Ok that's way more than I ever expected xD Nice! I don't think I ever did an in-place update. I just love the feeling of a completely new install with no left overs ;P

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I don't think I've ever considered automating setup of a personal PC, or even my development machine at work. Neither case happens often enough to spend the time automating the process,

Me too, but something I didn't mention in my original post is that I have a website running on a Raspberry Pi (like a mini computer) and the install gets borked very often, either due to updates, the power going down and corrupts the file system, etc and creating images is a pain because I have to remove the SD Card, make a copy on my desktop and then put the SD card back. That was my main motivation for this post, to see if someone had comeup with a tool of sorts that I could point to a system (local or not) and it would just configure everything.

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especially considering most of the application installs aren't amenable to automation.

This is my biggest gripe.. Especially with "consumer" apps like Photoshop and the like.

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Creating the Windows 10 images took over a month given the relatively poor guidance from Microsoft for the process and the fact that I had four different models of hardware to handle. Windows 11 only took a week thanks to greatly improved Microsoft documentation and only two sets of hardware.

Ouch! That's a lot of work for something that should be "simple" but yeah I agree, Microsofts documentation is a bit it or miss to put it mildly. Azure is great but older stuff...

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All your questions seem like overkill - then again, I'm AR so take no offense

None taken :) but what does AR mean? My work laptop is about the same age but it hs so much corporate crap that formatting probably wouldn't change much anyway... And it's definitely overkill but I work on DevOps all day so it would be cool to have something that could do that for personal computers. I want to format my desktop but I dread having to find all the configurations, env variables, installed software, custom shortcuts, etc :S

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Over the past few years, I have been migrating to virtual machines. The Xp one I have has been in use for over 10 years. Rock solid. The beauty of VMs is that you just don't give a flying elephant about images or backups. It's a control C/control V to an external drive and you go get a beer.

The thing with VMs is that sometimes there's problems with USB devices, especially embeded suff :/

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Scripts, esp powershell? ewwwww.

Let's not go there ehehe 😝

For some reason, imaging my system didn't even cross my mind. I'll have to give that a try! How to you make image 5? Do you format your pc, restore the image, update and create a new image? Or do you do it using a VM/second PC/other? Also any software suggestions for creating the images?

I've been playing around with Ansible, Terraform, etc to provision VMs, I was wondering what do you guys use to automatically configure brand new PCs to your liking? Do you write powershell scripts or similar to install all the software and configure, shortcuts, environment variables, etc? Is there a tool like ansible to locally configure a system based on a configuration file? Also, out of curiosity, how long have been without formating a Windows computer? My current record seems to be around 3 years. Note: I'm only refering to literal personal computers. Not the ones provided by your employer, VM in clouds, etc

Awesome thank you! Bookmarked!

I guess they did. I haven't received an email in 3 days at least... :( Worse, I can't find the link to the archives of "The Insider" newsletter...

That's actually a very good point now that you mentioned it. I didn't consider that and assumed that an ASP.Net app would be large enough to see some optimizations but I guess the libraries used are already optimized and my code doesn't have much stuff to optimize.

Thanks but in that case I don't understand what is the purpose of the --configuration flag? I understand that JIT will optimize things at runtime but I was expecting the --configuration to, at least, do some sort of (even if small) optimization when compiling (a la gcc compiling C code for example) to MSIL. Many tutorials (especially Microsoft) almost always add that flag when publishing so it must do something but I can't understand what exactly.

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Debug builds do not run with optimizations, but contain more debugging information that may not be in the final executables.

Yes this is exactly what I find confusing because my debug build doesn't have (as far as I can tell) any extra debugging information. It seems to be exactly the same as the release build (using -c Release)

Hi everyone, I'm building my personal web site using ASP.Net and recently noticed something curious. When publishing my project, it doesn't seem to matter if I use:

dotnet publish -c Release -o out

or

dotnet publish -c Debug -o out

Both commands will output (as far as I can tell) exactly the same binary. However shouldn't the release output be smaller/optimized? Unfortunately I can't find much documentation regarding this config flag and as far as I can tell, the dotnet command is just passing it along to MSBuild which then select the proper configuration (profile?). Does anyone know if it's supposed to work like that or am I doing something dumb? PS: My csproj has nothing special in it as far as I can tell:

	net6.0
	enable



	
	
	
	
	
	
	
	
		all
		runtime; build; native; contentfiles; analyzers; buildtransitive