Further to this, it is not all about making the right decision in the moment, but documenting it so that tech and non-tech people understand the implications and organising the documentation so that in a couple of years time you can find the answer to "Why the heck did we decide to do it this way?", or "What are the implications of making change X?". How do you feel about organising documentation? As mentioned above, your decisions have to take into account the overall business needs, which means sometimes taking the (technically) sub-optimal choice, and being the one who has to justify this to the dev team. How do you feel about making technical compromises? Adam

There is a mini-series on BB radio 4 (by Ian Hislop) that talks about this period BBC Sounds - This Union: The Ghost Kingdoms of England[^]. Easy to listen to and engaging. (I'm not sure how much of BBC content is available if you're not in the UK, but give it a go.) Adam

Hi, Not exactly programming, but kind of adjacent to it. It's not the main topic, but the tech side of things is believable and reasonably well detailed. Cory definitely is a rich seam to mine, I'd recommend these below, plus Void Star: Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (free)[^] Cory Doctorow - Car Wars (free)[^] Cory again - Little Brother (free)[^] Zachary Mason - Void Star[^] Adam

We moved from Keepass to PasswordState - Secure, Affordable, Enterprise Password Management[^] - AD integration - REST API - Flexible RBAC - Lots more It seems to do everything pretty well. Adam

It may not have native support, but .Net Standard is implemented by a number of platforms (including Mono, Xamarin): .NET Standard | Microsoft Docs[^].

I recall (many years) ago a unix tool that output text to the screen. It included options to simulate a lazy/drunk human (you could specify how drunk with some numerical argument). It introduced delays, mistakes and corrections into the typing and looked convincingly human. I can't remember it being useful, but it was funny.

I haven't any knowledge of the MS roadmap for SF, but I guess they would keep support for both SF Apps and containers for the foreseeable future. For some (i.e. those .Net devs without container experience) the barrier to entry is lower for SF apps, as you can Project->New in VS, then right click and publish your app direct to SF. But as soon as you have multiple services to deploy as a unit, containers are your friend, and worth getting to grips with the new tech. Obviously if you are using containers outside the MS ecosystem, the fact MS now support them means that the entry barrier for you to start using MS hosting has lowered. Keeping both means that MS keeps both groups of people happy (= paying customers).

I've just realised that it reads like a sales pitch from MS... not intentional!

SF allows you to automatically spin up and shut down VMs running your microservice instances, based on a schedule or just reacting to periods of heavy use. Coupled with auto-scaling of storage (e.g. CosmosDB) you can meet the demands of peak usage whilst keeping the hosting costs to a minimum. Adam

Also, if you haven't seen this, its worth a look. Lots of code and articles to get you started: azure-content/articles/service-fabric at master · uglide/azure-content · GitHub[^], including this one which sounds applicable to you, for your APIs: azure-content/service-fabric-reliable-services-communication-webapi.md at master · uglide/azure-content · GitHub[^] Adam

We have been using Service Fabric to host microservices for about a year while now. We created a few Stateless services with minimal use of the SF SDK so most of the time when developing you can ignore the fact they are hosted in SF, and moving away from SF should not be too expensive. You can run the SF host on your dev machine, but because we have kept the SF references to just the 'shell' we can also run the services locally in a console host if you want, which makes dev a little easier. Our deployments are via Octopus, which does have some built-in support for SF deployments, not great but you can get it running smoothly with a little fiddling. Later versions of Octopus might be better at this now. What I really like about SF is that zero-downtime deployments are easy and it manages the drain-stopping of load balancer for you. You can package up multiple services into single application package that is deployed as a unit (and rolled back as a unit in the case of failure), which is great, but of course, if you want that you should be thinking of containers anyway. So, we are looking at moving to containers this year (it is the MS recommended direction of travel too). You can currently host containers in SF but it is a bit awkward and there is some new stuff in the pipeline (Seabreeze) that supports server-less hosting of containers which is where I think we will end up. Adam

This isn't quite what you want to see, but it's a start... http://oglaf.com/moonshine/[^] A

Or you could switch all the menu captions to full UPPER CASE (scroll down to second picture[^]), who wouldn't want to pay for an upgrade if the software is constantly shouting at you? A

Our techies tell us that SQL 2008 R2 is buggy. Stick to 2008 (v10.0) or wait a little for Denali, unless there are killer features in R2 (not in v10.0) you need. A

We escalated a WPF performance issue to MS (found mostly on older PCs - but all within MS recommended WPF spec) and we heard from a senior MS dev that WPF shouldn't really be used on anything less than 2 cores, as there are 2 blocking threads in operation. Its not the official line of course, but do not assume it will perform on older kit. Adam

I have done something similar to this using Quartz[^]. Quartz allows you to write your own 'job' class and to add it to its scheduling service with a specific firing time. I poll my DB table for new/changed jobs every few minutes, and submit the jobs to Quartz, which then takes on the precise timing without me having to worry about it. (Quartz is very good for scheduled - i.e. repeating - jobs and it doesn't sound like you want that, but worth a look nonetheless.) Adam

In response to this story[^] in the Daily Mail you can now generate your own seasonal Mail-esque headlines here[^]. A

Good on you. We had a raffle too, and guess who won the top prize (iPod)? One of the founding Directors. Nice one. A

Nah - just a glitch in the downloader. Pause and restart and it tells the truth: "2.81 Gb / 3.0 Gb done" A

Yup - downloading... ...but how big is it? Mine currently shows "3.22 Gb / 3.0 Gb done" - when will it end? A