Tech News - Application Development

Many of you may remember GIMP from school if you weren’t using MS Paint instead. The open-source cross-platform image editor is free to use and to modify the source code. GIMP is associated with the non-profit GNOME, a Linux desktop environment. The $100K donation given to them is a part of the $400K donation made to GNOME by Handshake.org in early August. Now 25 percent of this donation will go to GIMP. After the release of GIMP 2.10.6, hopefully, this donation helps them to accomplish their next GTK3-ported GIMP 3.0 release. In May this year, an anonymous donor pledged $1M to the GNOME foundation over the course of next two years. This donation enabled them to put up job listings for four additional roles of Development Coordinator, Program Coordinator, DevOps/Sysadmin, and GTK+ core developer. Their website states “We thank both Handshake.org and GNOME Foundation for the generous donation and will use the money to do much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting.” Handshake.org was launched on August 2 this year. It is a decentralized certificate authority and peer-to-peer DNS service. Handshake.org is donating about $10 million to non-profits and free/open-source projects. Handshake’s purpose is not to replace the DNS protocol. But it aims at replacing the root zone file and root servers with a public commons. Their website states: “Handshake’s original incubators, Purse.io and Private Internet Access, provided enough support to build and launch the platform without additional funding. In the spirit of free software and radical gifting we’ve taken the validation value from this project and shared it with the world.” The details are posted on the official GIMP website. A Tour Around GIMP GNOME 3.30 released with improved Desktop performance, Screen Sharing, and more Creating a quick logo for a company with GIMP 2.6

Mastodon 2.5 is here, a social network often viewed as an alternative to Twitter. The 100th version of the social network has a variety of software improvements in UI, media and a bunch of fixes including security and performance fixes. UI changes in Mastodon 2.5 The web interface in Mastodon 2.5 has been redesigned for public areas. The design and color scheme is now more consistent when logged in to your account. A better use of space is made with a new profile layout with prominent follow buttons for new users. The public pages now display reply, favorite and boost buttons. The actions can open a remote interaction dialogue. You can interact with the dialogue from your home server and interact with the toot from your account. This is a simpler approach than the previous approach where users had to copy paste permalink to the server’s search bar. You can also choose to feature specific people you follow, on your profile. They can be displayed randomly or as a recommendation to your profile visitors. The count of replies to toots is now displayed enabling you to know if a question has been already answered or if a discussion is happening. Mastodon 2.5 now also accepts MOV video files from iOS, and other large video files. It also has better image resizing. Admin and deployment changes For admins who moderate Mastodon servers, a new dashboard is available providing an overview of important information like weekly sign-up and activity numbers. The e-mail notifications generated from reports have been cut down and report notifications can be disabled for your account now. Suspending users now has a confirmation screen where you can type the name of the account you want to suspend. The temporary lock-out is now reversible and works as an alternative to suspensions. For admins who run Mastodon servers, the database schema has been changed to reduce disk write operations and CPU load of PostgreSQL. For scaling, there is support for red-replicas baked into the software, you only need to change the configuration. There is also a new command-line interface for making it easy Terminal easy to use These were a select few updates. For a full list of changes, take a look at the changelog. PrimeTek releases PrimeReact 2.0.0 Beta 3 version Babel 7 released with Typescript and JSX fragment support Node.js announces security updates for all their active release lines for August 2018

Yesterday, Mozilla released the latest versions of Firefox for desktop, Android, and iOS. The latest version for desktop and Android users is Firefox 62.0 and for iOS users it is Firefox 13.2. They have made some changes for faster page loads, better scrolling performance, a newly added Dark theme for iOS users, and much more. They have also laid foundation for upcoming release, Firefox 63, by allowing users to distrust certificates issued by Symantec. In Firefox 63, all trust for Symantec-issued certificates will be removed. What’s new for desktop users? The default New Tab, Firefox Home, now can display up to 4 rows of top sites, Pocket stories, and highlights. The Reopen in Container option is added for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container. Dark theme is automatically enabled in macOS 10.14 dark mode. Improved graphics rendering for Windows users without accelerated hardware. Users opting to disconnect from Sync can now wipe their Firefox profile data, including bookmarks, passwords, history, cookies, and site data from their desktop computer. FreeBSD support is added for WebAuthn. The Description field for bookmarks is removed. Added support for CSS Shapes for richer web page layouts. Added support for CSS Variable Fonts to create beautiful typography with a single font file. What’s new for Android users? Scrolling performance is improved. Page loading is now faster over WiFi connections by loading from the network cache if disk cache is slow. Notifications settings provides a toggle button, Product and feature tips, to allow more control over which notifications are shown. What’s new for iOS users? New dark theme: Firefox for iOS now supports dark and light theme. According to your preference, you can easily switch between the two themes either manually or automatically. To enable this manually, tap Settings in the menu panel, then, tap Display, and choose either Light or Dark. To automatically turn it on you can use Automatic switch. Source: Mozilla Improved searching experience: They have made some improvements to make searching content easier. Tab settings can now be managed in a single view allowing  you to make changes easily and quickly. You will also be able to search your open tabs and seamlessly switch between normal and private browsing. Source: Mozilla To know more, read Mozilla’s official announcement and also check their release notes. Mozilla, Internet Society, and web foundation wants G20 to address “techlash” fuelled by security and privacy concerns Mozilla’s new Firefox DNS security updates spark privacy hue and cry Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature

The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. GNOME 3.30 features many significant performance improvements. In total, the release incorporates 24845 changes, made by approximately 801 contributors. GNOME is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux and most BSD derivatives. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Fun Fact: 3.30 has been named “Almería” in recognition of this year’s GUADEC organizing team. GUADEC is GNOME’s primary annual conference which was held in Almería, Spain this year.[/box] Improvements to Desktop performance The entire desktop now uses fewer system resources. Users can now run multiple apps at once without encountering performance issues. Improved Screen Sharing With GNOME 3.30, it is now easier than ever to control screen sharing and remote desktop sessions. A newly added system menu displays an indicator when a remote connection is active, making it easy to stop the session when finished. Update Flatpaks Automatically Flatpak is an emerging technology that makes getting apps fast and secure. Many new apps are already available on Flathub which is a repository of curated Flatpaks. GNOME software manager, can now automatically update installed Flatpaks. Focus on Content Web, the GNOME browser, now comes with a new minimal reader view. Web can toggle between the normal view and the clean, minimal reader view when viewing a compatible web page. The minimal reader view removes irrelevant menus, images, and content not related to the article or document. Updates to GNOME Virtual machine application Boxes, the GNOME virtual machine application, can now connect to remote Windows servers using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Boxes also now has the ability to import OVA files, making sharing virtual machines even easier. Gaming Application changes Games, the retro gaming application can now be navigated by gamepad making it faster to use: The keyboard is mappable to gamepad inputs. Additional details about each available game is displayed in the collection view. The Flatpak bundles 4 more emulator cores. GNOME 3.30 introduces a new podcast app called Podcasts that lets you subscribe and listen to your favorite podcasts, right from your desktop. These are just a select few updates. For a complete list of updates, read the GNOME Blog. Deploying HTML5 Applications with GNOME. Install GNOME-Shell on Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Is Linux hard to learn?

Yesterday, Facebook made its video-streaming service named, Facebook Watch globally available. It was first launched in August 2017 for a limited group of people in the US. Facebook Watch's content is produced by its partners, who can earn 55% of advertising revenue while Facebook keeps 45%. How Facebook Watch is different from other streaming rivals like YouTube, Twitch and more? Facebook believes that Watch is unique as compared to its rivals, such as YouTube, Amazon’s Twitch, Netflix because it has an added advantage of how Watch helps viewers interact with each other. Fidji Simo, Facebook’s vice-president of video, told BBC: “It is built on the notion that watching video doesn’t have to be a passive experience. You can have a two-way conversation about the content with friends, other fans or even the creators themselves.” Facebook Watch comes with a feature called Watch Party that lets its users to coordinate themselves to watch a show together. Creators can boost engagement with the help of Interactivity Platform that allows them to run polls, challenges, and quizzes. How will it support its content creators? Facebook has laid out a plan to support their publishers and content creators in two main areas: Ad breaks to generate revenue from their videos Creator Studio to understand how their content is performing Ad breaks eligibility criteria and availability Ad breaks are launched across four markets and is only available to pages that publish videos in certain languages and countries right now. It will support more countries and languages by the end of the year and in 2019. Eligibility: Your videos should be 3-minute long Videos that have generated more than 30,000 1-minute views in total over the past two months Pages should have at least 10,000 Facebook followers Meet their Monetisation Eligibility standards Should be located in a country where ad breaks are available Availability: Currently, ad breaks are supported in the US, UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. Over the next few months, availability will further expand to more countries and languages. Manage your video content with Creator Studio Creator Studio provide creators a central place for Pages to manage their entire content library and business. You can do the following: Manage content and interactions: Look through the insights, manage interactions across all owned Pages, respond to Facebook messages or comments on Facebook and Instagram. Streamline video publishing: Compose, schedule, and publish content across owned Pages and also do bulk uploads. Access ad breaks: Review monetisation insights and view payments. Along with this, you can access Rights Manager, use sound collection, and take advantage of new features and monetisation opportunities that they may be eligible for. To know more about the recent updates and your eligibility on Facebook Watch, check out their official announcement. A new conservative employee group within Facebook to protest Facebook’s “intolerant” liberal policies Facebook bans another quiz app and suspends 400 more due to concerns of data misuse Facebook is reportedly rating users on how trustworthy they are at flagging fake news

On the second day of GopherCon, 28th Aug, Microsoft announced contributions to the open-source Project Athens and their involvement with GopherSource. These announcements add to Microsoft’s efforts to better enable Go developers for making better apps and services. They support GO in Microsoft Visual Studio and on Azure cloud. Project Athens Package version changes in Go causes the current builds to break. This happens when the changed packages are dependencies for a working project. Project Athens stores and serves packages outside of Github, which means that Athens holds dependencies. It is an open source project released under the MIT license and is hosted on GitHub. Microsoft’s current focus is on improving the whole module experience. The aim is to ensure seamless working of Go modules with all proxy servers. They are working to set up a federated and diverse proxy network to include features like: Proxy server implementation for edge deployments in Go modules A new protocol for authenticated module proxies Adding module notary servers for source code authentication An include/exclude list for companies using Go to filter external Go packages Project Athens has been open-source and community owned since it was formed. While Microsoft engineers remain the core maintainers of the project, Athens is supported by many developers from the open-source community now. GopherSource Go can be confusing and intimidating to start using for both new and experienced developers. GopherSource is an initiative to enhance and expand the Go ecosystem by building up more contributors to contribute to Go and key Go projects, this includes Project Athens. GopherSource is like a community for Go developers, to contribute for upstreaming Go, give feedback, make proposals, and provide mentorship. Go at Microsoft There are many users at Microsoft who use Go to build products at scale. They implemented the core services behind Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in Golang. Aaron Schlesinger, developer at Microsoft Azure, and core maintainer of Project Athens, stated in Microsoft’s blog post: “Internally, we contribute a significant amount of Go code to the cloud native ecosystem, including Virtual Kubelet, which enables scheduling Kubernetes workloads to off-cluster resources such as IoT Edge or Azure Container Instances; and Helm, the Kubernetes package manager.” For more, visit the Microsoft Blog. Go 2 design drafts include plans for better error handling and generics Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates GoMobile: GoLang’s Foray into the Mobile World

Github has introduced “Project Paper Cuts” that was inspired from a lot of refined GitHub additions. This project aims to fix smaller code related and UI issues that users face during a project development workflow.   Source: Twitter Project Paper Cuts is committed to working directly with the community in order to fix small to medium-sized workflow problems. It aims to improve UI/UX and find ways to make quick improvements to nagging issues that users often encounter in their projects. The project aims to find fixes on issues that have the most impact but are supported with hardly any or no discussions. Most “paper cuts” will have a public changelog entry associated with them so users can keep pace. The few “lesser talked issues” that GitHub has already managed to solve are: #1 Unselect markers when copying and pasting the contents of a diff The + and - diff markers are no longer copied to the clipboard when users copy the contents of a diff. #2 Edit a repository’s README from the repository root If a user has the permission to push to a repository,  they can edit a README file from the repository root by clicking the pen icon to the right of the README’s file header. #3 Users can access their repositories straight from the profile dropdown Users can use the profile dropdown, on any page, to quickly go straight to the “Your Repositories” tab within their user profile. #4 Highlight permalinked comments When following a permalink to a specific comment in an issue or pull request, the comment will be highlighted so that a user can easily find it among other comments in the thread. #5 Remove files from a pull request with a button If a user has a write permission, he can click on the ‘trash’ icon for a file right in the pull request’s “Files changed” view to make a commit and remove it. #6 Branch names in merge notification emails The email notification from GitHub about a merge will also include the name of the base branch that the change was merged into. #7 Users can create new pull requests from their repository’s Pull Requests Page In order to quickly create a pull request without having to switch back to the “Code” tab, when a user push branches while using the “Pull requests” tab, GitHub will now display the dynamic “Compare and pull request” widget. #8 Add a teammate from the team discussions page Users can add an organization member to a team directly from the team discussion page by clicking the + button inside the sidebar. #9 Collapse all diffs in a pull request at once When a pull request contains a lot of changed files, code reviewers find it hard to isolate the changes that are necessary/ important to them. Project paper cut allows them to collapse or expand the contents of all diffs in a pull request. This can be done by holding down the alt key and clicking on the inverted caret icon in any file header. They can also use the “Jump to file or symbol” dropdown to jump to the file that they are interested to review to automatically expand it. #10 Copy the URL of a comment Previously, in order to grab a permalink to a comment within an issue or pull request, users would have to copy the URL from a comment’s timestamp. They can now click Copy URL within the comment’s options menu to quickly copy the URL to the clipboard. Project Paper Cuts is solely aimed to help all developers do their best work, faster. By incorporating customers feedback into making this project, GitHub is paving the way to make small changes in the way it works. You can read the detailed announcement on the Github Blog to know more about Project Paper Cuts. Git-bug: A new distributed bug tracker embedded in git Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition is good for the open source community GitHub open sources its GitHub Load Balancer (GLB) Director  

Deno is a runtime by creator of Node, Ryan Dahl. It aims at fixing some of the problems in Node. Originally written in Go, Deno is now rewritten in Rust and is in version 0.1. Node.js was developed nearly a decade ago. It was designed in 2009 to use server-side JavaScript. The implementation solved problems of 2009, for which Dahl has no regrets. But lately, he did have regrets elaborated in a talk on 10 things he regrets about Node in the JSConf 2018. Some of the regrets included packages, security issues, the entire build system, among others. Deno is a secure TypeScript run-time on Chrome V8. It was originally written in Go and now has been rewritten in Rust to avoid potential garbage collector issues. Deno is similar to Node.js but is focused on security. Deno takes full advantage of JavaScript being a secure sandbox. So, unlike Node.js, Deno is sandboxed. Scripts should run without any write access by default. Using untrusted utilities like linters will be optional. There is no package.json in Deno, no npm and it is not explicitly compatible with Node. An important thing to note is that the requirement is Python 2, not Python 3. This is because Chrome V8 scripts still use Python 2. There were plans to rewrite Deno in Rust when it was originally released in June this year. Dahl mentioned in a GitHub comment: “The reason for not using Go is that it has a rather complex runtime - including a GC. Although I haven't experienced any problems with that yet, it's not hard to imagine that down the road that might clash badly with V8's very complex runtime.” You can get the binaries here to get started and check out the Github repo. Deploying Node.js apps on Google App Engine is now easy Creating Macros in Rust [Tutorial] Rust Language Server, RLS 1.0 releases with code intelligence, syntax highlighting and more

Earlier this week, the Gluon team announced that JavaFX 11 GA will be released in the second half of September, close to the release of Java 11. In the meantime, development has begun on JavaFX 12. JavaFX is the software platform that allows development of desktop Java apps. It comprises a single codebase which consists of code for a rich, interactive UI on many platforms. Users access information from multiple devices so having a single codebase makes it cost-effective. Single codebases are also easy to maintain and interact well with enterprise and cloud services. It was announced, back in March, that the framework JavaFX would be offered as a separate component and no longer will be a part of the Java SDK. Ever since then, JavaFX has been under development by the community as a stand-alone project called OpenJFX with multiple new developers joining in. As mentioned in the official Gluon blog post, the reason behind new developers contributing to JavaFX 11 is the fact that GitHub has made it easier for these developers to get started  as all they have to do now is “sign the contributor agreement, commit the code -- pushed upstream to the official OpenJFX repository on the OpenJDK infrastructure”. JavaFX 11 is the first release under the umbrella of the OpenJFX open project. Johan Vos, Co-CTO of Gluon, is also co-lead of the OpenJFX project and one of the driving forces behind the advancement of JavaFX. A JavaFX 11 stabilization repository has been created. This will only be responsible for fixing the blocking issues. Gluon will be handling the release of JavaFX 11. In addition to that, the Gluon team has increased their investment in OpenJFX as they are constantly working on its code. Development on JavaFX 12 is currently ongoing and the Gluon community is keen on following the same core principles which are: release often, include the ready features. In case of a feature not ready for a particular release, it can be made available in the next release cycle, 6 months away. Keeping in mind that not all developers are interested in changing versions every six months, Gluon offers JavaFX Enterprise Support, where a Long Term Support version of JavaFX 11 is maintained. On subscribing to this payment mode, you will have access to builds s which have been backported to JavaFX 11. This is an attempt to make sure that the developers are always using  “the latest, feature-rich, stable, well-tested code in their projects They don’t have to wait years for a feature or bug fix to be in a released version. It also allows the OpenJFX developers to work on future versions, and to include new technologies and ideas into the JavaFX code” says the Gluon team. For more information, check out the official blog post. State of OpenJDK: Past, Present and Future with Oracle NVIDIA open sources its material definition language, MDL SDK Unit testing with Java frameworks: JUnit and TestNG [Tutorial]  

Gitlab released version 11.2 with new features to help developers get started and iterate faster. Major improvements in this version are enhancements to the Web IDE, support for manifesting files to import Android projects, and custom project templates enabled. Let us look at each in detail: Preview changes in Web IDE Contributing changes to your projects with an advanced code editor and commit staging right within your browser will be faster and easier with the new WebIDE version. You can now easily see the effect of your code change and debug even before you commit with the Gitlab 11.2. You can now preview your JavaScript web app in the Web IDE, viewing your changes in real time, right next to the code for client-side evaluation. In addition, with 11.2, you can delete and rename files and switch branches without ever leaving the Web IDE. Android Project Import Importing complex project structures with multiple sub-structures was a tedious, time-consuming task until now. With the new support for XML manifest files, you can now import larger project structures with multiple repositories altogether, including Android OS code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Simplified Cloud Native & more features To help you quickly install Gitlab on Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Helm Chart is now generally available. A GitLab Runner is deployed, making it easy to get started with GitLab CI/CD. With 11.2, GitLab administrators can offer instance-wide custom project templates, allowing users to start new projects quickly by automating repetitive setup tasks. Features such as issue board milestone lists, summed weights for issue board lists, group milestones on the milestone dashboard page, and todos for epics enable better work management. Major changes and improvements are contributed by the Gitlab community itself. Check out the Gitlab page for more details. GitLab is moving from Azure to Google Cloud in July GitLab open sources its Web IDE in GitLab 10.7 GitLab’s new DevOps solution

JetBrains released ReSharper Ultimate 2018.2 with fixes for improved performance, and C# 7.3 support, integrated spellcheck. It also features JSLint, ESLint, and TSLint support along with navigation improvements. Performance improvements Around 30 performance fixes are made in different areas of ReSharper. They range from speeding up EditorConfig support to decreasing solution loading times. Visit the page dedicated to performance improvements for more details. C# 7.3 support ReSharper now fully supports C# 7.3 including all features from the latest. New inspections and appropriate quick-fixes are included to make compatible with C# 7.3. The features include Tuple equality, pattern-based fixed statement, indexing movable fixed buffers and others. JSLint, ESLint, and TSLint support These three static analysis tools have been integrated into JavaScript/TypeScript code analysis. This will provide additional inspections and appropriate quick-fixes. These linters help ensure readability in JavaScript and TypeScript code. Integrated spell checking with ReSpeller There is spell-checking functionality out of the box, enabled for most of the supported languages. By default, this spell checker comes with a built-in dictionary for English (US) but more languages can be downloaded. Blazor support added Blazor is experimental as of now, but initial support is added in ReSharper. For example, code completion includes all possible directives such as page (routing), inject (service injection), and function (component members). Navigation improvements A long-awaited feature is introduced for Search & Navigation options: ignored files can be specified by using a mask in under Search & Navigation in Environment. Files can be excluded from all search and navigation features based on a file extension or by folder. Some ReSharper features now take local functions into account, they include: File Structure, Containing Declaration, Next/Previous Members, and others. Formatter engine updated Comments that override formatter settings can now be generated automatically. Improvements are made to the formatting rules presentation which come from a StyleCop config file. Refactorings UI update Many ReSharper refactorings are moved to the new presentation framework. This will yield many benefits in the near future thanks to a unified control behavior for ReSharper and Rider. Visible UI changes are code completion under Change Signature and a better presentation for Extract Method. Other features Fix-in-scope quick-fixes now have more granular fixing scopes. The code style for Built-in Type has been improved. There’s a new option to execute BeforeBuild and AfterBuild targets for skipped projects in ReSharper Build.  A new inspection was also added to highlight misplaced text in XAML. For more details visit the JetBrains page. Visual Studio code July 2018 release, version 1.26 is out! Microsoft releases the Python Language Server in Visual Studio Visual Studio 2019: New features you should expect to see

Can you guess what is common between, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison? Yes they are very successful trendsetters in tech, some being co-founders and founders of top tech companies. But what else? They are also college dropouts. The point here I want to highlight is that real skills are more important than acquired college degrees. If you do not have a college degree, but have the skill set a company wants, you are in! In today’s economy it is important to have hands-on experience instead of being only book smart. Last week, the job searching website, Glassdoor compiled a list of Top companies that do not require a 4 year college degree as long as you have the skills required. The list includes some of the top tech companies as well such as Google, Apple, and IBM. Google has clearly mentioned on their web page: Source: Google If no degrees, then what? Now, you must be thinking that if these companies are not looking at your GPAs then how are they going to shortlist n number of applications coming their way. Remember the names I called out in the beginning? They have something more in common. They believed in self-learning, were passionate and innovative, and had clear goals. Sam Ladah, IBM’s head of talent organization, calls these type of jobs, “new-collar jobs.” He told the Marketplace in an interview that IBM consider the applicants based on their skills. This includes applicants who didn’t get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. They have also been finding talents from coding bootcamps. A very good example of finding talent beyond traditional educational boundaries is Tanmay Bakshi, one of the youngest software programmers in the world. At the age of 11, he came across a documentary on the IBM Watson and how it played Jeopardy. He was immediately hooked to IBM Watson and AI and found inspiration to build his own first Watson app called “Ask Tanmay”. Later he was able to find a bug in the Document Conversion service by IBM and posted that on his Twitter. IBMers who were working on this service took a note of this and contacted Tanmay. Two of those initial contacts eventually became his mentors and assisted him in collaborating with IBM. Even if you have a degree in any other background but are keen on learning software development and bagging a job in top-tech companies, you can start anytime. Margaret Hamilton, the Director of the Software Engineer Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1960 and later the CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc, was actually a Mathematics graduate. Angela Taylor, who was working as an HR person in Google, with her hardwork and can-do attitude became a Google engineer. She fell in love with programming when she volunteered to fix a spreadsheet and learned Visual Basic for it. These were a few examples of the people who were able to challenge the current education system and became successful. Here is a great Medium post which could give you some amazing tips to further your career, if you are a coder but not an engineer. 1k+ Google employees frustrated with continued betrayal, protest against Censored Search engine project for China 16 year old hacked into Apple’s servers, accessed ‘extremely secure’ customer accounts for over a year undetected Facebook, Apple, Spotify pull Alex Jones content

“Security, customizability, flexibility and cost are a few of the benefits of open-source software for developers. They’ll get all these and more from NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language software development kit.” —NVIDIA Blog. The material definition language (MDL) is a programming language used to define and render physical materials. This includes the creation of a wide range of physical materials such as woods, fabrics, translucent plastics and more. It is a set of tools integrating the precise look and feel of real-world materials into rendering applications. It gives users the freedom to share these materials between applications that support them. Now users can move a library of these materials between applications without worrying about them losing their appearance. This will allow developers to focus on building their applications. Allegorithmic had already built an entire MDL authoring tool, but with NVIDIA making the MDL SDK open source, developers get a deeper unrestricted access to the entire spec. The Blog states that Unreal Studio 4.20 now offers native support for MDL. “Being able to use a single material definition, like NVIDIA’s MDL, across multiple applications and render engines is a huge benefit to the end-user,” said Ken Pimentel, senior product manager of the Enterprise team at Epic Games. “Now that we’ve added MDL support to Unreal Studio, our enterprise customers can see their material representations converted to real time in Unreal Engine without baking every parameter. This means their creative intent can be carried to new forms of expression.” The MDL SDK API is C++ based and used for integration and customization tasks. It can be loaded dynamically and linked to visualization applications. The API also allows applications to load MDL modules, and analyze and understand the structure of a material. Therefore it can build a UI for editing materials then rendering the results. Some of the features in MDL SDK include: Can be used on GPU as well as CPU Database view on the imported MDL package space MDL editing C++ component-based API, and plugin architecture for extensibility MDL SDK supports Windows (only 64-bit), Linux, and macOS. To know more, visit the NVIDIA website and to get started here is the GitHub repository. Nvidia unveils a new Turing architecture: “The world’s first ray tracing GPU” Nvidia and AI researchers create AI agent Noise2Noise that can denoise images Nvidia GPUs offer Kubernetes for accelerated deployments of Artificial Intelligence workloads

The July 2018 release of Visual Studio code 1.26 version is now available. This version includes new features for navigation, how to apply a quick fix to any problem, managing extensions and much more. What’s new in the Visual Studio code 1.26? Breadcrumbs The Visual studio editor now has a navigation bar above its contents called Breadcrumbs. It displays the current location and allows quick navigation between symbols and files. Breadcrumb navigation allows one to jump to symbols and files in their workspace. Quick Fixes from Problems panel Now one can apply Quick code fixes from the Problems panel while reviewing warning and errors. When a problem entry is hovered or selected, the respective Quick Fixes are shown via a light bulb indicator. Quick Fixes can be applied either by clicking on the light bulb or by opening the context menu for the problem entry. User setup on Windows The user setup package for Windows, announced in the previous release, is now available. This setup does not require Administrator privileges while installation. It also provides a smoother background update experience. Current users of the system-wide Windows setup will be prompted to switch to the user setup. New users will be directed towards using it by default via Visual Studio code Download page. Terminal column selection Column selection is now supported within the Integrated Terminal via Alt+click. Add all missing imports with a single quick fix The Add missing import Quick Fix can now be applied to all missing imports in a JavaScript/TypeScript file. This Quick Fix requires only a single action to add all missing imports in a JavaScript/TypeScript file. JSX tag completion Now one can work with JSX tags in JavaScript/TypeScript similar to that in HTML. The JSX tags are now closed automatically when you type ‘>’ in a JavaScript or TypeScript file. Auto closing of tags can be disabled by setting "javascript.autoClosingTags": false and "typescript.autoClosingTags": false. Better JS/TS error reporting The TypeScript team has done a lot of work to make JavaScript and TypeScript error messages smarter and clearer. Some error messages now include links to relevant locations in the source code. Improved extension search This release has added an IntelliSense autocompletion to the extension searchfield making it easier. This will help in refining extension searches to filter results based on things like category and install state; or sort results by name, rating, or install count. Extension Pack management Extension Pack management has been improved in this release. An Extension Pack is installed, uninstalled, enabled or disabled always as a single pack. One can now uninstall or disable an extension belonging to an Extension Pack without requiring to uninstall or disable the entire Extension Pack. One can easily manage Extension Packs as a single unit or by individual extension. There is also a new Extension Pack tab which displays which extensions are bundled in the Extension Pack. Preview: Settings editor This version includes a preview of GUI for editing settings. To try it out, one can go to Preferences: Open Settings (Preview) command. It contains rich settings description display, "Table of Contents" tracks scrolling, and much more. Read more about these features in detail on the Visual Studio Code July 2018 version 1.26 release notes. Microsoft releases the Python Language Server in Visual Studio Debugging Xamarin Application on Visual Studio [Tutorial] Visual Studio 2019: New features you should expect to see

Qml.Net is a C# library for cross-platform GUI development with native dependency. It exposes the required object types to host a QML engine. In Qml.NET, Qml and JavaScript together form the UI layer. It can be thought of as the view in MVC. Qml.Net features The PInvoke code in this .NET library is hand-crafted by developer Paul Knopf to ensure appropriate memory management and pointer ownership semantics. He is pretty confident about the library and mentions in his blog “I’d bet you couldn’t generate a segfault, even if you wanted to.” In Qml.Net C# objects can be registered to be treated as QML components. You can then interoperate with them as you would with regular JavaScript objects. The registered C# objects serve as a portal through which the QML world can interact with your .NET objects. This has an added benefit of keeping your business/UI concerns separate cleanly. There will also be no chatty PInvoke calls for rendering. It is a great match. A pre-compiled portable installation of Qt and the native C wrapper is available for Windows, OSX, and Linux. Developers wouldn’t have to bother with C/C++. All you need to know is QML, C#, and JavaScript; QML if fairly simple. QML can’t really be classified as a language, in the semantic sense. More appropriately it can be considered as a combination of JSON and JavaScript. Qml.Net support and working Qml.Net will work with any .NET language including popular C# and functional languages like F#. Your libraries will reference the pure .NET NuGet package, Qml.Net. The host process (Program.Main) references the native NuGet packages. This is dependent on the OS you are on: Qml.Net.WindowsBinaries Qml.Net.OSXBinaries Qml.Net.LinuxBinaries Paul currently only tests his own models that are C# objects registered with the QML engine. They are specific to each control/page. Since Microsoft's announcement of .NET Core, there hasn’t been any clear idea on cross-platform GUI development. Although Microsoft plans to support WPF in .NET Core 3.0, it will be limited to Windows machines. With community involvement and support, Qml.net can be a potential game changer. You can head to the GitHub repository and also view some hosted examples to get a better idea. Read next Exciting New Features in C# 8.0 .NET Core completes move to the new compiler – RyuJIT Microsoft Azure's new governance DApp: An enterprise blockchain without mining