Microsoft in the News
Remember Windows Phone? Yeah, me neither. Other than the fact that it existed at some point in the past, very few people can tell you much about it. Which is why it went the way of the Dodo.
Bill Gates is quoted as saying that success is a terrible teacher. Which implies that failure can be a great teacher. It looks like Microsoft may be taking the lessons from the failure of Windows Phone and making another run at this sector.
In what looks to be an accidental disclosure, Cortana support of Microsoft Asia Research Institute mentioned a “Surface Phone”. While answering a complaint about poor integration of Cortana on Android, a Microsoft Engineer said he was looking forward to the perfect performance of Cortana on Surface Phone. The answer was later edited to add “but we do not know there will be a Surface Phone”.
Rumors have been swirling about the possible release of Andromeda (the Surface Phone) later in 2018. If it follows the Surface and Surface Book, we can expect some great design elements, premium finish, some high-end specs, and a price in the iPhone range.
You probably won’t hear about it here first, but I’m just curious enough that you may get a review when it is released.
Microsoft Visual Studio Update
Before everyone’s frustration levels rise, like that of my client, I thought I’d let people know of an update that is available for Visual Studio.
My client has been running into an odd feature of V.17.3 where, when they deploy a single RDL from Visual Studios under SSDT 17.3, the entire project is deployed instead. As you can imagine, their blood pressure starts to rise when you have double checked your work, but the entire project keeps getting deployed. Finding out this is a “feature”, not a miss step in the deploy and that there is a simple solution, was good for their health, and I thought others would likewise benefit.
SSDT 17.4 for Visual Studio 2015 was released on December 22 and addresses this feature.
As always, when updating software, be aware of backwards compatibility and ensure the necessary backups are in place before installing.
