It’s been a quiet week at work. Fixing a bug here and there, implementing minor features, writing some documentation etc etc. Hence, this weeks findings are not programming related.

Without further ado, here is what I learned last week:

  • Windows 10 app restart on unexpected shutdown (or after update restart) cannot be disabled;
  • Solving ‘PkgMgr.exe is deprecated’ error.

Now to details.

 

Windows 10 app restart on unexpected shutdown cannot be disabled

Since Fall Creators update Windows 10 gained an interesting feature. Much like OS X, it restores your applications upon unexpected shutdown or maintenance restarts. Now, I bet this feature sounds great on paper and I bet it is perfect for your everyday user. However, the feature is totally useless and annoying to anyone, doing something more with his/hers computer, besides browsing the internet and watching occasional X rated movie.

Imagine this. At the point of maintenance restart (updates have finished installing), I have 7 Visual Studios 2012 in administrator mode, 5 Visual Studios 2010 (again in administrator mode), 6 Microsoft SQL Management studios, a Notepad++, Outlook, 3 Word documents and 5 Excel worksheets open. I am not even going to count remote desktop sessions and other minor software windows. Now, computer does reboot, it comes back and and I am presented with login prompt. After typing my password 3 times (seriously, I need another password), OS starts loading all windows mentioned above. Except, it opens all Visual studios in normal mode and without opened solutions (thanks for that, btw). Same goes for MS SQL Management Studios. It opens 6 instances, not one having an active connection or at least a correct SQL instance selected. Useless and annoying.

To top it all off, apparently, this feature cannot be turned off and no upgrade to make this available is scheduled to this point.

Solving ‘PkgMgr.exe is deprecated’ error

After a server came crashing, we had to set up a new one. After completed install of server roles and features and our applications, I tried running some of them and got Service unavailable error. I tried to register .NET by issuing

aspnet_regiis -ir

command. This returned another error PkgMgr.exe is deprecated. Quick googling found this page, that explains the cause for the error is missing ASP.NET installation. I went back to server installation and selected ASP.NET 3.5. That solved the problem.