Automatic Online Upgrade - upgrade

I installed Acrobat Reader 9.0 last month,
Each time I open a pdf document, I get small icon which says some updates are available,
If I say, it goes ahead and install the updates.
Anyone know what is the technology behind this , any paper, details.

Nothing fancy, when you launch the program it "phones home" to Adobe and checks its current version against the latest one available. Typically it's a simple HTTP exchange, although some products may use something besides HTTP/HTTPS.

Related

Problems with MS TFS 2018's Dashboards, Build Pipelines, and Icons

I am having some recent problems with TFS 2018 that have escaped my ability to troubleshoot. The application runs on a Hyper-V VM hosting Server 2019 and connects to a separate MS SQL 2016 database over on a separate Windows 2019 VM.
A few weeks ago we migrated our database server over to a new machine which, over the course of setting our existing TFS server up to use the new database, required us to run though the TFS setup wizard again.
Everything was fine for about a week when we started to have issues, specifically with the TFS web front-end we use. First we lost various icons on the webpage, with the browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc). replacing them with rectangles:
A little while after that we lost our project Dashboards, and the whole dashboard page is just blank now. A little while after that, our WIP build/test automation feature also lost its management section of the site.
Other than these things not displaying, things generally "work" - the source control stuff functions, work items can be interacted with, etc. It's just that the interface is clumsier without the icons (which extends to every icon within every work item type, not just the banner I shared) and we can't get our automated test reports without the site's front-end for it. The latter is the real show stopper.
I spent some time troubleshooting and at best was able to figure out a maybe solution for the icon problem: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c1038468-9d94-473d-a020-254789e9a19b/tfs-2015-update-2-missing-icons?forum=tfsgeneral
This seemed to do the trick for just the icon problem, though some time later they disappeared and reappeared when people were refreshing pages. I'm still unsure if the re-failure was a fluke or not, as we rolled back the VM snapshot the changes were made on shortly after.
Using Chrome's developer tools, it seems like the lack of dashboard data is related to issues retrieving content on the host server for a cause we cannot determine.
Here is what shows up on the DevTool in Chrome for our main project's Dashboard:
What's interesting is the error claims widget.css is either not present or empty. Neither of these are the case as I can find the file and read data in it.
I recognize MIME types as a thing that shows up in IIS but I don't know what to do with the information. Should I be adding .css to the MIME Types list within IIS? Maybe that was set and the wizard reverted it?
Here's what shows up in the Builds section:
Thing is, I don't know what to do with this information. I found some vague hints online from people having similar issues with sites they were themselves coding (which stated the errors in question were red herrings), but this TFS front end is not something I've created and I had not any idea what to do with the information shared.
Does anyone have an idea of what might have gone wrong with the dashboards here? I have run out of ideas and can't figure out a different attack angle to approach this from.

Can’t submit file for Facebook App Approval

I’ll set my outrage with the way this process works (to whom can I speak?) aside for the moment: we are attempting to provide FB with a link to our ~200 mb app for approval. We have been rejected 3 times because they are incapable of extracting our zip file (they request a zip for some unknown reason — it has minimal size impact).
Some detail: we are linking to the zip on our Dropbox. We have removed all punctuation from our app title (Pandamonium!.app becomes Pandamonium.app). We have eliminated spaces from our source folder. I thought all these could be causing a problem with iOS-sim.
I’m not sure what is left to do, but I am hoping someone can present a clear set of instructions (NOT THEIR INSTRUCTIONS, WHICH I HAVE READ) they have followed particularly if you have met similar snags or ANY ideas for resolution. All they send me is useless screenshots of their simulator unable to open the app which I have simulated and opened successfully daily with iOS-sim for the last week.
After a great deal of trial and error I found that using Facebook's command-line instructions was what was causing the issue. You should just compress your .app file in an ordinary fashion (right click and compress -- I used a Windows computer just to make sure everything was copasetic after reading about bizarre Mac .cbgz compression issues).
Regardless, in summary, I can now see why no one else has had an issue with this: it's because no one reads their instructions and rather just creates their .zip files in the ordinary way; unsurprisingly, you're better off using your common sense rather than listening to others.
Aside: ironically, after being told my use case was fine and the only issue was not being able to unzip, Facebook (India) has now told me they couldn't find my login button (which is gigantic, in multiple places, and clearly described in my instructions). This process is an absolute joke. I wish anyone going through this hell good luck.

VSCode plugins and thoughts on alpha release

So I'm starting to guess Javascript wasn't the best choice for VSCode to be based on. It is pretty much the same as SublimeText and even slower, though the debugger and code intel is awesome and far beyond Sublime's capabilities.
The thing is I suddenly got a chrome-like inspector frame on the right side of the window, which caught my attention and got me googling about it (too bad almost nobody is talking about vscode yet so it's a pain to even find some info), and found out another person got the same weird issue. Somebody told him that F12 opens the inspector like a normal web app so you can look under the hood (which os most likely bullcrap since it makes no sense, probably just a bug).
The thing is I decided to test out keypresses, and discovered Fn+Shift+Cmd+F12 opens a new window with a weird button and a web inspector, which has no utility at all, but it's there so I got curious and messed up with it for a while. Bad idea since it crashed the entire app.
All this story has the point of warning about how Javascript is not as stable and independent as Objective C, since it's obviously working on top of V8 and Webkit and whatnot, any of which multiply its chances to crash.
Sublime has also crashed for me a couple times, but it does Atom Saving (operating system's native autosave that stores every change in the filesystem so app crashes don't affect the files).
VSCode is not native and is in a very alpa state (version 0.1.0 as today), so this is kind of a feedback for them and a warning for other users, posted here because there is a link for this stackoverflow community on their website, and is the only community-driven way of feedback they have.
I wish they open the development so others can contribute or, at least, do like SublimeText which isn't open but supports extensibility thru plugins and python console.
Now, the question:
Is there a way to make Sublime plugins work here?
The keybindings you have found are used by us internally to debug VSCode quickly in case we notice a problem. We simply forgot to remove them, kind of like how Ctrl+Alt+Delete happened :).
We will remove these keybindings with our next update, to avoid confusion, in a couple of weeks.
We have plans on supporting plugins, we have made progress on this story, but we were not happy enough with the API, and we decided to further validate and improve it before making it public, to avoid as much as possible future API breakage.
As for the actual question, it is not possible to run Sublime plugins in VSCode, for similar reasons why it is not possible to run Sublime plugins in Eclipse or in Visual Studio. There is, however the possibility of code sharing between plugins developed for different platforms, see for example Omnisharp, which is shipped with VSCode and for which there is a Sublime plugin.
You're complaining about VSCode being created using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and not something like C# or Objective C. You do realize that since day one the following Apple apps were made with a similar hybrid approach of Objective C and HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These are apps that millions of people use: iOS: iTunes app, iTunes Store app, App Store, and on desktop: iTunes, App Store.
Visual Studio Code is a preview, meaning something that just left alpha stage development and is in early, early, early beta, like just a week ago. So there are lots of things that are still missing or not totally working yet. The Visual Studio team is working at three-week sprints and intend to update the product at that pace, so if you've downloaded it, don't expect it to have every possible feature yet. This is a preview. Explore it. If it doesn't fit your current workflow, don't use it. Stick with what you have. But keep an eye on it because it will evolve steadily over the coming months.
I tried F12 in VSCode on windows and it opened the Dev Tools window, which makes sense since it's built on GIT's open source editor Atom & Chrome.
Sublime plugins? No, you can't use ST3 plugins in Atom, but hopefully we'll be able to use Atom plugins in VSCode once plugins are included in VSCode.
At the moment VSCode don't have any functionality for plugins, but it's coming soon see forum
There is also menu item under help in VSCode for reporting issues and suggesting features.
Me too would like Plugins for VS Code. As I would like a WakaTime plugin as I'm spending so much time working in it :). Both on Mac as in Windows.
I also discovered F12 one day but just thought: 'wow pretty cool!' and nothing more. But hey, I'm a webdev.. :)
It's now october and it's still there. And I hope it will stay. Just like crrl+alt+delete. #Sebastian I agree with #JimmyBoh, the whole preamble of this question is probably better suited to be put on a forum. Otherwise this question will probably be closed as 'not constructive'. To prevent other non-answers like this one :).

How to ensure that a desktop program works correctly after a clean-slate installation?

Motivation — I had a new version of my Cocoa application ready that worked fine on all beta testers' machines. So I released it. Turns out that a crucial feature simply doesn't work on anybody else's computer. Yikes! Yes, read that again: I released software that didn't work.
Cause — Users who had used previous versions my app (read: all my loyal beta testers) already had a folder ~/Application Support/MyApp/ from an older version. Due to the critical bug in the new release, this folder was necessary for the software to work. And for everybody else, because the folder did not exist, it didn't work.
As you can imagine, this is extremely embarrassing, and I want this to never, ever, happen again.
Remedies? — The straight-forward way to ensure this, of course, is to actually download and install it on a "clean" machine just before you publish a new release. But this seems impractical, because in time I will run out of friends with a Mac who have never tried my app yet (eventually all will have ;-)), and because I'm not eager to "format c:" my Mac before every single release…
This is where I need your help:
How can I ensure that a user who has never used my software before will get the same results as someone who has?
Virtual machines (VMWare Workstation, etc.) can be useful for testing clean installs of applications. You can start up a new virtual OS, install your stuff, test it, then delete the VM when you're done. There are ways to automate the spinning-up of a VM as well, which can make your life even easier.
Another thing to do is to determine all the prerequisites your app requires, and add checks for these things at startup. If something is not setup right, you can either attempt to set it up within your code, or inform the user to do it.
A more lightweight approach might be using tools like AppZapper to get rid of everything — temporary files, preferences, cache, history, etc – related to the app to test.

How to highlight the differences between two versions of a text in .NET web app?

I have been supporting a web application at work for our Call Center unit for about 2 years now. The app is written in ASP.NET 3.5 with SQL server 2005 database. I’ve been asked to expand the call detail section to allow agents to edit the current call note with the ability to revert back to its previous version. Now, that’s all cool but now the manager wants to be able to click on any particular note and see all edits with changes highlighted in yellow (and if something was deleted, he wants to SEE the deleted text crossed out). Actually, what I need is very similar to how Stackoverflow handles edits on their questions. I’ve been thinking about how to go about this and after doing research and Google-ing of course, I am still unsure which route to take. I am fairly new to .NET development. Any ideas on the best technique for highlighting the changes in UI? I am afraid I am going to have to store a copy of the entire note each time they make a change because the manager wants to be able to easily review notes and revert back to ANY version (not just the most recent one) before sending the monthly call report off to our VIP customers. Since this department OFTEN changes their mind on things, I want to make sure the new functionality is scalable and easy to maintain. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I am really just looking for someone to point me in the right direction; maybe there are some tools out there that can be useful, recommended keywords in Google lookup, etc.
This will be difficult do to.
You'll need a "text editor" control that can not only edit the text, but which can also tell you what changes were made.
You then need to store not only the final text string, but also the list of changes
You'll then need to be able to display the text plus changes, using strike-outs, and different colors for inserts vs. changes
You'll need to do this not only for the changes of a single user, but you'll need to store each users' changes in the database, and will need to be able to display all the changes, all at once.
Your manager should be really sure he needs this.
Some tools for doing the diff for you can be found at Any decent text diff/merge engine for .NET?.
This would entail storing every version like you say. This should allow you to implement it similarly to SO. I seem to recall reading or hearing Jeff mention it, but wasn't able to find it, likely in one of the SO podcasts.
Easiest would be to store the text for each revision, then when the user wants to see the diff use a diff tool to generate the highlighted text.
Here is some Javascript diff code:
http://ejohn.org/projects/javascript-diff-algorithm/
If all the computers have Word installed you may be able to use a Word control to accomplish this. TortoiseSVN has scripts in its program directory which can take two word documents and produce a document with changes highlighted. To see this create c:\aaa.doc and bbb.doc, then install TortoiseSVN and run:
wscript.exe "C:\program files\tortoisesvn\Diff-Scripts\diff-doc.js" c:\aaa.doc c:\bbb.doc //E:javascript
I think you should see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control