Silverlight is Dead, Long Live Silverlight

Silverlight lives on in XAML. Visual Studio supports XAML but has lost the visual XAML editor. It's ok.

Figma Basics and First Impressions

Figma feels a lot "lighter" than Microsoft's historical desktop design tool Expression Blend. Being a SaaS it is also easy to get started without installing software - which is time consuming and taxing on laptops.

It operates on design files, has a central canvas, toolbox and two sidebars. The left sidebar is Navigation and the right sidebar is the Properties bar. Very neat and simple.

Figma for Non Design People

The Concept of Figma

Figma is a SaaS tool - popular with UI/UX designers - for creating prototypes and designs enabling real-time collaboration.  Its purpose is to "bridge the gap" between designers and developers.

Adobe XD (Adobe Experience Design), now being discontinued, and Sketch are alternatives - however Figma was designed from the ground up to be cloud-native. This adds convenience as well as practical usefulness e.g. collaborating around live synchronised files.

Microsoft Integration with Figma

Microsoft has built custom Figma plugins to integrate its Fluent Design System into Figma. This creates design consistency e.g. in icons, text strings etc. The Fluent Design System is the design language used across Windows, Office and other products.

Microsoft PowerApps

Microsoft enables app creation from Figma designs using Power Apps, part of the Power Platform series of low code tools.

Figuring out Fluent 2

Fluent 2 is the next iteration of Microsoft's design "product" which consists of the Fluent 2 UI Kit build in Figma.

Sidestep Kernel with RDMA

Remote Direct Memory Access - or RDMA for short - allows machines to access memory of other machines without going through the operating system kernel.  This is a traditional computer science trick - if you have an abstraction in the way of your objective, bypass the abstraction.

The idea is to get performance improvement - low latency and high throughput. Sometimes these tricks come under the label of "ultra-low-latency software development" or "ultra low latency techniques".

The goal is zero-copy (or near-zero-copy) data transfer - data moves between memory buffers directly. 

Key benefits include:

• Skipping kernel involvement
• Avoid creation of multiple intermediate copies
• Avoid switching between kernel space and user space

Protocols to support this include:

•  InfiniBand
• RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet)
• iWARP (RDMA over TCP/IP).

Kernel Bypass Networking

Kernel bypass networking is a technique to improve network performance by enabling applications to interact with network hardware directly, instead of going via an abstraction layer (the OS kernel's network stack).  All intermediate abstractions are bypassed. There are various specialized libraries such as DPDK, RDMA and OpenOnload to access Network Interface Cards (NICs) directly. 

Built-in Secure VPN for Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge now comes with a free built-in VPN to keep your location private, safeguard sensitive data, fill out forms and more. There is an option to automatically use VPN for public wifi. The VPN is allegedly powered by CloudFlare and comes with usage limits.

OpenAI Releases Open Models under Apache 2.0

OpenAI has released two open models as part of that is now dubbed the gpt-oss series.

• gpt-oss-120b
• gpt-oss-20b

The first is more suited to data centers, the latter is more for laptop and personal use.

They are both trained on the harmony response format (if going through a provider like HuggingFace, Ollama or vLLM you don't need to worry about it - the provider will deal with the format).

AWS S3 (and Auth Methods) for Azure Folks

Amazon S3 is something akin to Azure Blob Storage. 

A quick revision of Azure Blob Storage: 

Azure Blob Storage is a general-purpose cloud storage option for cloud native workloads.  

It supports WORM operating scenarios (Write Once Read Many) aka WORM-compliant storage (which prevents data from being edited or deleted). Role based access control (RBAC) is supported as is authentication with Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure Active Directory).

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a similar offering in AWS.

The services are exposed as a web service with a custom HTTP scheme known as keyed-HMAC (Hash Message Authentication Code).  A more "high level" authentication option is available via AWS IAM.

The End of Microsoft Authenticator

Microsoft Authenticator is/was a mechanism for MFA (or multi-factor authentication) - proving your identity using more than just username and password. However as of 1 August 2025, Microsoft Authenticator is shutting down, with passkeys being the recommended alternative.