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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Pennsylvania, USA
This guide explores the essential role of the .NET host process, which initializes the runtime, resolves dependencies, and launches applications. It highlights common issues with lingering host processes, especially during BenchmarkDotNet runs, and offers diagnostic strategies to identify root causes, such as unclean shutdowns and locked files. Understanding this can streamline troubleshooting.
Pennsylvania, USA
Ask almost any development team how they measure the quality of their test suite, and one answer appears almost immediately:
Code coverage.
Many organizations even establish minimum coverage requirements before allowing code to be merged. CI pipelines proudly display percentages, dashboards celebrate reaching 90% or even 100%, and developers spend time writing tests simply to satisfy coverage gates.
Code coverage has become one of the most common quality metrics in software development.
But there’s a problem.
Code coverage measures what your tests execute—not whether those tests are actually good.
As software systems grow and AI begins generating tests by the thousands, this distinction becomes increasingly important.
Why We Love Code Coverage
Coverage is easy to understand.
If a method isn’t executed during testing, there’s obviously some risk that bugs in that code will go unnoticed.
Coverage tools provide a simple answer:
“How much of the application was executed while running the tests?”
That information is valuable.
Without coverage tools, many teams would overlook entire sections of their codebase.
Coverage encourages developers to think about testing early, helps identify untested functionality, and often improves overall engineering discipline.
But somewhere along the way, many teams started treating code coverage as though it measured software quality itself.
It doesn’t.
Martin Fowler explains why coverage is valuable, but not a complete measure of software quality
Two Projects, The Same Coverage
Imagine two applications.
Both report 92% code coverage.
Project A
- Tests are isolated.
- Every assertion validates business behavior.
- External dependencies are mocked correctly.
- Tests run consistently on every machine.
- Failures almost always indicate real bugs.
Project B
- Several tests perform exactly the same validation.
- Some tests depend on the current time.
- Others access the file system.
- Network calls occasionally escape the mocking framework.
- A number of fake objects are configured but never actually used.
Both projects report exactly the same coverage percentage.
Which project would you rather maintain?
Coverage simply can’t answer that question.
What Code Coverage Doesn’t Tell You
Coverage cannot determine whether your tests are actually providing confidence.
For example, it won’t tell you if your tests:
- Depend on files stored on disk.
- Communicate over the network.
- Read the Windows Registry.
- Depend on environment variables.
- Rely on the current system time.
- Duplicate existing tests.
- Configure mocks that are never used.
- Contain assertions that don’t validate meaningful behavior.
Every one of these issues can make a test suite harder to maintain while leaving your coverage number completely unchanged.
The False Sense of Security
Perhaps the biggest danger of chasing coverage is psychological.
Imagine a dashboard that proudly displays:
95% Code Coverage
Most developers instinctively feel confident.
Management feels confident.
Release managers feel confident.
Customers indirectly benefit from that confidence.
But what if many of those tests provide little additional value?
High coverage can create the illusion that a system is well tested, even when significant risks remain hidden.
A passing test suite isn’t necessarily a trustworthy one.
AI Makes This Even More Important
The rise of AI coding assistants has changed software development dramatically.
Today, tools can generate dozens of unit tests from a single prompt.
That’s a remarkable productivity gain.
But AI optimizes for generation, not necessarily quality.
Generated tests may:
- Repeat existing scenarios.
- Miss important edge cases.
- Depend on implementation details.
- Introduce unnecessary mocks.
- Increase maintenance costs.
Ironically, AI may increase code coverage while simultaneously reducing the overall quality of a test suite.
Coverage percentages alone won’t reveal that.
Measuring Confidence Instead of Execution
Imagine asking different questions.
Instead of asking:
Did this code execute?
Ask:
- Can this test be trusted?
- Is it isolated?
- Does it depend on external resources?
- Does it duplicate another test?
- Does it provide new information?
- Will it remain reliable six months from now?
These questions are much harder to answer.
But they’re the questions developers actually care about.
Runtime Analysis Changes the Conversation
Some testing problems simply cannot be discovered by reading source code.
They only become visible while tests execute.
For example:
- A hidden network request.
- A file read that wasn’t expected.
- A dependency on the current clock.
- A fake that is configured but never exercised.
Runtime analysis allows development teams to discover behaviors that traditional metrics never expose.
Instead of measuring only execution, it evaluates how tests behave while running.
Better Tests Beat More Tests
Many organizations continue investing in writing more tests.
That’s important.
But eventually every team reaches a different challenge.
Maintaining those tests.
The best test suites aren’t necessarily the largest ones.
They’re the ones developers trust.
Reliable tests encourage refactoring.
Reliable tests speed up releases.
Reliable tests reduce debugging time.
Reliable tests give teams confidence to move faster.
Coverage helps identify what hasn’t been tested.
Test quality determines whether those tests are actually useful.
You need both.
Looking Beyond the Percentage
Code coverage remains an important engineering metric.
It should absolutely remain part of every team’s quality strategy.
But it shouldn’t be the final measure of software quality.
The next generation of testing tools won’t simply tell developers how much code executed.
They’ll help developers understand whether their automated tests provide meaningful confidence.
Because ultimately, the goal isn’t achieving 100% coverage.
The goal is building software you can trust.
Learn More About Test Quality
TypeMock Test Review complements traditional testing metrics by analyzing the behavior of your automated tests during execution. It helps identify hidden dependencies, duplicate tests, ineffective fakes, and other issues that code coverage alone cannot detect.
If your team already measures coverage, the next logical question is:
How good are the tests behind that number?
Explore the TypeMock Test Review preview in TypeMock Isolator 9.5 and discover a new way to evaluate automated test quality.
The post Why 90% Code Coverage Doesn’t Mean Your Tests Are Good appeared first on Typemock.
Pennsylvania, USA
What makes description work in fiction? Learn how to write clear, vivid details and avoid 10 common mistakes that can weaken your story.
What Is Good Description?
When we describe well in our stories, we are firmly entrenched in a character’s viewpoint using action, dialogue, emotion, and the senses to engage our reader’s imagination.
If we don’t get this right, we risk the problem of having talking, or worse, thinking heads suspended on a blank canvas. We need to describe our characters and our settings.
When we describe, we need to tell and show. In a good book, telling makes up about 30-40% of the book and showing 60-70%. Suggested reading:
- Show Don’t Tell: 5 Simple Techniques Every Writer Should Know
- 5 Instances When You Need To Tell (And Not Show)
The Writer’s Guide To Good Description: 10 Mistakes To Avoid
1. Being Vague
Be specific when you write. Don’t write about an expensive car, write about a Porsche. Don’t write about a dog, write about a poodle. We add details to describe a character psychologically and socio-economically. We should be specific if we are going to mention details. For example, we should name the brands they use. They tell us who the character is.
Here are some great details to use in your stories:
- What kind of car do they drive?
- Where do they live?
- Where do they shop?
- Which brands of clothing do they prefer?
- What accessories do they buy?
- Which perfume or cologne do they wear?
- What type of pet do they have?
2. Not Using The Senses
Readers want to experience the story. The easiest way for you to allow them to do this is by using the five senses. Tell us and show us what they see, hear, smell, touch, and taste.
3. Not Using A Viewpoint Character
Description falls flat if we don’t have a character to interact with our settings. Once you have a viewpoint character, describe what they experience through their senses, body language, thoughts, and speech.
4. Not Including Descriptions In Dialogue
We talk about where we are going and what we are doing. We comment on our environment all the time. When your characters arrive at their destination, allow them to comment on where they are, especially is something is different. Use description in dialogue.
5. Not Thinking About The Genre
We also need to be aware that genre dictates difference in length, type, details, and intensity of description. Here are some examples:
- Romance novels feature exotic, far away settings that are loosely written with detailed, sensuous descriptions.
- Suspense novels feature gritty, more realistic settings, which are intrinsically related to the plot. Descriptions are often crisp and understated, and they add to the sense of danger.
- Historical novels require attention to detail and research. Writers need a wealth of factual information to make the story authentic.
- Sci-Fi novels generally involve a setting that causes the plot. The basis for science fiction is normally an extrapolation from known scientific facts.
- Fantasy novels feature detailed settings. Worldbuilding and magic are important in this genre. Writers need to create a universe for their characters.
6. Repeating The Same Words
As a rule, we should try to avoid using the same word more than once or twice on a page. If you are describing a prison, mention the word ‘prison’ when your character first enters it or sees it, and perhaps once more, but we don’t need to see it more than that.
Keep a list of alternative words for some of the more repetitive verbs like walk and run, but don’t use pretentious words you would never normally use. If we do our job properly, our descriptions should form a perfect picture in the mind of the reader without interrupting the flow of the story.
7. Making All Our Sentences Seem The Same
Description is all about creating exciting sentences. Remember that we’re taking our readers on a journey in our books. They will encounter people and places they will never meet. Make it memorable for them.
Janet Fitch, author of Paint it Black and White Oleander says the best writing advice she ever received was from an editor who asked her: what is unique about your sentences? In White Oleander she describes the man who changes everything like this: ‘Barry. When he appeared, he was so small. Smaller than a comma, insignificant as a cough.’ When you think about it commas can change everything and doctors always tell you not to ignore a cough.
Also important: Change the length of your sentences. They should vary. Include fragments, simple sentences, and compound sentences. Introduce white space when you need to increase your pace.
8. Overusing The Verb To Be
The two most overused words in description are was and were. You have to use them at times but they destroy most good sentences.
Don’t say: Detective Wright was tired. He drove home as the sun was setting.
Do say: Detective Wright yawned and rubbed his eyes as he drove home. The sun bled into the horizon.
If you use the second sentence, you are showing not telling. You are also using the tool of foreshadowing. A detective novel usually ends up with the reader encountering blood somewhere. It fits the genre.
9. Using Too Many Adjectives And Adverbs
Use nouns and verbs that paint a picture for your readers. Nouns and verbs show. Adjectives and adverbs tell. This does not mean you should not use them. Of course, we need them, but don’t use them for the sake of using them. Don’t say ‘green grass’ unless the grass is spectacularly green and it must be described. Of course, ‘purple grass’ should be mentioned. Also, try to avoid overusing adverbial dialogue tags.
10. Too Many Abstract Words
We want to know exactly what a person or a place looks like.
- Saying ‘they lived in poverty’ is abstract. Telling us about ‘the broken chairs, the pit toilets, and the radio that stopped because the batteries were dead’ is concrete.
- Saying that someone is ‘beautiful’ is boring. Saying that ‘men could not take their eyes off her’ is better. Show us the effect of the abstract word on other people.
Exercises To Help You Avoid These Description Errors
- Write a scene between a child and a parent. Begin with these words: ‘This isn’t the way we usually go, Daddy.’
- Write two scenes. One for a crime novel and one for a romance. The characters are Jan and Peter and they are in a supermarket. In the crime novel, begin with: ‘The boxes and bottles obscured Jan’s line of sight. Where was Peter?’ In the romance novel, begin with: ‘Jan smiled at the luxurious gift boxes on the shelf, the memory of Peter’s kiss colouring everything. She picked up a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. It would be perfect for tonight.’
- Describe your antagonist’s home by choosing 10 items in their home. Write the scene as your protagonist moves through this space looking at the items, perhaps picking them up, hearing noises, smelling something.
The Last Word
Good description helps readers see, hear, and feel your story. Avoid these common mistakes, and your writing will feel stronger and more genuine. Choose details that matter, and let them bring your characters and world to life.
Source for image: Enrique from Pixabay
© Amanda Patterson
If you enjoyed this blogger’s article, read:
- 10 Powerful Cliffhangers Every Writer Should Know
- How To Write A Vignette (With Examples)
- Mystery, Horror, Thriller – What’s The Difference?
- How Writers Use The Love Interest As A Literary Device
- Make Readers Care: 9 Ways To Create An Unforgettable Story
- 30 Practical Tips To Beat Writer’s Block
- What Is Backstory? How To Make It Work Like Scar Tissue In Your Book
- 15 Fascinating Fictional Fathers Every Writer Should Know
- How Writers Use The Confidant As A Literary Device
- 10 Powerful Recurring Themes In Children’s Stories & Why They Matter
Top Tip: Sign up for our free daily writing links.
The post The Writer’s Guide To Good Description: 10 Mistakes To Avoid appeared first on Writers Write.
Pennsylvania, USA
I asked Microsoft whether it has any plans to give presenters or organizers greater control over AI features in Teams, including the ability to turn off meeting AI features, such as Copilot, entirely. The company pointed me to a recent update on its admin portal, where it clearly states Teams will finally add an in-meeting toggle to manage AI features.
Microsoft says this feature is called “Meeting AI” and it’s supposed to give organizers or presenters greater control over AI features in a meeting.
I personally find AI in Teams quite useful for certain meetings and unnecessary for others. For example, Facilitator, which can automatically take notes during meetings, is useful when you’re supposed to finish tasks after the call. I have found it useful for my use cases, and I can say the same about transcription or AI translation.
However, some of you might simply dislike AI features, and Microsoft appears to understand that after all the backlash.
Now, as first spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft shared the following note in a post on the admin center:
“Microsoft Teams will add an in-meeting toggle for licensed organizers and presenters to turn Meeting AI (Copilot, Facilitator, recap) on or off during live meetings,” the company said. “Rollout starts early July 2026, with no changes to existing compliance or licensing requirements.”
Microsoft also shared a screenshot that shows off the Meeting AI toggle in Teams, and it’s quite straightforward. You can independently turn off Copilot and Recap, and just keep Facilitator if you prefer that feature.
Likewise, you can also choose to turn everything off, turn everything on, or manually toggle each option.
I’m neither advocating for AI nor against it, but regardless of which side we stand on, we can all strongly agree that AI needs to be entirely optional, and presenters or organizers should be given greater control. Microsoft is finally delivering it, and the company could help make it an industry standard.
Can you manage meeting AI controls even when AI is turned on by your tenant?
Microsoft notes that Meeting AI appears only when it’s allowed by policy, so existing tenant policies are respected. That means the toggle will not appear if Meeting AI is specifically turned off by policy.
By default, it’s supposed to appear when the policy allows it, and it should make it easier for organizers and presenters to control what AI features are active during meetings.
When Meeting AI is turned off, Teams won’t generate Copilot responses, Facilitator responses, or Notes. However, it does not affect previous meetings, as the control only applies to new meetings.
There’s also an important transcription dependency. If Meeting AI is used with transcription, the two remain connected. Turning on Meeting AI automatically turns on transcription and generates a recap. Likewise, starting transcription automatically enables Meeting AI and recap.
In other words, if a meeting must avoid AI entirely, transcription and Meeting AI must both remain off.
The rollout begins with Targeted Release in early July 2026 and should complete by mid-July. General Availability begins in mid-July and is expected to complete by the end of July 2026.
Microsoft officials say the ability to turn off all AI features easily in Teams will show up across all devices, including Windows, macOS, mobile, and web.
Other AI and general improvements coming to Microsoft Teams
At the same time, Microsoft is testing a controversial feature in which AI (Facilitator) will automatically listen to your meetings and start a conversation in the chat when it detects a knowledge gap or members appear uncertain. Teams AI will automatically try to fill the gap by answering using Bing-powered search queries.
This is being seen as a major concern for privacy, so there are no plans to turn it on by default, and if it’s turned on in your organization, Meeting AI will let you turn it off.
In addition, Teams is testing simpler meeting controls to reduce accidental clicks (screen share), and faster performance via Efficiency mode on low-end PCs.
The post Microsoft caves after Teams AI backlash, will let you turn off Copilot, Facilitator and Recap mid-meeting appeared first on Windows Latest
Pennsylvania, USA
In 2007, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 consoles started dying — overheating until three lights on the front blinked red, a defect gamers came to call the “red ring of death.” Microsoft’s response was to extend the warranty on every machine and take a charge of more than $1 billion to fix the problem, making it one of the costliest product failures in the company’s history.
Microsoft could afford it financially, but the bigger factor was strategy. Xbox was a bet on the living room, and for a company minting money on Windows and Office at the time, losing a billion or so was a justifiable cost of staying in the game.
Nearly two decades later, that patience has run out.
“Going forward, this cannot continue,” the new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote in a memo to employees last month, offering a blunt assessment of a business that has spent more than $20 billion over five years, only to see its core revenue fall by nearly half a billion dollars, running at a thin 3% profit margin, by Microsoft’s own internal measures.
With thousands of layoffs expected to be announced across Microsoft as soon as next week, the Xbox division is likely to be among the hardest hit.
The cuts reach across the company — including sales and consulting — part of a restructuring that has become routine around the close of Microsoft’s fiscal year. But for Xbox, they’re an early step in a broader effort to reset the business, rein in costs, and position the division for healthier profits.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been blunt about it: the company has spent years subsidizing Xbox rather than profiting from it, and that era is over. The videos and livestreams of people playing Xbox games that fill YouTube generate more money than Microsoft makes from the games themselves, he noted in an appearance on the Hard Fork podcast.
“No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years,” Nadella said. “And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business.”
Long-term strategic bet
Turning it around means breaking a pattern that runs through Xbox’s entire history.
Xbox launched in 2001 and lost money for most of its first decade. Microsoft absorbed the losses and stayed in — going up against Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo — because it saw a strategic prize in owning a piece of the living room, and later of mobile. Online gaming also gave the company early experience running services at scale, which fed its cloud ambitions.
Over time, the goal shifted from selling hardware to selling subscriptions.
Xbox Live, launched in 2002, turned online play into recurring revenue. Game Pass, which arrived in 2017, let players pay a monthly fee — the top tier is about $23 — for a library of games, including Microsoft’s own new releases the day they come out. The idea was to get people paying for Xbox everywhere: consoles, PCs, phones and the cloud.
And when growth stalled, Microsoft doubled down. It paid $7.5 billion in 2021 for Bethesda, the studio behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, then $69 billion in 2023 for Activision Blizzard (whose games include Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo and the mobile hit Candy Crush) the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history.
A series of economic headwinds
Microsoft could afford to be patient through all of it. Now it’s not so simple. In recent years, almost everything about the economics of gaming has turned against Xbox at the same time.
Hardware loses money, and AI is making it worse. Microsoft sells consoles at or below cost, banking on games and subscriptions to make up the difference. But AI data centers are consuming so much memory and storage that chip prices have spiked. That has forced Microsoft to raise Xbox console prices, most recently a $100-to-$150 hike this summer that it blamed directly on component costs.
Xbox lost the console war. By most estimates, Sony’s PlayStation 5 has outsold the Xbox Series X and S more than two to one. A smaller base means fewer game sales and subscriptions to offset the upfront hardware losses. That has left Xbox a distant second for the entire generation.
Revenue is shrinking. Even setting aside the games it gained from Activision, Xbox’s annual revenue has fallen nearly $500 million over five years — while the money going into the business keeps climbing. It has been investing more to earn less.
Microsoft’s most recent quarterly filing shows gaming revenue of $16.8 billion for the nine months through March, down about $1.1 billion, or 6%, from a year earlier.
Game Pass cuts into sales. Handing subscribers a new game the day it launches undercuts the roughly $70 they would have paid to buy it. The service delivers steady subscription income, but thinner economics on the games themselves.
Activision didn’t fix the margins. Even with one of gaming’s most profitable businesses folded in, Xbox earns only about 3 cents of profit on every dollar — well under the 17 to 22 cents typical in the industry. If the biggest acquisition in company history can’t move the margin, little will.
Every spare billion is flowing to AI. Microsoft is pouring more than $100 billion a year into the data centers and chips behind its AI push, trying to capitalize on the boom. Against a risk and payoff that big, a gaming business that barely breaks even feels like yesterday’s strategic bet.
What’s next for Xbox
The cuts have already started. In recent weeks, Microsoft has signaled plans to close or sell some studios, including Ninja Theory, maker of the acclaimed “Hellblade” series.
Shedding staff, studios and marketing will lift Xbox’s profit margins in the near term. What it won’t do is fix the underlying problem: a business can trim its way to a better number only so much before it has to generate more revenue.
Sharma’s plan, so far, is to concentrate on Xbox’s biggest franchises, funding blockbusters like Halo and Fallout while pulling back elsewhere. It’s leaning on Game Pass and releasing most of its games on PCs and rival consoles from Sony and Nintendo, reaching players well beyond Xbox’s shrinking base, even as it holds back a few new exclusives like Gears of War to give owners a reason to stay.
Microsoft is also rethinking the console itself. In her memo, Sharma described a “hardware component crisis” that has left the company unable to make as many consoles as players want, and called for “a new business model and partnerships” for its hardware.
How far the reset ultimately goes is an open question. The Information reported that Microsoft has weighed making Xbox a standalone subsidiary, a joint venture, or a spin-off, though nothing is imminent.
Whatever happens next, it’s clear that times have changed. In 2007, as the red ring of death crisis emerged, Peter Moore, who ran the Xbox business at the time, and his boss Robbie Bach went to then-CEO Steve Ballmer to ask for the money to repair and replace the failing consoles.
Ballmer didn’t flinch. “What’s it going to cost?” he asked, as Moore later recalled.
Told it was $1.15 billion, Ballmer said, simply: “Do it.”
Moore credits that decision with saving Xbox. There would have been no Xbox One, he said, without Ballmer’s willingness to spend more than a billion dollars to protect the brand.
But nearly two decades later, Microsoft is done writing that kind of check for Xbox.
Pennsylvania, USA
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