One of the biggest challenges in project management is knowing when work will actually be completed—and which tasks matter most to hit that date. This gets exponentially harder when projects include multiple teams, handoffs, and dependencies.

To address this, Microsoft Planner introduces advanced planning capabilities like task dependencies and critical path identification, all visualized in the Timeline view. These features help teams prioritize work, reduce delays, and manage complex initiatives with more confidence.

In this post, we’ll break down how dependencies and critical path work in Planner—and how to use them effectively.

Why Dependencies and Critical Path Matter

Without dependencies, every task looks equally important. That’s a problem.

Dependencies define how work connects. The critical path shows which sequence of tasks determines your project’s finish date. Together, they help teams:

• Identify tasks that truly impact delivery
• Prioritize work that cannot slip
• Understand downstream effects of delays
• Build realistic timelines

Microsoft Planner’s scheduling engine handles the math—so teams can focus on execution.

Advanced Task Dependencies in Microsoft Planner

Planner supports multiple dependency types, allowing you to model real-world workflows more accurately.

Supported Dependency Types

• Finish-to-Start (FS)
  
  A task starts after its predecessor finishes (default).

• Finish-to-Finish (FF)
  
  A task finishes at the same time as its predecessor.

• Start-to-Start (SS)
  
  A task starts when its predecessor starts.

• Start-to-Finish (SF)
  
  A task finishes when its predecessor starts.

Lead and Lag Time

• Lead time allows tasks to overlap (start early).
• Lag time introduces a delay between tasks.

This flexibility is essential for fast-moving or parallel workflows.

How to Set Up Dependencies in Planner

Step 1: Create Your Tasks

Start by listing all tasks in your plan.

Step 2: Link Tasks

In the Grid view, use the Depends on or Dependents (after) column to select:

• The related task
• The dependency type (FS, SS, FF, SF)

Step 3: Add Lead or Lag Time

Add offsets in days, hours, minutes, weeks, or months.

Using Keyboard Shortcodes for Dependencies

Planner also supports fast entry using keyboard shortcuts:

Example:

This means Task 3 starts 10 days after its predecessor finishes.

Understanding the Critical Path in Timeline View

The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks that determines when your project finishes. If any task on this path slips, the entire project slips.

Example Scenario

You’re organizing a conference:

• Book venue: 3/5 – 3/10
• Write invitation list: 3/5 – 3/15
• Send invitations: 3/10 – 3/20

If tasks are independent, Send invitations defines the finish date.

If Send invitations depends on Write invitation list, both tasks form the critical path.

How to View Critical Path in Microsoft Planner

1. Open Timeline view
2. Toggle Critical Path
3. Planner highlights critical tasks in red

This gives instant clarity into which tasks require the most attention.

Why Timeline View Changes How Teams Plan

Timeline view turns complex schedules into a visual story:

• Dependencies are easy to spot
• Critical tasks stand out instantly
• Schedule risks become obvious early

Instead of reacting to missed deadlines, teams can proactively adjust before delays happen.

Final Thoughts

Dependencies and critical path in Microsoft Planner aren’t just advanced features—they’re strategic planning tools.

When combined with Timeline view, they allow teams to:

• Model complex projects accurately
• Focus on the work that matters most
• Deliver outcomes with greater predictability

If you’re already using Microsoft 365 and Teams, explore the new Planner app in Teams and start using these premium planning capabilities to take control of your project timelines.

UUID is an important data type that we can utilize in relational database (RDS). There are two common ways to generate UUIDs in PostgreSQL: using the uuid-ossp extension or the pgcrypto extension. In this article, we will discuss how to generate UUIDs using both pgcrypto.

To use this function, make sure that the pgcrypto extension is enabled in your database. You can do this by running this command:

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "pgcrypto";

Let's say, you have a table named candidate with a UUID column named id. You can create the table like this:

CREATE TABLE candidate (
    id UUID PRIMARY KEY,
    name TEXT
);

Once the extension is enabled, you can use the gen_random_uuid() function in your INSERT statement, for example:

INSERT INTO candidate (id, name) VALUES (gen_random_uuid(), 'Ahmad');

You can also use the gen_random_uuid() function to generate UUIDs multiple data in your table in a single insert query, for example :

INSERT INTO candidate (id, name) VALUES (gen_random_uuid(), 'Ahmad'), (gen_random_uuid(), 'Mujahid');

If you want to generate UUIDs for existing rows in your table, you can use the UPDATE statement like this:

UPDATE candidate SET id = gen_random_uuid() WHERE id IS NULL;

Pro Tip

You can set the id column to be generated automatically by using the DEFAULT keyword in your table definition so that you don't need to specify the UUID in your INSERT statement.

CREATE TABLE candidate (
    id UUID PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT
        gen_random_uuid(),
    name TEXT
);

Then, you can simply insert data without specifying the id:

INSERT INTO candidate (name) VALUES ('Ahmad');

As fast as the old year passes, it’s been heartening to see people preserving the work of those who came before us. The Computer History Museum, Stack Overflow and countless nonprofits and foundations have carried yesterday’s operating systems, technical discussions and other creative works forward into a fresh new year.

As our technology continues to evolve through time — some becoming obsolete, and others still being resurrected unexpectedly — we see signs that the tech world is a community that preserves its history and its heritage.

And in 2025, some of their preservation efforts were especially dramatic.

The Discovery of a 1974 Unix Tape

It was a day to remember. University of Utah research professor Rob Ricci — whose work usually involves building cloud-based infrastructure — discovered a surprise while cleaning out a storage room. Buried inside a forgotten box, “Our staff found this tape containing UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973,” Ricci posted on Mastodon.

Because this could be the only remaining copy of Unix v4, the reel of magnetic tape was carefully transported to Silicon Valley. Ricci noted the staffer who found it drove the precious tape to the museum rather than trust it to mail carriers.

There, the tape was lovingly resurrected and read again for the first time by Al Kossow, software curator at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum — with the moment shared on our modern-day social media. “So far, some of our folks think they have found Hunt The Wumpus,” Ricci posted playfully, “and the C code for a Snobol interpreter.”

And halfway around the globe, a Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast created a site with the contents of the tape ready for bootstrapping, including all the necessary instructions for hobbyists to bring it to life on their own systems.

So what technological artifacts did they find? Ricci posted later that it seems to include a file named sh.c, which he suspects may be the oldest known version of a shell program in C. And one social media user noticed the OS’s time-conversion code includes a flagging variable named nixonflg, apparently commemorating one of 1974’s memorable moments.

That January — seven months before resigning from office — President Nixon had enacted a year-round switch to daylight saving time. That move was rescinded eight weeks into the presidency of Gerald Ford, but the Unix tape still has its nixonflg variable, which “if set to 1, will cause daylight saving time all year around independently of ‘daylight.'”

Tom’s Hardware called the tape “a Christmas gift that should warm many a cold sysadmin’s heart,” remembering that at the time the tape was created, Unix “was still an escaped lab experiment.”

And on December 26, Ricci posted another tantalizing announcement. “[B]y the way, there are more tapes. We sent a box of other tapes to the Computer History Museum along with the UNIX V4 tape.” These include a 34-year-old version of Hewlett-Packard’s own proprietary version of Unix and some 1988 software from mt Xinu (which made a commercially licensed version of BSD Unix). While the findings “are not necessarily ‘lost,’ and may not be redistributable due to licensing issues,” Ricci seemed excited on social media.

He posted, “I’ll let you know if they find anything interesting on them.”

Stack Overflow Shutters Its Data Centers

Far from Utah — in New Jersey — Stack Overflow reached its own milestone in 2025, finally moving its operations entirely into the cloud and abandoning the physical servers its site reliability engineering (SRE) team has managed “for almost our entire 16-year existence.”

In 2025, Stack Overflow carefully culled its hardware while still preserving all its digital content.

The day of “the great unracking,” blog/podcast editor Ryan Donovan remembered fondly that the servers “had a warm spot in our history and our hearts.”

When he’d joined the company in 2019, he’d spotted “the original server mounted on a wall with a laudatory plaque like a beloved pet.” But in a July 2 blog post, he marked the day they’d unplugged over 400 cables — “Our de-cabling process involved throwing everything into the corner of the room” — and building seven large piles of decommissioned servers/network devices. “So long and thanks for all the bits!”

And then: 50 servers were shredded or destroyed “for security reasons (and to protect the personally identifiable information of all our users and customers).” As the site’s Director of Reliability Engineering told him, “No need to be gentle anymore.” Over the last 16 years, its SRE team handled all the cabling and racking (and replacing of failed disks), work the blog post remembers “required someone to physically show up at the data center and poke the machines.”

But now? “Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware.”

Other Tech Farewells and Preservations of 2025

In addition to Unix v 4, 2025 saw other moments where the world’s technological history was preserved and honored.

• The Video Game History Foundation opened access to its massive digital archive of video game magazines — some published even before the launch of the public web.
• A nonprofit that finds and digitizes 78 rpm records teamed with the University of California, Santa Barbara, to put thousands of historic American recordings online.
• Archive.org upgraded its collection of animated 1990s GIFs from GeoCities.
• The Library of Congress inducted Microsoft’s reboot chime into the National Recording Registry of “significant” works reflecting U.S. life (along with the soundtrack to Minecraft).

But 2025 also some some technologies saying goodbye. AOL pulled the plug on its dial-up internet service. Roomba filed for bankruptcy. PC Magazine even created its own memorial, titled “Connection Lost: The Tech That Died in 2025,” including the Humane AI Pin and Skype.

And Enron.com relaunched after its trademark was bought by a T-shirt company that joked they were now working on egg-shaped nuclear reactors.

Looking Ahead to 2026

So maybe today is the perfect day to celebrate what we didn’t lose in 2025. Despite the death of Vim creator Bram Moolenaar in 2023, Vim is still carrying on. And even the International Obfuscated C Code Contest returned again in 2025 — after a four-year hiatus — to celebrate and honor its 40th anniversary. In one of the most touching moments of the year, 75-year-old EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor even finished that grad school program he’d dropped out of in 1979 to found Lotus.

Kapor wrote a timely and heartfelt thesis on “gap-closing investing.”

And as we look to the future, we can already see more tech milestones heading towards us in 2026. Steve Jobs will turn up on a $1 coin.

Java will stop supporting Java applets. We’ll see the relaunch of Digg.com, and Lara Croft will resume raiding tombs.

And as the sun rises on January 1, hundreds of sound recordings from 1925 will finally enter the public domain — along with hundreds of published works from 1930.

Maybe it’s all proof that the tech world remains a dynamic place — still remembering its past even as it looks ahead to a dramatically different future. As always in 2026, the question will not be what technologies we have, but how we’ll end up using them. But at least those who remember their past are not doomed to repeat it.

And it’s heartening that 2025 included some shining examples of the tech world being a community that preserves its history.

The post Technology We Saved and Tech We Lost in 2025 appeared first on The New Stack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft plans to end support for several products in 2026, and the list of those products also includes Windows 11 24H2. In fact, Windows 11 will be five years old this year, and we might soon start hearing about the company’s future plans (I’ll have more on that later). Other products losing support include Office LTSC 2021 for Windows and macOS.

Microsoft has a long track record of killing products, but at the same time, it’s pretty good with backward compatibility and extended or longer support for products. Each year, some of the company’s products lose official support, and Microsoft starts encouraging customers to upgrade.

Windows 11 24H2 support ends in October 2026

In 2025, Microsoft ended support for Windows 11 23H2, and now Windows 11 24H2 will follow the same suit.

Windows 11 24H2 shipped on October 1, 2024, and it’s now almost a year and a half old at this point. According to the support document, Windows 11 24H2 support is set to end on October 4, 2026. After that day, Windows 11 24H2 will support new updates, and you will be forced to upgrade to Windows 11 25H2.

Is that a bad thing? No. Windows 11 25H2 is an enablement package, and it’s based on the same platform release as version 24H2. So nothing really changes when you upgrade from one release to another, as the underlying codebase is still Windows 11 24H2. You’ll still have the new Start menu, new battery icons, etc.

Microsoft has already confirmed that it’ll begin force-upgrading Windows 11 24H2 PCs to version 25H2 in the coming days.

Windows 11 23H2 23H2 Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise support ends in  November 2026

Windows 11 23H2 support for consumers (Home and Pro) already ceased in November of 2025, but if you have the Enterprise edition installed, your Windows version is still supported. However, starting November 10, 2026, Microsoft will no longer release updates for Windows 11 23H2 Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise.

Office 2021 support ends in October 2026

This year also marks the end of support for Office 2021, which has been succeeded by Office 2024.

Office 2021 launched on Oct 5, 2021, and Microsoft is ending support on October 13, 2026, as per the support documents seen by Windows Latest. Microsoft also confirmed that it will end support for Office LTSC 2021 and Office LTSC 2021 for Mac on October 13, 2026.

This means you have approximately 10 months before you decide whether you prefer Office 2024 (standalone licence) or Microsoft 365 (subscription-based, billed monthly or annually).

You can’t just “upgrade” from Office 2021 to Office 2024 because the two are separate apps and products. You need to purchase an Office 2024 license after support for Office 2021 ends because the latter will stop getting updates. Of course, Office 2021 does not support working after October 13, 2026, but it won’t get critical updates.

If you dislike the Microsoft 365 subscription approach, you can purchase Office 2024, which is supported until October 9, 2029.

Full list of Microsoft products losing support this year (2026):

• .NET 9: support ends on November 10, 2026. After this date, .NET 9 stops getting security fixes and updates. If you are a developer, you will need to upgrade your apps to .NET 10 (LTS) (supported longer) or move to another supported LTS release. (Microsoft Learn)
• .NET 8 (LTS): support ends on November 10, 2026.
• PowerShell 7.4 (LTS): support ends on November 10, 2026.
• Windows Server 2012 / 2012 R2: ESU Year 3 ends on October 13, 2026. After Oct 13, 2026, there are no more ESU security updates for Server 2012/2012 R2. And you will need to upgrade to a newer Windows Server version.

The post Microsoft’s 2026 end-of-support wave includes Windows 11 24H2, Office 2021, and more appeared first on Windows Latest