As far as I can remember, Microsoft Windows only had a Telnet server integrated, if we don’t count recent PowerShell Remoting (using Windows Remote Management, or WinRM). Still, it wasn’t SSH. Since 14352, people were finding traces, of what proved to be an integrated Microsoft SSH Server for Windows. Because Microsoft is also contributing to OpenSSH for Windows project, and that it’s getting to a fairly usable stage, I found the inclusion of the service quite interesting.

For a long time, I’ve been on the side of… let’s say, maybe not advocates, but generally accepting to the Windows 10 upgrade offer. What I disliked from the first moment, though, was the aggresivity with which Microsoft cloned his baby to hundreds of millions of machines. And now, it looks like the Sky.NET has finally awoken, ready to upgrade us all! So, what happened and why am I so passively angry about it? And why I’m writing now?

This is a story about one of the most used components in Windows Runtime framework – and, from a historical perspective, also one of the most flawed collection of components. During previous months, I had to endure several really unpleasant encounters with this devil of a component, whether it was imperfect implementation or missing features… So, in this article, I’ll attempt to outline at least some of these.

NOTE: this was supposed to be released months ago. I just found it in my drafts.

A lot has been written on the subject of Jim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games. He presented some very (for the Windows community) outrageous cricitism based on a theory that UWP ecosystem is, in fact, locked down, and that Win32 applications do not have these restrictions.

Well, let me tell you something, and some of you won’t like it. (You know that I try to advocate MS sometimes.) That guy has a point.

Did you get stuck on “COM Surrogate” crashing while trying to configure Internet Connection Sharing feature in latest Windows 10 builds? Or WLAN Autoconfig (WlanSvc) service is crashing for you? Here, I present a workaround that worked for me.

Yesterday, new build of Windows 10 Mobile - 14283 - was released to Insiders. SDK, however, is not out yet. That did not stop Martin (thanks!) from analyzing APIs that came with the build using his ApiPeek, discovering some hidden secrets in the process. I was lucky enough to notice that MS added custom validation of TLS certificates. Wanna know more?

First, great respect to the entire Turris team at CZ.NIC, you are truly building an awesome thing! (And there’s still 7 hours to fund it! When the $850,000 mark is hit, there’s a promise of a nice thank you gift… :))

Second, let me also make one quick comment about how quickly has the project gained the necessary “kick”.

Just a few quick remarks about the current state of Windows 10 - both on mobile and on desktop. Both are running 10586.

Personally, I can tackle most of the common Linux problems, but then, I get punched to the face from a completely unexpected direction. Kernel issues are the ones that are the hardest for me to debug, and when one happens, it always takes me whole day to come to that magical conclusion…

(DISCLAIMER: Most of the first paragraphs was written half an hour after Mika’s performance, which was on 19^th of July. :-)