Windows 10 remote assistance is totally borked

This one is a doozie. After the problem descriptions I've tried to spell out some fixes. Hopefully these will get back to MS.

First of all, Windows 7 will not connect to Windows 10 with remote assistance. Not with the helpdesk option by IP address and not with an invitation file. It gives the useless error below and dies.

Windows 7 works to Windows 8.1. I guess it was too much of a surprise to Microsoft that Windows 10 came out all of a sudden and they didn't have time to test it fully.
Problem: Windows 7 remote assistance will not connect to Windows 10
Possible Solutions:

1. Make it compatible *Recommended*
2. Put an error message in the program that will tell the frustrated users their versions are incompatible.

Not acceptable, but Microsoft does it anyway:

1. Cross fingers and hope it's compatible
2. Give a generic error message that doesn't help the user and let them figure it out by themselves. 

Second, once you get in with remote assistance (I did it by installing windows 10 in a virtual machine and using remote assistance from there) you won't be able to help because admin functions have been screwed up. Not disabled, but screwed up. Really.

I needed to remote into a family member's computer to put in the license key because he's not an admin on his domain-joined laptop. Now he's remote, so he connects to my network through a VPN -- and that means he has to stay logged in. If I use remote desktop the VPN connection will drop and I'll get disconnected. In the past (and win 8.1) when anything needed to be done I'd use remote assistance to give permission to install programs or whatever he needed. It worked well once group policy was applied to make the UAC window visible remotely.

You can't seem to elevate the default license key window from the GUI so in this case I needed to open an administrative command prompt to put in the command to change the license key. No big deal. I searched for command prompt, right clicked, and chose run as administrator. Windows presented the box where you would enter your admin credentials. I could see the box, but I couldn't click on it. When I clicked on it, nothing happened. I couldn't give the window focus nor anything within it. I had him click the user name box and that worked to give it focus. I could type in it so I thought the problem was solved. I entered my domain admin username and password and hit enter. Invalid password. Tried again, but had him hit the button, same thing. Tried using a local admin account instead of a domain one. Invalid password. Tried opening a regular command prompt and using runas with domain and local accounts. Invalid password. Finally I gave him the password and had him type it in. Worked first try. So windows either prevents remote users from using credentials on purpose, or it changes the password you enter. Isn't that the darndest thing you've ever heard of?  Let's have admins support users by giving the users admin passwords! Microsoft has done some stupid things but for this one I think they should be awarded a cake.

Once you've given away the admin credentials to the user, you still can't click on the elevated command prompt window to give it focus. They have to click it. Once they do, you can type in it.

Problem: Admins can't click on elevated permission windows
Solution: Fix the interface so admins can give focus to windows running with elevated permissions

Problem: Admins can't use their admin credentials, they have to give them to users to type in
Solution: Fix the interface so admins can type in their own credentials

Microsoft may have snowed the general public with their new half-baked OS but they haven't fooled me. This was my first interaction with windows 10 RTM, and it was miserable. They spend so much money hyping their new product, leverage geeks everywhere to test it for them, and it still turns out to be a broken mess. If only they had enough money to do it right! Oh wait a minute, they do! And that is why I hate Microsoft today. How about you?

Invisible Modal Windows

I installed Windows 10 in a VM (Hyper-V) to see if it was good enough to be installed on my real computers. The first thing I needed to do is activate it. I remoted into the computer, went to the activation screen, and clicked the "Change License Key" button. Nothing seemed to happen, so I tried clicking it again. This time I got a "ding" sound. I tried clicking on some other things and kept getting that sound. It seemed like there was a modal dialog open that I couldn't see. I pressed Alt-F4 and everything returned to normal. None of the windows I could see closed but I could click on everything again.

I clicked on the button again to see if I could find the window. The settings window became unclickable again, there was nothing in the taskbar, alt-tab didn't show any new windows. Alt-F4 returned it to normal. Out of curiosity I tried it from Hyper-V. Same behavior. I would post a screenshot, but, you know.

Invisible modal windows. How could they make something so broken? The mind boggles. I wonder how many others there are. Of course the workaround is to use the command
     slmgr.vbs -ipk xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxfrom an elevated command prompt. I was really looking forward to upgrading to windows 10 but it's clearly not ready if you can't see some windows through remote connections. Guess I'll be waiting for whatever form service pack 1 takes in this new system. That's why I hate Microsoft today.

Because who would want to modify their own calendar

Outlook is a pretty cool piece of software. I use it for email, contacts, and calendar stuff. It syncs with SharePoint pretty well which is also cool. One big flaw it has though is that there's one thing my phone's crummy no-name calendar app can do that Outlook can't and that is modify internet calendars. I use Google calendar a lot to coordinate calendars with different groups of people. Outlook can only open them read-only. That is just amazingly inconvenient. Why can my phone app do something Outlook can't? My iPod can modify Exchange calendars and Google calendars. Does Microsoft want to be the third stringer? Clearly Microsoft could make it work if they cared, but making an application that works the way people want it to is clearly not their goal.

That's why I hate Microsoft today.

Office 2016 is supposed to be coming out next month. Maybe there's hope.

The "Send" Button and What It Should Do

As I've said before, I use Outlook a lot. It does a lot of nifty things. I recently posted about one of the problems Outlook has with calendars. This post deals with email.

A close family member recently tried to send me something from an application. He clicked the email link and the Outlook email window popped up since that is his default email client. He clicked send and the window closed. Minutes passed and I still hadn't received the email. Now if you are a normal person like him, you would think that when you click "Send" that email is going to be sent. Not the case with Outlook. So I told him that he would need to open Outlook for that message to actually go. He expressed his disappointment to me that the application worked in such a stupid way and I said, "You're absolutely right. You know what, that's why I hate Microsoft today. I'm going to make a post about that." You see the greatest minds available at Microsoft decided "Send" should just queue the mail up for delivery and should you ever open Outlook again, that is when your messages will be sent.

Obviously Microsoft cheaped out on the focus group for this one, but just to save you a buck Microsoft, here's some quick stats for you:

• 10 out of 10 people expect that when they click the SEND button on an email, it's going to SEND and no other steps are necessary.
• 9 out of 10 people think buttons that say they are going to do something should do that thing. (that 10th guy is obviously a Microsoft shill)

Problem: I click SEND on an email and it DOESN'T SEND
Possible Solutions:

1. Have Outlook send that email in the background
2. Have the button say "Send Later" or something to that effect when Outlook is not already open
3. Have a "SEND NOW" and a "SEND LATER" button. Have Outlook open itself if someone clicks "SEND NOW" and queue it up if they click "SEND LATER"

PlayStation 4, Xbox 0

I've always been a PlayStation guy. Given the theme of this blog it shouldn't be hard to figure out why I would avoid the Xbox. I just can't bring myself to support a platform that could be the best but is just so disappointing. However, for free I might just use an Xbox. Recently, a friend from church gave me an Xbox 360 so I could play games with him. Sure, I would need to sign up for Xbox Live and buy a couple games, but that didn't seem like a big deal if my friend wanted me to play badly enough to give me an Xbox. 

I brought it home and plugged it in. Everything came up, looking good. Then I got this 

Well of course I'd like to update. 

Still looking good....

 And there it is! For a moment they had me believing I would not be experiencing the regular disgust at the pathetic quality of their products. More money than anyone. More resources, more know how, more failure! WHY?! You could have made it work Microsoft! I know you could! Oh what I would give for you to make something that works! 

Oh yes, it's connected to the internet alright. The failure belongs to Microsoft. I'll probably wind up having to update it manually. You know I've never had to do that with any of my Sony products, which I will gladly continue to pay for. I believe that makes the score PlayStation 4, Xbox 0. So much promise and so little delivery, this is why I hate Microsoft today. How about you?

Sorting is such a simple idea

Having just returned from vacation, I'm doing a lot of picture stuff. When I tried to put my camera's folder in order by date so I could have pluck pictures out from a certain date range, I get this arrangement. They're all in descending order by date EXCEPT the first three. For some crazy reason they decided to be up top instead of in order like they're supposed to be. Microsoft, how is it possible that you do not sort your rows by the value in the column? Even if the date was in a different format or something, translate it first, then sort it. This is pretty basic stuff. And yes, there is another section of files down below with the 6/24/2014 date. They got sorted correctly. 

Windows You Can't Resize

I've been using windows since 3.11. Back then everything was tiny and new and we were just so impressed at far Microsoft had come since DOS that nobody really minded when a window was too small for the information it displayed. Screens were 640x480 and we were glad to have it!

It's 2015. I should now be able to see the full location
without scrolling.

Fast forward thirty years and I can't believe some of the things that are still lingering around. To this day when I open a file properties dialog box sometimes the file name fits. Sometimes the user names fit. If you're lucky and your stuff doesn't fit, you get a horizontal scroll bar. Often you get nothing and you have to try to put the cursor at the end of what you can see and use the arrow keys to scroll the past the end of the field. You can't resize the window at all.












Internet explorer has come a long way too, right? Now thanks to Twitter Bootstrap and other similar efforts, we can write web pages that resize content and have a fantastic experience on any size device. But no matter what size device you have, if you're in the IE settings you're getting a window that's one size and that even the built in data doesn't fit in. Just go to internet options and look at the advanced tab. Horizontal scroll bar. Microsoft, you know how wide the content is, you put it there, can you possibly make the window fit? Impossible? How about some word wrap? Notepad (one of Microsoft's best programs ever) can do it. Too lazy? How about letting people resize the window? It's kind of a thing in the windows operating system people are used to being able to do. I'll give you a pass for now on the Windows 8 only-full-screen-app fiasco.




Then there are apps where information is divided into two sub windows such as in active directory users and computers. Now if you're going for bad user experience, I apologize. If you're going for a good user experience, how about not making the window so small? And if you are dedicated to making it small, how about using the space you have so users don't have to resize every column and screen section to get things to fit. A quarter of the right panel is unused yet every column is too small to display the data it contains. You can do better than this, Microsoft!

Then there are times when you choose from one column to put things in another column like in mmc.exe. In the left column nothing fits. You have to resize the column to read what things actually are. The window is less than half my small laptop screen and it's not resizable. You want little windows to be nice and small and cute like it used to be but it's not cute anymore. Make windows resizable!





I can relate to the attraction to recycle old code. but Microsoft, the time has come to step into the twenty-first century. The first step is to get rid of fixed-size windows. The second step, if you can make it, would be to have columns fit the data they contain. Window too small? Make it bigger. Intelligent UI like that would be the mark of the best software company in the world.

Broken By Default

A web application of mine started timing out waiting for a SQL query to return results. The query ran in less than a second in enterprise manager, but took more than 30 seconds when called from the web server. I was amazed to discover after Googling I was amazed to discover that to get the query to return in less than one second from the web page you have to put the words SET ARITHABORT ON in the stored procedure.

I'm not terribly surprised given Microsoft's track record that the default setting for ASP.NET pages causes them to break but why would it be different in enterprise manager than it is for applications? It sure does make troubleshooting take longer!

To break it down, just for you, Microsoft --

Problem #1: ARITHABORT is set to off by default for ASP.Net applications. This causes applications to work initially and then fail some random time later.

Solution: Set ARITHABORT on by default. Thanks for assuming that I wanted my query to take as long as possible, but I'd really like it as fast as possible.

Problem #1: ARITHABORT is set to different settings in SQL Enterprise Manager and for applications.

Solution: Set them to be the same! It sure would be nice if those troubleshooting didn't have to look for a secret switch to flip before the SQL behavior becomes consistent.

Hyper-V Won't Connect to VMs

Wow. My Hyper-V host can't connect to the VMs it's running. My other host can connect to them just fine. To fix this, I had to shut down all the VMs and restart the host. I couldn't find a fix anywhere. 

Things that make no sense

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn584113.aspx

Does this make any kind of sense?

Windows Server 2012 R2 Upgrade Compatibility Checker

I decided to upgrade my test lab 2008 R2 servers to 2012 R2 for some of the nice new features. I was pleasantly surprised that there was a compatibility checker that ran before the upgrade. Each time I did it, there were no issues detected. I upgraded my DC with no issues -- awesome. I upgraded my remote access server with no issues -- great! "They've finally done something right!" I told myself.

I knew the real test would be upgrading my SharePoint 2010 web front end and app server. That's the canary for sure. When the compatibility checker came back with no issues I was hopeful, but I made a checkpoint just in case. After the upgrade several services required by SharePoint would not start. I Googled the issue and found out that you can't upgrade with 2010 installed, you have to install it fresh from disk if you want SP 2010 to run on server 2012 R2.

Microsoft, SharePoint is one of your flagship products. I applaud the idea of including a compatibility checker in your upgrade software. I certainly don't expect you to look for third party software or software that's no longer supported, but if you're not checking to see if one of your biggest apps will still work, WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU CHECKING FOR?? All I'm saying is that if you're going to go to the trouble of making a checker, make it useful. Make it find the BIG stuff. What would you have needed to do it right? Time? Money? Testers? Whatever it is, please go find it. 

The "fix" for group policy actually completely breaks it

Microsoft recently published a set of patches to fix a 15 year vulnerability in the way clients update group policy. I was glad to read how they had taken the time they needed to get the fix right. Now it just so happened the week after this patch was automatically installed on my computers that I needed to make a group policy change. When I ran gpupdate on the client to get the changes, the update failed. Network access denied. So I tried a few more computers and discovered that the 2012 servers were OK, one of five of the 2008 servers was OK, and only one of 3 windows 7 machines would still work and it was the one that hadn't been patched yet. SYSVOL and NETLOGON shares were completely unreachable on the affected machines. I spent several hours troubleshooting with the guidance of the error messages -- checked DFS clients, ran AD diagnostics, tested network access, firewalls, demoted a secondary DC, and so on... Finally when nothing made any difference I figured I'd just have to roll everything back. For science though, I just uninstalled patch 3000483. As soon as the computer restarted group policy started updating again. Naturally the computers all automatically installed the patch again, but this time it worked. My best guess is that there was some race condition that affected those machines.

So there I was just trying to get something done and wouldn't you know, the group policy "fix" broke group policy on half my machines. They point out in the article that they had time to do this patch right and it still cost me hours of troubleshooting. Can you imagine how bad it would've been if they hadn't "done it right"? This is why I hate Microsoft today. If only they had a few more resources to throw at quality control, a few more dollars to pay some people to test these things out, I might not have had to lose all that time. Have you had any issues with the Jasbug patches? Commiserate in the comments.