A warm welcome to all who are joining us for this October edition of the Readiness newsletter. I hope that everyone has been able to enjoy the autumnal weather – and not get too depressed about the coming November rains.
What’s Happening at Readiness?
We have been busy – both delivering automated testing results and application packaging requests to our customers. Of course, but in addition to this production (keep the lights on, and the customers happy) work we have focused on code-clean-up and optimising our systems. Over COVID there was an incredible amount of innovation at Readiness which included:
- Fully automated smoke-testing across multiple builds
- Automated Quality Assurance documentation
- A new “test-harness” for creating new customer reports and packaging standards.
- Support for Liquidware and the latest MSIX conversion modules
With these rapid changes, we have had to take some time to “clean-up” some of the rapid development modules and prototypes and consolidate our code-base – all the while moving to the latest versions of .NET and PowerShell. This process, while never complete, has reached a stage where Readiness can now scale to more customers, more packages tested and delivered – more rapidly (sorry for the grammar).
Partner Spotlight
Our partner in the spotlight this month is Liquidware. We have been working with the Liquidware team for the past few months and have joined up as mutual partners for the delivery of application assessments and conversion to the FlexApp format. FlexApp has great compatibility with today’s modern applications following the Liquidware Assess/Prepare/Deploy model. Thank you David for your support and a shout out to Jason for helping to get this great partnership started.
Industry News
Windows 12 is coming, with lots of AI added. We are likely to see the next version of Windows in 2024 along with hardware requirements published in the next few months.
Some of the new features that expect to see in Windows 12 include:
- Separation from core and optional components with the CorePC concept
- Faster, more secure updates (which will include support for 3rd party applications)
- An updated desktop UI
- Much more AI integration (see co-pilot on Windows 11)
- Removal of support for 32-bit ARM
Windows 12 will be part of the new yearly update/release cadence from Microsoft. This is a big move from the twice-yearly feature release and monthly updates seen in versions Windows 10 and 11. Watch this space.
Our Latest Readiness Blog Postings
We are now posting quite regularly on our Application Readiness blog. Here are a few links to our most recent posting:
- You need to update WinRAR now: Multiple government backed hacking groups are exploiting a known vulnerability CVE-2023-38831 which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code (RCE) on a target system.
- Microsoft addresses three zero-days for October’s Patch Tuesday : Microsoft this week rolled out 103 security updates, including for three zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Windows and Edge.
- October Patch Testing Guidance: Each month, the team at Readiness analyses the latest Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance.
- Microsoft’s Removal of Support for VBScript is a Big Deal: Microsoft is planning to remove support (deprecate) for VB Script in future versions of Windows. This is a big deal and will have large repercussions on application packages, installations, and deployment infrastructure.
You can also find all of the Readiness blog postings here and Greg’s ComputerWorld Patch Tuesday postings here.
If you are interested in finding more about application packaging, conversion and automated testing, feel free to contact us.
