Blog
Practical articles from KomuraSoft LLC about website development, SEO, Google Ads, Windows development, legacy asset reuse, and bug investigation.
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Designing Scheduled Flows in Power Automate — Month-End Processing, Business-Day Checks, and Reminders in Practice
A practical guide to automating recurring processes with Power Automate's Recurrence trigger. Covers the trap of the default time zone being UTC, date expres...
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PowerShell Execution Policy and Script Signing — A Practical Guide to Graduating From "Papering Over It With Bypass"
PowerShell's execution policy is "a safety feature, not a security boundary." This article covers the differences between policies like RemoteSigned, scope p...
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Automating Data Entry Into Legacy Core Systems With Power Automate for Desktop — Replacing Manual Entry From Excel and Paper With UI Automation
A practical guide to replacing manual data entry into old core systems that have no API, using UI automation in Power Automate for desktop (PAD). Covers what...
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Automating Purchase-Order and Invoice PDFs That Arrive by Email With Power Automate — Designing Storage, Routing, Notification, and Extraction
A practical guide to automating the storage, routing, and notification of purchase-order and invoice PDFs that arrive by email with Power Automate, covering ...
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Building an Approval Workflow in Power Automate — Digitizing Paper and Email-Based Approval Requests
A practical guide to digitizing paper approval forms and email-attached Excel requests with Power Automate: the types of approval actions, choosing among For...
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Migrating Excel VBA Macros to Power Automate — What to Replace with Office Scripts, and What to Leave as VBA
A guide to whether Excel VBA macros can migrate to Power Automate, covering what Office Scripts can replace, what only VBA can still do, connector limits, li...
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Information Security 10 Major Threats 2026 — How to Read the Ranking, and What SMEs Should Actually Guard Against
In IPA's 'Information Security 10 Major Threats 2026,' ransomware attacks took first place for the 11th year running, supply chain attacks came in second, an...
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Incident Response Doesn't End at Recovery — A Postmortem (Recurrence Prevention) Template for Small Development Teams
Treating an incident as over once it's fixed and apologized for guarantees you'll repeat it. This article translates the blameless postmortem for small teams...
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An Introduction to ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) — The Minimal Way to Record 'Why We Designed It This Way' on a Small Team
Code never explains why it was written that way. We cover how to use an ADR (Architecture Decision Record) — one decision, one Markdown file — to preserve th...
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DLL and COM Interface Backward Compatibility — A Decision Table for Which Changes Break Callers
Which changes to a DLL or COM component actually break their callers? We lay out the three layers of compatibility — binary, source, and behavioral — a decis...
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Versioning Your Business App's Database Schema — Migration Practices to Prevent 'Every Customer Has a Different DB'
A practical guide to versioning the database schema of a business app whose databases are scattered across customer sites. Covers PRAGMA user_version and a C...
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CI/CD for WinForms / WPF Apps in Practice — Automating from Build to Signing and Distribution with GitHub Actions
A practical guide to setting up CI/CD for WinForms / WPF apps with GitHub Actions. Covers a minimal YAML for build+test on windows-latest, tag-driven version...
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Can the Labour-Saving Investment Subsidy Pay for Moving FAX Orders to the Web? — How to Think About Order-System Investment Under the General Type
Moving FAX order intake to the web with automated import can be a candidate for the SME Labour-Saving Investment Subsidy (General type). This article covers ...
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Safely Modifying a Legacy Business App That Has No Tests — Characterization Testing and Refactoring in Practice
To safely modify a business application with no tests, this article explains, with C# examples, the procedure for a characterization test (the golden master ...
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Don't Forget to Decide 'How Many Seconds Is Fast Enough' — Organizing Non-Functional Requirements With IPA's Non-Functional Requirements Grade
Disputes like 'it's too slow' or 'we didn't expect that failure response' usually trace back to non-functional requirements nobody decided on. This article e...
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How to Run a Subsidised System Development Project — Working Backwards From the Grant Decision, and the Practicalities of Writing the Business Plan
A system development project funded by a subsidy runs differently from an ordinary one. This article covers, in practical terms, how to schedule backwards fr...
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Should Custom Software Development Specs Stay in Excel? — Choosing the Right Format for Deliverables
Should the specification and design documents delivered in custom software development stay in Excel 'graph paper' format? This article works through the pro...
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Can You Use a Subsidy to Outsource System Development? — A Map of the Programmes by Purpose, and the Pitfalls to Know Before You Place an Order (FY2026 Edition)
Can you use a subsidy to outsource system development? This article explains why "bespoke development on the IT Introduction Subsidy" does not work, maps out...
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What Website Clients Should Know Too — Using IPA's 'How to Secure Your Website' as a Checklist
What standard should you use to check your company website's security against? This article explains the 11 vulnerabilities and countermeasures covered in IP...
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When Your In-House Windows App Gets Flagged as a Virus — Handling Microsoft Defender False Positives and Living With the Performance Impact
We lay out the proper way to respond when Microsoft Defender flags your in-house Windows app as malware: how modern antivirus detection actually works, how t...
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Sleep, Hibernation, Modern Standby, and Long-Running Apps — Designing Around 'It Stopped Overnight'
Why a long-running Windows app can end up 'stopped by the time you check it in the morning,' worked through from the differences between S3 sleep, hibernatio...
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What Happens When You Tap a My Number Health Insurance Card — Reading Online Eligibility Verification and Its Integration with the Medical Billing System from ORCA's Source Code
From tapping a My Number health insurance card to insurance eligibility landing in the medical billing system, explained through the end-to-end flow of onlin...
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How to Work Correctly Under a Quasi-Mandate Contract and Avoid Disguised Contracting — It Comes Down to Direction and Supervision, Not the Name on the Contract
Even under a quasi-mandate contract, if the client directs and supervises the contractor's engineers directly, that is disguised contracting. Drawing on prim...
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Where Should SMEs Start on Security? — A Walkthrough of IPA's 'Information Security Guidelines for SMEs,' 4th Edition
Where should small and medium-sized businesses start on security? Drawing on IPA's 'Information Security Guidelines for Small and Medium Enterprises,' 4th ed...
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Do Business Apps Run on Windows on Arm? — The Reality of x64 Emulation (Prism) and Native DLLs/COM
An answer, aimed at developers and IT staff, to 'will our business app run on Windows on Arm?' Covers how x64 emulation (Prism) works, the layers it can't re...
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Grasping the Whole Nichi-Rece API from the Source Code — Reading ORCA's Published Source (with a Mapping Table of All 137 Endpoints)
Grasping the whole picture of the Nichi-Rece API from the published source code of ORCA (the JMA Standard Receipt Software). Covers a mapping table of all 13...
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When You Inherit a System With No Source Code and No Documentation — A Practical Playbook for Keeping It Running
A practical playbook for starting operations and maintenance on a business system that has no source code and no specifications. Covers preserving and backin...
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MAX_PATH and Windows Path/Filename Pitfalls — the 260-Character Limit, Reserved Names, Trailing Dots, and Case Sensitivity
A rundown of the path and filename limits behind the classic 'file not found' bug. Covers the breakdown of MAX_PATH=260, enabling long paths with LongPathsEn...
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ORCA (Nichi-Rece) Is Not an Electronic Medical Record System — Medical Billing Systems and Healthcare IT Architecture from an Engineer's Perspective
ORCA (Nichi-Rece) is not an electronic medical record system — it is a medical billing system. From an engineer's perspective, this article covers the system...
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How Should You Structure a Custom Software Development or Operations & Maintenance Contract? — Learning the Quasi-Mandate vs. Contract-for-Work Distinction from IPA's 'Model Contract'
When you outsource system development, how should the contract be structured? Drawing on the 'Information System Model Transaction and Contract' published by...