Articles by KENNETH

Choose your own layout with updated Microsoft News app Users of the newly redesigned Microsoft News app for iOS and Android have given the release high marks in their feedback, plus some interesting feature suggestions. One of the top requests has been for the ability to choose a more compact layout of the news feed. In response, the Microsoft News team announced Thursday the new Layout Choices feature for your news feed on your phone. “This feature puts you in control of the layout for your news feed: standard, compact or text-only,” Senior Program Manager Lance Lee said in a blog post. “While the standard layout provides a modern and beautiful experience, you can choose to see more news stories at a glance in the compact or text-only views.” Check out the blog post for additional images, info and more. [ more… ]

Using Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) from .NET About BITS and downloading and uploading files Programs nowadays often need to download files and data from the internet – maybe they need new content, new configurations, or the latest updates. The Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) is an easy way for programs to ask Windows to download files from or upload files to a remote HTTP or SMB file server. BITS will handle problems like network outages, expensive networks (when your user is on a cell plan and is roaming), and more. In this blog post I’ll show how you can easily use BITS from a C# or other .NET language program. To use BITS from C++ using its native COM interface, see the GitHub sample at https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-classic-samples/tree/master/Samples/BacgroundIntelligenceTransferServicePolicy. Your program can create new downloads from and uploads to HTTP web [ more… ]