All posts by onlyconnect

android, microsoft

Microsoft needs to fix its Android emulator

6 Comments

Microsoft wants Windows 10 to be an ideal developer operating system, with its Linux subsystem, and Visual Studio 2017 is notable for its strong cross-platform development tools.

There is an annoyance though. Google’s Android SDK includes an emulator for debugging mobile applications, but it requires hardware acceleration in the form of Intel’s HAXM (Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager). Otherwise you get an error as below:

image

Unfortunately this is incompatible with Hyper-V, the hypervisor built into Windows. You cannot fix this by stopping Hyper-V services; it is set when Windows boots.

Hyper-V is increasingly important for general Windows developers. It is not only useful for running up VMs on which to test stuff, but also for the official Docker tools and testing Windows containers.

The solution should be to use the Visual Studio Emulator for Android. This is based on Hyper-V so no problem.

Unfortunately it does not currently work very well. On one of my PCs it starts, but without internet connectivity, rendering it useless for many apps. On another PC it does not start at all.

image

I spent a bit of time trying to get it to work. The networking problem seems to be related to conflicts with other applications using Hyper-V. Specifically, the Visual Studio Emulator for Android uses two Hyper-V virtual network adapters, one connected to the Windows Phone Emulator Internal Switch, and the other connected to an external virtual switch. This second adapter gets its network settings using DHCP (there is no way to change this). The emulator app proxies internet connections from the internal to the external network.

The reference to Windows Phone comes about because this is essentially the Windows Phone emulator adapted to run Android.

In my Hyper-V setup I have another internal switch, called DockerNAT, used by the Docker tools, as well as a third internal switch which I’ve used for other things. In the emulator’s network settings I can actually see four Desktop Adapters (in addition to the primary “Emulator adapter”, of which only one has internet connectivity via my business network. I theorised that the emulator is attempting to proxy via the wrong adapter, and disabled the others in Control Panel – Network Connections. However it still does not connect.

Judging by posts like this and this, there may be some cocktail of settings in Hyper-V and in Control Panel that gets this working. Bear in mind though that I want everything else to work too.

I also note that Windows developer evangelist Scott Hanselman suggests setting up a dual boot arrangement so that you can boot with HAXM enabled when you want to develop on Android, and with Hyper-V otherwise – implying that there is no other easy fix.

This works, though it is a dreadful solution. Rebooting is not only time-consuming, but disruptive to the flow of your work, and having to reboot with special settings just to work on Android is painful.

It strikes me that this could be fixed with a bit of effort. If Microsoft is serious about persuading developers to use Windows 10, Visual Studio and Xamarin for cross-platform mobile apps, that would be a good idea.

Notes from the field

Disabling automatic update restarts in Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2016 is in effect the Windows 10 version of the server OS. If you look in Settings it seems to have the same attitude to updates; in other words, you get them automatically whether you like it or not. Currently my server is even offering me Windows 10 Creators Update:

image

However, I prefer to have servers just download updates and let me decide when to install them. There can be good reasons for this. For example, I run Exchange Server on a machine that is not really up to spec, and the Exchange services have to be manually started every time it reboots. Well, there are ways round this, but it makes the point.

It turns out that you can after all set Windows Server 2016 to download-only. Just run sconfig from the command line and choose option 5:

image

The sconfig menu will be familiar if you have worked with Server Core or other variants of Windows Server without a GUI.

Incidentally, I tried to install Exchange 2016 on Server 2016 without a GUI but it appears not to be supported. A shame.

Returning to the subject of updates, Brendan Power at Microsoft popped up on Reddit to say that this is a bug in in the settings:

The "Available updates will be downloaded…" text in the UI is a bug that doesn’t represent the actual automatic update settings.

To verify the actual server settings, you can open the command prompt and run sconfig.cmd; in the menu, you should see option 5 set to Manual.

A bug? I am not sure. If so, it seems an odd and obvious one. I think Microsoft is keen to have us update automatically. That said, Windows Server 2016 is meant to follow the Long Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) model rather than the “Windows as a service” approach in Windows 10, unless you run Nano Server, according to this post. So compulsory update to retain a supported configuration does not apply here.

Of course you should patch your Windows Server installations in a timely manner, however you choose to do it.

Notes from the field

How to get a Bitlocker recovery key on Android

Scenario: you are out and about with your laptop and phone. Laptop protected with Bitlocker encryption. You start up your laptop and it decides for no obvious reason to demand your Bitlocker key before booting up.

If your laptop is domain-joined, this key is normally stored in Active Directory. If is not domain-joined, it is normally stored in the OneDrive linked with your Microsoft account. These are options when the Bitlocker encryption was applied.

This laptop is not domain-joined and the key is in OneDrive. So I pick up my phone and find the link, which is here.

Android helpfully opened this link in the OneDrive app, but not to the location of the keys, just the home page. No idea how to find the recovery keys in there.

The solution I found was to copy the link and paste it directly into the browser. You might need to get a code sent to your phone if you have 2-factor authentication. I found I needed to check the box for “I log on frequently with this device” before it worked.

Then I could see the key in the Android web browser. Phew.

development, microsoft, professional, software development

QCon London 2017: IoT insecurity, serverless computing, predicting technical debt, and why .NET Core depends on a 36,000 line C++ file

I’m at the QCon event in London, a multi-vendor conference aimed primarily at enterprise developers and architects.

image
Adam Tornhill speaks at QCon London 2017

A few notes on day one. Alasdair Allan gave a keynote on security and the internet of things; it was an entertaining and disturbing résumé of all that is wrong with the mad rush to connect everything to the internet though short on answers; our culture has to change so that organisations such as hotels, toy manufacturers, appliance vendors and even makers of medical equipment take security seriously but it is not clear how this will come about unless so many bad things happen that customers start to insist on it.

Michael Feathers spoke on strategic code deletion, part of a track on “Dark code: the legacy/tech debt dilemma.” This was an excellent session; code is added to projects more often than it is removed, and lack of hygiene in this regard has risks including security, reliability and performance. But discovering which code is safe to remove is not always trivial, and Feathers explored some of the nuances and suggested some techniques.

Steve Faulkner gave a session on serverless JavaScript, or more specifically, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and API Gateway. Faulkner said that the API Gateway was the piece that made Lambda viable for them; he is Director of Platform Engineering at Bustle, a busy content site based in the USA. In a nutshell, moving from EC2 VMs to Lambda has yielded both financial savings and easier management. The only downside is performance; each call to a Lambda function takes a minimum of 100ms whereas the same function on a WM might take 20ms. In the end it is not critical as performance remains satisfactory.

Faulkner said that AWS is ahead of its competitors (Microsoft, Google and IBM were mentioned) but when pressed said that both Microsoft and Google offered strong alternatives. Microsoft’s Azure Functions are spoilt by the need to specify a maximum scale, rather than scaling automatically, but its routing solution is in some ways ahead of AWS, he said. Google’s Functions will be great when out of beta.

Adam Tornhill spoke on A Crystal Ball to prioritise Technical Debt, another session in the dark code track. This was my favourite of the day. Tornhill presented a relatively simple way to discover what code you should refactor now in order to avoid future issues. His method is based on looking for files with many lines of code (a way of measuring complexity) and many commits (suggesting high importance and activity), the “hotspots” in your projects. For more detail and some utilities see Tornhill’s blog.

Why do we end up with bad or risky code in our software? Tornhill said that developers often mistake organisational problems for technical problems and try unsuccessfully to fix them with tools.

He also mentioned an example of high-risk code, the file gc.cpp which performs garbage collection in .NET Core, the next generation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. This file is over 36,000 lines and should be refactored. There is a discussion on the subject here. It exactly bears out Tornhill’s point. A developer proposes to refactor the file, back in March 2015. Microsoft’s Karel Zikmund defends the status quo:

Why it is this way? … Partly historical reasons (it is this way since the start). Partly because devs working on it didn’t feel the urge to refactor it. Partly because splitting of gc.cpp is non-trivial and risky and because it does not bring too big value (ramp up in the code base can be gained also in the combination of reading BOTR and debugging the code). Why it is staying this way? … Cost/benefit/risk ratio is IMO not in favor of a change here.

Few additional thoughts:
Am I happy that there is only 1 large file? No, but it doesn’t hurt me much either.
Do I see the disadvantages of large file? Yes, but I don’t think they are huge. More like minor annoyances with easy workarounds.
And to turn it around: Do you see the risk of any changes here? Do you see the cost of extra careful code reviews to mitigate the risk?

Strictly technically, we truly believe this is a formatting change. If it was simple to split it up and if it would be low risk and if it would be very easy to review, it might be worth the ‘minor’ improvements mentioned above … but I don’t see that combo happening (not on a noticeable scale in gc.cpp).
On a personal note: I also trust CLR team that if all these three things were true, the refactoring would have happened long time ago.

Note that some of this code goes back beyond .NET Core to the .NET Framework, the “historical reasons” that Zikmund mentions. We can see that the factors preventing change are as much organisational as technical.

Finally I attended a session on Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. Note this was in the “Sponsored solution track”. Microsoft also has a stand here focused on its Cognitive Services.

There is not much Microsoft Platform content at QCon and it seems under-represented, though many of the sessions are applicable to developers on any platform. I am not sure of all the reasons for this; there used to be an Advanced .NET track at QCon. It does reflect some overall development trends as well as the history and evolution of QCon itself. That said, there is a session on SQL Server on Linux so the company is not completely invisible here.

As for the session, it was a reasonable overview of Microsoft’s expanding Cognitive Services APIs, which covers things like image recognition, speech recognition and more. I would have liked more depth and would have preferred to hear from a practitioner, in other words, “we built an application on Cognitive Services and this is what we learned.” I am not altogether clear why the company is pushing this so hard, except that it is a driver for developers to use Azure. I asked about how developers should deal with the problem of uncertainty*, in other words, that Cognitive Services does not deliver absolute results but rather draws conclusions with a confidence score – eg it might be pretty sure that an image contains a human face, fairly sure that it is male, and somewhat confident that the age of the person is mid forties. When the speaker demoed speech recognition it went pretty well except that “Start” was transcribed as “Stop.” This stuff is difficult.

Looking forward now to Day Two: Containers, Machine Learning, and more.

*More concisely expressed as “Systems are moving from the deterministic to the probabilistic” by Stephen Whitworth, who is now speaking on Machine Learning.

hardware, mobile

Blackberry KEYone launches: but we have moved on from keyboard phones

First up at Mobile World Congress is the launch of TCL’s Blackberry smartphone. TCL is a Chinese manufacturer with headquarters in Hong Kong, and has licensed the Blackberry brand. TCL also markets smartphones under its own name and as Alcatel OneTouch.

image

The KEYone runs Android 7.1 “Nougat” but with a couple of distinctive features. The most obvious is the full QWERTY keyboard, though this one has extra features including gesture support, flick typing (suggested words appear as you type with one-key shortcuts), and the ability to make up to 52 keyboard shortcuts to launch applications. The spacebar doubles as a fingerprint sensor.

The other special feature is hardware-based security, based on Blackberry root of trust technology. There is also a DTEK app which monitors security and adds malware protection.

TCL says it is “the world’s most secure Android experience” though note that alternatives like Samsung’s Knox technology are also hardware based.

None of the other mainstream smartphones have physical QWERTY keyboards though. However there may be a good reason for that. I am a fan of keyboards; I am a touch typist and the keyboard is one of the things which ties me to laptops or external keyboards; I can do without a mouse, but a keyboard is hard to live without.

That said, thumb-size QWERTY keyboards miss the point somewhat, in that you cannot touch type. I suggest also that the advent of swipe-style predictive keyboards has largely removed whatever advantage these little keyboards once had. Swiping only works on a touch keyboard, and is now very effective.

The downside of a real keyboard is that you get a smaller screen.

Still, there will be some users who find a physical keyboard reassuringly familiar and the shortcut feature could be useful.

The KEYone will be available from April 2017 at around €599/£499/$549.

Quick hardware specs:

  • 4.5-inch display (1620×1080 resolution/434 PPI )
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset with Adreno 506 GPU.
  • 3505 mAh battery
  • 12MP rear camera with Sony IMX378 sensor.
  • 8MP front camera with fixed focus and 84-degree wide angle lens.
  • 3GB RAM and 32GB storage
  • Micro SD slot

More information here.

microsoft, office 365

New Office 365 OneDrive for Business sync client now supports team sites

Microsoft has announced new capabilities for its next-generation OneDrive for Business sync client – the software that lets users access OneDrive documents through Windows Explorer rather than having to go via a web browser.

Technically, there are two ways to access OneDrive with Windows Explorer. One uses WebDAV and only works online, the other makes a local copy of the documents and synchronises them when it can. Microsoft pushes users towards the second option. If you use WebDAV, repeated authentication prompts and lack of offline capabilities are annoyances that many find it hard to cope with.

Problem is that the old OneDrive for Business sync client, called Groove, is just not reliable. Every so often it stops syncing and there is often no solution other than to delete all the local copies and start again.

Microsoft is therefore replacing it with a new OneDrive for Business sync client, which has been in preview since September 2015. “The preview client adds OneDrive for Business connectivity to our proven OneDrive consumer client,” explained Microsoft, abandoning the problematic Groove.

There was a snag though. The new client did not support Team Sites, also known as SharePoint Online, but only personal OneDrive for Business cloud storage. Many businesses make more use of Team Sites than they do of the personal storage. Users with both had to run both the old and new sync clients side by side.

I was among those complaining so it is pleasing to see that Microsoft, a mere 15 months later, has met my request, by adding support for Team Sites to its new client.

image

(I had no idea until I looked today how much support the feedback had received).

Today’s announcement also includes a new standalone Mac client, which can be deployed centrally, and an enhancd UI with an Activity Center.

There are also new admin features in the Office 365 dashboard, like blocking syncing of specified file types, control over device access, and usage reporting.

There may still be some snags – and note that the new client is still a preview.

Competitors like DropBox and Box have some technical advantages, but Microsoft’s key benefit is integration with Office 365, and the fact that it comes as part of the bundle in most plans. If it can iron out the technical issues, of which sync has to date been the most annoying, it will significantly strengthen its cloud platform.

Notes from the field

Publishing Exchange with pfSense

6 Comments

pfSense is a FreeBSD-based firewall which you can find here.

I wanted to publish Exchange through pfSense. I installed the Squid plugin which includes specific reverse proxy support for Exchange.

If you search for help with publishing Exchange on pfSense you will find this document by Mohammed Hamada.

Unfortunately the steps given seem to be incorrect in some places, certainly for my version which is 2.3.2.

Here’s what I had to do to get it working:

1. Simple one not mentioned in his steps, you have to enable the Squid Proxy Server otherwise Squid will not run

2. Hamada sets a NAT rule to forward HTTPS traffic to his Exchange server:

image

If you do this, it will bypass your reverse proxy. What you should do instead is to create a Firewall rule to accept HTTPS:

image

You should also verify that the pfSense web GUI is not using the same port (443), in System/Advanced/Admin Access. If it is set to HTTP rather than HTTPS that is OK too. Normally access to the web GUI from the WAN is blocked. One other thing: in order to use port 443 in Squid Reverse Proxy General Settings, I set net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh to 0 in System/Advanced/System Tunables

3. I did this, as well as setting up Exchange in Squid Reverse Proxy General Settings, whereupon OWA worked but remote Outlook and mobile clients did not, or at least not reliably. The main problem was this setting in Squid Reverse Proxy / General:

image

This must be set to Intermediate rather than Modern (the default).

Now it works – though if pfSense experts out there have better ways to achieve the above I would be interested.

Update: one other thing to check, make sure that your pfSense box can resolve the internal hostname of your Exchange server. By default it may use external DNS servers even if you put internal DNS servers in General Setup. This is because of the setting Allow DNS server list to be overridden by DHCP/PPP on WAN.

cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft Office 365 Activation Hassles

1 Comment

Imagine you are a customer of Microsoft’s Office 365 service, including a subscription to the Office desktop applications like Word, Excel and Outlook.

One day you click on the shortcut for Word, but instead of opening, it just shows a “Starting” splash screen which never progresses.

Being smart, you try to start Word in safe mode by holding down the Ctrl key, but the exact same thing happens.

Annoying, when you want to do your work. What is going on?

I took a look at a case like this. Two things you should do (after the usual reboot):

1. Look in the event viewer. Here, I found a clue that the issue is related to software activation, specifically Event 2011 “Office Subscription Licensing exception”:

image

2. For all things related to Office licensing, open a command prompt, go to (for example) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16, and type:

cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

In this case I got the following:

image

This told me that Windows thinks TWO product keys for Office are installed. One has expired, the other is fine.

The guilty party may (or may not) be the trial version of Office typically pre-installed with a new PC. Or it could be a consequence of changing your Office 365 subscription. Neither would be the fault of the user, who is fully licensed and has done nothing other than follow Microsoft’s normal procedures for installing Office 365.

Solution: we reinstalled Office from the Office 365 portal, and attempted to remove the dud product key with:

cscript ospp.vbs /unpkey:<Last five characters of product key>

as explained here. All is well for the moment.

This kind of thing drives me nuts though. Activation and subscription license checking is for the benefit of the vendor, not the user, and should never get in the way like this.

Further, cannot Microsoft find some way of informing the user when this happens, and not have Word simply hang on starting? How difficult is it to check for licensing and activation issues, and throw up a message?

azure, cloud computing, microsoft

From Windows Embedded to cloud: Microsoft announces the Connected Vehicle Platform

Microsoft has announced the Connected Vehicle Platform, at the CES event under way in Las Vegas.

image

The company is not new to in-car systems, but its track record is disappointing. It used to be all about Windows Embedded, using Windows CE to make a vehicle into a smart device.

Ford was Microsoft’s biggest partner. It built Ford SYNC on the platform and in 2012 announced five years of partnership and 5 million SYNC-enabled vehicles.

However in 2014 Ford announced SYNC 3 with no mention of Microsoft – because SYNC 3 uses Blackberry’s QNX.

What went wrong? There’s a 2014 analysis from Bill Howard that offers a few clues. The bit that chimes with me is that Microsoft was too slow in updating the system. The overall Windows story over the last 10 years is convoluted to say the least, with many changes to the platform and disruptive (in a bad way) strategy shifts. The same factor is a large part of why Windows Phone failed.

It is not clear at this stage whether or not Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Platform partners (which include Renault-Nissan and BMW) will use Windows Embedded in their solutions; but what is notable is that Microsoft’s release makes no mention of it. The company has shifted to a cloud strategy, and is primarily offering Azure services rather than mandating how manufacturers choose to consume them. The detail of the announcement identifies five key areas:

  • Telematics and Predictive services
  • Marketing (“Customer insights and engagement”)
  • Productivity (Office 365, Skype)
  • Connected ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), ie. the car helping you to drive
  • Advanced Navigation

Cortana also gets a mention. We may think of Cortana as a virtual assistant, but what this means is a user interface to intelligent services.

There is big competition for all this of course, with Google, Amazon and Apple also in this space. There is also politics involved. If you read Howard’s analysis linked above, note that he mentions how the auto companies dislike restrictions such as Google insisting that you can’t have Google Search unless you also use Google Maps (I have no idea if this is still the case). There is a tension here. In-car systems are an important value-add for customers and critical to marketing vehicles, but the auto companies do not want their vehicles to become just another channel for big data-gathering companies like Google and Amazon.

Another point of interest is how smartphones interact with your car. If you want a simple and integrated experience, you can just dock your phone and use it for navigation, communication and entertainment – three key areas for in-car systems. On the other hand, a docked phone will not have the built-in screen and control of vehicle features that an embedded system can offer.