Windows comes with the tar utility now

Recently I needed to extract a tar.gz archive on Windows as part of an automated pipeline. I tried fiddling with 7-zip and WinRAR's command-line executable but hoped for something more straightforward. I had the Linux subsystem installed, and I knew about the tar utility, so I poked around and accidentally noticed that there's a tar provided by Windows even outside WSL. tar xzf works for extracting tar.gz files from the Windows command line just like on Linux.

Policy Plus - Several fixes

I had some fun today fixing a couple issues with Policy Plus. I previously thought that the undocumented multiTextBox presentation element had no attributes other than ID, but it turns out to sometimes have a label as the tag's inner text. Policy Plus will now display the multiline text box's label if specified.

While double-checking that multiTextBoxes work with Semantic Policy, I noticed that Semantic Policy import was broken for user policies; all policies were always imported to the machine policy source. That was an easy fix.

The changes are live on GitHub.

"Found cyclical include chain" can be caused by tools:layout

Today I helped a student who was getting a "found cyclical <include> chain" error from the Android Studio UI designer. Despite the error message, there was no <include> tag in the layout's XML. Rather, the self-inclusion was from a tools:layout attribute, set as the layout attribute in the Attributes pane of a fragment.