Well this week (Ending March 09, 2019) was a great time for #WindowsInsiders with a couple new builds on both the Fast and Skip rings. I was experiementing and with some Windows Forms and programing, since I am a Solution Architect and a 'rookie' scripter I thought it was time to expand my scope and do a little developing! Well here is my first published creation on GitHub!
Its a tool to tell #WindowsInsiders all about the previous builds on their current machine, hand coded (I thought I could use a builder like Sapien but i wanted to learn old school..)
This all started this week with the new Fast ring release and I was pretty confident that I would be getting up there in builds and thought for sure one of my machines would hit the threshold for Flight Commander or Build Monster!
Well needless to say that when I upgraded to the latest fast ring, my status remained unchanged - I felt something has to be wrong - so I reached out to the Program Manager for the Feedback Hub, Nikki Rubino @NikkiRubin0 to see what exactly was up! She checked with her team and she assured me that I was right were I needed to be. Well that didnt quite jive with how many installs I had on the machine in question. Its was time to do some investigation as to what exactly my total build/upgrades I had. I figured it was also a good time to learn a little more about powershell forms and to publish something on GitHub.
It took me a couple tries, and my coding is amateur at best, but it does work, and looks ok as long as your DPI scaling is at 100%( Suggestions and code improvements welcome!)!
My tool proved Nikki and her team were right, the machine I had in question had many more installs, but it turns out that I put in a new disk and reinstalled the operating system some time after Oct and it reset my count when i installed a brand new OS.
In my testing, I found one of my machines had a very long and eventful history (See my first graphic!) It was one of my very first Windows 10 test machine (and assigned to my Live ID and not my AAD ID), it started out on build 14251, on the 1511 ring! I must say it is currently on the Fast ring 18353, has had 7 different release rings and has been upgraded 122 times!
I would love to see how many times your machines have been upgraded! If you would like to run the code, its PowerShell so just run it in the ISE, Download it here: https://github.com/Murmanz/InsiderCount
You can also help me bug check it as I am sure there are a few issues! I know it will not run properly on a brand new machine that has never been upgraded, but I am working for a fix for that!
Download it, review the code and send up a screen shot of your oldest machine (I didn't check back further then 1511 so just remember its not been tested that much!), I want to see how far back yours goes, Tweet me a screen shot to @Murmanz to show me your counts, I look forward to hearing from you!
See you OnTheWinSide.com
Murray @murmanz