

"value" alias hex(1)	Default or blank	String value data with escape characters
hex alias hex(3)	REG_BINARY	Binary data (any arbitrary data)
dword alias hex(4)	REG_DWORD	A 32-bit unsigned integer coded in little-endian format
hex(0)	REG_NONE	No type (the stored value, if any)
hex(1)	REG_SZ	A string value, normally stored and exposed in UTF-16LE (when using the Unicode version of Win32 API functions), usually terminated by a NUL character
hex(2)	EXPAND_SZ	An “expandable” string value that can contain environment variables, normally stored and exposed in UTF-16LE, usually terminated by a NUL character
hex(3)	REG_BINARY	Binary data (any arbitrary data) including variable byte encoded UTF8 values
hex(4)	REG_DWORD_LITTLE_ENDIAN equivalent to REG_DWORD	A 32-bit unsigned integer coded in little-endian format
hex(5)	REG_DWORD_BIG_ENDIAN	A 32-bit unsigned integer coded in big-endian format
hex(6)	REG_LINK	A symbolic link (UNICODE) to another Registry key, specifying a root key and the path to the target key
hex(7)	REG_MULTI_SZ	A multi-string value, which is an ordered list of non-empty strings, normally stored and exposed in UTF-16LE, each one terminated by a NUL character, the list being normally terminated by a second NUL character.
hex(8)	REG_RESOURCE_LIST	A resource list
hex(9)	REG_FULL_RESOURCE_DESCRIPTOR	A resource descriptor
hex(a)	REG_RESOURCE_REQUIREMENTS_LIST	A resource requirements list
hex(b)	REG_QWORD_LITTLE_ENDIAN equivalent to REG_QWORD	A 64-bit integer little-endian (introduced in Windows XP)

Sources:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/310516