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The never-ending quest to enhance the quality of our code and improve its readability, maintainability, and performance has produced a number of architectural and design principles over the years. The DRY (“Don’t repeat yourself”), YAGNI (“You’re not gonna need it”), and KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid”) principles are three we should all keep in mind when we code.These three acronyms represent concepts that can help streamline your development process as well as make your code simpler, cleaner, and more maintainable. We will examine these three principles here as well as learn how they can be applied to the code of your .NET applications.To work with the code examples provided in this article, you should have Visual Studio 2022 installed in your system. If you don’t already have a copy, you can download Visual Studio 2022 here.

Bouncing between apps and programs can become a time suck—a problem that Microsoft Edge’s newest features want to nip in the bud. Splashiest among them is the integration of Microsoft’s Dall-E powered Bing Image Creator, which lets you generate custom AI art right within the browser.

Available for desktop users, Bing Image Creator generates four images for download in response to a prompt (e.g., “smartphone with a thick case but broken screen”). For users who’ve had the feature roll out to them, you’ll need to first add it to Edge’s sidebar, or the strip of icons running along the right side of a browser tab or window. Afterward, getting started is merely a single click in the sidebar.

Microsoft made a significant investment in Windows 10 Mobile, including acquiring Nokia to produce its own handsets. Despite the strengths of the tiled mobile operating system, it was unable to compete with the dominant iOS and Android platforms. While Windows 10 became a successful operating system for PCs and tablets, Microsoft was eventually abandon its mobile ambitions As Windows 11 gradually replaces Windows 10, the question remains whether it would perform better than its predecessor in the mobile space.

Microsoft's ongoing layoffs are hitting its home turf, with new notices affecting 1,248 people in the Redmond, Bellevue and Issaquah, Wash. areas in May.

Microsoft's May job cuts will affect 689 people in that area, starting on May 5, plus 559 people located in Redmond and Bellevue, which will occur on May 26, according to a Fox 13 report. The layoff statistics come from the state's Employment Security Department, which issues "a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification alert when companies with 100 or more employees have layoffs or closures," the report noted.

Microsoft's latest collaboration application, Loop, is now available as a public preview.

The Microsoft Loop service has three parts, consisting of "components," "workspaces" and "pages." The Loop App ties those elements together.

The components part of Microsoft Loop was released late last year, and it functions like sharable application chunks that can be coauthored, with the changes appearing across apps. Loop pages are described as "canvases" for organizing Loop components. Loop workspaces are the "shared" spaces that can be used to collaborate on group projects.

Since its inception, Microsoft Defender Antivirus was considered somewhat of a joke by power users. They would assert that it provided you with the protection of an umbrella in a hurricane. While its deficiencies were often exaggerated, indeed, it didn’t give you the same depth and scope as high-quality third-party solutions.

When Bitdefender retired its free antivirus solution in 2021, many turned back to Microsoft Defender. After all, Microsoft should ultimately know the best ways to secure its software. It's surprising it took so long for the company to expand the coverage of its Microsoft Defender line, especially, with the largest share of its revenue being made from intelligent cloud computing.

Microsoft is reassuring the public that it still is focused on mixed-reality products, including Microsoft Mesh and the HoloLens 2 headset.

Microsoft's mixed-reality product commitments were described by Robin Seiler, corporate vice president and chief operating officer of Microsoft's Windows and Devices organization, and manager of the company's mixed-reality operations. Seiler offered the following assurances: HoloLens 2 is still getting produced by Microsoft, and it receives monthly software updates.

Microsoft and Adobe have collaborated on "natively embedding" new Adobe Acrobat PDF technology into the Microsoft Edge browser for Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems, according to a Wednesday Microsoft announcement.

This new Adobe Acrobat PDF engine will start to appear in Edge for unmanaged Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems as early as March. It'll be replacing the current "legacy engine" that's already in the Edge browser. These unmanaged Windows users won't have an opt-out option.

Organizations overseeing managed devices won't get the new engine in March, but they can opt in to get it then, if wanted, according to Microsoft's FAQ announcement. The policy to opt into using the new engine is called "NewPDFReaderOptInEnabled." Organizations with managed Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices will start getting their rollout of the new Adobe Acrobat PDF engine in September. They'll also have an opt-out policy option at that time. However, this September opt-out policy will just give organizations a six-month reprieve, as Microsoft intends to remove the old engine on March 31, 2024. That's also the date when the opt-out policy will expire for organizations.

This week during the Ignite conference, evidence of Microsoft's plans to kill the Office brand name in favor of "Microsoft 365" has started to emerge.

Also popping up this week during the Microsoft Ignite event is a new "O" logo for Office products, which are now switching to become Microsoft 365 products for the most part.

The source of Office product name-change news is Microsoft itself. It has published this Microsoft365.com landing page for a new and coming Microsoft 365 App and Office.com replacement. The page flatly declares that "Office is becoming Microsoft 365." The actual application products, though, aren't changing with this declaration. It's just a name change.

Network ATC for Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft's "intent-based deployment" solution that lets IT pros set up configurations to apply to "all nodes in the cluster." The meaning of "ATC" doesn't seem to be defined in Microsoft's documentation, but the concept was described in this 2021 Microsoft announcement. The Network ATC feature is now at the GA stage to support Azure Stack HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure), which is Microsoft's "Azure in a box" for use by organizations in their infrastructures. (BoN 2.2.3.) Azure Arc for SQL Server.