Development for Windows *

Hi, Habr. Here I have prepared for you a small guide about NTFS Reparse points (hereinafter RP). This article is for those who are just starting to dive into the Windows kernel drivers development. In the beginning, I will explain the theory with examples, then I will give an interesting task to solve.

English translation of Philip Ranzim's post at his blog page here. (With author's permission)

Once upon a time, my girlfriend started using Instagram. She asked me to sign up for it and subscribe to it. I tried — I couldn't do it because you couldn't register at Instagram from a desktop computer. I then thought — how weird people are. Well, what kind of fool would make a software product that can't be used with a normal computer? They won't succeed, and this Instagram will be a marginal service for a bunch of strange women, who for some reason don't like desktops.

It has only been a few years, the market has put everything in place — and the biggest fool was me. And the geniuses at Instagram predicted how and where everything would develop. Today, most of the user applications are made primarily for mobile platforms. At best, they include a universal web client, which is still optimized for mobile phones. Because users love iPhones, not computers. Business people sat down, counted, and made a decision — let's make more money, let's have mobile First everywhere.

To exclude some folder from the defender list can be used cmdlet Set-MpPreference
Manly, now you can stop reading, go to the PowerShell and update excludes:)
But if you are want to see how to perform this in more detail — welcome under the habrcut.

UPD: Added a script to add selected folder to excluded Defender locations (at the end of the post)

We continue telling you about our cooperation with Innopolis University guys to develop Active Restore technology. It will allow users to start working as soon as possible after a failure. Today, we will talk about Native Windows applications, including details on their development and launch. Under the cut, you will find some information about our project, and a hands-on guide on developing native apps.

Hello, Habr! My name is Roman. Today I would like to share a story of how we at Innopolis University developed a test stand and a service for Acronis Active Restore system, which will soon become part of the company’s product range. Those interested to know how the University builds its relationship with industrial partners are welcome to click the «Read More» button.

Backing up valuable data is a proven practice, but what if we need to continue work immediately after a natural disaster or other disruptive events, and every minute is important? Our team at Acronis decided to see how quickly we can start an operating system. This is our first post from the Active Restore series. Today I will tell you how we launched our project with Innopolis University, which solutions were studied, and what we are working on today. All the details are under the Cut.

The new Windows Terminal version has been recently released. Everything would be fine, but performance of its scrollbar leaves a great deal to be desired. Time has come to poke it and have some mumbo jumbo dances with it.

Commercial and educational customers moving to the cloud with Microsoft 365 have long needed a simple, easy print experience for their employees. Today we are happy to announce a private preview of Universal Print, a Microsoft cloud-based print infrastructure that will enable a simple, rich and secure print experience for users and help reduce time and effort for IT.

We continue making the use of PVS-Studio more convenient. Our analyzer is now available in Chocolatey, the package manager for Windows. We believe this will make it easier to deploy PVS-Studio, particularly in cloud services. So right off the bat, we also checked the source code of the same Chocolatey. Azure DevOps took on the role of the CI system.

One of the modules in the Windows kernel provides support for combining a set of file operations into an entity known as a transaction. Just like in databases, these entities are isolated and atomic. You can make some changes to the file system that won't be visible outside until you commit them. Or, as an alternative, you can always rollback everything. In any case, you act upon the group of operations as a whole. Precisely what needed to preserve consistency while installing software or updating our systems, right? If something goes wrong — the installer or even the whole system crashes — the transaction rolls back automatically.

From the very first time I saw an article about this incredible mechanism, I always wondered how the world would look like from the inside. And you know what? I just discovered a truly marvelous approach to force any process to operate within a predefined transaction, which this margin is too narrow to contain. Furthermore, most of the time, it does not even require administrative privileges.

Let's then talk about Windows internals, try out a new tool, and answer one question: what does it have to do with sandboxes?

Hyper-V is more known as a server virtualization technology; however, since Windows 8, it is also available in the client operating system. In Windows 10, Microsoft improved the experience drastically to make Hyper-V an excellent solution for developers and IT Pros.
 
Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, is a native (type 1) hypervisor that directly runs on the hardware, compared to VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, and other type 2 or hosted hypervisors. It was first released in Windows Server 2008, and it allows you to run virtual machines on x86-64 systems.

As mentioned, with Windows 10, Microsoft optimized Hyper-V for developers. Hyper-V allows developers to quickly spin up development virtual machines on Windows 10 with excellent performance, but it is also used in a couple of other development features as a back-end technology, like the Android Emulator, the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 or Docker Containers. In this article, we will have a quick look at what Hyper-V on Windows 10 can over for developers.

Today we have another high-quality Microsoft project to be checked, which we'll heroically delve into trying to find errors with PVS-Studio. SARIF, an acronym for Static Analysis Interchange Format, which is a standard (file format), designed to interact and share the results of static analyzers with other tools: IDEs, complex code verification and analysis tools (e.g. SonarQube), continuous integration systems, etc. SARIF SDK, respectively, contains .NET developer tools to support SARIF as well as additional files.

When we decided to search for errors in the Azure SDK for .NET project, we were pleasantly surprised by its size. «Three and a half million lines of code,» we kept saying, studying the project's statistics. There might be so many findings. Alas and alack! The project turned out to be crafty. So what was the zest of the project and how it was checked — read in this article.

Another release is out for the Windows Terminal preview! This release is labeled as v0.7 in the About section of the Terminal. As always, you can download the Terminal from the Microsoft Store and from the GitHub releases page. Here’s what’s new in this release:

Windows Terminal Updates

Panes

You are now able to split your Terminal window into multiple panes! This allows you to have multiple command prompts open at the same time within the same tab.

Note: At the moment, you’re only able to open your default profile within a new pane. Opening a profile of your choice is an option we’re planning to include in a future release!



Read more below.

It's no secret I dig WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and now that WSL2 is available in Windows Insiders Slow it's a great time to really explore the options that are available. What I'm finding is so interesting about WSL and how it relates to the Windows system around it is how you can cleanly move data between worlds. This isn't an experience you can easily have with full virtual machines, and it speaks to the tight integration of Linux and Windows.

Look at all this cool stuff you can do when you mix your peanut butter and chocolate!

In September, we released .NET Core support for building Windows desktop applications, including WPF and Windows Forms. Since then, we have been delighted to see so many developers share their stories of migrating desktop applications (and controls libraries) to .NET Core. We constantly hear stories of .NET Windows desktop developers powering their business with WPF and Windows Forms, especially in scenarios where the desktop shines, including:

• UI-dense forms over data (FOD) applications
• Responsive low-latency UI
• Applications that need to run offline/disconnected
• Applications with dependencies on custom device drivers

This is just the beginning for Windows application development on .NET Core. Read on to learn more about the benefits of .NET Core for building Windows applications.

Another update to the Windows Terminal has just been released! As always, you can download the Terminal from the Microsoft Store, the Microsoft Store for Business, and GitHub.

Note: In the About popup within the Terminal, this version will appear as v0.6.

I've been talking about it for months, but in case you haven't heard, there's a new Windows Terminal in town. You can download it and start using it now from the Windows Store. It's free and open source.

At the time of this writing, Windows Terminal is around version 0.5. It's not officially released as a 1.0 so things are changing all the time.

Here's your todo - Have you installed the Windows Terminal before? Have you customize your profile.json file? If so, I want you to DELETE your profiles.json!

The Windows Terminal can now connect you to the Azure Cloud Shell!



We have a new default profile – the Azure Cloud Shell, which will allow you to access your Azure directories/tenants through the Windows Terminal app itself.

Styles, by default, in wpf, in Avalonia, are neutral, and far from always suitable for the tasks we need. In this article, I would like to talk about the basics of working with styles and show a couple of interesting examples.