Tech News - Application Development

Yesterday, Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel announced the release of Linux 5.1 in a mailing list announcement. This release provides users with an open source operating system with lots of great additions, as well as improvements to existing features. The previous version, Linux 5.0 was released two months ago. “On the whole, 5.1 looks very normal with just over 13k commits (plus another 1k+ if you count merges). Which is pretty much our normal size these days. No way to boil that down to a sane shortlog, with work all over.”, said Linus Torvalds in the official announcement. What’s new in Linux 5.1? Io_uring: New Linux IO interface Linux 5.1 introduces a new high-performance interface called io_uring. It’s easy to use and hard to misuse user/application interface. Io_uring has an efficient buffered asynchronous I/O support, the ability to do I/O without even performing a system call via polled I/O, and other efficiency enhancements. This will help deliver fast and efficient I/O for Linux. Io_uring permits safe signal delivery in the presence of PID reuse which will improve power management without affecting power consumption. Liburing is used as the user-space library which will make the usage simpler. Axboe's FIO benchmark has also been adapted already to support io_uring. Security In Linux 5.1, the SafeSetID LSM module has been added which will provide administrators with security and policy controls. It will restrict UID/GID transitions from a given UID/GID to only those approved by system-wide acceptable lists. This will also help in stopping to receive the auxiliary privileges associated with CAP_SET{U/G}ID, which will allow the user to set up user namespace UID mappings. Storage Along with physical RAM, users can now use persistent memory as RAM (system memory), allowing them to boot the system to a device-mapper device without using initramfs, as well as support for cumulative patches for the live kernel patching feature. This persistent memory can also be used as a cost-effective RAM replacement. Live patching improvements With Linux 5.1 a new capability is being added to live patching, it’s called Atomic Replace. It includes all wanted changes from all older live patches and can completely replace them in one transition. Live patching enables a running system to be patched without the need for a full system reboot. This will allow new drivers compatible with new hardware. Users are quite happy with this update. A user on Reddit commented, “Finally! I think this one fixes problems with Elantech's touchpads spamming the dmesg log. Can't wait to install it!” Another user added, “Thank you and congratulations for the developers!” To download the Linux kernel 5.1 sources, head over to kernel.org. To know more about the release, check out the official mailing announcement. Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo Beta releases with support for Linux 5.0 and GNOME 3.32 Announcing Linux 5.0! Bodhi Linux 5.0.0 released with updated Ubuntu core 18.04 and a modern look  

Yesterday, at the Microsoft Build 2019, the team at Microsoft announced Windows Terminal, a new terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like PowerShell, Command Prompt, and WSL. This terminal will be delivered via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 and will be regularly updated. Key features of Windows Terminal Multiple tabs Windows Terminal comes with multiple tab support so users will now be able to open any number of tabs, each connected to a command-line shell or app of their choice. E.g. PowerShell, Ubuntu on WSL, Command Prompt, a Raspberry Pi via SSH, etc. Text Windows terminal uses a GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine so that it displays text characters, glyphs, and symbols present within fonts on the PC. In addition, it also includes emoji, powerline symbols, CJK ideograms, icons, programming ligatures, etc. It can also render text much faster as compared to the previously used engines. Users now have the option of using their own new font. Settings and configurability Windows Terminal comes with many settings and configuration options that manage Terminal’s appearance and each of the shells/profiles that users open as new tabs. The settings are stored in a structured text file so that it makes it easy for users and/or tools to configure. With the terminal’s configuration mechanism, users will be able to create multiple “profiles” for each shell/app/tool. And these profiles can have their own combination of color themes, font styles and sizes, background blur/transparency levels, etc so that users can now create their own custom-styled Terminal. Windows Console The team further announced that they are open sourcing Windows Console which hosts the command-line infrastructure in Windows and provides the traditional Console UX. The primary goal of the console is preserving backward compatibility with existing command-line tools, scripts, etc. To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Microsoft introduces Remote Development extensions to make remote development easier on VS Code Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository    

Yesterday, on the first day of Microsoft Build 2019, the team behind .NET Core announced that .NET Core 3.0 will be .NET 5, which will also be the next big release in the .NET family. Now there will be just one .NET going forward, and users will be able to use it to target  Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and much more. .NET Core team will also introduce new .NET APIs, runtime capabilities and language features as part of .NET 5 along with the first preview, which is expected in November 2020. .NET 5 takes .NET Core and the best of Mono, runtime for .NET Core, to create a single platform that you can use for all your modern .NET code. This release will be supported with future updates to Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio for Mac. What is expected in .NET 5? Switch build in runtimes .NET Core has two main runtimes, namely, Mono which is the original cross-platform implementation of .NET and CoreCLR which is primarily targeted at supporting cloud applications, including the largest services at Microsoft. Both runtimes have a lot of similarities, so, the team has decided to make CoreCLR and Mono drop-in replacements for one another. The team plans to make it easier for users to choose between the different runtime options. .NET 5 applications In this release, all the .NET 5 applications will be using the CoreFX framework which will work smoothly with Xamarin and client-side Blazor workloads. These .NET 5 applications will be buildable with the .NET CLI, which will ensure that users have common command-line tooling across projects. Naming The team thought of simplifying the naming as there is only one .NET going forward, so there is no need of clarifying term like “Core”. According to the team, .NET 5 is a shorter name and also communicates that it has uniform capabilities and behaviors. Others ways in which .NET 5 project will improve are: This release will produce a single .NET runtime and framework which has a uniform runtime behaviour and developer experiences and can be used everywhere. This release will also expand the capabilities of .NET by reflecting the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono. It will also help in building projects out of a single code-base that developers can work on and expand together. Also, the code and project files will look and feel the same no matter which type of app is getting built. Users will continue to get access to the same runtime, API and language capabilities with each app. Users will now have more choice for runtime experiences. This release will come with Java interoperability for all the platforms. In this release, Objective-C and Swift interoperability will be supported on multiple operating systems. What won’t change? NET Core will continue to be open source and community-oriented on GitHub. It will still have cross-platform implementation. This release will also support platform-specific capabilities, such as Windows Forms and WPF on Windows, etc. It will support side-by-side installation and provide high performance. It will also support small project files (SDK-style) and command-line interface (CLI). A glimpse at the future roadmap Image source: Microsoft The blog reads, “The .NET 5 project is an important and exciting new direction for .NET. You will see .NET become simpler but also have a broader and more expansive capability and utility. All new development and feature capabilities will be part of .NET 5, including new C# versions. We see a bright future ahead in which you can use the same.” To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support .NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions – Async .NET 4.5 Extension Methods on IQueryable  

Yesterday, on the first day of Microsoft Build 2019, the team at Microsoft introduced WSL 2, the newest architecture for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. With WSL 2, file system performance will increase and users will be able to run more Linux apps. The initial builds of WSL 2 will be available by the end of June, this year. https://twitter.com/windowsdev/status/1125484494616649728 https://twitter.com/poppastring/status/1125489352795201539 What’s new in WSL 2? Run Linux libraries WSL 2 powers Windows Subsystem for Linux to run ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows. This new architecture brings changes to how these Linux binaries interact with Windows and computer’s hardware, but it will still manage to provide the same user experience as in WSL Linux distros With this release, the individual Linux distros can be run either as a WSL 1 distro, or as a WSL 2 distro, and can be upgraded or downgraded at any time. Also, users can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side. This new architecture uses an entirely new architecture that uses a real Linux kernel. Increases speed With this release, file-intensive operations like git clone, npm install, apt update, apt upgrade, and more will get faster. The initial tests that the team has run have WSL 2 running up to 20x faster as compared to WSL 1, when unpacking a zipped tarball. And it is around 2-5x faster while using git clone, npm install and cmake on various projects. Linux kernel with Windows The team will be shipping an open source real Linux kernel with Windows which will make full system call compatibility possible. This will also be the first time a Linux kernel is shipped with Windows. The team is building the kernel in house and in the initial builds they will ship version 4.19 of the kernel. This kernel is been designed in tune with WSL 2 and it has been optimized for size and performance. The team will service this Linux kernel through Windows updates, users will get the latest security fixes and kernel improvements without needing to manage it themselves. The configuration for this kernel will be available on GitHub once WSL 2 will release. The WSL kernel source will consist of links to a set of patches in addition to the long-term stable source. Full system call compatibility The Linux binaries use system calls for performing functions such as accessing files, requesting memory, creating processes, and more. In WSL 1 the team has created a translation layer that interprets most of these system calls and allow them to work on the Windows NT kernel. It is challenging to implement all of these system calls, where some of the apps don’t run properly in WSL 1. WSL 2 includes its own Linux kernel which has full system call compatibility. To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Microsoft introduces Remote Development extensions to make remote development easier on VS Code Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository      

Last week, the team behind RStudio released RStudio 1.2 that includes dozens of new productivity enhancements and capabilities. RStudio 1.2 is compatible with projects in SQL, Stan, Python, and D3. With this release, testing R code integrations for shinytest and testthat is easier. Users can create,  test, and publish APIs in R with Plumber and run R scripts. What’s new in RStudio 1.2? Python sessions This release uses a shared Python session for executing Python chunks. It comes with simple bindings to access R objects from Python chunks and vice versa. Keyring In RStudio 1.2, passwords and secrets are stored securely with keyring by calling rstudioapi::askForSecret(). Users can install keyring directly from dialog prompt. Run R scripts Users can now run any R script as a background job in a clean R session and can also have a look at the script output in real time. Testing with RStudio 1.2 Users can opt for Run Tests command in testthat R scripts for directly running their projects. The testthat output in the Build pane now comes with navigable issue list. PowerPoint Users can now create PowerPoint presentations with R Markdown Package management With RStudio 1.2, users can now Specify a primary CRAN URL and secondary CRAN repos from the package preferences pane. Users can link to a package’s primary CRAN page from the packages pane. The CRAN repos can be configured with a repos.conf configuration file and the r-cran-repos-file option. Plumber Users can now easily create Plumber APIs in RStudio 1.2 and execute them within RStudio to view Swagger documentation and make test calls to the APIs Bug fixes in RStudio 1.2 In this release, the issue regarding “invalid byte sequence” has been fixed. Incorrect Git status has been rectified. Issues with low/no-contrast colors with HTML widgets has been fixed. It seems most users are excited about this release and they think that this way, Python will be more accessible to R users. A user commented on HackerNews, “I’m personally an Emacs Speaks Statistics fan myself, but RStudio has been huge boon to the R community. I expect that this will go a long ways towards making Python more accessible to R users.” Some are not much happy with this release as they think it has less options for graphics. Another comment reads, “I wish rstudio would render markdown in-line. It also tends to forget graphics in output after many open and closes of rmd. I’m intrigued by .org mode but as far as I can tell, there are not options for graphical output while editing.” To know more about this news, check out the post by RStudio. How to create your own R package with RStudio [Tutorial] The new RStudio Package Manager is now generally available Getting Started with RStudio    

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the preview of Remote Development extension pack for VS Code to enable developers to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment. https://twitter.com/code/status/1124016109076799488 Currently, developers will need to use the Insiders build for remote development until the stable version is available. The Insiders builds are the versions that are shipped daily with latest features and bug fixes. Why these VS Code extensions are needed? Developers often choose containers or remote virtual machines configured with specific development and runtime stacks as their development environment. This is an optimal choice because configuring such development environments locally could be too difficult or sometimes even impossible. Data scientists also require remote environments to do their work efficiently. They build and train data models and to do that they need to analyze large datasets. This demands massive storage and compute service, which a local machine can hardly provide. One option to solve this problem is using Remote Desktop but it can be sometimes laggy. Developers often use Vim and SSH or local tools with file synchronization, but these can also be slow and error-prone. There are browser-based tools that can be used in some scenarios, but they lack the richness and familiarity that desktop tools provide. VS Code Remote Development extensions pack Looking at these challenges, the VS Code team came up with a solution that suggested that VS Code should run in two places at once. One instance will run the developer tools locally and the other will connect to a set of development services running remotely in the context of a physical or virtual machine. Following are three extensions for working with remote workspaces: Remote-WSL Remote - WSL allows you to use WSL as a full development environment directly from VS Code. It runs commands and extensions directly in WSL so developers don’t have to think about pathing issues, binary compatibility, or other cross-OS challenges. With this extension, developers will be able to edit files located in WSL or the mounted Windows filesystem and also run and debug Linux-based applications on Windows. Remote-SSH Remote - SSH allows you to open folders or workspaces hosted on any remote machine, VM, or container with a running SSH server. It directly runs commands and other extensions on the remote machine so you don’t need to have the source code on your local machine. It enables you to use larger, faster, or more specialized hardware than your local machine. You can also quickly switch between different remote development environments and safely make updates. Remote-Containers Remote - Containers allows you to use a Docker container as your development container. It starts or attaches to a development container, which is running a well-defined tool and runtime stack. All your workspace files are copied or cloned into the container, or mounted from the local file system. To configure the development container you can use a ‘devcontainer.json’ file. To read more in detail, visit Microsoft’s official website. Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository Microsoft employees raise their voice against the company’s misogynist, sexist and racist acts  

Yesterday, GitHub announced in a blog post that they are deprecating the Network Graph from the repository’s Insights panel and that visits to this page will be redirected to the forks page instead. Following this announcement, they removed the network graph. On the same day, however, they deleted the blog post and also added back the network graph. The network graph is one of the useful features for developers on GitHub. It is used to display the branch history of the entire repository network, including branches of the root repository and branches of forks that contain commits unique to the network. Users of GitHub were alarmed on seeing the blog post about the removal of network graph without any prior notification or provision of a suitable replacement. For many users, this meant a significant burden of additional work. https://twitter.com/misaelcalman/status/1123603429090373632 https://twitter.com/theterg/status/1123594154255187973 https://twitter.com/morphosis7/status/1123654028867588096 https://twitter.com/jomarnz/status/1123615123090935808 Following the backlash and requests to bring back the Graph Network, on the same day, the Community Manager of GitHub posted on its community forum, that they will be reverting this change, based on the users’ feedback. Later on, the blog post announcing the deprecation was removed and the network graph was back on its website. This has brought a huge sigh of relief amongst GitHub’s users. The feature is famous for checking the state of a repository and the relationship between active branches. https://twitter.com/dotemacs/status/1123851067849097217 https://twitter.com/AlpineLakes/status/1123765300862836737 GitHub has not yet officially commented on why they removed the network graph in the first place. A Reddit user has put up an interesting shortlist of suspicions: The cost-benefit analysis from "The Top" determined that the compute time for generating the graph was too expensive, and so they "moved" the feature to a more premium account. "Moved" could also mean unceremoniously kill off the feature because some manager thought it wasn't shiny enough. Microsoft buying GitHub made (and will continue to make) GitHub worse, and this is just a harbinger of things to come. DockerHub database breach exposes 190K customer data including tokens for GitHub and Bitbucket repositories Apache Software Foundation finally joins the GitHub open source community Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository

Last month, the Fedora team announced the release of Fedora 30 Beta version. Just last week, the Fedora team broke the news of the release of Fedora 30 that serves as the staging environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This release comes with a number of improvements and performance optimizations. What’s new in Fedora 30? GCC 9.0 This release uses GCC 9.0 which brings performance improvements across all applications that have been recompiled with this version. This release also features a flicker-free boot process that hides the GRUB loader/kernel select screen by default and also relies on creative theming to incorporate the bootsplash image into the loading process. GNOME 3.32 This release has been shipped with GNOME 3.32 that includes all-new app icons that use a new visual language reminiscent of Google's Material Design guidelines. GNOME 3.32 provides more robust support for HiDPI displays including experimental non-integer scaling. Performance improvements This release comes with performance improvements including an upgrade to Bash 5.0, Boost 1.69, and glibc to 2.29. In this release, even Python 2 packages have been removed and Ruby 2.6 and PHP 7.3 has been updated. Excessive linking for Fedora-built packages has been removed, which will improve startup times and smaller metadata files. This release also brings UEFI for ARMv7 devices that makes it possible to install Fedora on UEFI-compatible ARM hardware that is similar to installing on an arbitrary computer. New packages for desktop environments This release includes packages for DeepinDE and Pantheon, the desktop environments that are used in Deepin Linux, also known as "the single most beautiful desktop on the market" by TechRepublic's Jack Wallen. These packages require a simple and manual installation process. Most of the users are happy and excited about this news. A user commented on HackerNews, “Love this, switched today! Definitely the most easy to use distro out there and, especially in the case of Silverblue, the most modern by far (containers only!).” Few others are complaining about the bugs in this release. Another user commented, “This is good distro for developers by developers. I wouldn't suggest it for everyday users though. There are too many beta quality bugs since it uses really bleeding edge releases.” To know more about this news, check out the Fedora 30’s official announcement. Fedora 30 Beta released with desktop environment options, GNOME 3.32, and much more Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support Fedora 29 released with Modularity, Silverblue, and more  

Just two days ago, Amazon announced that it has made Amazon S3 Batch Operations, a storage management feature for processing millions of S3 objects in an easier way. It is also an automated feature that was first previewed at AWS re:Invent 2018. Users can now set tags or access control lists (ACLs), copy objects to another bucket, initiate a restore from Glacier, and also invoke an AWS Lambda function on each one. Developers and IT administrators can now change object properties and metadata and further execute storage management tasks with a single API request. For example, S3 Batch Operations allows customers to replace object tags, change access controls, add object retention dates, copy objects from one bucket to another, and even trigger Lambda functions against existing objects stored in S3. S3’s existing support for inventory reports are used to drive the batch operations. With this new feature of Batch Operations, users can now easily write code, set up any server fleets, or figure out how to partition the work and distribute it to the fleet. Users can now create a job in minutes with a couple of clicks. S3 uses massive, behind-the-scenes parallelism to manage the job. Users can also create, monitor, and manage their batch jobs using the S3 CLI, the S3 Console, or the S3 APIs. Important terminologies for batch operations Bucket An S3 bucket can hold a collection of any number of S3 objects, with optional per-object versioning. S3 Inventory report An S3 inventory report can be generated when daily or weekly bucket inventory is run. A report can be configured to include all of the objects in a bucket or to focus on a prefix-delimited subset. Manifest A manifest is an inventory report or a file in CSV format that identifies the objects to be processed in the batch job. Batch Action Batch action is the desired action on the objects which is described by a Manifest. IAM role An IAM role provides S3 with permission for reading the objects in the inventory report and perform the desired actions for writing the optional completion report. Batch job Batch references all of the above-mentioned terminologies. Each job has a status and a priority; higher priority (numerically) jobs take precedence over those with lower priority. Most of the users are happy because of this news as they think the performance of their projects might increase. A user commented on HackerNews, “This S3 request rate performance increase removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes to achieve faster performance. That means you can now use logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications.” To know more about this news, check out Amazon’s blog post. Amazon finally agrees to let shareholders vote on selling facial recognition software Eero’s acquisition by Amazon creates a financial catastrophe for investors and employees Amazon Alexa is HIPAA-compliant: bigger leap in the health care sector      

In 2016, Apache decided to start integrating GitHub’s repository and tooling with their own services. After working on the integration over the years, they made a move towards simplifying how they work and move all Git projects to GitHub. By February, this year, Apache completed the migration to GitHub and enabled all the projects with a simple platform to host and review code, collaborate on projects, and build software alongside developers around the world. Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator, said, "In 2016, the Foundation started integrating GitHub's repository and tooling, with our own services. This enabled selected projects to use GitHub's excellent tools. Over time, we improved, debugged, and solidified this integration. In late 2018, we asked all projects to move away from our internal git service, to that provided by GitHub. This shift brought all of their tooling to our projects, while we maintain a backup mirror on our infrastructure." Yesterday, Apache Software Foundation (ASF) finally joined the GitHub open source community. Apache Software Foundation has about 200M+ lines of code that are managed by an all-volunteer community of 730 individuals. Nat Friedman, Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, said on this announcement, "We're proud to have such a long standing member of the Open Source community migrate to GitHub. Whether we're working with individual Open Source maintainers and contributors or some of the world's largest Open Source foundations like Apache, GitHub's mission is to be the home for all developers by supporting Open Source communities, addressing their unique needs, and helping Open Source projects thrive." Initially, Apache projects had two version control services, Apache Subversion and Git. As the number of projects increased, ASF communities wanted to see their source code available on GitHub because the codes were read-only mirrors. Also, the ability to use the GitHub tools around those repositories was very limited. This made Apache take the decision to join GitHub. Greg Stein further added, "We continue to experiment and expand the set of services that GitHub can provide to our communities, given our own needs and requirements. The Foundation has started working closely with GitHub management to explore ways to make this happen, and what will be possible in the future." Many users think that the reason for Apache to migrate to GitHub was the increasing cost of managing the code and infrastructure. A user commented on HackerNews, “Apparently, one of the big motivating reasons for this was "cost". The foundation’s 2018 five-year strategic plan noted that infrastructure services account for more than 80 percent of the total ASF expense budget, adding: Increasingly, project communities have infrastructure requirements that strain the capabilities of the ASF. The report noted that, given burgeoning costs, encouraging the use of more externally provided services was its best option.” Another comment reads, “Holy shit, they're spending $800k a year on infrastructure! Honestly, it's difficult to understand why they haven't sooner moved to GitHub, or even GitLab or the like - it feels reckless. That money could be put to far greater use - as an Apache supporter who hasn't ever felt the need to look at their costs, I have to say that I'm very disappointed.” To know more about this news, check out Apache’s blog post. Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub GitHub releases Vulcanizer, a new Golang Library for operating Elasticsearch    

This week, the team at Python announced the release of Python Extension for Visual Studio Code. This release comes with enhanced variable explorer and data viewer and improvements to the Python Language Server. What’s new in Python in Visual Studio Code? Enhanced Variable Explorer and Data Viewer This release comes with a built-in Variable Explorer along with a Data Viewer, which will help the users to easily view, inspect and filter the variables in the application, including lists, NumPy arrays, pandas data frames, and more. This release shows a section for variables while running code and cells in the Python Interactive window. On expanding it, users can see a list of the variables in the current Jupyter session. More variables will automatically show up as they get used in the code. And users can sort the variables in columns by clicking on each column header. Users can now double-click on each row or use the “Show variable in Data Viewer” button in order to view full data of each variable in the newly-added Data Viewer and can perform a simple search over its values. Improvements to debug configuration In this release, the process of configuring the debugger has now been simplified. If a user starts debugging through the Debug Panel and no debug configuration exists, then the users will now be prompted to create a debug configuration for their application. Instead of manually configuring the launch.json file, users can now create a debug configuration through a set of menus. Improvements to the Python Language Server This release comes with fixes and improvements to the Python Language Server. The team has added back the features that were removed in the 0.2 release including “Rename Symbol”, “Go to Definition” and “Find All References”. Also, the loading time and memory usage have been improved while importing scientific libraries such as pandas, Plotly, PyQt5, especially while running in full Anaconda environments.   Read Also: Visualizing data in R and Python using Anaconda [Tutorial] Major changes In this release, the default behavior of debugger has been changed to display return values. “Unit Test” has been renamed to “Test” or “Testing”. The debugStdLib setting has been replaced with justMyCode. This release comes with setting to just enable/disable the data science codelens. The reliability of test discovery while using pytest has been improved. Bug Fixes The issues with cell spacing have been resolved. Problems with errors not showing up for import have been fixed. Issues with the tabs in the comments section have been fixed. To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s official blog post. Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly Microsoft introduces Pyright, a static type checker for the Python language written in TypeScript Debugging and Profiling Python Scripts [Tutorial]  

Yesterday, the team at GitLab released GitLab 11.10, a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool. This release comes with new features including pipelines on the operations dashboard, pipelines for merged results, and much more. What’s new in GitLab 11.10? Enhanced operations dashboard GitLab 11.10 enhances the operations dashboard with a powerful feature that provides an overview of pipeline status. This becomes useful while looking at a single project's pipeline as well as for multi-project pipelines. With this release, users can now get instant visibility at a glance into the health of all of the pipelines on the operations dashboard. Run pipelines against merged results Users can now run pipelines against the merged result prior to merging. This allows the users to quickly catch errors for much quicker resolution of pipeline failures and more efficient usage of GitLab Runners. By having the merge request pipeline automatically create a new ref that contains the combined merge result of the source and target branch, it is possible to have the combined result valid. Scoped labels Scoped labels allow teams to use apply labels on issues, merge requests, and epics and custom workflow states. These labels can be configured by using a special double colon syntax in the label title. Few users think that new updates won’t be as successful as the team expects it to be and there is still a long way to go for GitLab. A user commented on HackerNews, “Can't help but feel that their focus on moving all operation insights into gitlab itself will not be as successful as they want it to be (as far as I read, their goal was to replace their operations and monitoring tools with gitlab itself[1]). I've worked with the ultimate edition for a year and the kubernetes integration is nowhere close to the insight you would get from google, amazon or azure in terms of insight and integration with ops-land. I wish all these hours were spent on improving the developer lifecycle instead.” Few others are happy with this news and they think that GitLab has progressed well. A comment reads, “GitLab has really come a long way in the past few years. The days of being a github-alike are long gone. Very happy to see them continue to find success.” To know more about this news, check out GitLab’s post. GitLab considers moving to a single Rails codebase by combining the two existing repositories Introducing GitLab Serverless to deploy cloud-agnostic serverless functions and applications GitLab 11.7 releases with multi-level child epics, API integration with Kubernetes, search filter box and more  

The first release candidate for Rails 6.0.0 was out yesterday. Rails 6.0.0 rc1 is the polished version of all the previous beta releases. Main features include Action Mailbox, Action Text, multiple database support, parallel testing, and Webpacker handling JavaScript by default. The latest  beta release, Rails 6.0.0.beta3 was released last month. In early January, the first release of Rails 6 was announced. Two new major frameworks are added in Rails 6.0 called Action Mailbox and Action Text. There are also two scalable upgrades in the form of multiple database support and parallel testing. Action Mailbox guides incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes in order for processing to take place in Rails. Action Text brings rich text and enables editing such files in Rails. Though the team at Rails couldn't meet their aspirational release schedule, they did manage to include around 1000 commits in Rails 6.0.0 rc1. The crew at The Pragmatic Programmers, particularly Sam Ruby, David Bryant Copeland have also come up with beta of Agile Web Development with Rails 6  to coincide with the release of rc1. For more information on the release, check out their official announcement. GitLab considers moving to a single Rails codebase by combining the two existing repositories Uber releases AresDB, a new GPU-powered real-time Analytics Engine Niantic, of the Pokemon Go fame, releases a preview of its AR platform

After publicly sharing the release timeline for Electron 5.0 and beyond in February, On Tuesday Electron 5.0 was released, as per the plan, with new features, upgrades, and fixes. Electron ships with the latest version upgrades of core components Chromium, Node.js, and V8: Chromium 73.0.3683.119, Node.js 12.0.0, and V8 7.3.492.27. Electron 5.0 also includes improvements to Electron-specific APIs. With this release, Electron 2.0.x has reached end of life. Major changes in Electron 5.0 Packaged apps will now behave the same as the default app. A default application menu will be created (unless the app has one) and the window-all-closed event will be automatically handled. (unless the app handles the event) Mixed sandbox mode is now enabled by default. Renderers launched with sandbox: true will now be actually sandboxed, where previously they would only be sandboxed if mixed-sandbox mode was also enabled. The default values of nodeIntegration and webviewTag are now false to improve security. The SpellCheck API has been changed to provide asynchronous results. New features BrowserWindow now supports managing multiple BrowserViews within the same BrowserWindow. Electron 5 continues with Electron's Promisification initiative.  This initiative will convert callback-based functions in Electron to return Promises. During this transition period, both the callback and Promise-based versions of these functions will work correctly, and will both be documented. A total of 12 APIs were converted for Electron 5.0. Three functions were changed or added to systemPreferences to access macOS systems' colors. These include systemPreferences.getAccentColor, systemPreferences.getColor, and systemPreferences.getSystemColor The function process.getProcessMemoryInfo has been added to get memory usage statistics about the current process. New remote events have been added to improve security in the remote API. Now, remote.getBuiltin, remote.getCurrentWindow, remote.getCurrentWebContents and <webview>.getWebContents can be filtered. Deprecated APIs Three APIs are newly deprecated in Electron 5.0.0 and planned for removal in 6.0.0. These include Mksnapshot binaries for arm and arm64, ServiceWorker APIs on WebContents, and Automatic modules with sandboxed webContents. These are just a select few updates. For other specific details, you may see the release notes.  Also, check out the tentative 6.0.0 schedule for key dates in the Electron 6 development life cycle. Users can install Electron 5.0 with npm via npm install electron@latest or download the tarballs from Electron releases page. The Electron team publicly shares the release timeline for Electron 5.0 Flutter challenges Electron, soon to release a desktop client to accelerate mobile development How to create a desktop application with Electron [Tutorial]

The team behind Xubuntu, have released a new update for the lightweight, GTK-based desktop environment built around Ubuntu. Xubuntu 19.04 is available since yesterday as a part of the Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" launch. New features include latest Xfce package releases, new wallpapers/artwork, re-addition of GIMP to ISO, and various other changes. Xubuntu 19.04 also halts the production of x86 32-bit install images. New additions in Xubuntu 19.04 AptURL is now included in the latest release. It provides an easy way to link to and install packages from the repositories. It supports most browsers and works without any additional configuration when installed. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulating Program), a feature-packed image editor also ships with this release. It was notably absent from Xubuntu since 15.04 “Vivid Vervet”. The addition of LibreOffice Impress completes the Xubuntu office suite. Impress makes it possible for users to quickly and easily produce and present high-quality presentations. It comes with a number of great templates already installed, and hundreds more at the LibreOffice Extensions website. Updates to existing Xfce settings Xfce Application Finder The application Finder is ported to GTK 3 and searches are now fuzzy Menu items without a name are no longer displayed Applications can now be launched by pressing Enter once The Application Finder will no longer crash when toggling bookmarks A new preference was added to hide the category panel and it has improved application sorting and keyboard navigation Xfce Desktop Orientation option is added for icon arrangement Support for the RandR primary monitor is added Integration for the AccountsService wallpaper is added The crash with monitor changes is fixed. Also the icon size in the “Open With” submenu is fixed. Xfce Dictionary Crashes related to invalid URLs were resolved Web search links are only displayed when URLs are valid The link tooltip is now escaped, fixing display issues Xfce Panel Maximum icon size can be specified for improved control. Per-panel icon size preferences are added Numerous improvements are made to plugin display and sizing issues Support for alternative menu editors, with MenuLibre as default is added Fixed issues with clicking panel items at the top or left of the screen Fixed space reservation on the bottom and right of the screen Fixed crashes in the Directory Menu plugin and when removing certain plugins Fixed alignment of various plugin menus and the display of the binary clock Xfce Screenshooter Added width and height to the region select overlay Fixed delay functionality in the panel plugin and saving screenshots from the panel plugin Improved Imgur upload results dialog Improved support when XInput is not available and for HiDPI displays Xfce Session Replaced packaging recommendation on Xscreensaver with Light Locker Added support for MATE Screensaver and Xfce Screensaver Xfce System Load Plugin Reworked preferences dialog The default update interval was updated to 0.5 seconds Xfce Task Manager Builds now default to GTK 3, with GTK 2 being removed in the next release Improved UTF-8 normalization Fixed crash when closing processes Xubuntu Artwork New desktop wallpaper for 19.04 New release-agnostic wallpaper for Plymouth These are just a select few updates. For a more exhaustive version, head over to the blog post by Bluesabre. If you want to contribute, check out the Xubuntu contributor documentation to learn how to get started. Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo Beta releases with support for Linux 5.0 and GNOME 3.32 Chromium blacklists nouveau graphics device driver for Linux and Ubuntu users Ubuntu 18.10 ‘Cosmic Cuttlefish’ releases with focus on AI development, multi-cloud and edge deployments, and much more