Microsoft Cloud Blogs

Microsoft recently open sourced[1] one of the main tools they use for web accessibility testing.

Accessibility Insights for Web (https://accessibilityinsights.io) is a Chrome extension that guides you through doing an accessibility assessment of a website. It includes a combination of automated checks (using aXe[2]) and assisted/guided manual checks. Its rules are based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines[3]; passing a full assessment in the tool amounts to meeting all the "A" and "AA" WCAG 2.0 requirements.

Like other commenters have mentioned, automated checks (like aXe) are a great start, but aren't really sufficient on their own. Accessibility Insights will lead you through how to test different aspects of screen reader usage (and other types of accessibility issues, too!). It will also help you track issues as you go, and produce a pretty report at the end that you can attach to a bug.

As with most types of UI testing, no matter what tools you're using, there's really no substitute for watching a real user try to use your product.

Disclaimer: I am an engineer that works for Microsoft on the Accessibilty Insights team.

[1] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/03/12/microsoft-open-sources-accessibility-insights/
[2] https://www.deque.com/axe/
[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/

That's not a great comparison. The author probably should have compared Docker with Webassembly.

Kubernetes isn't really about running many containers sharing a physical hardware. You can do that with Docker as well. What Kubernetes offers that Docker does not offer, is self-healing and resilience when managing many containers spread across many underlying nodes. There is no monolithic "Kubernetes" running. Rather, Kubernetes is designed as a set of microservices loosely coupled and maintaining desired states. The resiliency comes from that design.

Because it is architected as microservices, Kubernetes is also extensible. Operators, for example, which manage a single distributed system (such as etcd, or postgres, or mongodb) can only be created because Kubernetes was architected as a set of loosely-coupled microservices.

WebAssembly is the container runtime without the orchestration capabilities. However, Kubernetes is capable of being modified such that it can schedule, orchestrate, and manage WebAssembly containers: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/04/07/announcing-krustlet-kubernetes-rust-kubelet-webassembly-wasm/

My experience also. This is particularly bad in the SQL Server space, since Microsoft essentially dropped source control integration in SQL Server Management Studio 2016 and later (there's an official workaround[0], but it's not well received).

Most likely they're happy to offload version control to add-ins. There are a few, but most of them are way out of budget for small businesses or small IT departments. Which means version control usually doesn't happen.

This has been such a problem for me with clients that I started a side project[1] to try to help fill the gap. If anything it's shown me that the problem is more widespread than I originally thought.

[0] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/11/21/source-control-in-sql-server-management-studio-ssms/

[1] https://www.versionsql.com/

According to John Gossman "Microsoft Distinguished Engineer & Linux Foundation Board Member" in a related announcement, Microsoft plans to contribute it to the Linux kernel:

We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.

Still some patent squirrelly words (they imply you have to sign a patent cross licensing agreement with the OIN - not sure of the implications) and no timeline.

Ref: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat-linux-kernel/

OIN Ref: https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/joining-oin/

the TaxGPT example in the GPT-4 Developer Livestream [1] was powerful. I'm hoping (soon?) for a Microsoft 365 assistant that can do the same trick on ALL your MS cloud data (docs/files/mails/notes...)

Edit : the included "Business Chat" goes in the same direction (on what they call the Microsoft Graph)

Also, there were interesting "coding" examples in the same livestream. So the coming GPT-4 (and 5) integration in the Power Platform [2] could be a game-changer for less technical staff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ?feature=share&t=1136

[2] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/powerplatform/2023/03/16/power-platform-is-leading-a-new-era-of-ai-generated-low-code-app-development/

That's a great question. Stress testing, which is what you are suggesting helps, but is not super effective and often misses bugs. You need tools which can precisely control the task/go-routine scheduling during testing and systematically explore the various interleavings which can happen in the system. We generally don't have good tool support for such testing. There are promising tools emerging however; here is a case study of one such tool and how it was used to reliably reproduce and fix a subtle concurrency bug: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/07/14/extreme-programming-meets-systematic-testing-using-coyote/