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Microsoft has released the latest version of Visual Studio 1.22 recently with a few additions and improvements to it. The primary feature that Microsoft has introduced is called “Logpoints”. The idea of Logpoints is very literal - i.e. these are the breakpoints while debugging code and while taking note of these breakpoints, the developers need not stop code execution and can keep a track of events. The primary changes are: Syntax Aware code folding: This feature allows better code folding for CSS, HTML, JSON and Markdown files. This feature ensures that the code folding is not based on indentation but based on code syntax and hence makes the code much more readable and developer friendly. Conversion to ES6 Refactoring: How many times have you thought that a little bit of help while coding would have made your coding experience better? Visual Studio has added this feature in their new release. The code suggest button (an elliptical hover button) will suggest latest ES 6 code snippets and the developers will have the choice to accept it or modify it. A welcome feature for the new and mid-level programmers for sure. Auto Attach to process: This feature provides a lot of help for the Node.js developers. It automatically starts debugging node.js programs and applications the moment you launch them, eliminating the need for a dedicated launcher program. The other important features of the new version are: Cross file error, warning and reference navigation: This helps you to navigate through the different workspaces efficiently. Improved Large File support: This enables faster syntax highlighting and helps in better and larger memory allocation for bigger applications making the overall debugging process faster. Multi-Line links in the terminal: This feature allows developers to hyperlink multiple links spanning across several lines in the editor. Better organization of JavaScript/TypeScript imports: This feature helps programmers to remove unused codes and sort their imports in a more orderly manner. Emmet Wrap preview: This feature provides the live preview for Emmet's wrap with abbreviation functionality. With these new and exciting features, Visual Studio surely is moving towards a more user-friendly and predictive coding platform for the programmers. We will keep a close watch on its future release and share updates on how these releases target better code reusability, importing different codes easily and better-debugging functionality. Read about the full update on the official Visual Studio website. C++, SFML, Visual Studio, and Starting the first game  

There has been some exciting news from OpenCV: OpenCV developer Vadim Pisarevsky announced the development on OpenCV 4 on the GitHub repository of OpenCV and addressed why the time is right for the release of OpenCV 4. OpenCV 3 was released in 2015 taking 6 years to come out after OpenCV 2 which was released in 2009. OpenCV 3 has been built around C++ 98 standards. Re-writing the library in the recent version of C++ like C++ 11 or later versions would mean to break the "binary compatibility". This makes it important to move further from the OpenCV 3 promises. There are two interesting concepts that we need to know here - Binary compatibility and source-level compatibility. OpenCV had made a promise to stay binary-compatible with versions, that means the release of new OpenCV versions will stay compatible with the previous version library calls. Now moving from C++ 98 standard to recent C++ standard will break this promise. However, OpenCV has looked into this and found that not much harm will be caused by this migration, hence relaxing the "binary compatibility" and moving to "source compatibility" with the new release. Apart from migrating to latest C++ standards, the OpenCV library needs refactoring and new module additions for Deep learning and neural networks seeing the heavy usage of OpenCV in machine learning. OpenCV developers can expect some big revisions in functions and modules. Here is a quick summary of what you might expect in this major release of OpenCV 4.0: Hardware-accelerated Video I/O module: This module maximizes OpenCV performance using software and hardware accelerator in the machine. This means calling this module with OpenCV 4 will harness the acceleration. HighGUI module (Revised): With the enhancement of this module, you can efficiently read video from camera or files and also perform a write operation on them. This module comes with a lot of functionality for media IO operation. Graph API module: This module creates support for efficiently reading and writing graphs from the image. Point Cloud module: Point cloud module contains algorithms such as feature estimation, model fitting, and segmentation. These algorithms can be used for filtering noisy data, stitch 3D point clouds, segment part of the image, among others. Tracking, Calibration, and Stereo Modules, among other features that will benefit image processing with OpenCV. You can find the full list of a new module that might get added in OpenCV 4 in the issues page of OpenCV repo. The OpenCV community is relying on its huge developer community to facilitate closing the open issues within the speculated time of release, that is July 2018. Functionalities that don’t make it OpenCV 4 release, will be rolled into the OpenCV 4.x releases. While you wait for OpenCV 4, enjoy these OpenCV 3 tutorials: New functionality in OpenCV 3.0 Fingerprint detection using OpenCV 3 OpenCV Primer: What can you do with Computer Vision and how to get started? Image filtering techniques in OpenCV Building a classification system with logistic regression in OpenCV Exploring Structure from Motion Using OpenCV

Mozilla is building a bridge between Rust and JavaScript. The bridge - Wasm-bindgen - allows Rust to interact with Web Assembly modules and JavaScript. One of Mozilla's aims is to turn Rust into a language for web development; building a link to WebAssembly is perhaps the most straightforward way for it to run on the web. But this doesn't mean Mozilla wants Rust to replace JavaScript - far from it. The plan is instead for Rust to be a language that runs alongside JavaScript on the backend. Read more about Mozilla's plan here. What is wasm-bindgen? It's worth reading this from the Mozilla blog to see the logic behind wasm-bidgen and how it's going to work: "Today the WebAssembly specification only defines four types: two integer types and two floating-point types. Most of the time, however, JS and Rust developers are working with much richer types! For example, JS developers often interact with document to add or modify HTML nodes, while Rust developers work with types like Result for error handling, and almost all programmers work with strings. Being limited only to the types that WebAssembly provides today would be far too restrictive, and this is where wasm-bindgen comes into the picture. The goal of wasm-bindgen is to provide a bridge between the types of JS and Rust. It allows JS to call a Rust API with a string, or a Rust function to catch a JS exception. wasm-bindgen erases the impedance mismatch between WebAssembly and JavaScript, ensuring that JavaScript can invoke WebAssembly functions efficiently and without boilerplate, and that WebAssembly can do the same with JavaScript functions." This is exciting as it is a valuable step in expanding the capabilities of Rust. But the thinking behind wasm-bindgen will also help to further drive the adoption of web assembly. While the focus is, of course, on Rust at the moment, there's a possibility that wasm-bindgen could eventually be used with other languages, such as C and C++. This might take some time, owever. Download wasm-bindgen from GitHub.