We had a weird problem when moving a WordPress website for a customer: after DUMPing it out of MySQL, we noted that the wp_options table had a problem, namely the table had no primary key and no index on the option_name field. We noted that because the WordPress website, once moved, looked akward and wrong, missing some key pieces and it also seemed to use settings that were old. The reason was that, with primary key missing, lots of duplicate records were stored inside the table and I’m pretty sure it was not what the website was meant to do. Field option_id was set to 0 in most cases when it should have been an auto-incremented integer plus it seemed [...]

While developing an application that will be hosted on Azure Service Fabric and adding a .NET Standard library or project, Visual Studio might display a warning like this one:

Warning MSB3270 There was a mismatch between the processor architecture of the project being built “MSIL” and the processor architecture of the reference “C:\[…]”, “AMD64”. This mismatch may cause runtime failures. Please consider changing the targeted processor architecture of your project through the Configuration Manager so as to align the processor architectures between your project and references, or take a dependency on references with a processor [...]

A few days ago Microsoft introduced its new operating system designed for IoT devices: Azure Sphere OS. The new operating system aims at providing a secure-by-default platform to build IoT services and thus avoiding the pitfalls that made such devices so prone even to unsophisticated attacks that rogue organizations use them to build botnets or to compromise users’ privacy.

The new OS

Azure Sphere is just a part of a broader solution to provide a secure platform for IoT that also includes custom microcontrollers that implement Microsoft 7 rules for IoT security and a security service that runs on Azure to verify the status of each device and report any error or [...]