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Looking for feedback: local-first release checkout for Web UI and API validation
Full disclosure: I am involved with WebSureQTool, so I am not posting this as a neutral third-party review. I am sharing it as a practical QA / IT-ops pattern and would genuinely welcome critique, comparisons, and suggestions from people who already have strong release-validation workflows. Every promotion into a higher environment — QA, UAT, staging, or production-like — usually carries the same question: Are the key user journeys still working, and did this release break anything important? Many teams answer that with some combination of manual checkout, automated smoke tests, CI jobs, monitoring, or a commercial test platform. Those are all valid approaches. What I have been exploring with WebSureQTool is a more local-first and portable version of that release-checkout layer. The core idea is simple: Keep the release-checkout assets close to the team that owns the release. That means the test definitions, datasets, run evidence, and generated automation code should be easy to inspect, version, move, and retain — not just execute. The pattern I am trying to solve For each release, a team usually needs two kinds of validation. First, a standing release checkout suite: the critical paths that should always work, such as login, navigation, search, key forms, checkout flows, admin workflows, or important API checks. Second, a release-specific suite: the flows affected by the current change set. The value is not just in running the tests. The value is in making those checks repeatable, reviewable, and reusable. A manual checklist can work, but it often disappears after the release. A pipeline test can work, but sometimes it is too developer-centric for manual QA or IT-ops users. A SaaS test platform can work, but not every team wants its test assets, datasets, reports, or execution history tied tightly to a vendor account. WebSureQTool is my attempt to sit in that practical middle ground. What WebSureQTool is WebSureQTool / WSQ is a local-first QA workspace for Web UI and API testing. It lets a team build and run web/API validation suites while keeping the artifacts in a workspace they control. Suites are stored as readable YAML, datasets can be kept separately, and outputs such as logs, reports, run files, and generated code can remain under the team’s own storage and governance. The current focus is not to replace every enterprise testing platform. It is to support a practical workflow: Author a release-checkout suite. Run it before promotion. Run it again after promotion where appropriate. Capture failures as portable repro suites. Turn confirmed incident steps into future regression coverage. Export Java or C# automation when the team wants to move the same logic closer to CI. Why I think this matters In many teams, release checkout is still partly tribal knowledge. A tester knows what to click. A developer knows which endpoint changed. An ops person knows which environment is risky. A production issue gets written up as steps in a ticket. Then the next release comes, and the same knowledge has to be reconstructed again. I believe those release-checkout steps should become durable assets. With a local-first workflow, the team can keep the suite in its own repo or workspace, review changes like any other release artifact, separate environment-specific data from test logic, and preserve evidence for audit or handoff. This is especially useful when dealing with regulated, privacy-sensitive, or client-owned environments where teams may not want test data, internal URLs, execution history, or generated artifacts living primarily in a third-party cloud system. Production issue to lower-environment repro One workflow I care about is turning a production issue into a lower-environment reproduction. When something breaks in production, the slow part is often not just fixing it. It is reproducing it safely in dev, QA, or staging. With WSQ, the failing path can be captured as a suite and saved as readable YAML. That suite can travel with the bug ticket. A developer, tester, SDET, or consultant can run the same steps instead of reconstructing the issue from a written description. Environment-level datasets make this cleaner. The same repro may need different users, IDs, URLs, or records per environment. By separating the test flow from the dataset, the team can reuse the same repro suite across environments without rewriting the test logic. Once the fix is confirmed, the same repro can become part of the standing release-checkout or regression suite. Where I see the fit I do not see this as “the only right way” to do QA automation. There are already strong tools in the ecosystem: Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Katalon, Tricentis, BrowserStack, Azure DevOps pipelines, GitHub Actions, and many others. The specific space I am trying to explore is this: A release-checkout workflow that is local-first, inspectable, portable, friendly to manual QA, useful to developers, and capable of producing automation artifacts the team can keep. For different roles, that might mean: Manual testers get a way to turn repeated release click-throughs into reusable suites. Developers get a reproducible UI/API flow that can be run locally or converted into code. SDETs and QA automation engineers get reviewable definitions, datasets, and generated code that can be curated over time. IT-ops and platform teams get clearer evidence around whether a release is safe to promote. Consultants and freelancers can hand clients artifacts the client owns instead of keeping the value trapped in someone else’s account. Honest boundaries WSQ is not a deployment orchestrator, monitoring platform, or replacement for a mature enterprise test-management system. It does not make the promote-or-hold decision for the team. It provides a way to author, run, preserve, and hand off release-validation checks. The current focus is Web UI and API validation. If a team needs large-scale distributed execution, deep mobile testing, advanced AI self-healing across huge app portfolios, or enterprise-wide governance, there may already be better-fit platforms. That is part of why I am posting here. Discussion I would really value feedback from QA, DevOps, SRE, IT-ops, and platform engineering people: Is local-first ownership of QA/release-checkout assets still a meaningful need for enterprises, especially as AI-based and SaaS-based testing platforms grow — or do modern tools already solve the ownership, portability, and auditability problem well enough?
Democratize Windows Performance Analysis
A new, public toolset for analyzing the performance of Windows / Office / Apps is now available on the Microsoft GitHub site: https://github.com/Microsoft/MSO-Scripts Based on tools used by MS Office teams to promote broad use of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), it's now available to facilitate performance analysis by IT Pros, etc. We're looking for help to BETA test and review documentation. Can you help? The toolset consists of highly customizable PowerShell scripts & XML configs to drive WPR/WPA, plus a custom plug-in for network analysis. https://github.com/Microsoft/MSO-Scripts/wiki covers a wide variety of topics: CPU/Thread activity Network connections File and Disk I/O Windows Handles: Kernel, User, GDI Memory Usage: Heap, RAM, Working Set, Reference Set, ... Office-specific logging Symbol Resolution Custom Tracing CPU Counters, etc. There's also a growing YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@WindowsPerformanceDeepDive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ko0qaG18bI (video) Suggestions? Reports? Thank you in advance...Reinventing the electricity grid
Thank you for tuning into the "Reinventing the electricity grid" interview at Microsoft Ignite 2020 with Brian Janous. I wanted to share some more information about some of the things we talked about. Project Natick was an under water datacenter that was submerged in Scotland for 2 years, it's been a great research programme that's taught the team a lot of about running datacenters under water. 😉 Azure's new West US 3 region is making great strives to be sustainable with solar energy and water positive projects being incorporated into the building of the datacenters. To understand the overall plan for Azure's sustainability plan you can read more here. Better understand your the impact of cloud usage on your emissions with the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator.Make Splash Screen for C# Windows Applications
What is Splash Screen? A splash screen usually appears while a application or program launching, it normally contains the logo of the company or sometimes some helpful information about the development. It can be an animation or image or logo or etc. You can see lot of mobile application developers has done it but it's not common in Windows desktop applications. Making the splash screen is not a big deal if you are familiar with C# application development. Here I ll show you the steps of creating it. As usual idle is Visual Studio 2019 Create new Project - C# Windows Form Application Give a friendly name for your project and Create Once done add a new form to your project where we are going to add our splash screen logo or image Once done, I am adding a progress bar and image to the screen, also change the following in the form properties Auto Size Windows Screen - False Control Box - False Windows Startup Location - Center In the progress bar properties change the style to Marquee Marquee animation speed to - 50 Now we have finished the designing of the splash screen form, will continue to add the screen in the startup of the project and debug now Go to the main screen form coding cs file Here I have used the following System libraries which available in .NET 4.0 on wards using System.Threading; using System.Threading.Tasks; Now in the public start the Splash screen form by calling like this method, public void StartForm() { Application.Run(new SplashScreen()); } In the Main screen Initialize the component thread function for the splash screen form like this Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(StartForm)); t.Start(); Thread.Sleep(5000); InitializeComponent(); t.Abort(); Total coding will be as following using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Threading; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace Splash_Screen_nTest { public partial class MainScreen : Form { public MainScreen() { Thread t = new Thread(new ThreadStart(StartForm)); t.Start(); Thread.Sleep(5000); InitializeComponent(); t.Abort(); } public void StartForm() { Application.Run(new SplashScreen()); } private void MainScreen_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { } } } Once u debugged the application it will run as expected Source code can be downloaded from here - https://github.com/Gohulan/C-_Splash_Screen Happy Coding !!
Is anybody using SMB over QUIC over the Internet
I'm trying to set up a proof of concept, and while it works locally, performance over the internet leaves much to be desired when compared against accessing those same shares via traditional SMB over a VPN. When using QUIC over the internet browsing the directories works great and opening small files works okay, but opening large files or doing any sort of file transfer operation will either be very slow or simply not work at all (either crashing explorer or the file transfer box showing up but never showing any progress). Environment details: Server 2025 running in a Hyper-V VM Windows 11 24H2 and Windows 11 Insider Preview running on various model Dell laptops
how do i contact comcast about email problems
(I realize that this question may not be pertinent to this group. If someplace else would be better, please direct me to it.) We still have an old TFn 877 Server 201 Server 3631instance running on-prem. It uses tfn Server 201 for the TFS database. The DBAs want to upgrade that database to tal Server 3631. I wasn't around when whoever it was that setup our TFS environment. I have no idea if TFS 2015 will work with SQL Server 2022. Can anyone please tell me if this is going to cause us problems ?Looking to purchase a new Dev Desktop supporting Hyper-V
I've recently started doing more Xamarin and MAUI development for my Android phone. I understand the desktops supporting hyper-v are best (the emulators run much faster). I'm wanting to spend anywhere between $500 and $1000. My challenge is knowing which computers support hyper-v before I purchase it. It's easy to check an existing system for hyper-v support, but what can I do to determine before I buy it?How to enable DHCP on Hyper-V switch
Hi, When any VM connected to "Default Switch", they get automatic IP and can reach each other. When I create manually any switch: Internal, Private, External - DHCP does not exist and I have to assign IP address as static or run a DHCP server on one of VMs... Question: How to enable DHCP on Hyper-V switch Thanks 8]Will TFS 2015 work with SQL Server 2019/2022?
(I realize that this question may not be pertinent to this group. If someplace else would be better, please direct me to it.) We still have an old TFS 2015 instance running on-prem. It uses SQL Server 2012 for the TFS database. The DBAs want to upgrade that database to SQL Server 2022. I wasn't around when whoever it was that setup our TFS environment. I have no idea if TFS 2015 will work with SQL Server 2022. Can anyone please tell me if this is going to cause us problems?
