How's your week been?

General Discussion
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It’s Friday! How’s your week been? Have you achieved all that you hoped?

My week has been busy helping developers to receive their prizes, queries, training, and all the reporting that comes with the end of the month.

Hoping for a weekend of sunshine, family and good food :grinning:

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Things I learned this week:

  • Microsoft Store products don’t have to declare the backgroundMediaPlayback capability to play music in the background; it’s possible to declare an audio background task without a corresponding capability (which is how it was done in Windows 8). This means I can’t fully rely on observing this capability in Store listing metadata to help make purchasing decisions (to avoid low-effort soundtrack applications built using video game engines that are unsuitable for this purpose), but it’s still a pretty safe bet since the backgroundMediaPlayback capability is now the recommended mechanism.
  • Managed to diagnose how the Windows 11 Snipping Tool can hang and block access to your desktop if your device is joined to an Active Directory domain and you’re disconnected from the domain controller, which usually means you’ll have to log off to recover control since the hang even covers up Task Manager. (Sigh, screen capturing ought to work if you’re offline.) In the process, I learned what the Data Sharing Service (DsSvc) does and how this hang affects other Windows developers that use file sharing tokens. If you’re enrolled in the Windows Insider program (I filed this from an Insider build in hopes of reaching a smaller but better audience, so it won’t be visible or accessible to general consumers, which is the portion that I learned this week), you can read the details in Feedback Hub: feedback-hub:?contextid=973&feedbackid=70d5d42e-be51-4aa1-89e6-69975e73c1ac&form=1&src=1
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Thanks for sharing your learnings @cubeof11.

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  • I’m pushing to migrate my day-to-day Windows computing to use sandboxed applications like the ones that the Microsoft Store prefers to accept for publication. Dealing with network isolation is proving to be complicated (since I use virtual machines), and I’m not sure I like the fact that I have to source guidance from security research blogs to understand what’s happening.
  • Xbox consoles have a new dashboard design rolling out, and I’ve lost a little bit of customization, so this weekend I’m going to prioritize building a way to gather local product installation data so I can recreate my groups and pins in my alternative launcher, since I haven’t identified a way to retrieve their contents directly. Coincidentally (I hope), I did a factory reset because launching a specific installed game suddenly started yielding an error code that isn’t documented on the support site, and I know I tend to stress test the system due to having 600+ products installed (in the past, this has caused an internal database to become full, which prevented all title updates from being applied). Turns out the factory reset didn’t help, and it was probably just corrupted disk data, since copying it to another storage device would also fail.