During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was one of the lucky ones who was able to keep my job and work from home. At least, so far... It's one of the benefits of working in computer programming: you can often work from anywhere, so long as you have a functioning VPN. One of my tasks over the quarantine period was to try to configure an application to support automatic updates. These applications are UWP apps built for a Windows IoT installation on a Raspberry Pi (RPi). It's an internal application that is still in a Beta stage, so it's not suitable to release over the Microsoft Store (at least, not yet). We had been manually updating the handful of devices in the field for the past two years, and as the number of deployed devices has grown, having to send someone out to manually update them was becoming a pain. Even moreso in this new era of social distancing.
Many Windows apps can be built in Visual Studio to support automatic updates.
Windows IoT has not been the best of environments to work in. It lacks a lot of functionality built-in to other Windows environments, and documentation for it is spotty, at best. Back in 2018 (shortly after we had started deploying the apps in the field), Microsoft released an update for Windows and Visual Studio that allows UWP apps to be built such that they automatically periodically check a specified server location for new updates. Awesome! It sounded like there would be a simple solution!
Be sure to update the version number.
I built the app with auto-updates enabled for every hour, deployed it to my test RPi over the Windows Device Manager, and deployed the update package and .appinstaller file onto our test server.
Then I waited.
Select an appropriate frequency to check for updates. I set it to check every hour while testing.
And nothing happened.
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Tags:Windows, Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, Universal Windows Platform, MS App Installer, .appinstaller, Visual Studio, programming, C#, COVID-19, social distancing, work-from-home
The company that I work for is switching over to using a new set of software for our products. Because of this, several members of our development staff were required to travel to our development studio in Manchester, United Kingdom in order to be trained on the new software.
Downtown Manchester, January 30, 2015.
As one of the senior developers in my office, I was asked to be one of the representatives of our studio for this training, and I had the good fortune of being able to go on my very first trip abroad. It wasn't technically my first visit to a foreign country, as I've visited Canada several times. Nor was it my first trip over an ocean, since I've visited Hawai'i. But the trip to Canada was many years ago; before a passport was even needed to cross the border, so it didn't feel like as big of a deal.
The training element was a bit underwhelming. The training schedule coincided with a major release deadline, so the engineer who was supposed to be providing the training and answering our questions had limited availability due to some last minute crises that he had to handle. So instead, we had a room full of people from different development studios in different countries all trying to bumble our way through the new software together.
But we did still learn some things, and even taught the lead engineer a thing or two!
A piece of advice to tech companies: don't schedule training sessions to begin a couple days before a major software release deadline - especially if you are flying developers in from halfway around the world to participate.
A British perspective on the World Wars
It wasn't all work though. I did try to do some touristy things.
I arrived in Manchester early Sunday morning after a red-eye flight from Philadelphia. After checking into the hotel to drop off my luggage, I took the cable car trolley back into the city and visited the Imperial War Museum (North). The main museum is in London (which I did not get to visit, other than a lay-over on the return trip), but there is a small branch of the museum in Manchester as well.
A tank displayed outside the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, U.K.
One of the interesting things about this museum (compared to most history museums in the States) is the emphasis on the domestic impacts of war. Several exhibits were dedicated exclusively to the effects that the world wars had on the general populace [More]
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Tags:Manchester, United Kingdom, England, business, software, training, Imperial War Museum, London, Heathrow, Indian food, India Palace, India Ocean, vindaloo, spicy, Guiness, beer, pub, Old Wellington, nightlife, public transit, Britain, passport
Last night's episode of The Colbert Report was a rare episode in which I actually watched the guest interview because (for once) the discussion was about a national economic issue that may have actually affected me directly. Last night's guest was Jeffry Leonard of The Washington Monthly, who recently wrote an article about the increasing amount of large corporations who are essentially stiffing thier small business partners when it comes time to pay the bill. Many large corporations are switching to the "net-60-plus" system of paying debts, in which they will pay off small companies that they hire in 60 or 120 days after the invoice is filed instead of the 30 days that has been standard since the beginning of time (that's an exaggeration - mostly).
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