Happy Friday and, more importantly, welcome to May and what I hope will be the beginning of the end of this ongoing terribleness. Here’s a bunch of interesting questions to kick off the weekend.

NBA + Mixer

Chris_Kez asks:

Crazy idea here, but is there any chance that Microsoft and the NBA use Mixer in some capacity as part of their new partnership? I’m not suggesting that Mixer replaces ESPN, TNT or NBA.com, but perhaps they could use it to deliver secondary content, or as part of a second screen experience, or as a way to add an interactive layer to some aspect of the NBA’s digital experience? The ink isn’t even dry on the deal, but maybe this is something to keep an ear out for over the next 12-18 months as they start laying out a roadmap.

What you’re suggesting sounds very familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it: The notion of a live video feed with a chat pane or whatever on the side connected to some kind of online service. I feel like someone did try something like this a while back. But certainly this would be much easier/more viable today. (Maybe someone remembers what I’m not remembering here.)

I agree something like this could make sense. But all I can do is speculate, I’ve never heard about plans for such a thing.

Basketball

sabertooth920 asks:

Are the 1986 Celtics the greatest basketball team you ever saw?

Yes.

But I grew up in Boston, and we shared season’s tickets with several other people. And I do watch a lot of old NBA footage. And the 1980’s Lakers, the early 1980’s 76ers, the late 80’s/early 90’s Pistons, and 1990’s Bulls were all amazing teams. Today’s NBA is just not the same.

On a related note, eeisner asks:

Let’s skip tech – Have you watched any of the Michael Jordan doc on ESPN? Thoughts?

Not yet, but I absolutely will. I’ve watched a ton of Jordan-era Bulls videos on YouTube recently, including a few related to the ESPN series. I am looking forward to it.

Solitaire woes

Simard57 asks:

I installed a cumulative update this week (1909) and when I try to play Microsoft Solitaire, it reports an error (1770000) signing in and forces I can only play as a guest . it works from my phone and it works from my ipad. I opened the xbox console and it also will not let me sign in. I downloaded the repair tool (msert) and let it do a complete scan which took 4+ hours but did not fix it. I uninstalled Solitaire and reinstalled from the store without a fix… do you have other ideas what to try?

The only app-specific repair tool I’m aware of is the Reset capability in Windows 10 Settings: Open Settings and navigate to Apps > Apps & features and find the app in the list; then, choose Advanced options and then Reset. I’m guessing this isn’t going to work for you, however, since this seems like a sign-in (Microsoft account) issue. But I can’t imagine why installing a CU like 1909 would trigger this error.  (I’m on 2004 and it works fine, but I realize that doesn’t help at all.)

COD + Xbox

madthinus asks:

Lets forget who you are and what you do for a living. As a gamer, playing COD, is the Series X a have to buy in Paul’s book. Or do you think it will have little value on day one for yourself.

I prefer the Xbox ecosystem over PlayStation by a wide margin, but if Call of Duty is all you care about, you should be on PlayStation, not Xbox. This has made my life difficult, to be sure.

Looking at the Xbox Series X, COD will be a mixed bag. I suspect it will be the platform on which the new COD games look and run the best, but the downloadable content (DLC) will always be behind PS4/5. Going from the Xbox One S to Xbox One X definitely made a visual difference; COD:WWII looks(ed) much better on the latter. So maybe there will at least be that.

Coincidentally, I just picked up Modern Warfare 2 Remastered, which is finally available on Xbox. It’s only the campaign, but I forget how good COD campaigns could be. This game is still amazing.

But PS4 users had it a month ago.

WFH

BigM72 asks:

A lot of people, myself included, are feeling the cabin fever of being at home all day every day save for the odd walk or grocery shop. You wrote recently about your daily/weekly routine. If you had to reflect, did you also initially struggle then adapt or do you think there’s something in particular you do right to make working from home enjoyable long term?

My big insight about working from home—and, seriously this is from over 15 years ago—was that you need to let go of the normal office hours thing. You’re home. Take breaks. Do laundry. Go on errands. Break up your day. Take naps. And do all that without feeling guilty. Sure, you probably have certain things you need to be around for at specific times—meetings, whatever—but I feel like the home work schedule is more honest than when you go into a place and feel like you have to look busy all the time. You can stop faking it at home. But you have to accept it first.

Over a longer period of time, you’ll find a schedule and a way of working that works for you. My routine is my routine, and what I do for a living is a bit specific, but I’ve also changed it over time as needs/wants changed. And I’m sure working from home isn’t for everyone. Many will be happy to go back to an office. But I’ve been doing it for so long that I’m ruined for it. I could never go into an office every day now. I bet that will happen to a lot of people because of this pandemic too.

Print to digital

ingve asks:

You must read a lot of books and printed material when researching the Programming Windows series of articles, and you’re also a fan of digitizing physical media. Have you tried services where you send your books or other physical media to a scanning service and receive a PDF file in return? Seems like this could save a lot of shelf space, and with modern retina screens the books would still be very easy to read?

I prefer digital to physical media, but for the Programming Windows series specifically, I don’t have any reason to hang on to that stuff. Whenever we do move next, I won’t be packing all that up into boxes and taking it with me.

But I also found while working on the series that there is an incredible wealth of digitize books at the Internet Archive, and I actually borrowed several books from their digital library for the series, including a few on COM, as I recall.  (For example, here are the search results for Visual Basic.) I bet everything I needed is out there somewhere.

Grammarly

BeckoningEagle asks:

I went to the Grammarly site to evaluate it. I was surprised at the price. It is $14.95 per month / per user. Did I see that right?

Grammarly is free. The price you’re seeing is for Grammarly Premium, which provides additional features. I would consider paying for Premium, given how much I rely on it, but I also find their prices to be exceptionally high (that’s more money than Office 365 Home!), even when it’s on sale. And it’s always on sale.

I can understand the value of Grammarly, but an add-in to browsers and office which is more expensive than an Office 365 subscription is bit much. Since they sponsor TWIT, could you forward a message to Leo (so he in turns forwards it to Grammarly) that they should consider a family plan. The additional features in the non-free version would really help my kids at school. Also, other languages besides English would also drive up subscriptions.

I have communicated the cost issue to Grammarly. I can’t explain why it’s so expensive.

.NET and the future of desktop apps

brothernod asks:

I feel like back in the Vista days the clear vision from Microsoft was that the future of development was .NET and they even were contemplating writing core windows apps in their managed languages. I know that didn’t pan out, but .NET was still their go to suggestion if someone was going to build a Windows app from scratch. But I feel like that vision hasn’t been clear for years. UWP appears dead and not cleaned out, Microsoft seems to still be making their core apps in c++, and they’re using a bunch of different tech for other releases.

So after reading your NetPad series I was wondering, what’s Microsoft’s vision and direction for the best way to develop a Windows app now and the next 5 years? Is it c++ still, or .net core, or electron or Xamarin or React Native or UWP?

This is going to sound like a cop-out, but it’s all of that. After pushing UWP as the sole way forward for Windows client developers, Microsoft has finally acknowledged that that strategy has failed and racing to equally support all developers, no matter which frameworks or technologies they prefer. Today, you can build modern Windows client apps however you want, and with WinUI taking the user experience code out of UWP and making it available basically everywhere, they’ve eliminated another major pain point, where certain features required certain versions of Windows.

If I had to choose from what’s available and create a desktop productivity application today, I would choose Windows Presentation, .NET Core 3.1 (soon 5), and C#, and I would at evolving that to include WinUI 3.0 when it’s ready.

Would you consider building NetPad in your answered language?

I’m not sure where I’ll go next. I feel like Xamarin Forms deserves a look, but that’s not an ideal candidate for .NETpad. I like where Flutter is going, especially for web and maybe true desktop apps someday, and think a Material Design .NETpad for big-screen devices would be interesting. I would like to look at the web, perhaps React, React Native, or Electron.

But there’s only so much time, and this isn’t my primary focus. Short term, I’m going to look at shoring up the WPF version of .NETpad, since that’s my favorite version and the most feature-complete. I have some temporarily abandoned ideas for that related to scaling up the UI to make it more like the UWP version, and I’d like to make some more sophisticated XAML dialogs/panes (in particular for Find/Replace). After that, we’ll see.

Xbox Series X vs. Series S

PsychoSuperman asks:

This may be more of a Brad question, but I was wondering about the positioning of Xbox Lockhart as a companion console. Has there been any discussion about console streaming between the Series X and the potentially lower powered Lockhart? If the Lockhart can handle 1440p gaming natively, I wonder if it could stream full 4k/60fps/raytraced content from the Series X on a home network. That would allow high quality content in several rooms of your house with a lower price point. I guess I am wondering if Lockhart can slot in as a more robust Hobart streaming device that was cancelled a few years back.

That seems reasonable, and I do think that an Xbox Series S will happen, and that delivering consistent 1440p gaming is a good place for it to land. But I suppose any Xbox One could fill the role of a streaming endpoint from Xbox Series X. There probably isn’t a huge market for dedicated streaming device, but using a console you already may have in a multi-console household is a no-brainer.

Suspect we won’t hear much about a Series S until well after Series X hits the market and is, hopefully, successful enough to warrant such a thing.