It’s that time of the year again when bicycles take over the streets of Adelaide and nearby country South Australia. The Tour Down Under is in town, and that also means the Friday is also the BUPA Challenge Tour. This gives us mere mortals a chance to ride the same course as the professionals, complete with supported rest and refuel stops all along the way.

Usually I ride with my dad and we do the full distance, but this year my son decided he’d like to take part for the first time. So while dad still started at Norwood, we chose to do the shorter 60km distance starting at Mt Pleasant and finishing at Campbelltown.

Carson had previously done a few rides with me and the other Mud, Sweat & Gears riders down to McLaren Vale (a confortable 30km ride from our place), so I was pretty confident he’d be up to the longer distance, given plenty of breaks along the way.

Our family friend Jane also joined us for the ride (as well as giving us a lift to our starting location at Mt Pleasant).

The day started off cool and overcast, a huge relief from the high temperatures we’d had in the previous days. There’d also been a decent thunderstorm overnight. A small amount of drizzle hung around for the first part of the ride, but nothing too annoying.

We made good use of the rest stops along the way to get refreshments and make use of the ‘conveniences’.

We also had a bonus visit to the bakery in Lobethal. A welcome boost.

At one stop, we did an adjustment to Carson’s seat pole – turns out he’s been growing a bit and those legs wanted a bit more room to stretch out . Later on at the Cudlee Creek stop, we were just about to head off when he noticed that his rear brake was not working properly. The main rest stops also have resident bike mechanics, so we immediately went over to get it looked at. This brake had played up in a similar way a few months ago and I thought I’d resolved the problem. I was encouraged that the mechanic tried exactly the same things that I had done myself previously. He managed to get it working so it would get us safely to the finish (which was a fair bit of downhill, so having good brakes was critical), but recommended we take it in to get serviced as there’s obviously something not quite right.

The final ride down to the finish went well and the three of us even got a chance to ride arm-in-arm under the finish archway, much to the appreciation of the crowd. The finish line was right next to Foxfield Oval with the huge gum trees lining the road. That made it the ideal place to stay and wait for the professional teams to come sprinting in.

All in all a great day. Super proud of Carson for riding 60km (as Jane pointed out, every km after the 30km mark was a PB!). Also nice to finish the ride and not feel completely wrecked too!

It’s the first day of 2017, so a good time to reflect on the year just past.

Travel

A couple of friends have commented either “You’ve travelled a lot this year” or “where are you travelling to next?”. My first reaction was surprise – I don’t travel a lot do I?

• May MVP Seminar in Sydney
• Almost Canberra and Sydney .NET User Group
• NDC Sydney
• DDD Melbourne
• MVP Summit

Well ok, that was a few trips. But no future travel plans at this stage.

Family

I won’t dwell on this too much but the health challenges continue for some members. Some of you know me well enough to know the details.

The kids did well at school (I’m sure better than I ever did!). They’re all growing up fast too.

We did have a couple of sad losses – Princess Layer (one of our bantam hens) and Guido (a goldfish) both passed away. Layer died quite suddenly of unknown causes (maybe snake or spider bite). We held a little burial ceremony in the backyard for her.

I’ve got a couple of weeks off over the Christmas break. Nice to spend time at home with the family, do a bit of gardening/weeding, a few bike rides and take it easy.

Garden

We planted new cherry, apricot and nectarine trees. Looking forward to seeing them fruit in years to come.

I finally finished the chicken run, so we can let the chooks out of their shed into the run during the day, and not worry about foxes or the odd stray dog. If we’re home, we usually let them out of the run to roam around the backyard anyway.

Technology

I got a new laptop, and more recently a new phone. The girls got iPads for Christmas so all three kids now have them. As annoying as it is to set up, at least the Apple Family Sharing means we can share single app purchases amongst all the devices. I say annoying as from my experience the ‘app approval’ part only works if a parent also has an Apple device.

Maybe updating to an XBox One S as a late family Christmas present?

Also on the radar is one of these Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC Lite WiFi access points. We have a few reception dead spots around the house that I think could be fixed by one of these.

Don’t think I’m buying new toys/technology all the time! Like most families we have a limited budget so these purchases only happen when absolutely necessary and we’ll get as much use out of them as we can.

Apparently in a few months our suburb will have the NBN. I’ll be looking closely at my options when that becomes available.

.NET and dev things

I’m in my second year as a Microsoft MVP. I’ve really appreciated the opportunities this has given me to participate and learn more. It’s also opened some doors particularly in regards to the Adelaide .NET User Group, which I help run.

The group continues to meet monthly and enjoys good attendances. It would be great to have some other members step up and get more involved with the organising and possibly allow us to run a “DDD Adelaide” event too.

This year I became a volunteer moderator for Chocolatey. I’ve been a fan of Chocolatey for a number of years now (my “Let’s get Chocolatey” t-shirt from supporting their KickStarter is a favourite), and it’s nice to be able to help share the load of moderating new package submissions.

Microsoft has changed considerably as a company over recent years. I really like their approach to doing much more in the open (including developing many products as open source on Github) and working with (instead of against) Linux and other platforms. The way .NET is evolving, together with new innovations like TypeScript gives me confidence that they’re heading the the right direction.

Work

I don’t generally write about the details of my day-to-day work at RL Solutions, but it has been a busy year and 2017 looks to be no different. The consistent highlight is the people I work with. We recently advertised for a graduate developer to join our Adelaide team. It’s good to be growing (and also I can finally pass on the “new guy” mantle).

I’m sure I’ve missed some things, but that will do for now. Happy New Year!

I’ve had my Nokia Lumia 920 phone for just over three and a half years, and it’s starting to age. It has served me pretty well, but the screen is showing a distinct yellowing and more annoyingly if someone calls me, I need to switch to hands free mode for them to hear me. (Not always convenient if I’m in a public place like sitting on a bus!)

So I’d started thinking about what’s next. I’d already decided that as much as I love the Windows Phone interface, there’s only a limited future for those phones so a change of platform was due.

Initially I was looking at Android phones, in particular the Nexus models (figuring that they would be better supported and updated seeing as they come from Google). I was a bit concerned about a number of security vulnerabilities discovered in Android recently, and while iOS isn’t necessarily any more secure, I had been impressed with the stance Apple had taken with the FBI earlier this year. The other consideration was that the kids will all have iPads for school, so maybe iOS could make sense.

I didn’t want a huge phone, so something similar in size to the 920 would be nice. A friend recently bought an iPhone 6 and I’d helped her set it up, and I thought it looked pretty good.

So weighing all that up (combined with getting $140 store credit when I bought two iPads on Black Friday) an iPhone it is. I ended up gong with an iPhone, opting for the latest iPhone 7 model.

I placed the order on Wednesday and went in to the Apple Store here in Adelaide first thing Thursday morning to pick it up. Turns out most of the people in the queue outside the shop were for service and repairs so I was in and out in about 5 minutes. A quick visit across the road to Vodafone to get a nano SIM and job done. Because of the new SIM card, it did mean I couldn’t wait until Christmas morning to open my new present!

I already had an existing Apple ID, and it has a rather complex password. It’s quite a pain to have to enter into the phone repeatedly. I soon figured out that the fingerprint reader on the phone can be used instead of having to re-enter the password, but you need to enable that as it’s turned off by default.

Next stop was to install apps. A few favourites to match those I’d used on my Lumia and a few new ones to try out.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• BOM Weather
• Skype
• Dropbox
• My Vodafone Australia
• Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote/Outlook
• Office Lens
• Microsoft Authenticator
• Pluralsight
• Stocard
• metroMATE
• KeePass Touch
• Feedly
• Endomondo
• Australian Taxation Office
• SwiftKey Keyboard
• Google Maps
• Fing Network Scanner
• Pocket Casts

Paul Thurrott has written a couple of posts for people transitioning to iOS from Windows Phone. They are informative reading:

• iPhone for the Windows Guy: Use Your Microsoft Accounts
• iPhone for the Windows Guy: Minimize Apple’s Grip on Your Device

Some app-specific notes

Stocard

I used this on the Lumia, but frustratingly the Windows Phone version doesn’t have a backup/export option, so I’ll need to re-enter all my store cards. Maybe I can scan the barcodes off of the Windows Phone app directly into the iOS one?

Microsoft Authenticator

A nice two-factor authentication app. Obviously I needed to manually transfer all my accounts over. One nice thing, I can now just ‘Approve’ when my Microsoft Account needs authentication. No idea why they couldn’t do that on Windows Phone.

Australian Taxation Office

I was able to export my data from this app on Windows Phone to OneDrive and import it into the iOS version. The only thing which doesn’t transfer is any photos of receipts.

Pocket Casts

It does cost $5.99, but a) it’s created by an Adelaide company and b) it has a lot of recommendations (including Thurrott), so I splashed out on this . It can import OPML files. I had one lying around on OneDrive, though it wasn’t my current list as the default Windows Phone podcast app doesn’t support exporting OPML files. Not a big drama.

So that’s my new Christmas present! Any other app suggestions for me?

I’ve just returned from my second Microsoft MVP Summit held in Bellevue and Redmond, Washington (just outside Seattle). I had an awesome time!

I flew over on Saturday going via Brisbane and Vancouver. It was drizzly in Seattle when I arrived (not uncommon I know), but not so wet that I couldn’t spend a bit of time walking around downtown, getting a few souvenirs for the family and generally trying to stay awake as long as I could with the plan to try and go to sleep at right time. That wasn’t easy!

I’d stayed in Seattle the first night, but the summit was over at Bellevue and at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, so I caught the bus up there on Sunday.

I stayed at the Bellevue Hyatt, which was very nice (and convenient as that was also where registration and some of the off-campus events were being held).

Sunday afternoon there were some optional “pre-event” workshops that I attended.

Monday through Wednesday, I attended technical sessions hosted by the various Microsoft Product Teams at Redmond Campus. These started at 8am, so I was up bright and early to grab breakfast and jump on the shuttle buses to get from Bellevue to Redmond in time.

One unexpected surprise was to be one of a handful of MVPs to receive a special token of appreciation for contributing to open source projects connected to the .NET Foundation.

I believe some of the technical sessions were recorded with the intention that where they don’t cover NDA content they’ll be published to Channel 9. Also, you should watch out for the Microsoft Connect() event happening this week.

Thursday was a bit different. Still an 8am start, but for my area (Visual Studio and Development Technologies), Jeff Fritz (who had been coordinating the previous three days) organised a day-long hackathon.

I joined the Visual Studio Extensions group and worked on an extension code analyzer, which can check for common mistakes when creating an extension and offer code fixes. The idea for the analyzer came about after getting some advice on another of my extensions the previous night from Mads Kristensen (Microsoft Web Tooling and Visual Studio Extension author extraordinaire) and Justin Clareburt (expat Aussie and Senior Program Manager for Visual Studio Extensibility). You can see my progress on Github. After a little bit more polish, I hope to publish the analyzer to NuGet (and yes, I even spelled it with a ‘z’ )

Jeff tweeted about one of the other extensions produced at the hackathon, which integrates with the new Surface Dial. Very cool!

During the MVP Summit hackathon, Nico implemented a Visual Studio extension for the Surface Dial as a debugging tool https://t.co/P2NWS77WWH

— Jeff Fritz (@csharpfritz) November 11, 2016

Another highlight was going down to visit the Microsoft Store in the Bellevue shops and trying out the Surface Studio and having snowball fight with their HTC Vive Virtual Reality headset (photo taken by fellow MVP Alan Burchill).

Thursday night I headed home, arriving back Saturday afternoon. There were some tight connections, but staff at both Vancouver and Brisbane were able to ensure I (and my baggage) made my flights. Phew.

Special thanks to RL Solutions for supporting me attending the summit and especially for my family for allowing me to be away for the week.

A few weeks ago I received an email saying that I would be upgraded to the new outlook.com. Then last weekend I noticed I’d stopped receiving new emails and figured the migration had begun.

My email setup is a bit unusual. I have a custom domain “gardiner.net.au” and email for this domain is handled by Google Apps Free edition (legacy). This is the version of Google Apps (now called “G Suite”) that Google no longer offers for new customers, but maintain for existing ones.

A while back when Google and Microsoft were being less than friendly about GMail support with Windows Phones (combined with a weird problem on my phone where using GMail was using unusually high cellular data), I switched to using Outlook.com. To make this work, I configured Outlook.com to regularly pull email from GMail, and to send all outbound emails back through GMail too (so that SPF and DKIM would continue to work).

That setup worked well for my phone, and also for family calendar sharing (seeing as my wife Narelle had been using Hotmail for ages).

The downsides were that there appeared to be a sporadic bug with the email import process. Just occasionally emails would get ever so slightly corrupted. Most times you could still read them, but sometimes just one character changing was enough to render it completely unreadable.

I lived in hope that the migration to the new O365 infrastructure would resolve the corruption problem.

So where was the new Outlook.com? Every time I tried to log in, I kept getting a “Sorry, something went wrong” page, and if I looked at the details of the error, it mentioned this “ADDriverStoreAccessNonLocalException”. I sent a number of tweets to @Outlook, but got zero responses (disappointing).

I figured I’d give it a few days, but then it was still saying the same thing. Eventually I stumbled across a post to the Microsoft Support Forums which suggested switching my Microsoft Account to use a different default profile. It sounded crazy, but I was willing to give it a try. And it worked!

The new Outlook.com now loaded in my browser in all it’s O365-like glory. Great!

I suspect the reason I might have had this problem is that I’d previously set up a real O365 account (via a free trial through being an MVP) and I’d partially configured that to use “gardiner.net.au” (without ever changing my MX records to actually deliver there). My theory is that new Outlook.com, being O365-based, probably could see that other half-set up system and got confused. As part of resolving this I also modified the settings on the O365 service to remove the “gardiner.net.au” domain settings.

I could then switch my default profile back to my @gardiner.net.au name and things continued to work.

The new Outlook.com. More responsive, and so far not prone to those import corruption issues. That’s great.

BUT

I noticed that the integration with my custom domain hosted on GMail was also reduced. Sending emails continued to work correctly – they’d use the GMail SMTP gateway that I’d configured in the Outlook.com settings. However when I went create a meeting invite, the email wasn’t sent through GMail, but directly from Outlook.com, and it was sent using one of the profile aliases (not my @gardiner.net.au address).

The migration also seemed to have messed up my email filter rules. Ok, I’ll go in and edit them then. Well looks like there’s some bugs there as this is all I get for editing the list of email addresses for a rule:

Yes, kind of hard to edit email addresses when the text box is empty. That’s just annoying.

The other downside to this whole “pulling email from GMail into Outlook.com” is that it uses polling – so there’s often a delay of a few minutes, up to maybe 30 minutes between polls from Outlook.com back to GMail checking for new emails.

So now I’m thinking that I might move back to using GMail directly (whilst keeping an eye on phone data usage).

Sometimes an “extra layer of abstraction” doesn’t help so much.