Findings and thingies

... It’s a hard problem and I can see the upsides of Apple automating the clearing of truly abandoned apps from the App Store, but it seems like there ought to be a way for developers of not-updated-for-a-while apps and games to just log into Apple’s developer portal and hit a button to vouch that they still work and don’t need an update. ...

My guess is that this will become a huge topic in the next weeks because from a developer perspective it doesn't make sense to touch a perfectly fine running piece of software. On the other hand I can also understand why Apple is trying to "clean" the app store. The above quoted suggested compromise could be a good way to handle, in any case a better approach than the one Apple is currently pursuing.

The ALM Accelerator for Power Platform includes a canvas app that sits on top of Azure DevOps Pipelines and Git source control. The app provides a simplified interface for makers to regularly export the components in their Power Platform Solutions to source control and create deployment requests to have their work reviewed before deploying to target environments.

Very interesting to see that a platform that also targets citizen developers now gets more and more ALM tooling. My guess that professional developers were not happy with the given possibilities before. But I think that this is a good thing.

This year's Microsoft Ignite was only a virtual event as it was last year. There were so many announcements this year, even more than last year. But that's just my personal feeling.

To get a summary of all news announced at Ignite 2021 one can always look at the so called book of news provided by Microsoft.

Microsoft Ignite Book of News

It's a perfect episode among many great episodes. The high-concept risk paid off, and it still holds up a decade (!) later as dexterous writing and effortless comedy that allowed each actor to be in their element.

For me Community is definitely one of the best series I've ever watched. Especially the nice combination of empathy displayed combined with a nice (dark) sense of humour made it so special for me. I definitely agree with the author of the article that this episode is the best one of the series.

Azure Integration Services (AIS), comprising of Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus, Event Grid, and Data Factory, helps customers connect applications, data, and services, on-premises and in the cloud. Azure Integration Services helps businesses boost productivity and increase agility with highly secure automated workflows and create new revenue opportunities with an API driven partner and developer ecosystem.

Being an Azure Solutions Architect myself and especially interested in data flows between systems, I can totally see why Microsoft has been put into this quadrant. But what really amazes me is that AWS doesn't appear in this classification at all.

Of course, AWS does not have this deep integration with numerous services as is possible with Microsoft's connectors, e.g. M365. Nevertheless, I personally see that AWS is also strong in this segment (integration based on PaaS) and should therefore also be represented in this classification.

What are your thoughts on this? Please feel free to get in touch to share your thoughts.

I experience a lot of random errors on Azure. Code Functions will randomly fail to trigger until redeployed, builds pushed into Oryx will not always successfully complete. There isn’t the feeling of robustness with it that you get elsewhere.

I also see things described in this post from time to time. Especially random error messages and inconsistent behaviour is something which really can drive you nuts.

Therefore, I agree with the conclusion the Microsoft should spent some time serious engineering on both security and availability.

"Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible," Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters in introducing the report.

Cheap devices come at a cost...

So to summarize, here are my key points from this talk, in a nutshell — please make these your key takeaways.

• Distributed teams are better than localized teams — not because they’re distributed, but because they’re asynchronous.
• Avoid anything that makes a distributed team run synchronously.
• Use less chat.
• Have fewer meetings.
• Write. Things. Down.

This post is such a good summary on how and why one should embrace and extend working asynchronously.

As you’ve come to expect, this Book of News is your resource for all the announcements we’re making at Microsoft Build. Here you will find details about enhancements and integrations spanning the entire Microsoft developer platform across Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, Windows and Microsoft 365. We want to make it easier than ever for developers to go from idea, to code, to cloud—and we want to empower all developers to do more.

If you didn't had the time to attend all or even any session of Microsoft Build 2021 then the book of news is the resource to get all the news from this event and announcements made by Microsoft.

Whilst some people employ lightweight modelling techniques such as C4, most diagrams in use today, are what I call, somewhat derogatorily, masala diagrams. No hard feelings, I call my own diagrams like this. Why masala? Because they are informal; they cover multiple dimensions at once, they may be both structural and behavioural, logical and physical. They are often a mishmash of the 4+1 architectural model’s views.

I must admit that I never liked UML for describing systems architecture. I can't name any special reason for this. However, I really like the term masala diagrams for diagrams illustrated in the linked article. From my point of view these kinds of diagrams feed the needs of the separate roles in a business context. And somehow everybody looking at these kind of diagrams gets a grasp of how the system is architected and what its intension is.

Even though I still see why UML has been appealing in the first place to describe business models.