Articles Tagged “Technical Consulting”
54 articles tagged “Technical Consulting”, newest first.
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Time Travel Debugging — Recording and Rewinding the Bugs That Never Reproduce in Long-Running Apps
A once-a-month bug leaves only its result in a crash dump. Record and rewind execution with WinDbg Time Travel Debugging (TTD): TTD.exe, ring buffers, and TT...
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End of Servicing for Windows Printer Drivers — How Business Apps Should Prepare Their Report and Label Printing
Microsoft is phasing out v3/v4 printer drivers. What Windows protected print mode removes, and how to inventory and prepare report and label printing in busi...
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Is OpenHarmony a Viable OS for Industrial Equipment? — Compared with Windows IoT and Embedded Linux
Is OpenHarmony an option for industrial equipment? Compare maintenance, memory, tooling and sourcing with Windows IoT LTSC and embedded Linux in a decision t...
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What Is OpenHarmony? — Sorting Out How It Differs from HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT
OpenHarmony is not HarmonyOS. From primary sources, this article maps the OpenAtom Foundation's open source OS, Huawei's commercial OS, and Android-free Harm...
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Choosing Between Power Automate and PowerShell + Task Scheduler — Putting Each Automation Tool Where It Fits Instead of Mixing Them
For IT staff at small and mid-sized companies where PowerShell + Task Scheduler nightly batches and Power Automate flows have started to coexist, this articl...
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Preventing Key-Person Dependency in Power Automate — Keeping Flows Running After the Person Who Built Them Leaves
An overview of how to counter the risk of Power Automate flows stopping when their creator resigns or transfers: what happens when the owner is deleted, sett...
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Reading Faxed Purchase Orders With AI Builder — A Realistic Design for Cutting Manual Data Entry, and Where It Stops
A walkthrough of how to cut manual entry of faxed purchase orders using AI Builder document processing: turning faxes into PDFs on the MFP, training a custom...
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Power Automate Licensing — How Far Microsoft 365 Gets You for Free, and When You Need Premium
Within Microsoft 365 you can build and run cloud flows on standard connectors at no extra cost, but premium connectors such as HTTP, SQL Server, and Datavers...
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Building an Intake for Internal Requests with Microsoft Forms — Consolidating Email and Verbal Requests into a Form
A practical guide to consolidating the email and verbal requests that land on IT, general affairs, and accounting into Microsoft Forms. Covers question desig...
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Replacing an Excel Ledger with a SharePoint List — Sharing, History, and Flow Integration to Put an End to the Broken Ledger
A practical guide to migrating an Excel ledger on a shared folder to a SharePoint list (Microsoft Lists). Covers solving concurrent editing, overwrites and r...
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Power Automate Error Handling and Retry Design — Preventing 'The Flow Was Working, Then It Just Stopped'
A collection of design patterns for preventing Power Automate flows from silently stopping without anyone noticing. Based on Microsoft Learn's official speci...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Pitfalls of Network Drives and UNC Paths — Working With File Servers (Shared Folders) From a Business Application
This article organizes the classic problems that show up when a business application writes to or watches a shared folder: why a drive letter (Z:) is invisib...
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System Tray Icons and Toast Notifications in Windows Apps — NotifyIcon Pitfalls and Choosing the Right AppNotification API
A practical guide to keeping a business Windows app resident in the system tray and notifying users with toast notifications. Covers the correct use of Notif...
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How Long Will VB6 Apps Keep Running? — Runtime Support Status and a Practical Path to .NET Migration
How long will VB6 applications keep running? This practical guide clarifies the asymmetry between the VB6 runtime support policy (still supported on Windows ...
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Japanese Era Dates, Public Holidays, and Closing-Date Processing in Business Apps — Era-Resilient Design, JapaneseCalendar, and Business-Day Calculations in Practice
A report that must show '令和8年' in the Japanese era, business-day calculations that exclude public holidays, payment due on the last business day of the month...
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A Practical Guide to Process Monitor (ProcMon) — Pinpointing "Settings Not Applied" and "ACCESS DENIED" in 10 Minutes
"I fixed the config file, but nothing changed." "It worked yesterday, but won't start today." Before touching the source code, Process Monitor (ProcMon) lets...
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When Not to Move a Windows App to the Web: A Decision Table and the Practical Answer of Splitting
Requests to move in-house Windows apps to the web are increasing, but for apps built around device integration, local file processing, offline operation, or ...
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Localizing WinForms/WPF Apps — resx, Satellite Assemblies, and Culture Switching in Practice
A practical guide to localizing Windows desktop apps, covering the difference between CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture, how resx and satellite assemblies ...
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CSV Is Not "Just Text": A Practical Guide to CSV Handling in C# Business Apps (Encoding, Excel Compatibility, Injection Defense)
A practical rundown of the classic failure patterns in business-app CSV I/O - hand-rolled Split(',') parsing, mojibake from BOM-less UTF-8 in Excel, lost lea...
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Don't Wrap HttpClient in a using Block — Practical HTTP Communication in C# Business Apps (Creation Patterns, Timeouts, Retries)
Creating a new C# HttpClient with using on every request exhausts sockets, but making it static means it stops following DNS changes. This article walks thro...
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Pinpointing "Slow" with PerfView and dotnet-trace — A Practical Introduction to .NET Performance Investigation
When a business app is "slow," "pegs the CPU," or "occasionally freezes," which tool should you reach for, and what should you look at? This article walks th...
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More Than appsettings.json — A Practical Guide to Configuration Management in Windows Business Apps (Per-Environment Settings, Secrets, and Where to Write)
A practical look at configuration management for Windows business apps: layering appsettings.json, choosing between IConfiguration and the IOptions/IOptionsS...
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Printing and PDF Output in Windows Business Apps — Choosing Between System.Drawing.Printing, WPF, and Report Libraries
Organizes WinForms printing with PrintDocument, WPF FlowDocument/FixedDocument printing, and PDF output options into a requirement-based decision table. Cove...
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Getting a Real Feel for the OSI Model — Dissecting a Single HTTP Request Into Its Seven Layers
Understand the OSI model through the real thing instead of rote memorization. We assemble and dissect, in C#, the Ethernet frame carrying a single HTTP GET r...
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How to Think About Windows Session Isolation — Session 0, RDP, and Running Multiple Users Concurrently
This article untangles the concept of a Windows "session," a topic that consistently confuses Windows app developers. It covers why Session 0 isolation exist...
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Extending the Life of and Migrating VB6 / Access Business Apps — A Decision Table for Keep, Wrap, or Replace
How do you decide whether to leave a VB6 application or Microsoft Access business app as-is, extend its life by wrapping only part of it, or replace it outri...
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Reading Crash Dumps with WinDbg + SOS — A Practical Guide to Analysis After Collection
Explains how to actually read a collected Windows crash dump using WinDbg and the SOS extension. Covers symbol path configuration, tracking exceptions and me...
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Preventing Multiple Instances of a Windows App — Named Mutexes and Activating the Existing Window on a Second Launch
This article organizes the classic requirement for business Windows apps — 'don't let the same app launch twice' — around a named Mutex. We cover the pitfall...
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Safely Calling Win32 APIs from C# — A Practical P/Invoke Guide (DllImport / LibraryImport / CsWin32)
A practical rundown of what to watch for when calling Win32 APIs and native DLLs from C# via P/Invoke. Covers the differences between DllImport and LibraryIm...
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Integrating Entra ID Authentication into WinForms/WPF Apps — A Practical Architecture with MSAL.NET and the WAM Broker
A practical, hands-on look at integrating Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) authentication into WinForms/WPF desktop apps: the public client mindset, where ROPC s...
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Date, Time, and Timezones in Business Apps — From DateTime Pitfalls to the UTC-Storage Principle and Test Design
Timestamps drift by nine hours after a server migration; only the overseas office's dates roll back to the previous day — we trace date/time incidents back t...
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WPF High-DPI Support — Why It Still Blurs and Bleeds Despite Being 'Supposedly DPI-Aware,' and How to Fix It
WPF lays out UI in DIPs (1/96 inch) and is System DPI Aware from the start, but moving a window to a monitor with a different DPI blurs the whole screen, and...
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Why EXCEL.EXE Processes Remain After C# Excel COM Automation — Reference Release Patterns and the Replacement Decision
A practical look at why EXCEL.EXE processes remain running after automating Excel from C# via Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel, explained through COM reference...
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High-DPI Support in WinForms — Why the UI Blurs or Breaks on 4K Monitors, and Practical Fixes
This article organizes the reasons WinForms apps blur or have broken layouts on 4K monitors and 150% scaling, starting from DPI virtualization and DPI awaren...
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Choosing Windows Inter-Process Communication ── A Decision Table for Named Pipes / TCP / gRPC / Shared Memory / COM
How do you choose the right way for Windows applications to talk to each other? This article organizes named pipes, local TCP, gRPC, shared memory, file-base...
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Using SQLite from C# in Business Apps — WAL Mode, Exclusive Locking, Corruption Countermeasures, and When to Reach for EF Core
A practical rundown of embedding SQLite into a business Windows app with Microsoft.Data.Sqlite: connection strings and pooling, how WAL mode works, SQLITE_BU...
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How to Build and Operate Windows Services ── From Choosing Between Task Scheduler and Services to Turning a BackgroundService into a Windows Service
Should a background process become a Windows service, or is Task Scheduler enough? This guide organizes the practical design work for putting a service into ...
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Is WebView2 the Right Successor to IE Mode? — The ActiveX Constraint and a Realistic Migration Design
A rundown of WebView2's basic architecture, the Evergreen vs. Fixed Version distribution strategies, the user data folder trap, how native code talks to web ...
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How to Choose Where a Windows App Stores Local Data — A Decision Table for SQLite / JSON / Registry / Access
Where — and in what format — should a Windows desktop app store its data? This article organizes the choice between AppData and ProgramData, and the strength...
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When Task Scheduler Tasks Don't Run or Exit with 0x1 — Isolating the Cause and Designing for Reliable Operation
A design guide to putting Windows Task Scheduler into reliable production use: execution accounts and logon types, what 'Run whether user is logged on or not...