Didn't Bill Gates "kill the command line" in a infamous video when Windows 95 came out?
Sure but they released PowerShell in 2006, a few years after he stepped down as CEO.
Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
171–180 of 223 posts
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#172Is it me or is Microsoft degrading user experience on Windows 10 with constant system breaking updates? It feels that most of them do nothing but slow the system down or change things for the sake of change (some project managers want to show they do something?). It feels like Microsoft is trying to "convince" users to switch to Windows 11 by making Windows 10 bad. At the same time Win 10 computers without this UEFI…
once you've paid for win10, you as a user is no longer a revenue but a cost. And you can obviously guess what happens to costs.
But why bother to change UI at all
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
This attitude seems a little silly to me—being "extra vigilant, pedantic and strict" about happy-path code would necessarily imply the same about "exception and error paths". Generally speaking, bugs mostly appear in a binary fashion and not in varying degrees—ie your code either reflect expected behavior or doesn't.
As a game developer, I definitely distinguish high-risk and low-risk parts of the code base. There's code that can be allowed to fail, and furthermore, it will eventually fail due to the sheer amount of this code, the development time constraints, the number of possible game states, etc. I don't care that this code rarely fails under some arcane conditions, because this simply causes some button to stop working, some…
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Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#174Can Microsoft just bring back a proper QA department instead of leaving it to unpaid "Insiders" who drink the Flavor-Aid and think Microsoft can't code a single thing wrong?
Based on the feedback community I don't think that's a particularly accurate take of Insiders as a whole.
That said it's been ~10 years now since they dumped the traditional QA department (which involved more than just leveraging external user validation) and I honestly can't say Windows is blowing up any more than it was the previous 10 years to that. I'd really like to see some actual measured statistics of e.g. patch issue outages at a health system over the last 20 years though.
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#175When installing the update, some users are finding themselves faced with an 0x80070643 error, a generic failure message. Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, "because of an error in the error code handling routine," this might not be the correct error. Error in the error code code is giving the wrong error code for the error. I'm curious how often the error code code needs touching that there is an error in there t…
About a year ago I had a bug assigned that ultimately turned out to be caused by an exception in the logging code that only occurred in the specific case of logging an exception being thrown by the exception handling code. This was internal tooling so I made sure to have some fun with the changeling entry—making it as confusing to parse as possible.
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#176As former windows Dev, I remember getting supper frustrated with their Windows upgrade. You could no longer reliably write to your install folder. They started forcing you to write to the registry, then to data folder, then other places. So you had to split up the install "ten ways" how and where you kept your data. HKEY local machine, HKEY_Current_User, and so on .. then ask for elevation to install.
I vaguely remember debugging a bug where I would delete a file in my install folder. But then found out windows was restoring an older version of it in the background. c:\program files was virtualized, and not really a directory anymore.
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#177When installing the update, some users are finding themselves faced with an 0x80070643 error, a generic failure message. Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, "because of an error in the error code handling routine," this might not be the correct error. Error in the error code code is giving the wrong error code for the error. I'm curious how often the error code code needs touching that there is an error in there t…
My favorite was "Something Happened" (smaller text) "Something Happened"
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Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#178i remember reading years ago about the reason windows updates since 8 or 10 were so bad was because MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud. I guess nothing has changed, still. cost cutting at its best.
>MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud Do you have any sources for this? AFAIK, according to the LTT wan show when he was duiscussing his conversation with MS baout Windows sleep issues, he laerned MS still uses plenty of bare metal HW for testing, especailly notebooks and in no way got rid of it.
No, i just remember a comment from some former MS dev who knew something about the testing process in MS. I think it might have even been a comment in here actually.
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strange. I've been on Linux some 28 years now, and it used to be like that¹. But today? I haven't had a kernel or graphics driver update failing on me for years. Maybe 10+ years? Granted, my Linux is the most boring, hardly-configged Unbuntu LTS. Boring hardware. Boring drivers. Everything optimized to "Just Work" - My machine pays my bills and if I'm down for a day because I fiddled around with some fancy custom tra…
What hardware? Your experience with Linux can be very different depending on that. For example, my laptop's WiFi refuses to work properly on Linux, so I'm forced to use Windows. Edit: oh, and not to mention graphics (Nvidia), multiple monitors and HiDPI, especially with fractional scaling and different multiples per display. HiDPI on Linux doesn't work nearly as well as Windows and macOS.
If you know you're going to use Linux before buying a machine, you can generally save yourself all the trouble by simply avoiding broadcom and nvidia. Those two have been the source of the most trouble for years.
Intel for graphics and wifi is generally the safest choice. I pick laptops with those and have great success.
Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how I imagine the error code looks. How else can you even return the wrong error? ```c# public class FooError { public Message(){ //TODO: I copy pasted this from somewhere else. I still need to update to a meaningful message return "this is a BarError" } } ```
The code which outputs the error message is probably getting it from GetLastError() or similar (the Windows equivalent to POSIX's errno). But meanwhile, some error handling code has called some library functions (probably to restore the system to a sane state), and one of these library functions accidentally overwrote the global per-thread "last error" variable. That is, the error in the error handling routine would…
I remember one bit of customer code where I needed to pass a BSTR string into a function. I constructed it using CComBSTR without considering that the destructor calls SetLastError. I could see the call failing but the only information I got back was ERROR_SUCCESS.