Tech Writing
My attention was caught by the claim that Linux desktop use surged to 22% on one workday. Unfortunately the claim does not stand up to scrutiny. The figures are drawn from Cloudflare data and based on North America only. The 22% is there but only at 9:00 UTC, which is 4:00am on the east coast Continue reading Linux on the desktop: growing, but not by as much as some claim
I am evaluating Microsoft s MAUI (Multi-platform app UI) for use on a cross-platform project. I mainly develop on a Mac with Visual Studio Code. Setup for MAUI development is well explained here though getting everything in place for Mac Catalyst, iOS and Android is tedious. There is a tricky issue related to Apple s Xcode, needed Continue reading First steps with MAUI: some friction
One thing Microsoft is generally good about is keeping old applications running. Applications built with Visual Basic 6.0 (first released in 1998) still run well (in most cases) on the latest Windows. I maintain an application which is not quite that old, but which was built with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0. It Continue reading Running Visual Studio 2008 in Windows 11
Although I make mistakes when I write, it is an activity that comes easily to me. Sometimes it is difficult: finding the best title, opening paragraph, closing paragraph, how to express a thought with the right nuance; all these things can be hard. If I know what I want to say though, the words come Continue reading Can AI write as capably as humans?
Vercel has previewed Scriptc on GitHub, a native compiler for TypeScript which is open source under the Apache 2 license. Scriptc takes TypeScript code as input and outputs a native code executable, along with an embedded JavaScript engine if needed, using the existing QuickJS ng project. The JavaScript engine is needed if there is code Continue reading Vercel s Scriptc is a TypeScript to native…
Signing applications is a requirement for deploying a desktop or mobile application and can be fiddly. Microsoft s Azure Artifact Signing always looked to me like a good solution in that the pricing is reasonable at $9.99 per month for up to 5,000 signings, and it is run by Microsoft so one would think that the Continue reading Getting started with Azure Artifact Signing
Last week Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K3, with the promise that the full model weights will be released by July 26 2026; while Alibaba said on X that Qwen 3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon . These are capable LLMs (large language models), and the open weights promise means that developers will be able to Continue reading Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8: is AI becoming a commodity?
Microsoft has released preview 6 of .NET 11, for which release is expected in November, including a big change to MAUI (Multi-platform App UI): it now runs only on .NET Core, rather than the Mono runtime. Principal product manager David Ortinau reports that your app builds and runs on CoreCLR, the same runtime behind ASP.NET Continue reading No Mono in Microsoft s cross-platform MAUI framework on…
One of the oddities of Microsoft s Visual Studio Code is that it is free to use for almost anything other than the company s own .NET platform. That is, there is nothing to stop developers from coding in C# with VS Code and using the .net command-line tools without paying Microsoft for a license; but the Continue reading JetBrains Resharper for Visual Studio Code adds C# debugging support
Following a power outage, all my Windows servers (hosted on a single Hyper-V server) rebooted. They are configured to come back up, but I found that Remote Desktop was not working to many of them, including the domain controller. I found a workaround using the Hyper-V manager on one server to which I could connect; Continue reading Notes from the field: when Remote Desktop cannot connect