BlizzCon® 2017 takes place November 3–4, but we’re kicking off the celebration early with the BlizzCon 2017 Virtual Ticket—available to order starting today through the Blizzard Shop!
The Virtual Ticket is your personal online and mobile warp gate to BlizzCon from wherever you are—and this year, we’ve upgraded the Virtual Ticket experience to bring you closer to the show than ever before.
For starters, the Virtual Ticket unlocks live access to all the stages at BlizzCon 2017—and in addition to the game updates, developer discussions, and community contests you’ve come to enjoy, you’ll also get access to events featuring community creators, voice actors, and more. Our new BlizzCon All Access channel will act as your guided tour through the event and around the show floor.
We’re also getting the party started early this year with several series of weekly pre-BlizzCon videos that go behind-the-scenes with Blizzard and our talented community. The first of these are available NOW—head over to the BlizzCon Watch page to start exploring.
For the whole lowdown, watch the new BlizzCon 2017 Pre-show Global Event featuring your BlizzCon All Access channel hosts: Michele Morrow, Alex Albrecht, and Malik Forté.
BlizzCon® 2017 Virtual Ticket – What’s Included
The BlizzCon 2017 Virtual Ticket offers comprehensive live HD coverage of Blizzard Entertainment’s gaming celebration via live stream. With more than 60 hours of programming, you’ll have plenty to watch live and via on-demand replays for more than a month after the show.
With the BlizzCon 2017 Virtual Ticket, you’ll unlock access to:
Developer and Community Events: Witness the latest game news live, get firsthand developer insight, and watch your favorite community creators in action on four stages. Full schedule to come!
Costume and Talent Contests: Get a great view of the creativity on display in the legendary BlizzCon Costume Contest and epic Talent Contest on Friday night.
Closing Ceremony: Be there for the closing festivities on Saturday night, celebrating two full days of Blizzard gaming and community.
Exclusive Interviews: Dig deeper into our game universes through exclusive interviews with Blizzard developers on the BlizzCon All Access channel.
Behind the Scenes & From the Floor: The BlizzCon All Access channel also gives you a closer look at the show floor so you can experience the more of BlizzCon from the comfort of your home.
Pre-show Video Series: Starting today on the Blizzard Watch page, enjoy multiple series of weekly videos leading up to the show, including Inside the Blizzard Vault, Casual Cosplay, and Artist’s Journey. Watch some for free, and unlock them all with the Virtual Ticket.
In-Game Goodies: Unlock this year’s BlizzCon in-game items for World of Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Hearthstone®, StarCraft® II, Diablo® III, and Heroes of the Storm®.
Heroes of Azeroth can show their BlizzCon spirit in World of Warcraft with the Stormwind Skychaser mount (for the Alliance!) and Orgrimmar Interceptor mount (for the Horde!)—available in-game starting today!
Enhanced Esports Viewing: The epic esports competition is always free, but this year, Virtual Ticket holders can watch without third-party commercials on BlizzCon.com and in the BlizzCon mobile app. During regular ad breaks, Virtual Ticket viewers will see alternate Blizzard content—including during Opening Week. Full esports schedule to come!
Goody Bag Discount: Get $10 USD off this year’s BlizzCon Goody Bag—visit the Goody Bag blog for all the details.*
The BlizzCon Virtual Ticket is available through the Blizzard Shop in the Americas, Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia (pricing and availability varies by region) and is also available in China (sold separately). The Virtual Ticket live stream is available in HD (720p) and in English only.
Subtitles for On Demand Videos BlizzCon is an epic celebration of Blizzard’s universes and our global community that truly brings them to life. This year, in order to bring that experience to more people across the globe than ever before, Virtual Ticket buyers will get access to subtitled VODs of the events on ALL four BlizzCon content stages, plus BlizzCon All Access Channel VODs, in the following languages: English, German, Russian, Korean and French. You can buy the Virtual Ticket now on the Blizzard Shop.
Be sure to make your purchase on the Blizzard Account you wish to use to watch the show, receive the in-game goodies, and get your BlizzCon Goody Bag discount. If you don’t yet have a Blizzard account, you can create one free now.
If you’re attending BlizzCon 2017 in person, you should have already received a code (one per ticket purchased) which can be used to unlock the Virtual Ticket and associated perks on a single Blizzard Account. These codes were emailed directly to the BlizzCon ticket purchaser, so check with the person who bought your ticket if you haven’t yet received your code.
Goody Bags Are Back!
The BlizzCon 2017 Goody Bag is a backpack chock full of collectibles, including an exclusive Eidgenossin Mercy backpack hanger and a treasure trove of real-world loot based on your favorite Blizzard games. You can pre-purchase* this sack o’ goodies now through the Blizzard Gear Store for $45 USD, but Virtual Ticket Purchasers can pre-purchase the Goody Bag at an automatically discounted price of $35. You also have the option to get an Epic Upgrade for your Goody Bag to get even more gear.
People attending BlizzCon in person will receive the standard Goody Bag with their ticket. If you’d like to purchase the additional items from the Epic Upgrade for your Goody Bag for $25, stay tuned for details.
The BlizzCon merchandise is also coming back, with early access for ticket holders. Stay tuned for more details.
Free Pre-Event Content, Opening Ceremony, and Esports Streams
This year, you can catch tons of BlizzCon content online for free. Catch a selection of pre-event content free on BlizzCon.com, where new videos will be added each week until the convention starts.
And as always, coverage of the BlizzCon opening ceremony and this year’s esports tournaments—including the global championships for StarCraft II, Heroes of the Storm, and World of Warcraft; the Hearthstone Inn-vitational and Tavern Vs. Tavern finals; and the finals of the Overwatch World Cup—will be streamed for free in HD at www.blizzcon.com
The Overwatch League™ Signs Final Three Teams for Inaugural Season
The World Could Use More Win
The Overwatch League is on a mission to celebrate fans and afford them opportunities to become champions through a professional esports ecosystem that embraces passion and rewards excellence.
Millions have answered the call to Overwatch, and the excitement of all those scientists, soldiers, adventurers, and oddities led directly to the creation of a new kind of esports program. Teams will have stability, players will have careers, and fans will have a new set of heroes to take them into the future of Overwatch.
This week at Bungie, a hero’s weapon made a triumphant return.
The Last Word is back. All owners of the Annual Pass are invited to kick off the Last Draw quest at the Drifter and earn their reward.
Many of you have earned this coveted reward, and taken it for a spin in the Crucible. We have been following the conversation and seen a lot of feedback concerning a difference in feel between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. The team is currently looking into this.
For those who haven’t heard the whispers in Destiny 2, their frequency has been increased. If you’re still on the hunt for Whisper of the Worm, head to Io with your fireteam (or solo!) to take on the challenge. The quest is available to all players of Destiny 2.
With Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 in the wild, Supers have been recharged and some weapons have gotten a tuning pass. Make sure to check out the patch notes for a full breakdown of changes. Look through your vault and give some other weapons a spin in the updated sandbox.
Season of the Forge continues on, but Season of the Drifter is quickly approaching. We still have some fun in store for this season, like Crimson Days and an upcoming Bungie Bounty, but we can start glancing toward the horizon for Season 6. Let’s dive in.
Getting the Clan Back Together
Since Forsaken launched, we’ve been gathering feedback concerning clans, their progression, and their rewards. Today, we have Design Lead Steve Dolan and Senior Designer Mark Uyeda back in the hot seats, speaking to what the team has planned!
Steve and Mark: Hey everybody! Steve Dolan and Mark Uyeda here to give you an update on what you can expect for Clan Progression in Season of the Drifter.
These past two seasons, we tried some new things. During that time we’ve gathered hard data, heard a ton of feedback (thanks, Cozmo and Dmg!), and now we’re going to walk you through what’s next.
Whenever we’re talking game design, it’s always good to discuss the design’s goals. In Forsaken, we were trying to create:
Stronger clans where players can make new friends in Destiny
Stronger incentives for clans to play with their clanmates
We feel good about how many of these changes affected large and strong clans, but we’ve also received a ton of feedback from the community that the Forsaken changes effected smaller and less hardcore clans less positively. These clans feel like they can no longer hit the levels they had in the past. We also heard that there is just too much emphasis on doing daily bounties. As a result of this feedback, we took some of the clan progression mechanics back to the workbench and made changes to improve the experience.
Starting in Season 6:
We’re returning to the Destiny 2 launch system for gaining clan experience. Go play activities in the game and you will earn clan XP and level up your clan.
As a result, daily clan bounties are no longer needed, and have been removed from the game.
There are now three weekly bounties that require playing with your clanmates to complete.
There will always be one PvE, Raid, and PvP weekly bounty from Hawthorne. They reward Legendary gear and a big chunk of clan XP.
As your clan levels its banner, the rewards you receive from these bounties grow.
At rank three, you earn mod components when completing a weekly bounty.
At rank four, you earn enhancement cores when completing a weekly bounty.
At rank six, your clan will unlock a fourth weekly bounty.
We also wanted to briefly talk about the tier 5 perk for Season 6. The perk reads, “Crucible and Strike catalysts have an increased drop rate when playing with clanmates.” For those of you who haven’t found all the available catalysts, you’ll have a better chance to find the ones you’re missing. If you already have them all (lucky you), we plan to release a few more from our Year 1 reserve during Season of the Drifter for you to chase. They won’t be released day one of Season 6, but keep your eyes on the patch notes for availability.
We hope these changes will help keep clans of all sizes thriving and chasing after each Season’s rewards. As always, we can’t wait to hear your feedback.
Cleaning House, Part 2
Last week, we had a preview for how powerful bounties will work from season to season. While we have put effort into preserving items within player inventory, two sources of powerful rewards will change at the end of Season 5, which may result in the loss of rewards if not redeemed.
Ethereal Keys from the Last Wish raid will have a maximum stack size of five.
If you currently have a stockpile, make sure you turn them in before the end of the Season, as any keys over the cap of five will be removed.
Iron Banner bounties from Season of the Forge will expire and be removed from player inventory.
Iron Banner bounties are being refreshed for Season 6 with new objectives, which we will speak to closer to Season of the Drifter!
We will be sending out reminders as we approach the end of Season 5 to redeem these items. For additional information on how powerful bounties between Seasons are changing, make sure to check out last week’s TWAB. Stay tuned to @Bungie and @BungieHelp for future announcements.
Fighting for Your Fireteam
Let’s say you’ve been working on some weapon frames from Ada-1 since this week’s reset, but are encountering issues when attempting to gain progress. The Player Support team is here for you, collecting reports and potential repro-steps to aid the development team in identifying the issue. You can find them in the #Help forum every day of the week.
This is their report:
Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4
On Tuesday, January 29, we rolled out Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 to players. The update introduced a slew of fixes to help resolve issues players reported encountering in the game. Below are a few highlights:
Fixed an issue where the Auto-Loading Holster perk was not reloading the magazine in some circumstances
Fixed various issues where the Redrix Broadsword quest was not progressing to the pickup step until a player re-entered orbit
Fixed an issue that prevented Enhancement Cores from being awarded when reaching Legend in Valor and Glory ranks
Fixed an issue where the Like a Diamond Flawless Triumph was not being rewarded properly
Fixed an issue where the Fastidious Miser Triumph was not properly unlocking for players
Fixed an issue there the Veterans of the Hunt emblem was using the wrong art
Fixed an issue where the Knife Flip emote did not properly loop
Additionally, Black Armory weapon frames, Modulus Reports, and Ballistics Logs have received a round of fixes and changes to resolve issues player were encountering with this content. For the full list of changes and fixes, please see the Update 2.1.4 Patch Notes.
Please note that Xbox One players downloading Update 2.1.4 may also have to download small updates to previously installed Destiny 2 content. This is to update some of the localization features in previous Destiny 2 content.
New Known Issues in Season of the Forge
Destiny Player Support remains ever vigilant in the #Help forums, on the lookout for issues as they arise, especially after game updates.
Compound Ether and Unstable Radiolaria: We have identified an issue preventing Compound Ether from dropping from Fallen for the basic Sniper Rifle frame and Unstable Radiolaria from dropping from Vex for the basic Bow frame. We are investigating deploying a fix for this issue.
Missing Weapon Frames: We have identified an issue causing weapon frames to go missing from player inventories. We are investigating deploying a fix for this issue.
“The Temptation” in the Draw Quest: Players have reported some confusion over progressing “The Temptation” step for the Draw quest. To make progress on this quest step, a player must defeat other Guardians in the Crucible. Each time the player dies in the Crucible, they will lose some progress towards completion.
“The Conversation” in the Draw Quest: We are investigating player reports that they did not receive the Last Word Exotic after completing “The Conversation” portion of the Draw Quest. Some players encountering this issue have reported that restarting the mission and progressing more slowly resolved the issue.
As always, if you are encountering an issue in Destiny 2, please sound off in the #Help forums where DPS, volunteer moderators, and other players can help answer questions. When reporting a bug in game, providing screenshots, video capture, or steps to reproduce the issue help DPS investigate your report.
They Don’t Need No Super Suit
Fantastic work. Outstanding. Phenomenal. These are all things that Lord Shaxx says when overseeing the Crucible, and we find ourselves saying the same about these montages. Highly recommend taking a seat before hitting play, as some of these plays hit hard enough to knock you off your feet.
Winner: RIOT
Runner up: What’s Up, Danger?
Whether you’ve made a sick play, eviscerated a raid boss, or just had a funny moment happen in Destiny 2, make sure to submit your movie to the Creations Page. You may find yourself taking Movie of the Week, and earning the Lens of Fate emblem to show off in-game.
I’m currently running through my Destiny 2 checklist for this weekend. Running some Last Wish and Scourge of the Past raids in search of armor rolls. Oh and can’t forget the curse cycle is in full effect, so I’ll need to plan a trip to the Dreaming City, too. A solo attempt at Shattered Throne for a sweet emblem, perhaps? I’ll more than likely be helping friends in the Crucible at some point on their path to the Last Word. Maybe I’ll see you out there.
There’s quite a bit to do, not to mention dusting off some weapons and Supers thanks to Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4. For the Hunters out there, Way of the Outlaw is calling. Titans have their Hammers, Warlocks have their Dawnblades… but you have a fan-fire Golden Gun to challenge them. Land those shots. Cause some Mayhem.
Next week, we’ll have some information on what to expect in Crimson Days and our upcoming Bungie Bounty. We’ll see you then.
Fedora Classroom sessions continue with two introductory sessions, on using Fedora Silverblue (February 7), and creating Fedora badges designs (February 10). The general schedule for sessions is availble on the wiki, along with resources and recordings from previous sessions. Details on both these upcoming sessions follow.
Topic: Fedora Silverblue
Fedora Silverblue is a variant of Fedora Workstation that is composed and delivered using ostree technology. It uses some of the same RPMs found in Fedora Workstation but delivers them in a way that produces an “immutable host” for the end user. This provides atomic upgrades for end users and allows users to move to a fully containerized environment using traditional containers and flatpaks.
This session is aimed at users who want to learn more about Fedora Silverblue,
ostree, rpm-ostree, containers, and Flatpaks. It is expected that attendees have some basic Linux knowledge.
The following topics will be covered:
What’s an immutable host?
How is Fedora Silverblue different from Fedora Workstation?
Micah Abbott is a Principal Quality Engineer working for Red Hat. He remembers his first introduction to Linux was during university when someone showed him Red Hat Linux running on a DEC Alpha Workstation. He’s dabbled with various distributions in the following years, but has always had a soft spot for Fedora. Micah has recently been contributing towards the development of Fedora/Red Hat CoreOS and before that Project Atomic. He enjoys engaging with the community to help solve problems that users are facing and has most recently been spending a lot of time involved with the Fedora Silverblue community.
Topic: Creating Fedora Badges Designs
Fedora Badges is a gamification system created around the hard work of the Fedora community on the various aspects of the Fedora Project. The Badges project helps to drive and motivate Fedora contributors to participate in all different parts of Fedora development, quality, content, events, and stay active in community initiatives. This classroom will explain the process of creating a design for a Fedora Badge.
Marie Nordin is a graphic designer and fine artist, with a day job as a Assistant Purchasing Manager in Rochester, NY. Marie began working on the Fedora Badges project and the Fedora Design Team in 2013 through an internship with the Outreachy program. She has maintained the design side of the Fedora Badges project for four years, as well as running workshops and teaching others how to contribute designs to Badges.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 03-05-2019, 02:41 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
Now is the time to make the shift to Microsoft 365
As we shared on January 14, 2019, the end of support for Windows 7 is less than a year away. Many of you are well on your journey to migrate to Window 10 and Office 365, as they provide the most productive, secure, and cost-effective experience for users and IT departments. More than half of commercial devices are on Windows 10, which shows great momentum.
We are here to help you every step of the way. The Modern Desktop Deployment Center provides detailed step-by-step migration guidance. We are seeing 99.9 percent application compatibility with Windows 7, giving you confidence to upgrade or buy new Windows 10 devices. The Desktop App Assure program provides dedicated engineering resources to help you remediate any application compatibility issues you might have.
Security remains our biggest priority, and Windows 10 provides the most secure experience. For those of you who aren’t able to migrate all of your apps and devices to Windows 10 by the January 14, 2020, end of support date and need additional time to make the transition, we’ve got you covered with new options:
As we announced in September 2018, we will provide Extended Security Updates for Windows 7.
Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (coming soon) will provide a Windows 7 device with free Extended Security Updates through January 2023, giving you more options to support legacy apps as you transition to Windows 10.
As a final resource those of you with legacy Windows 7 devices, Extended Security Updates will be available for purchase starting April 1, 2019. They will be sold on a per-device basis for eligible customers and the price will increase each year.
In addition, Office 365 ProPlus will be supported on devices with active Windows 7 Extended Security Updates through January 2023. This means that customers who purchase the Windows 7 Extended Security Updates will be able to continue to run Office 365 ProPlus.
Please reach out to your partner or Microsoft account team for more details or download our FAQs for additional information. Now is the time to shift to Microsoft 365.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 03-05-2019, 02:41 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
Why unplugging from work is more work than we think
Unplugging from work: most of us probably think we do it—maybe we believe we’re pretty good at it. During our personal time we tuck our phones away and turn off our notifications. Maybe we’re even disciplined enough to not send an email during off-hours. A whole economy has sprung up, from digital detox camps for adults to gatekeeping apps to control our screen time, to help us detach.
And yet—sorry, hang on, did you hear that ding?—we’re still distractedly glancing at our phones, habitually monitoring inboxes and that ever-growing volume of work email, anticipating notifications even when they’re muzzled, and inadvertently missing the winning point at our kid’s ball game (shoot, sorry sweetie).
We agree that unplugging is important, but many of us aren’t succeeding at it—and it’s hurting us, our colleagues, and our companies.
A study by LinkedIn found that 70 percent of professionals don’t fully unplug from work. A recent study of 1,400 information workers commissioned by Microsoft found that 40 percent of people work outside of regular hours in a way that interferes with family time. And research from Utah State University found that a person’s use of their mobile device for work during family time not only negatively impacted the employee and their spouse, but led to higher instances of burnout, a decreased commitment to their employer, and an increased likelihood of quitting.
Even official vacation time isn’t sacred: 67 percent of the people surveyed by LinkedIn said they would go ahead and contact a colleague about work-related matters while the colleague is on vacation.
Despite these statistics, leaders are increasingly aware that to be successful, companies must help employees feel balanced. And frazzled, distracted employees are increasingly desperate to disconnect from the very work tools they’ve come to rely on so they can truly recharge.
“Ironically, we have found that in modern life the source of a lot of our stress and tension is software, the way it is structured to be very notification-centric versus human-centric,” says Kamal Janardhan, partner director of product for Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics, tools that harness data to help drive change in the workplace. “Unplugging is almost a defense mechanism against that system.”
Ultimately, the actions we take individually—putting our phones in a box, locking apps, setting nebulous rules for ourselves that we then try to cheat—are reactions, and they aren’t enough to solve a larger problem. We need to change the system.
New research and our growing understanding about human behavior tell us two things for certain: that unplugging is more necessary than ever, and that true unplugging is not a single action but a social agreement—a culture shift that employees and companies must create together.
Finding hidden culprits
To understand where we are headed when it comes to the intersection of work and personal time, it’s important to remember how we got here. Much of what we believe about how we should work harkens back to the industrial revolution and the switch from a much longer workday to a 40-hour workweek and a collective expectation to clock in and clock out at set hours. In the 21st century this belief system became ripe for reinvention again, but not necessarily in the ways we’ve seen.
You need to regenerate your energy. Unplugging is an emotional recharge that we all need.
With modern technology, handheld and wearable devices, AI, and the cloud, work and personal time have blurred together for knowledge workers, the boundary now often invisible. There is no clear punch-out time anymore.
“Companies and experiments have shown that if you shorten the work week, employees become more productive, creative, and loyal. Henry Ford understood this impact on productivity when he shortened the week from 60 to 40 hours,” says Kate Nowak, solution design lead for Workplace Analytics, which enables companies to understand how employees work and collaborate every day and to build empowered workplace cultures.
“We need more companies to step up and experiment with new ways of working to inspire broader change.”
At the same time, humans are still humans, and while technology and work styles have shifted rapidly, our circadian rhythms still control our patterns of focus and rest, says Mary Czerwinski, principal research for Microsoft, who studies worker interaction techniques and multitasking. We aren’t built to be in a constant state of “on.” Workers have natural fluctuations of energy and attention in their day, from focused work to rote work to boredom, and we experience two peak focus times—midmorning and midafternoon.
“As your circadian rhythm goes down, the negative effects of trying to focus start to go up. You need that natural homeostasis boost again. That’s why we go home and take a break,” Czerwinski says. “You need to regenerate your energy. Unplugging is an emotional recharge that we all need.”
Often, though, the ways we’ve tried to address overload and enable unplugging have backfired. Have you ever pledged to unplug more, maybe spurred by something like National Day of Unplugging, or your partner or kids giving you the stink eye? Have you created rules for yourself only to find within a few days or a week you are reverting to old habits, sneaking glances at your inbox, reaching for your phone without even consciously choosing to?
One key reason it’s so hard to unplug is something called anticipatory stress: the anxiety we feel worrying about something that is coming or could come.
It works like this: It’s Saturday night and you’re getting ready to head out to a nice dinner with friends, when you get a ping from your boss with a head’s up about an important early Monday morning meeting, more details to come. Suddenly, even though you don’t log on to do any work, you’re anxious, thinking about prepping for the unexpected meeting and checking your phone for more emails. Your mind isn’t on the meal and the good company and your weekend wellbeing, it’s hung up on what work thing might come next.
According to the recent study of 1,400 workers , nearly half of respondents said that thinking about work outside of work hours regularly has a negative impact on their work-life balance. And thinking about work during personal time was the biggest work-life balance disruptor, beating out other factors such as phone notifications, manager and client expectations, and pressure from coworkers who work outside of work hours.
Another recent study supports this, finding employees and their families experience the strain of expectation even if the employee doesn’t actually engage in work in their off hours.
Another reason it’s hard to change the way we work on our own is because behavioral change spreads in part by social confirmation—the more others adopt a behavior, the easier it becomes for each of us to do so, too. If no one feels like the company culture allows for true unplugging, few people will do it. Employees can’t go it alone.
At the same time, our strategies to address overwhelm often just lead to more work. Even Merlin Mann, the creator of Inbox Zero, backed away from his methodology eventually.
“Since greater efficiency has led to more work not less, what we really need are ways to protect ourselves from work expanding into the time we create for ourselves,” Nowak says.
And while many company leaders have embraced the goal of nurturing employee engagement and wellbeing through culture, the truth is that often, the pressure on workers to stay plugged in afterhours stems from hidden factors leaders might not even be aware of.
Using Workplace Analytics to analyze anonymized and aggregated digital signals from meetings, email, HR surveys, and other data sources, many Microsoft customers have looked at the behaviors of their workforce. Some consistent patterns connected directly to unplugging and work-life balance have emerged.
In one Fortune 100 technology company, for example, data revealed that every hour people managers spent working after-hours translated to 20 minutes of after-hour work time for direct reports. The numbers vary, but similar patterns have surfaced at several other companies.
In another instance here at Microsoft, leaders applied Workplace Analytics and were able to uncover the cause of a poor work-life balance rating by a group of engineers on an annual survey. It turned out that bloated, redundant meetings were keeping engineers from focus time during their day, so they felt compelled to finish work at home and couldn’t unplug. Compounding the problem, managers spurred afterhours email by leading by example. Once leaders gained these organizational insights, they kicked off a change program that worked.
Often, leaders can’t see the overall pattern of these types of behaviors or measure their true impact across a company. Through organizational analysis, company-specific insights emerge and leaders can work to evolve their culture, empowering employees to change collectively so they don’t have to go it alone.
Achieving personal balance
Designing another Microsoft tool that helps address work-life balance and the ability to unplug, this one driven from the employee side, product managers have recently shifted how they think about unplugging from work and employee wellbeing. Instead of telling employees how much time they spend working after hours every day, MyAnalytics—which shows personalized work metrics and insights only to individual employees—has changed to now track “quiet days” instead. An employee can look at their email digest and dashboard to see how many consecutive days out of their past month were quiet days—days without any emails, meetings, and chats outside working hours.
For instance, I can see that during a recent month my longest streak was 5 consecutive quiet days (including weekends). And I can see that 13 days of the month were quiet while 15 were not. By understanding work habits through this lens, I can mentally contextualize how impacted my personal life is overall by my work.
This new way of thinking reflects the research around anticipatory stress, says Wendy Guo, Microsoft senior program manager. When the MyAnalytics tool previously calculated after-hours work by the daily minute, many employees saw that, technically, they weren’t logging much time—maybe 15 or 45 minutes for instance. That might seem like maybe nothing to worry about—what’s 30 minutes a night sending emails, right?
But that measurement, and, more broadly, that way of thinking—day by day, hour by hour—doesn’t capture the cumulative stress of having your unplugged time constantly nibbled away at.
“It’s the pain of grazing,” Guo says. “Even if it’s 10 minutes checking email, scanning notifications, reading but not responding—it impedes your ability to mentally recharge. There is concrete evidence that people are engaging despite not wanting to.”
By reframing for employees how this accumulates, in a private, personalized report, Guo says her team hopes to empower workers with a sense of urgency “to think about work-life harmony, happiness, the things you can do instead of work when you allow yourself the time. To think about how you want to live. It’s ephemeral and not easy to quantify a sense of wellbeing, so we’re trying to help.”
With insight comes the power to evolve how we work so we’re productive and balanced in ways that work best for us. Just ask Vincent Fily, a global blackbelt seller in Microsoft’s Modern Workplace Sales division. Fily helps companies transform with tools like Workplace Analytics and the sister solution for employees, My Analytics. But when he moved back to France from the U.S. four years ago, he found himself having to navigate his own work-life balance.
It’s the pain of grazing.
He wanted to continue working flexibly as he had in the U.S.—taking his child to school before starting work, then focusing on emails and customers, taking time out for lunch, more customer time, then breaking to spend late afternoon and dinnertime with his family before finishing off work in the evening.
“This,” stresses Fily, who was born in France, “is not the French way.”
But instead of feeling guilty or worrying that he wasn’t adhering regional norms around work style, Fily knew he was productive and balanced, because he was using his own employee dashboard to gain these insights.
“I can see how I am doing. I can measure and see that I am going in the direction that I want. To me, that’s the goal—to see how you are doing and be able to shift how you work if you want.”
Getting there together
Employees and companies are poised to shift the culture of work because we’ve moved from acceptance—we understand technology is all-encompassing and work has fundamentally changed—to being ready for action. We can now do something about our state of near-constant connection, harnessing technology to help us unplug from work in intentional ways that are supported by collective norms.
“We have talked to a bunch of people, customers, employees, leaders, and analyzed data to find out the most common roots of this problem: people have too many meetings, they don’t block time, they feel the need to make up their lost focus time at home. During their personal time they are stressed out and unhappy. They get interrupted, by system notifications and people notifications. And there’s human psychology: some people cannot help responding to everything as it comes,” says Kalyan Nanduru, principal product manager for MyAnalytics.
But even those of us “beyond help” who think we might just be addicted to the ding of a notification can change. Organizations can look deeply at data to figure out what works and then replicate it; employees can team up to nurture a culture and each other in ways that honor the whole person and a healthy work-life continuum.
“People coming to work are just trying to get things done. I know, for example, that I cannot fix things like meeting culture on my own. If I want to stay offline in my personal time but my manager or teammates keep distracting me, I can’t,” Nanduru says.
“We have to build a system where we know if that’s happening across an organization. Then we can all work on it together.”
Unplugging is not tricking yourself. It’s not promising to stay in the moment but then constantly glancing at your inbox just to check in, so you don’t fall behind, because everyone else is doing it. Unplugging is a partnership on a journey toward the new way of working, and a key component of both personal happiness and workplace culture.
The ultimate vision could one day soon look like this: all of us spread out across parks and gyms and movie theaters and dinner tables and grocery stores and beaches focused wholly on our personal time, none of us contending with anticipatory stress because we’ve been empowered to solve for it. Then, when we’re all back at our jobs, we’re focused on the work that matters most, collaborating smartly, functioning effectively.
Razor support in Visual Studio Code now in Preview
Earlier this week we released a preview of support for working with Razor files (.cshtml) in the C# extension for Visual Studio Code (1.17.1). This initial release introduces C# completions, directive completions, and basic diagnostics (red squiggles for errors) for ASP.NET Core projects.
Prerequisites
To use this preview of Razor support in Visual Studio Code install the following:
If you already installed VS Code and the C# extension in the past, make sure you have updated to the latest versions of both.
Get started
To try out the new Razor tooling, create a new ASP.NET Core web app and then edit any Razor (.cshtml) file.
Open Visual Studio Code
Select Terminal > New Terminal
In the new terminal run:
dotnet new webapp -o WebApp1`
code -r WebApp1
Open About.cshtml
Try out HTML completions
And Razor directive completions
And C# completions
You also get diagnostics (red squiggles)
Limitations and known issues
This is the first alpha release of the Razor tooling for Visual Studio Code, so there are a number of limitations and known issues:
Razor editing is currently only supported in ASP.NET Core projects (no support for ASP.NET projects or Blazor projects yet)
Support for tag helpers and formatting is not yet implemented
Limited support for colorization
Loss of HTML completions following C# less than (<) operator
Error squiggles misaligned for expressions near the start of a new line
Incorrect errors in Blazor projects for event bindings
Emmet based abbreviation expansion is not yet supported
Note that if you need to disable the Razor tooling for any reason:
Open the Visual Studio Code User Settings: File -> Preferences -> Settings
Search for “razor”
Check the “Razor: Disabled” checkbox
Feedback
Even though the functionality of Razor tooling is currently pretty limited, we are shipping this preview now so that we can start collecting feedback. Any issues or suggestions for the Razor tooling in Visual Studio Code should be reported on the https://github.com/aspnet/Razor.VSCode repo.
To help us diagnose any reported issues please provide the following information in the GitHub issue:
Razor (cshtml) file content
Generated C# code from the Razor CSharp output
Right-click inside your .cshtml file and select “Command Palette”
Search for and select “Razor: Show Razor CSharp”
Verbose Razor log output
See instructions for capturing the Razor log output here
OmniSharp log output
Open VS Code’s “Output” pane
In the dropdown choose “OmniSharp Log”
What’s next?
Next up we are working on tag helper support. This will include support for tag helper completions and IntelliSense. Once we have tag helper tooling support in place we can then start work on enabling Blazor tooling support as well. Follow our progress and join in the conversation on the https://github.com/aspnet/Razor.VSCode repo.
You have 24 hours to vote in the 15th IMGA – have your say
By Joe Robinson19 Feb 2019
It’s a bit of a slow week for us at the moment, but fear not, we’ve got reviews coming tomorrow and Thursday to tide you over before another Weekender update. In the meantime, I thought we could go for something a little different today.
IMGA have announced the nominees for their 15th International Mobile Game Awards, and for the next 24 hours the public is being given a say via the Public Choice Award.
There’s a total of 153 nominees available, and you can only vote for one game out of the bunch – voting will end at 4PM GMT tomorrow. There’s a lot of names to sift through, but here are few PT favourites that you could vote for if you wanted to:
Alphabear 2, English word puzzle, Spry Fox LLC, United States
Alto’s Odyssey, Team Alto, United Kingdom
Donut County, Ben Esposito, United States
ELOH, jcstranger / Salon Alpin / Broken Rules, Austria
Kingdom Rush Vengeance, Ironhide Game Studio, Uruguay
One More Button, Tommy Søreide Kjær, Norway
Rebel Inc., Ndemic Creations, United Kingdom
Reigns: Game of Thrones, DevolverDigital, United States
The Room: Old Sins, Fireproof Games, United Kingdom
Please do check the full list if you can find the time though – there’s plenty of other games there (including Fortnite & PUBG Mobile, as it happens). The main awards, like the Grand Prix, will be decided by a panel of experts.
Along with these ‘Global’ awards, the IMGA runs regional awards in China, the MENA area and South-East Asia. If you’re interested you can look up past winners (which include games like Monument Valley and Tokaido) here.
All of the winners of this year’s awards, including Public Choice, will be announced on March 19th.
GitHub Free Tier Now Includes Unlimited Private Repositories
Back in June of 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for an eye watering 7.5 Billion dollars. This transaction took several months to make it through regulatory approval, with Microsoft finally taking control near the end of 2018. Yesterday, we saw the first official impact of the ownership change and for end users, it’s a pretty good change. The free tier of GitHub now offers unlimited private code repos! This was arguably the biggest reason for many small developers to actually pay for a premium account, so for these developers, they can downgrade to free and save their money. Now the major limitation between Free and Pro accounts is the number of collaborators in a private repo, with the free tier have a limit of 3, while the pro tier has no such limit.
GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Many developers want to use private repos to apply for a job, work on a side project, or try something out in private before releasing it publicly. Starting today, those scenarios, and many more, are possible on GitHub at no cost. Public repositories are still free (of course—no changes there) and include unlimited collaborators.
GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise). Organizations that want the flexibility to use GitHub in a cloud or self-hosted configuration can now access both at one per-seat price. And with GitHub Connect, these products can be securely linked, providing a hybrid option so developers can work seamlessly across both environments.
Pricing for individuals now breaks down as follows:
