Tech News - Application Development

The Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is no longer the home of OpenJDK committers and other regular contributors. Traditionally the OpenJDK community used to meet at FOSDEM every February in Brussels, but since the OpenJDK team is now shipping a release every six months they agreed that it was time to meet more frequently. To fill this need the team decided to hold a Committer's workshop on the first two days of August at Oracle’s campus in Santa Clara, California, USA. Mark Reinhold, the Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle was the conductor of the orchestra here. He shed some light on the recent developments to the OpenJDK ecosystem and shared some future plans in yesterday’s sessions. OpenJDK’s new release model is a blessing in disguise It’s probably old news for developers who have been tracking the Java release cycle for some time now, but nonetheless, it’s very important for how things are going to change for OpenJDK. 2018 marked a new dawn for the Java platform. After endless discussions in the community about the new release being a repeat telecast of the same old Java 9 movie—a historic feature driven update to the platform with no head or tail on the release date—Mark put all the rumors to bed. He suggested to replace this feature driven update to a strict, time-based model with a new feature release every six months, update releases every quarter, and a long-term support release every three years. Image Source: OpenJDK Community Update For example, JDK 10 which was a new feature release was made available in March this year. The next release in six months would be JDK 11, which automatically becomes a candidate for a Long term support which would last till 2021, i.e three years as mentioned above. The biggest advantage of this release schedule is the simplified release process; takes off the pressure of adhering to strict deadlines from the developers. It also means that every feature would have to be completed before it makes the final cut, this way there are no multiple minor versions of the same release which confuses the users and developers alike. To what extent will Oracle contribute to the OpenJDK community? In the Committer's workshop Mark Reinhold cleared some questions about Oracle’s contribution to the OpenJDK ecosystem. He mentioned that Oracle engineers would be leading and be contributing only to the current feature releases and first two updates on the quarterly release. The non-Oracle folks can have the opportunity of taking the ownership of long-term release projects. This decision is taken mainly due to the fact that Oracle developers and engineers can focus on the future releases and their functionalities rather than working on support for long-term releases. An important clause which was discussed during this session was Oracle’s smooth transition of leadership whenever the engineers feel that they need to dial down their contribution to a particular release line they would hand over the leadership of that project with relative ease. Oracle finally embraces the Open Source Culture Now the biggest announcement that came in this workshop was Oracle open sourcing the elements of it proprietary JDK. Now before discussing this, it is important for us to understand what exactly is the difference between OpenJDK and Oracle’s proprietary JDK. Sun Microsystems, who originally created Java, announced in the JavaOne conference of 2006, that Java is going to be open sourced. OpenJDK was a result of a free implementation of the Standard Edition (SE) of the Java Platform. When Oracle bought Sun in 2009, they created their own proprietary version of the JDK which catered to the enterprise users who valued stability; and unlike OpenJDK, it has releases planned every three years. Now coming back to the point of open sourcing Oracle’s proprietary JDK, for a long time developers questioned Oracle’s intentions on how they plan to shape the future of Java, especially after their feud with Google over Android that began back in 2010. The open source community felt largely alienated from Oracle as they believed that Oracle was wrong in going after an open source friendly company like Google. Fast forward to 2018 and in this day and age, companies are embracing more and more open source technologies. Oracle has finally decided to open source their JDK which includes elements like Java flight recorder, Java Mission Control, and ZGC which is Oracle’s very own garbage collector. There will still be an Oracle JDK for the purposes of offering commercial support, but it will have the same functionalities as OpenJDK. Finally, Oracle is going to release all the builds for the current releases under the GPL license for developers who prefer non-commercial licensing. To know more about the different sessions that took place at the Committer's Workshop you can visit their Official webpage. Mark Reinhold on the evolution of Java platform and OpenJDK Oracle announces a new pricing structure for Java The top 5 reasons why Node.js could topple Java

After Kotlin had released 1.2 nearly six months ago, the official language for Android finally announced the first release candidate of their next major version: ‘1.3 M1’. This new release comes with plenty of features most notably coroutines, new experimental unsigned arithmetic, and much more. Coroutines are no longer a pipe dream Coroutines have been in the experimental stage since they were first introduced in Kotlin 1.1. Kotlin 1.3 brings Coroutines to limelight as JetBrains’ Ilya Gorbunov explained in his blog post announcing Kotlin 1.3-M1. Coroutines simplify asynchronous programming by putting the complications into libraries. With coroutines, developers can express the logic of the program sequentially and the library will take care of the asynchrony. What’s more interesting is that with Kotlin coroutines developers can call asynchronous mechanisms from different programming languages into their own program as libraries. For example  async/await from C# and ECMAScript, channels and select from Go, and generators/yield from C# and Python. The Kotlin team has significantly improved the features surrounding coroutines since they were first introduced, some notable features include support callable references to suspending functions and serializability of all coroutine-related classes. But that’s not it, the Kotlin team plan to add a multiplatform version of the coroutine API which will support iOS through Kotlin/Native. Experimental New Features The technique of introducing experimental features in a release version helps the development team to gather valuable feedback from the community and implement their suggestions in the future releases, and that is exactly what the the Kotlin team has been doing. We saw a similar implementation with Coroutines in the previous version, and now the team is introducing a plethora of new experimental features such as inline classes, unsigned integer types, and annotations for marking an experimental API and opting-in for it. In order to use these experimental features in projects, developers would have to explicitly choose an opt-in flag. Without an opt-in, usage of a feature will be marked as warnings or errors. Other small features in Kotlin 1.3 While the bigger new features have been released as experimental there are numerous small features which have been released in this new version. Capturing when subject in a variable Capturing the subject of when expression in a variable is now supported in Kotlin language. This feature was one of the most popular feature request in Kotlin team’s issue tracker. This addition makes the response variable properly scoped within when expression, and makes the logic flow in a more expression-like fashion. @JvmStatic and @JvmField in companions of interfaces Kotlin interfaces can now expose static members (fields and methods) to Java clients. However, to use @JvmField on interface companion properties, all of them must be public final vals and all of them must be annotated. Also, the -jvm-target compiler option must be at least 1.8. Nested declarations in annotation classes Before 1.3, annotation classes could not have bodies in Kotlin. This release relaxes this limitation, allowing them to have nested classes, interfaces, and objects including a companion object. These are just a select set of features that make up for the entire release announcement of Kotlin 1.3. If you are interested in checking out the entire feature-set including the new APIs that are available in the standard library and the breaking changes, you can refer to JetBrain’s official blog. Kotlin/Native 0.8 recently released with safer concurrent programming 4 operator overloading techniques in Kotlin you need to know Building RESTful web services with Kotlin

Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development is nearing the end of its competition for this year. A student developer named Victor Perevertkin has been successful in his GSoC 2018 project on Btrfs file-system support for ReactOS. He has been able to boot the Windows API/ABI compatible OS off Btrfs. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]ReactOS is a free and open Source operating system and is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Seven). [/box] For his GSoC 2018 project, Perevertkin has been working on Btrfs support within the ReactOS boot-loader as well as other fixes needed to allow for ReactOS to be installed on and boot from a Btrfs file-system. BTRFS is case-sensitive file system, so paths like /ReactOS/System32, /reactos/system32, /ReactOS/system32 are different here. However, Windows is written assuming that case does not matter during path lookup. This issue is solved in WinBtrfs driver, but for Freeloader it can be a bit tricky. After Perevertkin was done with the Freeloader development and had fixed the VirtualBox bug, he was able to get to first error message from btrfs-booted ReactOS. He later found out that this was due to a bug in WinBtrfs driver. A pull-request to the upstream repository with a bugfix is provided on GitHub repository. At present, ReactOS is able to boot from BTRFS partition and also is in quite stable state. However, some problems are yet to be addressed. Read about this news in detail on ReactOS Blog. ReactOS version 0.4.9 released with Self-hosting and FastFAT crash fixes Google’s App Maker, a low-code tool for building business apps, is now generally available 5 reasons you should learn to code

The Apache NetBeans team has announced the latest release of the Java IDE Apache NetBeans 9.0 (incubating). This release focuses on two main objectives, the IP clearance of the Oracle code donation and Java 9 and 10 Support. It also adds other new features, such as support for local variable type inference and the Jigsaw module system, a new Java Modular Application project type, and Java Shell support. The ASF Incubator is the official entry path for projects and codebases that want to become a part of the ASF. This is the process through which those projects are screened to make sure they comply with the ASF legal standards and their support communities adhere to the ASF's guiding principles. The primary focus of this release is IP clearance of the code Oracle donated to the ASF. Local Variable Type Inference support Apache NetBeans (incubating) 9.0 adds support for Java 10 with new hints, error handlers, and refactorings for transforming to the new JDK 10 var type. New hint to convert explicit variable type to var. New hint to Convert var type back to explicit type. Var is not supported in a compound variable declaration. This hint helps correct compilation error by splitting the declaration into separate statements. New Error Hint for var Array declaration. This hint helps correct compilation errors by converting to an explicit type by inferring the type of data in an array. Support for the Jigsaw model Apache NetBeans 9.0 adds support for the Java Platform Module System (JPMS) which a central component of Project Jigsaw. NetBeans 9 adds ModulePath as a paradigm to NetBeans in addition to Classpath. Project Jigsaw was established with the goal to improve the security and maintainability of Java SE Platform Implementations and the JDK. It was made with the purpose to make it easy for developers to construct and maintain libraries and large applications. Java Modular Application project type Apache Netbeans 9.0 also adds a new Java Modular project type, which enables the development of several JDK 9 modules in one NetBeans project. The advantage of this type over other Java SE projects is that dependencies are managed by declaring the appropriate exports and requires, and all modules and the project are compiled at the same time. Java Shell support Apache Netbeans 9.0 also adds an integrated console-like UI to the Java Shell to leverage NetBeans editor capabilities. Java Shell introduces REPL (read-eval-print-loop) capabilities to Java and is included in JDK9 and defined in JEP 222. NetBeans also extends the capabilities of the command line tool, allowing developers to execute the shell as an agent on the debugged or run application. The Snippets written in JShell can be redefined and tested, even against a running code. Apache NetBeans 9.0 is available for download from your closest Apache mirror. For this release no installers are provided, you need to just download the binaries and unzip them. Source: incubating-netbeans-java-9.0-source.zip ( PGP ASC, SHA-1) Binaries: incubating-netbeans-java-9.0-bin.zip ( PGP ASC, SHA-1) More information about this release is available on the Apache NetBeans blog post. Apache NetBeans 9.0 RC1 released! What can you expect from the upcoming Java 11 JDK? The NetBeans Developer’s Life Cycle

Embarcadero has made a significant announcement of launching the community edition for its premium products Delphi, a cross-platform IDE and C++Builder, a powerful C++ IDE. With the community edition, the developers can start using both the products without any charge and access most of the features that are part of the Professional Edition. Apart from the developers, they have the free access to the organizations with less than $5,000 in annual revenue. This announcement is getting a big welcome in the community, considering the offerings for developers, startups, freelancers who have struggled to enter the Delphi ecosystem for years. Delphi has been unpopular among the native applications developers. This may be because of the entry point pricing. As such, this move seems to ease that barrier at least for the developers, using different IDEs. Delphi's community edition is said to provide access to all the features and components from the Professional edition. This will permit developing open source projects at no cost to the developers. Apart from the normal community edition offering, Delphi and C++Builder have free trial versions of the Pro, Enterprise, and Architect version of the products available. Embarcadero did not talk about RAD Studio, one of the 3 premium tools apart from Delphi and C++Builder in its lineup. RAD Studio is a platform to write, compile, and deploy cross-platform applications. You can download the starter edition for Delphi and C++Builder from the Embarcadero’s community website. In case you want to try other offerings, you can opt for a 30 days trial. Delphi: memory management techniques for parallel programming Implementing C++ libraries in Delphi for HPC [Tutorial] Delphi Cookbook

Last week Microsoft announced the release of Python Language Server which is a part of the July release for Python Extension for Visual Studio Code and will be released as a standalone product in the near future. Intellisense, Microsoft’s code analysis, and suggestion tool have been supporting Python since 2011, but this language support can now be extended to other tools using the Microsoft Language Server. Intellisense and Language Server Demystified IntelliSense is the general term for a number of features like List Members, Parameter Info, Quick Info, and Complete Word. These features help developers to learn more about the code they are using and to keep track of the parameters. With Intellisense, Microsoft has long featured the completion feature that makes writing code faster and less error-prone. Many aspects of IntelliSense are language-specific and many of its features are powered by a language server. Adding all these smart features in IntelliSense takes massive efforts and traditionally this effort is repeated for each development tool, as each tool provides different APIs for implementing the same feature. This effort can be significantly reduced with the help of a language server, as they provide these language-specific features to different tools with the help of a standard protocol known as Language Server Protocol (LSP). This way, a single Language Server can be re-used in multiple development tools, which in turn can support multiple languages with minimal effort. Benefits of the Python Language Server Python IntelliSense has been supported in Visual Studio since 2011 and is one of the most downloaded extensions, but only limited to Visual Studio developers. The Visual Studio team at Microsoft plan to separate the Python IntelliSense from Visual Studio and make it available as a standalone program using the language server protocol. Steve Dower, a developer at Microsoft, wrote in his blog that “Having a standalone, cross-platform language server means that we can continue to innovate and improve on our IntelliSense experience for Python developers in both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code at the same time”. The July release of Visual Studio Codes Python extension includes features such as: Syntax errors will appear as the code is typed Improved performance for analyzing workspaces and presenting completions The ability to detect syntax errors within the entire workspace Faster startup times and imports Better handling for several language constructs The standalone release of the Python Language Server will be released in a few months, till then you can check out VS Code release announcement for more information. Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition is good for the open source community Microsoft launches a free version of its Teams app to take Slack head on Microsoft’s Brad Smith calls for facial recognition technology to be regulated

ReactOS, the free and open source “ Windows-like” operating system has been released as a new version. ReactOS 0.4.9 comes with system stability and general consistency improvements such as Self-hosting, shell improvements, FastFAT crash fixes and more. As they target a newer release every three months, more focus is given on improvements with fewer headliner changes. ReactOS is now capable of Self-Hosting Self-hosting is a process of building an OS on an OS. Self-hosting although considered to be a milestone in any OS’ maturity, is associated with many challenges of its own. First, compiling any large codebase requires high memory usage and storage I/O stressing the operating system. Scheduling is also stressed, as modern build systems in general attempt to produce multiple compilation processes to speed up the build process. ReactOS featured self-hosting in an older version. However, changes brought by subsequent releases, such as the reworking of the kernel, made this self-hosting process non-existent. However, with the recent changes made to the filesystem, Self-hosting is now completely established in the 0.4.9 release. The open source FreeBSD project’s implementation of qsort played a major role in achieving this. Stability brought in by fixing FastFAT crashes ReactOS had significant resource leakages caused by the FastFAT driver. This leakage was eating up the common cache to the point where attempts to copy large files would result in a crash. The new version fixes the FastFAT driver’s behavior by adding in write throttling support and restraining its usage of the cache. A conservative usage of the cache may slow the system a bit during IO operations. However, it ensures that resources remain available to service for large IO operations instead of crashing like before. FastFAT driver also featured a complete rewrite of the support for dirty volumes greatly reducing the chance of file corruptions. This will protect the system from becoming unusable after a crash. Shell Improvements & Features Shell has also received several upgrades. It now has a built-in zipfldr (Zip Folder) extension. With this, ReactOS can also uncompress zipped files without needing to install third-party tools to accomplish it. It also allows users to now choose whether to move, copy, or link a file or folder when they drag it with the right mouse button. Some other new improvements A new mouse properties dialog in the GUI component of the ReactOS installer The inclusion of RAPPS, the gateway program used for getting various applications installed on ReactOS. With this Unicode support, ReactOS can now easily support many different languages. ReactOS can now present itself as Windows 8.1 with the Version APIs. These are just a select few major updates. For a full list of features, upgrades, and improvements, read the changelog. Microsoft releases Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 17115 with Machine Learning APIs Microsoft releases Windows 10 Insider build 17682! What’s new in the Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 17704

Qt team released Qt Creator 4.7.0 yesterday. The latest release includes features such as C++ Support, Test Integration, Windows Hosts and other improvements. The highlights of this latest release are: C++ Support Clang code model has now been turned on by default. The built-in model, earlier, wasn’t able to keep up with the developments in the C++ language and the tooling around it. You can still continue to use the built-in model by disabling the ClangCodeModel plugin. Clang code model has been upgraded to Clang 6.0. and provides information for the document used for the symbols dropdown, outline pane and “.” locator filter. There’s a new tool in Debug mode (Analyze > Clang-Tidy and Clazy) with the help of which you can run checks over your entire code. You can check the warnings and errors from the code model in the Issues pane. Test Integration For cases when your text cursor in the C++ editor is inside a test function, an individual test can be directly run with the new Run Test Under Cursor action. The location of failed tests is also marked by test integration in the editor. Google Test provides support for filtering. Windows Hosts The scanning for MSVC compilers on Windows has been improved. Issue leading to short-term freezes during Windows debug stream has been fixed. Now, saving files on network drives should work in all configurations. Other Improvements The kit options are put in their own top-level entry in the preferences dialog. Now, easily choose if you want Qt’s automatic scaling by enabling or disabling the new option in Environment > Interface ( for HiDPI screen on Windows or Linux). The File System is equipped with new options which show folder on top as well as turn off the base folder synchronization. New folders can be created directly in the File System view. The open source version of Qt Creator 4.7.0  is available on the Qt download page. You can find commercially licensed packages on the Qt Account Portal. Qt Creator 4.7.0 is also available through an update in the online installer. Apart from these major updates, there have been many other improvements and fixes. Check out the official changes file for more coverage on Qt Creator 4.7.0. How to create multithreaded applications in Qt How to Debug an application using Qt Creator Qt 5.11 has arrived!  

CMake 3.12.0 is now available for download. The new release includes changes in generators, command lines, variables, modules and other updates. Let’s have a look at major changes and new features in CMake 3.12.0 Key Updates Here are the new features added in the latest release: Generators The Visual Studio Generators for VS 2017 now offers support for version=14.## option in the CMAKE_GENERATOR_TOOLSET value (e.g. via the cmake(1) -T option). This helps in specifying a toolset version number. Command Line The cmake(1) Build Tool Mode (cmake --build) gained --parallel [<jobs>] and -j [<jobs>] options. This helps to specify a parallel build level. They also help map to the corresponding options in the native build tool. Commands The add_compile_definitions() command is now added to set the preprocessor definitions at a directory level. This supersedes add_definitions(). Also, the cmake_minimum_required() and cmake_policy(VERSION) commands can now accept a version range using the form <min>[...<max>]. The list() command offers a SUBLIST sub-command to get a sublist of the list. Variables The CMAKE_SUPPRESS_REGENERATION variable is extended and now provides support to the Ninja and Makefile Generators. The CMAKE_FOLDER variable has been added to initialize the FOLDER property on all targets. Properties VS_SHADER_DISABLE_OPTIMIZATIONS and VS_SHADER_ENABLE_DEBUG, which are the properties of HLSL source file now offer support for generator expressions. HLSL source file property VS_SHADER_OBJECT_FILE_NAME has been added to the Visual Studio Generators for VS 2010 and above. The property helps to specify the file name of the compiled shader object. Modules The FindALSA module is now capable of providing imported targets. The FindMatlab module offers support for the Matlab Runtime Compiler (MCR) for compiling and linking matlab extensions. The UseSWIG module has also gained support now for CSHARP variant wrapper files. Generator Expressions A new $<GENEX_EVAL:...> and $<TARGET_GENEX_EVAL:target,...> generator expression is now added to allow consumption of generator expressions. Their evaluation itself delivers generator expressions. Added a new $<TARGET_NAME_IF_EXISTS:...> generator expression. Other changes The Visual Studio 8 2005 generator has been deprecated. Fortran dependency scanning now provides support for dependencies implied by Fortran Submodules. The Compile Features functionality will now make use of C features in MSVC since VS 2010. For more information on the latest updates and features, check out the official CMake 3.12.0 release notes. Qt for Python 5.11 released! Apache NetBeans 9.0 RC1 released!  

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a free version of the Microsoft Teams app posing heavy competition to its rival chat service Slack. The new Teams app comes loaded with key features such as unlimited free chat messages, app integrations, 300 user base limit, etc.  Whereas, Slack’s free version limits users to 10,000 searchable messages, making the Teams app a strong contender to Slack. Until now, Teams was only offered to clients that paid for Office 365 and its subscription. But, there is no need to be an Office 365 subscriber anymore to experience the power of the Teams app as stated by Lori Wright, General Manager of Microsoft 365 Teamwork. Let’s have a look at the features that the free version of the Teams app offers. Key Features The free version of Teams app is globally available in 40 different languages. It offers unlimited chat messages, app integrations, and search. It provides 10 GB team file storage as well as additional 2 GB per user. It has a built-in online office which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote along with SharePoint and OneDrive. There are native audio and video calling options for one on one meetings, small groups as well as for the full team. With over 140 business apps working with Teams, Microsoft will offer two additional features to the free version of Teams app, later this year. This includes background blurring and Inline message Translation in 36 languages. Background Blurring will intelligently blur out your screen’s background. So if you are conducting a video call from your kitchen table, there is no need to worry about the dirty dishes and the mess in the background as it won’t be visible.  Inline Message Translation allows people to chat in their native language and then translate their messages into English. But, there are still some key features that are available only in the paid version of the Teams app. With the paid version, all the video chats conducted within Team can be stored in the cloud. These are searchable and comes with automatic captioning. It also offers Email hosting through Exchange or Outlook. Microsoft is also planning on including facial recognition for the viewers to easily search what was said and who said it. Other than that, there will be a public preview of "live events” feature i.e. video broadcasts that can be transcribed, archived, and time coded which will be available shortly. Microsoft doesn't consider the free version of the Teams App as a lightweight version of the paid offering, which is the case with Slack. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft includes innumerable features that offer increased storage space, messaging search features along with letting users make group video and voice calls. Whereas, Slack's free version only allows calls between two people at a time. But, Slack is also working on improving its own in-app search, with automated suggestions. The main question is, whether the users who are already happy using Slack would want to switch to the Teams app or not. We can only wait to find out. Microsoft launches Surface Go tablet at just $399 Microsoft Azure IoT Edge is open source and generally available! Microsoft introduces ‘Immutable Blob Storage’, a highly protected object storage for Azure  

Eclipse Foundation announced the release of Photon release of Eclipse IDE. Also with this release, the community announced the support for Rust language. This support will give a native Eclipse IDE working experience for Rust developers. Eclipse IDE has been known for providing the IDE support and the learning demands for the Rust community. This release marks the thirteenth annual simultaneous release of Eclipse. The important features in the Photon release as follows: Full Eclipse IDE support for building, debugging, running, and packaging Rust applications and giving a good user experience for Rust development. More support for C# for editing and debugging codes, this includes syntax coloring, autocomplete suggestions, diagnostics, and navigation. The Photon release has added some more frameworks to the IDE such as RedDeer (framework for building automated test), Yasson (Java framework for providing binding with JSON documents), JGit (Git for Java), among others. It also comes with some more updates and features for dynamic language toolkit, Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), PHP development tools, C/C++ development tools, tools for Cloud Foundry, dark theme and improvement in background color and popup dialogs. Eclipse foundation has also introduced, what they called Language Server Protocol (LSP), with the Photon release. WIth the LSP based release, Eclipse will deliver support for popular and emerging languages in the IDE. With the normal release cycle, LSP will focus on keeping pace with the emerging tools and technologies andon the developers and their commercial needs in their future releases. For more information on the Photon project and contributing to the Eclipse community, you can check out the Eclipse Meetup event. Read more What can you expect from the upcoming Java 11 JDK? Perform Advanced Programming with Rust The top 5 reasons why Node.js could topple Java

The .NET team has announced that have completely moved the .NET Core platform to RyuJIT, the compiler written in-house by Microsoft. The team had been long working on this shift to make the compilation faster for .NET Core applications given that web applications today take time to start up. JIT compiler is a program that converts the instructions written in .NET Core to native machine code so that it can be sent to the processor for processing action. The JIT compilers have become a standard to support the compilation for various platforms. They are an improvement over the traditional compilers which require the programs to re-compile when using on different computer systems. RyuJIT is developed by the .NET Core team as the next generation 64-bit compiler that will compile programs twice as fast. The .NET Core compiled with this JIT compiler is recorded to have 30% improved faster start-up time. Also the apps compiled with the RvyJIT produce great code that run efficiently on the servers. The most important factor that helped the performance was basing the RyuJIT to x64, shifting from x86 codebase. One of the major stability factors this will bring is that .NET programs will perform consistently across various architectures and will provide compatibility for .NET programs across the platforms like ARM, mobile, among others. This will help developers maintain a codebase that compiles on both 64-bit and 32-bit compilers and perform on both types of systems. The .NET team has promised the stability of the platform after this move and are expecting the performance to improve. The team is inviting developers to join the community and has put the documentation for the RyuJIT on the GitHub repository. Applying Single Responsibility principle from SOLID in .NET Core Microsoft Open Sources ML.NET, a cross-platform machine learning framework What is ASP.NET Core?

GitLab Web IDE, aimed to simplify the workflow of accepting merge requests, is now available in GitLab 10.7, along with other features focused on improving C++ and Go code security and improving Kubernetes integration. The GitLab Web IDE was initially released as a beta in GitLab 10.4 Ultimate. The primary goal of this IDE was to streamline the workflow to contribute small fixes and to resolve merge requests. This allowed developers to contribute without storing their changes and switching to a new branch locally, then back.This could be of particular interest to developers who have a significant number of PRs to review, as well as to developers starting their journey with Git. GitLab Web IDE has the familiar layout of many graphical IDEs, with a left panel showing the files belonging to the project and a middle panel allowing to view and edit their contents. The right panel in GitLab Web IDE is the commit panel, which allows developers to keep track of which files make up the commit, to review changes, edit the commit message, and control whether the commit goes to the master branch or to a new branch, and whether to merge the changes or not. GitLab Web IDE GitLab has made its Web IDE open source with the goal of letting the developer community contribute to its development and improvement. Setting up a local development environment, or needing to stash changes and switch branches locally, can add friction to the development process. Using the Web IDE you can change multiple files, preview Markdown, review the changes and commit directly all from a browser. You can even open the diff from a merge request and get a side by side view of the changes. The latest release of Web IDE comes with performance improvements and the ability to contribute small fixes and resolve merge request feedback. GitLab 10.7 also released SAST for Go and C/C++ Additionally, GitLab 10.7 also extends GitLab Static Application Security Testing (SAST) by adding support for C/C++ and Go. GitLab SAST is a set of security tools aimed to analyze source code to detect known vulnerabilities. In addition to C/C++ and Go, SAST supports Python, Java, and Ruby on Rails. GitLab SAST is somewhat reminiscent of GitHub Security Alerts, which support Ruby and JavaScript, while Python support is in the workings. Another interesting change brought by GitLab 10.7 is Deploy Tokens, which provides support for long-lived read-only authenticated sessions for specific needs, such as when using Kubernetes to orchestrate a bunch of containers in a CI pipeline. Indeed, to flawlessly handle pod restarts and auto scaling, Kubernetes requires ongoing access to the container registry. This was previously available through CI job token, which had the downside of expiring once Kubernetes completed its task. As a workaround, personal access tokens could be used, but this could be undesirable when the access token had to be shared among multiple users. Deploy token provides a solution to both limitations. GitLab 10.7 includes many more new features, such as parametrized CI/CD control flow, project badges, subgroup issues boards, and others. Do not miss the official announcement for full details. The Microsoft-GitHub deal has set into motion an exodus of GitHub projects to GitLab GitLab’s new DevOps solution Microsoft is going to acquire GitHub

The Qt team, in their blog, announced the official release of Qt with Python support. This is the first official of Qt framework with the support for Python and this release is tagged as Qt for Python 5.11. Previously  Python support for Qt developers was provided through the development of PySide module and now the work is said to have been done on PySide 2 to provide Qt for Python. However, Qt team has been working on the core Qt framework for quite some time to incorporate Python support and this is the first breakthrough in that direction. Adding to this, the Qt team has also informed that r version of Qt earlier than v5.11 will not support Python. In the release notes, the team has mentioned that the following versions of Qt will continue supporting this project and make the support for Python, stable going ahead. This is said to be the preview release, with a list of known issues for early adopters. The team is hoping to receive the feedback from the users so that it can make the binding more smooth and rectify the bugs. A lot of work has also gone into keeping the Qt syntax unchanged for flexible migration from C++, the de facto language for developing UI with Qt, to Python and the other way round. It mentions in the release blog, that the major roadblock in providing the Python binding for the C++ based Qt was the size of packages. This made the team to work on using external tools for Qt scripting with Python, which had resulted in the development of PySide in 2009. To extend the support for Python, the work has been done on C++ headers in Qt framework, so that the developers can write modules in Python. These efforts resulted in the latest PySide 2 which has very less overhead for using Python and Qt for GUI development. The Qt team has worked on developing the documentation for this and has provided examples enables you to understand the binding. Along with the Python binding for the core Qt framework, the team has also extended support for various Qt toolkits like Qtwidgets and QML to build interactive GUI with Qt and Python. For the early adopters of Qt for Python, to report a bug you use the Qt for Python project on bugreports.qt.io. The team can be reached on Freenode with #qt-pyside. Read more Qt 5.11 has arrived! WebAssembly comes to Qt. Now you can deploy your next Qt app in browser

Microsoft announced Visual Studio 2019, the next major version of its signature IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for software design. This exciting news has come right on the heels of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. According to Microsoft, the company is still in the "early planning phase" for Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. Release timing will be shared “in the coming months,” with the company simply promising “to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively.” Along with general improvements to make the developer tool more reliable and more productive, Microsoft has some concrete goals in mind. Last month at Build 2018 developers conference, Microsoft demonstrated two new Visual Studio previews: IntelliCode and Live Share. The former uses AI to offer intelligent suggestions that improve code quality and productivity, and the latter lets developers collaborate in real time with team members who can edit and debug directly from Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Specific features that will be delivered in VS2019 are not provided, rather Microsoft lists various themes that the project will address. Here are the major new features Microsoft will bring in Visual Studio 2019 in coming days : It will continue to explore connected capabilities such as Live Share, for users to collaborate in real time on the same code base worldwide. It wants to investigate making cloud development situations, such as working with online source repositories, smoother. Enhancements for AI-assisted development via IntelliCode and use of the Azure cloud to deliver AI-powered assistance to developers. Operational enhancements such as additional refactoring, quicker application load, faster builds, improved navigation, and improved debugging. The release date for VS2019 is not available yet, but VS2017 was released in March 2017 and was preceded by several preview builds throughout 2016. Similarly, one would expect the first preview build of VS2019 in late summer / early autumn this year.  Fortunately VS2019 is being designed to install side-by-side with existing VS2017 builds, so it will be easy to try out the new release when it is available. A key fact about this next release, according to Microsoft, is that it will remain a 32-bit application and will support Windows 7. Initial developer reactions indicate there are concerns about the unresolved issues and code quality problems with VS2017, and that it is premature to shift to VS2019.  Microsoft does not offer specifics, but does indicate that they are working to improve this with the development team. Microsoft is going to acquire GitHub Unit Testing in .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 for better code quality What’s new in Visual Studio 1.22