At VaiSulWeb virtualization is so pervasive that basically there aren’t physical machines other than virtualization hosts or storage since about 2008 or 2009. That means about 10 years now. And counting. Microsoft Hyper-V served us very well and over time our reliance on that technology increased with happy results. It has been solid and consistent and allowed us to scale up more and more, adding new technologies and solutions and enabling us to virtualize roles and workloads that seemed a bit difficult to virtualize.

As many other providers, we recently started integrating AMD CPUs into our infrastructure, given the terrific advantages that those could bring to the [...]

With an unusual move, Microsoft released on May critical patches for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Such operating systems are long been discontinued and they don’t usually receive patches and updates besides eventual special agreements that could have been signed by customers. However, even in the past when WannaCry ransomware had been spreading in the wild and it was compromising several thousands of machines Microsoft released special patches for such old software. This time the new patches address vulnerabilities that would allow remote execution code and thus they have been deemed as critical. The flaws affect Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and could be mitigated by [...]

While developing an application that will be hosted on Azure Service Fabric and adding a .NET Standard library or project, Visual Studio might display a warning like this one:

Warning MSB3270 There was a mismatch between the processor architecture of the project being built “MSIL” and the processor architecture of the reference “C:\[…]”, “AMD64”. This mismatch may cause runtime failures. Please consider changing the targeted processor architecture of your project through the Configuration Manager so as to align the processor architectures between your project and references, or take a dependency on references with a processor [...]

With a post on Microsoft DevBlog, Redmond giant clarified the situation around .NET Framework, its relationship with .NET Core and it announced that  .NET Framework 4.8 the last version of the .NET Framework  that Microsoft will ship. After the release of .NET Core 3 the next major version will be .NET Core 5 which Microsoft wants to be the version of .NET that developers must be using after .NET Core 3.

Microsoft also confirmed a few interesting details as for example that it will skip .NET Core 4 to avoid confusion so the next major version of .NET (any platform) has been called .NET Core 5 to allow developers using the .NET Framework to be familiar with the new [...]

A few days ago Microsoft introduced its new operating system designed for IoT devices: Azure Sphere OS. The new operating system aims at providing a secure-by-default platform to build IoT services and thus avoiding the pitfalls that made such devices so prone even to unsophisticated attacks that rogue organizations use them to build botnets or to compromise users’ privacy.

The new OS

Azure Sphere is just a part of a broader solution to provide a secure platform for IoT that also includes custom microcontrollers that implement Microsoft 7 rules for IoT security and a security service that runs on Azure to verify the status of each device and report any error or [...]