Category: Microsoft

New Year’s Day 2026

Well, here we are, with another New Year’s Day post. I’ve been doing these posts since 2008 or thereabouts. It occurs to me now that I should create a category for these posts, so I can see them all together. So I just did that. The category is NYD, and I have added it to all (or most) of my previous New Year’s Day posts.

Health

2025 was a bit of a rough year. Honestly, it didn’t start well, and it didn’t end well. I started the year sick, and I ended the year sick. There were a good number of healthy days in between, of course, but right now I’m fighting a cold (or flu or whatever) that’s been on and off since Thanksgiving. And I had my second bout of COVID in 2025, in July. That was unpleasant.

Travel

I don’t think I left NJ at all in 2025. No trips to NYC or anywhere else. I didn’t even go too far within NJ. I finally closed my E-ZPass account and returned my tag last month. I hadn’t used it since 2019.

Weight

I started the year at 165 pounds, and ended it at 167. (It’s gone as high as 169, but hasn’t stayed that high for more than a day or two.) I’d hoped to keep it at 165, but I haven’t quite managed to do that. In 2024, I went from 160 to 165, and the year before that, from 150 to 160. So I’ve cut my yearly increase from 10, to 5, and to 2 pounds. So that’s progress!

Exercise

It’s kind of funny that Apple Fitness doesn’t have a fancy “year in review” function the way so many other apps/services do. Going into the Health app, and looking at some yearly graphs, here’s what I see:

  • I’m averaging around 500 move calories per day over the last year.
  • I’m getting an average of 7800 steps in per day.
  • I’m averaging 28 minutes per day of exercise.

I also just downloaded an app called Fitness Wrapped, which is supposed to generate a year-in-review, but it requires payment before showing me the 2025 summary. It looks interesting, but I don’t know if I want to pay for it.

Either way, I think I did fine on exercise in 2025. It seems to be down from 2024 (550 move calories and 45 minutes exercise per day), but it’s fine.

Work

We didn’t do performance reviews this year, but I did get a small raise. It was slightly bigger than 2024’s raise, but smaller than 2023’s, for what that’s worth.

In January 2025, I transitioned to a new boss. (My previous boss is now my boss’s boss, so he’s moved up a bit.) The new boss is someone I’ve worked with for years, and I think we have a good relationship. It can be hard to tell, when you don’t have a formal performance review or any other structured review, but I think I’m doing OK.

Learning

My 2024 performance review included a goal (from my previous boss) that I pursue a SAFe Certification. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but I figured I should give it a try, so I did a bunch of e-learning around it, including a long series of videos on O’Reilly Learning. The cert exam is pretty expensive, and I never got an OK to go through with it, so I dropped it at some point and concentrated on other stuff.

I also mentioned in interest in pursuing an AZ-204 certification in my New Year’s post for 2025. I did actually go through with that one, and two other Microsoft certs. I passed the AZ-900 in April, the AZ-204 in June, and the GH-300 in December. So I’m a bit proud of getting all of that done.

This year, I’ll need to renew the AZ-204, if I want to keep my “Azure Developer Associate” status. I have until June to do that. And the renewal test is simpler than the initial one; you can do it without all of the Pearson OnVUE nonsense. So I’ll probably do that.

Books

Now onto some fun stuff. My Goodreads 2025 reading challenge shows me as having read 60 books. I think it was actually more like 50; the challenge picks up stuff from my Kindle that it probably shouldn’t, but I’m not going to try to clean that up.

I finished reading A Memory of Light in January, so that finished up the Wheel of Time series that had taken up so much of my time in 2024. I didn’t take on a similar project in 2025; I just read a bunch of random stuff, really.

  • I read a few Robert A. Heinlein novels that I thought I hadn’t read before, but which I discovered that I had read, probably in my teens. So that was interesting.
  • I was going to read a few Kurt Vonnegut books, but I see I only read one, Breakfast of Champions. Maybe I’ll get to a few more this year.
  • I managed to finish The Stand, by Stephen King, which I’d started in 2019, and then abandoned. That’s a very long book, and took a good chunk of time to get through.
  • I got on a Star Trek kick near the end of the year, and finished the Rise of the Federation series. I also started the Prey series. I’m almost done with that. (I was going to try to finish off the last book yesterday, but didn’t quite make it.)
  • I didn’t do a lot of self-help reading this year. I did finally manage to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, but that’s about it.
  • And I didn’t do much book reading for professional purposes. I read one random book on AI, and started another. I’ll probably mark that second one as “abandoned” on Goodreads and give up on it. I wasn’t getting much out of it. At this point, I guess I’m mostly doing all of my professional learning in video form, via O’Reilly and Pluralsight.
  • My comic book reading this year was pretty random. I read through a few volumes of Greg Rucka’s Lazarus series. I’m enjoying that, and should get back to it soon. I read all three volumes of Ed Brubaker’s Velvet series. I really enjoyed those too.

For next year, I’d like to maybe make some progress on my backlog of Dresden Files novels, Laundry Files novels, or maybe Discworld. (I said the same thing in last year’s post, and didn’t do any of that. So maybe in 2026.)

Summary

2025 felt like a “let’s just get through this” kind of year. I don’t blog about politics much, but… geez. And my health has been up and down. I’m hoping 2026 will be better, on several fronts, but I’m not sure it will. I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it though. I’ll end with links to a couple of funny New Year’s Day comic strips: Over the Hedge and Lio.

GitHub Copilot GH-300 exam

I took and passed the GitHub Copilot GH-300 exam last week. That’s the third Microsoft exam I’ve passed this year! (The others were AZ-900 and AZ-204.) This exam was pretty easy. I did these two learning paths from Microsoft:

…and that was it, really. I worked through some of the example projects. And I made a point of trying to use GitHub Copilot for some stuff at work over the last couple of months.

Overall, I’m not that impressed with GitHub Copilot. It’s cool when it works, but when it gets confused, or gives me bad info, then I feel like I’ve wasted my time. Generally, for most stuff, I’ve found that searching Stack Overflow gets me better results than asking Copilot.

I haven’t found a single case yet where trying to get agent mode to do something even mildly complicated produces good results. I have, of course, already hit the issue where agent mode insists that it’s doing something, when in fact it is not doing anything. That’s frustrating. And once it’s gone down that path, you really can’t convince it that it’s lying/hallucinating/whatever.

Maybe I just haven’t learned all the ins and outs of prompting it yet. I’ll keep trying. I’m still not quite “drinking the Kool-Aid” on all of this AI stuff. There’s a lot of overblown hype out there. I do think there’s some usefulness to it, but it’s not as powerful as some people think it is.

Fun With Windows Sandbox

I managed to solve a problem using Windows Sandbox a while back, and I thought I should blog about it.

The basic problem was this: I needed to run a PowerShell script that relied on a specific combination of old modules. It had to be run in the old Windows PowerShell, not PowerShell 7. I had originally hoped that I could find some way to set up a PowerShell sandbox of sorts, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to do that. So then I started looking into Windows Sandbox.

We start with a .wsb file that defines the sandbox. Mine looks like this:

<Configuration>
  <Networking>Enable</Networking>
  <MappedFolders>
    <MappedFolder>
      <HostFolder>\\my-pc\c$\dev\Projects\myproject</HostFolder>
      <SandboxFolder>C:\myproject</SandboxFolder>
      <ReadOnly>false</ReadOnly>
    </MappedFolder>
  </MappedFolders>
  <LogonCommand>
    <Command>c:\myproject\myfolder\sb-start.cmd</Command>
  </LogonCommand>
</Configuration>

This maps \\my-pc\c$\dev\Projects\myproject from my dev VM to C:\myproject in the sandbox.
And it runs c:\myproject\myfolder\sb-start.cmd once the sandbox starts.
I had a little trouble getting all of this right. I really wanted to have the logon command set up the PowerShell environment fully, and maybe even run my script, but that didn’t work.
So the startup command file just has this:

cd C:\myproject\myfolder
explorer.exe .
powershell.exe -executionpolicy unrestricted -command "start powershell {-noexit}"

So it starts Explorer and PowerShell, pointing at my work folder. Good enough.
Then, I manually run a script I call sandbox-setup.ps1, which looks a bit like this:

Write-Warning "This script installs the modules needed for the weird old script." -WarningAction Inquire
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Force
Install-PackageProvider -Name NuGet -Force
Set-PSRepository PSGallery -InstallationPolicy Trusted
Install-Module -Name WeirdModule -AllowClobber -Scope CurrentUser
Install-Module -Name Az.Accounts -RequiredVersion 2.9.1
Install-Module -Name Az.KeyVault -RequiredVersion 4.6.1

And then I can run the actual script. It produces a .CSV file, which is written to the mapped drive, so I can shut down the sandbox after running the script.

On the one hand, this feels like a kludgey way of doing this. On the other hand, it’s the simplest way I could think of. For more info on running PowerShell scripts in Windows Sandbox, see here.

Frustration

I have a bunch of stuff on my mind, and a few topics for blog posts I want to write. But I’m going to start with a little decompression about my work week. (I should first say that I need to be careful about this, since our policy on blogging about work has been tightened up recently. But none of this will come anywhere near to violating it, I think.)

We’re working on an upgrade to our AX environment right now, and we started some testing in a new test environment this sprint. This includes (for me) getting some web services working on the new test server, and getting them to point at the new AX test env. So a lot of my time this week has been spent whacking away at web services with a hammer, trying to get them to work. That’s always frustrating. It always seems like I need to try six different things until I finally hit on the one that actually fixes the issue. And I always feel like an idiot for not being able to get there faster.

I’ve been thinking about why this kind of work is frustrating, and I think a big part of it is having no clue how long it’s going to take, or how close you are to solving it. With certain kinds of work, you can break a problem down into parts, and work through them, so you know when you’re 10% done, or 30% done, or 80% done. But with this kind of troubleshooting, you don’t know if you’re going to need to try 5 things or 10 things or 20 things before you find the right thing. And you don’t always know if there’s one thing wrong, or two things, or ten things.

I won’t get into details on the actual issues I hit, but I will say that one of them was basically a new permutation of this issue I hit back in 2011, so it was fun to see that again! And another one was related to the topic of this post from 2020.

I’ve been using AI tools to help me with this work, and I’m not sure if they’re any more useful than just plain old internet searching. Sometimes it seems like they are; I can get a lot of seemingly-useful ideas from a chat with Copilot. But then the real answer comes from a simple search that leads to a Stack Overflow question/answer, or a GitHub issue. (For instance, one big problem I had this week was solved by reading through this GitHub issue from Microsoft’s WCF repo.)

My big project for this afternoon was working on a side-project for a little competition we’re having at work. (It’s one of those things where small project teams propose something, do a little work on it, then present it to the CIO. And then I guess the winning project actually gets green-lit.) That project is turning out to be a bit frustrating too. (It was supposed to be a nice break from the frustrating stuff!) First, I needed to get myself set up under our corporate developer account with one of the big package carriers, which we only managed to get done yesterday. And I’m still not completely set up, to where I can do what I actually need to do. But I can start testing, so I started work on that.

The project involves using the carrier’s webhook API for package tracking. My idea was to start out with a simple Azure function that I could point the webhook at. Then, to start, I’d just log the info I got from the carrier. The next step would be to hook that Azure function up to some kind of queue in Azure. Then, after that, writing another Azure function that would pick stuff out of the queue and send out notification emails. Basically, I was going to put my AZ-204 skills to work on a real project! (Well, not entirely real, but a POC at least.)

It took me the whole afternoon to get a simple Azure Function set up. I started out trying to use Copilot chat with GPT-5, which they rolled out yesterday, to help me out. That looked really impressive, showing me status info about what it was doing, and generating a lot of text with pretty specific instructions. But it seemed to be giving me quantity over quality. I turned GPT-5 off, and then managed to get a lot farther.

My initial idea was to just enter the C# code for the function directly in the Azure portal, but I set it up in isolated mode, which apparently doesn’t let you edit code directly in the portal. So then I tried using Visual Studio Code, which is supposed to be an easy way to quickly develop and deploy Azure Functions. That led me down a path of installing a bunch of stuff locally. I was initially doing this on my laptop, so I had to install .NET SDK 8, plus a bunch of VS Code extensions. At some point, I got nervous about how much stuff I was installing on my laptop, and switched over to my regular dev VM, which is where I’m supposed to do development. So then I had to install all that stuff there too, since I’d never installed the .NET 8 SDK there, or set up VS Code for Azure dev. So I probably killed an hour just getting my environment set up.

And then, once I had everything set up, I started hitting a bunch of weird little snags with editing, compiling, and running the function. I eventually gave up, and with some help from Copilot, set up the simplest Azure Function project I could, entirely from the command line, then got it running and uploaded to Azure. So that probably took another hour, and the end result was just something that would print “Welcome to Azure Functions!” when you hit the URL for the function.

After that, I got the thing working in VS Code, and managed to change the function from a GET to a POST function. And I thought I had gotten far enough with it that I could hit it from the carrier’s test page, but all I can get back from that is an error, with no details giving me any clue what’s wrong. And that’s pretty much where I ended my week.

I don’t really drink anymore, but I think I kinda want a beer right now. Or maybe just a bowl of ice cream.

my new (working) HP Mini

The replacement for my DOA HP Mini PC arrived today. I originally ordered the PC on June 30, and had hoped to set it up over the July 4 weekend, but now I guess I’m setting it up this weekend. (It does, at least, boot up, so that’s good.)

I think there’s going to be some bureaucratic back and forth on it, in terms of the warranty and registration. My HP account now shows the old broken PC under my name, but not the new one. And the serial number on the new one is not recognized. I had the same problem with the serial # on the previous PC. I get the feeling that HP has some weird cobbled-together system, where the serial # on a new PC doesn’t show in their online systems until a few days (or weeks) after it has shipped. So I think I’ll let it sit, then come back and check again in a week or so.

I may also need to straighten out the three-year extended warranty that I bought with the PC. I never got an email acknowledgement about that, and I don’t know if it’ll automatically attach itself to the new PC, or what. So I’m going to give that a week or so too, then follow up.

Here are some random notes about the basic setup and features on it:

  • It works fine with the IOGear KVM that I bought for it.
  • It appears to have an internal speaker, so I don’t need to worry about hooking up external speakers yet. The internal speaker is obviously not very good, but it’s enough so that I can hear basic audio for now.
  • I bought an external DVD burner to use with it, but haven’t tried it out yet.
  • From the specs, I wasn’t sure if it had Bluetooth or not. It does. So I might pair my AirPods with it, at some point.
  • I also wasn’t sure if it had WiFi or not; it does. I’m planning on sticking with a wired connection, but it’s good to know I can use WiFi if I have to.
  • The initial setup wasn’t too bad. It’s been a while since I’ve set up a PC from scratch. It’s definitely smoother than it used to be. Windows pulled over most of my preferences, settings, and even some installed software from my old desktop. So there’s less stuff to configure and install than there used to be.
  • It came with something called HP Wolf Security, which is probably useless, but I guess I’ll leave it installed. I think it might be a subscription thing that expires after a year. I’ll worry about it then, I guess.
  • I’m starting with OneDrive set to download files on-demand, so my 400 GB worth of files are all still in the cloud and the 1 TB drive is mostly empty. I’ve been slowly getting more comfortable with relying on the cloud; I used to have my desktop PC set to keep all of my files local, so I could back them up. But I turned that setting off a while ago, and have been clicking the “free up space” option on some folders here and there, when I start to run low on disk space. So I guess now I’m just going to let that go entirely and trust the cloud. (Maybe I should shop around for some service that backs up OneDrive to somewhere else…)

Overall, I got a bunch of the basics done today, in the background, while I was working from home. I’ll try to get some of the harder stuff done tomorrow.

I’m not sure when I’m going to switch over and consider it my “main machine.” I guess the most critical piece of software I have now that isn’t largely cloud-based is Quicken. So there’s going to have to be a point where I stop using Quicken on my old PC and start using it on my new one.

And I also need to figure out what I’m going to do with my music library. I still have 100 GB worth of MP3 files on my old PC. It’s all basically synced up to Apple Music at this point, so I could just install Apple Music on the new PC and trust that my library is safe in Apple’s hands.

DOA new PC

The new PC I ordered earlier this week arrived yesterday. I was pretty enthusiastic about getting to spend the three-day weekend getting it all set up. (Yes, I know, I’m a nerd.) But, alas, it arrived DOA.

When I hooked it up, it emitted a series of beeps that, according to this article, means that the computer could not detect its CPU. (Which is of course very bad…) I initially tried to contact tech support, but the support page wouldn’t recognize my serial number. I tried figuring out if there was a different way to get through to support, but there really isn’t.

So I eventually gave up and called order support and arranged to return it. I’ve got that all arranged now, but of course everything is closed today, so I can’t drop it off until tomorrow. And they won’t ship the replacement PC out until they get the broken one back, so it’ll be another week, I’d guess, before I can try this again.

One of the reasons I decided to buy a new PC direct from HP is that a lot of the other options I looked at seemed a bit iffy. (Third party sellers on Amazon and eBay, mostly.) I thought I’d be less likely to get a dud if I bought direct from one of the big PC makers. And I thought support would be smoother too. Oh well.

So now I guess I’m mostly going to be watching Wimbledon this weekend. And maybe doing some reading. So that’s not so bad.

going down a mini PC rabbit hole

All the talk about the end of support for Windows 10 has got me looking at new PCs. My current PC is a Dell XPS 8900, bought from Costco in 2016.

I ruminated about this in a blog post from about a month ago, and I still haven’t quite decided what to do.

Part of me really doesn’t want to give up on my ten-year-old Dell. It still works! I replaced the hard drive with an SSD quite some time ago, so that’s not an issue. It’s got a CD/DVD drive, which I like. And I have no particular problems with Windows 10 that would be solved by upgrading to Windows 11.

I’ve gone back and forth with a lot of ideas:

  • Simple: replace my Windows 10 tower PC with a new Windows 11 tower PC.
  • Complex (and probably a bad idea): Keep using my current PC, but wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu on it. Move away from Windows, and become a “Linux person”.
  • Kicking the can down the road: Keep using my current PC, and keep using Windows 10. Pay for security updates from either MS or a third party.
  • Get a Mac Mini, and gradually transition to using that as my primary desktop PC. Eventually, wipe and recycle the Dell.
  • Get a new mini PC, running Windows 11. Move my stuff over to that. Wipe and recycle the Dell. Remain a “Windows person” but stop being a “tower PC” person.

So it’s that mini PC track I’ve been on this weekend. I’ve learned a few things. First: new PCs, even mini PCs, are often very expensive these days. I’m looking at stuff from Dell and HP, and it’s $2000 or $3000, if I want 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I don’t know if that’s tariffs or what.

So I’m looking at refurbished stuff. There seems to be a pretty big ecosystem around selling and buying refurbished Mini PCs. I guess they’re mostly units that were used by large companies, and were dumped at end of lease. And it seems like a lot of the ones being sold on Amazon and eBay are not just refurbished, but have also had the original parts (SSD and RAM) replaced. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that looks pretty good, on paper, but might be a little iffy, and it’s hard to compare one guy’s mini PC to another guy’s, even if they appear to be the same model. I guess I should just “spin the wheel” and pick one. For my purposes, anything with enough RAM and a 1 TB SSD should be fine.

Since my current PC and monitor are so old, I’m thinking a bit about the extra complications I’m going to have when I switch to a new PC.

  • My monitor has one DVI port and one old analog VGA port. Any new PC is going to have either DisplayPort or HDMI out, so I’m going to need a DP/HDMI to DVI cable.
  • These mini PCs generally only have headphone ports for audio output. Audio is yet another rabbit hole here. I think the default setup now is to route the audio through the HDMI output, with the video, then have a soundbar under your monitor. But of course that won’t work for me. I may need to buy USB speakers.
  • If I want to keep using a CD/DVD drive, I’m going to need to buy an external USB one.
  • I actually have two 1 TB drives in my current PC: the SSD that I use as the main boot drive, and the original hard drive, which I now use for File History backups. I also have a 2 TB external USB drive that I use for backups (via Bvckup Pro). I’ll keep using the 2TB external, but I’ll need to think about whether or not I want to set up a second external drive for the File History backups.
  • And, if I’m going to keep both PCs going for awhile, I might want to get a KVM, so I can switch between them. The “M” part of that gets a little complicated. Do I want to get a DVI KVM? Am I going to keep the old DVI monitor for long, or should I punt and just get a new HDMI monitor?

As usual, I’m really spinning my wheels on all this stuff. I’m also starting to consider that maybe my end-state will be a mini PC running Windows 11, and a Mac Mini, stacked on top of each other, both connected to a KVM.

passed the AZ-204 exam

I’ve posted a few times recently about my efforts to study for the AZ-204 exam. TL;DR: I passed the exam today!

I’d scheduled it for today, back in May, using a free voucher that expires on June 30. So I had to schedule it before then.  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be ready for it, so the plan was to take the test today, fail it, and then use the score report to figure out where my strengths and weaknesses were, then come back and take it again in a month or two, after doing some targeted studying.

But I managed to eke out a passing score: 707 (where 700 is passing). So, just barely, but good enough.

These tests always take a lot out of me. I’m not sure why. I’ve always been like this. I used to get physically sick before big tests, back in high school. I managed to figure out how not to do that, or I never would have made it through college. But even, oh… 40 years later, I still get stressed before a big test. These days, of course, I don’t need to take very many tests.

I’m not really sure where I’m going to go next, in terms of learning and certifications. I was really assuming I’d need to keep working on the AZ-204 material for the next couple of months. Maybe I’ll just take a break and watch a lot of TV and read a lot of comics over the summer. Then get serious again in September!

rough weekend

I’m supposed to be taking the AZ-204 test next Friday, so I had planned to do some studying this weekend. I had Friday off (for Juneteenth), and no other specific plans, so I figured I could do a bit of studying and maybe catch up with the Cloud Academy videos I’ve been watching.

Instead, I woke up with a cold on Thursday, and had to call in sick. I was pretty useless that day, not even having enough energy to read anything challenging, so I found myself reading The Flintstones at the New York World’s Fair, a comic published in 1964 or 65 to promote the NY World’s Fair. It was dumb, but a good thing to read when you barely have enough energy to stay awake.

I then read Keif Llama: Mindset, a self-published comic from Matt Howarth. That was a bit more of a challenge than the Flintstones comic, but was still a very light read. (Side note: I couldn’t find that in Goodreads, since it’s self-published, and since it doesn’t have an ISBN number, I couldn’t add it to Goodreads either. You used to be able to add pretty much anything to Goodreads, which is probably why that random Flintstones comic was in there, but not any more. This bothered me a lot, but I got over it, I guess. End side note.)

I felt a little better on Friday, and did manage to leave the apartment, albeit only to go to the optician a few doors down from my apartment and get the lenses in my glasses replaced. (They got scratched up after my fall on June 1.) Just replacing the lenses (no new frames) cost me $900. So, yeah, I’ve got bad eyesight.

I felt, again, a bit better on Saturday, but still not enough for anything challenging. So, again, I mostly just watched TV and read comics.

Today, I felt a lot better, and even got out for a 25 minute walk this morning. I got through one module in the Cloud Academy series I’m working on, and did the compatibility test on my laptop for the exam, so I can say I did at least a little prep work. But I’m nowhere near ready for the exam, to be honest.

I finished reading Maggie the Mechanic on Friday, read Project Superpowers on Saturday, and then Legenderry today, so I got through some pretty weird and random comics this weekend. So that’s something. And I binge watched Dept. Q and AARO on Netflix, so I got through some pretty weird and random TV too.

I feel a little bad about not getting much useful work done, but I know my own limitations. When I’m sick, I can push myself if I really need to, but then I have to pay for it later. Better to take it easy for a few days, then start the next week fresh.

I guess I’m ready to start a regular work week tomorrow. I hope I can hold myself together. It’s going to be very hot, and I’m not really equipped for 100° weather. I may need to look into rescheduling my exam. I’m pretty sure I need to do that at least 24 hours before the scheduled time, so I should decide on that by Wednesday night. The main reason I scheduled it for June 27 is that the voucher I had expires at the end of June. I’m pretty sure that the voucher expiration date doesn’t prevent me from rescheduling the exam for July. I don’t know. I might just take the exam for the experience, and consider it a kind of “live fire” practice run.

mixed feelings about Microsoft

I’ve been having a lot of mixed feelings about Microsoft lately, and I feel like I need to blog about this, so I can get some stuff straight in my head.

Overall, my feelings about Microsoft have gone back and forth, over the years. At one point, I thought of Bill Gates as being pretty darn evil. After his retirement, and his reinvention as a philanthropist, I softened up on him a bit. I never liked Steve Ballmer. And I liked Satya Nadella quite a lot, in the beginning, and even read his book, but I’m starting to have mixed feelings about him. So that’s the CEOs.

As for operating systems, I tolerated MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, and knew I had to learn and use them, but never much liked them. When Windows 95 came out, I was actually kind of excited about it, enrolled in the preview program, and installed it on my home machine, from floppy disks. My enthusiasm for later Windows versions has varied. I do mostly like Windows 10, which is what I’m running on my home desktop PC right now.

And as a programmer, I’ve also gone back and forth. I liked classic ASP when that was released. And I liked ASP.NET, and .NET in general, when that came out. I’ve been an enthusiastic .NET developer since 2002.

Microsoft Build was this week, and I (as usual) registered for the online component of the conference, and tried to watch some of the content. Honestly, I couldn’t find much of interest to me. They’re really pushing AI, and, while I’m not entirely against it, I’m also just not as enthusiastic about it as they’d probably want me to be.

Watching this week’s Windows Weekly reminded me of some of the issues I have with Microsoft right now. First, MS is having issues with employees protesting during events, mostly around Israel/Palestine, and I don’t think they’re handing that well. (And here’s something from Brian Eno about the issue.) Second, I don’t think the layoffs they did recently were necessary, or handled well. Third, they had Elon Musk on stage during the Build keynote. (I don’t think I need to say why that’s bad…) Overall, they’re doing what I guess I should expect a giant tech company to do, but, well, I was hoping for better.

So, where does that leave me? Well, I still need to use Microsoft products for work, and a big part of my job is supporting our relationship with Microsoft, so I still need to be invested in the ecosystem. I registered for the AZ-204 exam today, for the end of June. (I blogged about that recently here.) I still have a lot of studying to do, to prepare for that. So, in general, I’m still going to keep learning and trying to keep up with this stuff. I can’t give it up and switch to Linux.

On the home front, I’ve been thinking about what I should do about my ten-year old Windows 10 desktop PC. It’s still my main machine, and it still works fine. With Windows 10 reaching end of support in October, I need to do something, but I can’t decide what to do. I might decide to subscribe to a third-party update service for Windows 10. That’s probably a little risky, but might be my best choice.

I’ve also been playing around with the idea of switching the machine over to Linux. That’s probably a horrible idea, but I kind of want to do it. There’s a campaign going on to encourage switching from Win 10 to Linux, and that’s what put the idea into my head. I would really still need to run Windows, though, so I’d have to figure out if I could make do with using my Lenovo ThinkPad for all my Windows stuff, or if I could dual-boot the desktop machine, or run Windows in a VM, or something. Regardless, I would just be complicating things and making life harder for myself. (Which doesn’t usually stop me from doing something stupid, but…)

My other thought was getting a Mac Mini and trying to gradually move my home stuff off Windows and onto Mac. That’s a lot more doable. (I already have a MacBook and use it for a lot of stuff.)

Well, this post has been a mess, and I don’t think I’ve decided on anything. But maybe I’ve moved forward a bit with my thinking. I going to leave it there, and try not to worry about it too much right now.