News For Dev-ops

Suppose you are using a Win32 ListView control in report mode, and you've got all your columns set up perfectly, and you don't want the user to resize them. How do you do that? There is no ListView style for preventing column resize, but there is a header control style to prevent sizing: HDS_NOSIZING . This style requires Common Controls version 6, but I'm sure you're all using that version already, right? auto hdr = ListView_GetHeader(hwndLV); SetWindowLong(hdr, GWL_STYLE, GetWindowLong(hdr, GWL_STYLE) | HDS_NOSIZING); Whether the columns can be resized is independent of whether the columns can be rearranged, which you specify by setting the LVS_ EX_ HEADER­DRAG­DROP ListView extended style. ListView_SetExtendedListViewStyleEx(hwndLV, LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP, LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP); Okay, but what if you're stuck in the dark ages with version 5 of the Common Controls? We'...

Back in the day, if you wandered into the parking area behind Building 11 on the original Redmond Microsoft campus, you would find a very large satellite dish antenna. This antenna was used for receiving video signals, such as cable television feeds for distribution to the Redmond campus. One purpose was to provide cable TV service for internal development and testing to teams like the Windows Media Center team and later the Xbox One team. The satellite dish antenna was a Simulsat-5 which was capable of gathering signals from 35 satellites simultaneously. (The record during this particular antenna's lifetime was 26 simultaneous satellites.) It was a stationary antenna, not capable of changing its orientation. It went into service in 1997, was upgraded a few times, until it was finally decommissioned in 2017 when all of its tasks had been subsumed by a satellite dish antenna at the Studio C building. Fun trivial about the satellite dish antenna: In the summer, bees would nest in ...

Series: Building Serverless Applications with Azure Functions and Azure Cosmos DB In the first post of this series , we focused on establishing the fundamentals of serverless architecture by building and deploying a simple HTTP API using Azure Functions and FastAPI. The post centred on serverless compute, showing how Azure Functions handles execution, scaling, and infrastructure management while FastAPI provides a modern, developer-friendly API framework. In this post, we extend that foundation by introducing serverless data. You’ll build a Python-based CRUD inventory API and persist data using Azure Cosmos DB Serverless, learning how to securely connect to a NoSQL database, model and validate data, and structure clean CRUD operations while keeping the application fully serverless. By the end of this post, you’ll understand how serverless compute and serverless data work together to form the core of a production-ready serverless application. Posts in this series Part 1: Building You...

If you use editor productivity extensions for Visual Studio 2026, there's good news—they can now load faster! Extension developers with existing MEF-based editor productivity extensions should read this blog to learn about recent changes and how they might be affected.   We introduced  VisualStudio.Extensibility  to simplify the creation of Visual Studio extensions for developers. Previously, handling  threads  in VSSDK-based extensions was often difficult, requiring knowledge of thread affinity and even the ins and outs of COM just to avoid freezing Visual Studio. The new extensibility model abstracts these technical details away seamlessly.   Despite this advancement, we recognize most Visual Studio extensions still use VSSDK, so we're striving to make targeted improvements there as well - especially regarding performance. For Visual Studio 2026, we've added the ability to load MEF-ba...

AWS Multi-Party Approval now requires approvers to verify their voting actions with a one-time password (OTP) sent to their registered AWS Identity Center email address. This additional security layer prevents AWS IAM Identity Center administrators from bypassing multi-party approval controls by impersonating approvers through credential resets or authentication endpoint modifications. When approvers access the Approval Portal and attempt to cast their vote on protected operations, the system generates a six-digit verification code and sends it to their email. Approvers enter this code within 10 minutes to complete their vote, with up to three attempts allowed. The OTP verification process activates only when approvers submit their vote decision, they can review all approval request details before verification is required. If approvers don't receive the email or the code expires, they can request a new code through the interface. AWS Multi-party approval with OTP verification f...

AWS Network Firewall now supports flexible cost allocation through AWS Transit Gateway native attachments in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions , enabling you to automatically distribute data processing costs across different AWS accounts. Customers can create metering policies to apply data processing charges based on their organization's chargeback requirements instead of consolidating all expenses in the firewall owner account. This capability helps security and network teams better manage centralized firewall costs by distributing charges to application teams based on actual usage. Organizations can now maintain centralized security controls while automatically allocating inspection costs to the appropriate business units or application owners, eliminating the need for custom cost management solutions. Flexible cost allocation is available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions. You can enable these features using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line ...