Visual Studio Community 2013

A bit over a week ago a new Visual Studio edition has appeared pretty much out of blue. For all practical purposes you can look at it as a cross between Visual Studio Professional (has same features) and Express editions (it’s free).

Unlike Express editions, Community can only be used by an individual developer, for open source, for learning/teaching, and in a small non-enterprise settings. If you are working for enterprise company, you’re out of luck.

Since Community is essentially the same as a Professional edition, there is not much new things that can be said about it. It can slice, it can dice, and it is an almost perfect development environment. Yes, there are Premium and Ultimate and they do offer some advantages (e.g. IntelliTrace is a gem) but most of the time one can live without those features just fine. Unlike with the Express editions you won’t feel constrained with the Community.

Surprisingly you cannot really install Community edition side-by-side with any other paid Visual Studio. Official explanation is that this is because Community is the part of a same line as other editions but I still find it an unfortunate decision. Developers wearing two hats in BYOD scenarios (e.g. enterprise by day, open source by night) might get into some conflicting situations. Side-by-side with the Express editions will still be supported so not all is black.

Speaking of Express editions, it is not really clear to me what is their destiny. Currently they do stand together with Community but they do overlap quite a bit. If we learned anything from the past, their days are numbered. I would like to be wrong since I do love them. Even with all their shortcomings, I can still see them useful in multiple scenarios (mostly due to their quite permissive licence). I will miss them.

If you currently don’t have anything better than Express on your machine and you fit into the restrictions, it is definitely worth checking out.

Windows Installation Media Creation Tool

For quite a long time Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool was the easiest way to create your bootable USB. Yes, it had its issues (e.g. didn’t work for UEFI) but it usually did its work. Only issue was where to get install media in the first place.

Well, now Microsoft gave us Windows Installation Media Creation Tool. As soon as you start it (no installation possible) you will get a selection of languages, editions (Standard/Pro), and architecture (x86/x64). Afterward you select whether you want to create a bootable USB or save it as an ISO file and, after a lengthy download, you will have your installation media. Perfect!

However, tool is not really perfect. First of all, it seems to have issues with some USB drives. I tried three different SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives and neither of them was even recognized by the tool: “We can’t find a USB flash drive. Insert one and try again.” This is first time ever I saw issue like this in any program.

One drive it did recognize (Super Talent’s Pico-C) was deemed too small although it’s size was required 4 GB. Yes, I know disk manufacturers like to count bytes a bit differently but I am puzzled by that 4 GB requirement. Pretty much all Windows installations are just slightly over 3 GB so better approach would be just to compare given flash size to selected installation media. And there is no technical reason since I could manually create a bootable drive from downloaded ISO just fine.

If you have a limited bandwidth, beware. Utility downloads a new file every time. It doesn’t matter if you just downloaded ISO five minutes ago and now you just want to create a bootable media. It will redo the whole download. Seems wasteful to me.

It would also help if default selections would match running system rather than being empty. The whole idea is to give you installation media for your machine and this gets quite a bit annoying if you are inexperienced user trying to guess which release you are currently running.

But all in all, I am happy with this tool for its ISO download capability. It finally makes it possible to do the pristine installation on your machine with original Microsoft media without having to be MSDN subscriber.

PS: If everything else fails, you can always make USB install manually.

Lollipop, Lollipop, Oh Lolli, Lolli, Lolli

As I saw today Android 5.0 (Lollipop) factory images, I got a twitch going on. Yes, I could wait OTA a week or so or I could install the newest Android OS on my phone immediately at the cost of data. It took me a whole second to know the answer.

First step was to install Java. I took latest x64 Java Development Kit and got that pest (temporarily) on my machine. Next step was to get Android SDK Tools. I opted to get it as a standalone install.

Upon starting Android SDK Tools, I just installed all packages offered by default. Nitpickers might say that you only need Platform Tools and Google USB Driver but I find it much easier to click Next, Next, Next until cows come home or all needed gets installed.

Last part of puzzle was actual factory image for Nexus 4. All files from it I unpacked in the same directory where fastboot.exe was installed. Since I took all defaults this was at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools.

Now I powered off my mobile phone and powered it back on while holding Volume down button. This brought me into the FastBoot mode and I connected my USB cable only to have device not be recognized. Therefore I had to go to the Device Manager and right-click Android device with a yellow question mark. Selecting Update Driver Software and then pointing dialog to the SDK directory (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk in my case) allowed installation of Google’s USB Driver.

Now I could start cmd.exe and unlock my phone:

cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools
fastboot oem unlock

This gave me a warning prompt on my mobile phone. To select Yes I had to use volume keys for the movement and power key for the confirmation. First step done.

Next step was to actually flash the phone. Fortunately Google provided nice script for that so I just started it (still in the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools directory):

flash-all.bat
 sending 'bootloader' (2264 KB)...
 OKAY [  0.076s]
 writing 'bootloader'...
 OKAY [  0.294s]
 finished. total time: 0.374s
 rebooting into bootloader...
 OKAY [  0.004s]
 finished. total time: 0.006s
 …
 sending 'cache' (10984 KB)...
 OKAY [  0.375s]
 writing 'cache'...
 OKAY [  0.602s]
 rebooting...
 finished. total time: 87.058s
 Press any key to exit...

After two minutes your phone was be rebooting with a brand new OS. First reboot took quite some time (eight minutes on my device) so have some patience was needed.

After setting everything up I rebooted the phone once more into the FastBoot mode (power off; VolumeDown+Power). Then I started cmd.exe one last time and brought the lock back:

cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools
fastboot oem lock
fastboot reboot

And with that installation of Lollipop was over.

PS: Interesting tidbit: during initial Lollipop setup I could only see 2.4 GHz wireless networks. As soon as I was connected, 5 GHz networks became visible too.

Rectangular NFC Antenna Calculator

For a project I had to calculate parameters needed to make nice rectangular PCB inductor for a NFC antenna. Since my search didn’t bear desired results, I decided to make my own.

Enjoy.

Calculation is done per NXP’s AN1445.

Livin' La Vida Https

I had SSL enabled on my site for a while now. My hosting provider had it available as an option and I hated having my password travel unencrypted. However, as Google pushed for https, I started playing with the idea to use https exclusively. As you can (hopefully) see, migration was successful.

First order of business was to sort out redirects. I wanted regular http domain 301-redirected to the https one. As my server was using Apache, following directives were added to .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

In order to be compliant with HTTP Strict Transport Security, I also added new header just above conditions in the same file:

Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains"

My Suffusion WordPress theme kept using http to fetch ads and that caused browsers to omit them all together (you cannot load http scripts on https site). Therefore I also had to make a slight modification to it. In file ./suffusion/functions/shortcodes.php I had to change suffusion_sc_ad function to use https by removing protocol name from the URL:

function suffusion_sc_ad($attr) {
        $params = array('client', 'slot', 'width', 'height');
        $provider = 'google';
        $provider_type = 'syndication';
        $service = 'ad';
        $service_type = 'page';
        $ret = "<div id='".$service."sense'>\n<script type='text/javascript'><!--\n";
        foreach ($params as $var) {
                $ret .= "\t".$provider."_".$service."_$var = '".$attr[$var]."';\n";
        }
        $ret .= "//-->\n</script>\n";
        $service_url = "!!http:!!//".$service_type.$service."2.$provider$provider_type.com/$service_type$service/show_{$service}s.js";
        $ret .= "<script type='text/javascript' src='$service_url'></script>\n";
        $ret .= "</div>\n";
        return $ret;
}

Result of these three changes is that my site is now https-only without any functionality loss.

PS: Those checking the certificate will notice that I use CloudFlare and their Universal SSL. Do notice that using such service is actually one big man-in-the-middle attack since CloudFlare decrypts all traffic before encrypting it again when it contacts your site. It is not because they are evil but because they cannot provide you with their CDN services (and more) any other way. For any website traffic, I see no problem with such approach. However, for administration tasks, I would recommend having a separate https subdomain that leads directly to your server.