Tech News - Application Development

Last week, Wednesday marked the first major milestone for Fyne, which is a cross-platform GUI written in Go. Fyne 1.0 uses OpenGL to provide cross-platform graphics and the entire toolkit is developed using scalable graphics. The Fyne toolkit communicates with operating system graphics using OpenGL, which is supported on almost all desktop and laptop systems. To do this, it relies on the built-in functionality of Cgo, the C language bridge for Go. For packaging, it uses fyne package command to generate and package all the required metadata for an application to distribute on macOS, Linux, or Windows. By default, it will build an application bundle for the current platform, which can be used in part of a cross-compilation workflow. What’s new in Fyne 1.0? Canvas API (rect, line, circle, text, image) Widget API (box, button, check, entry, form, group, hyperlink, icon, label, progress bar, radio, scroller, tabs, and toolbar) Light and dark themes Pointer, key and shortcut APIs (generic and desktop extension) OpenGL driver for Linux, macOS, and Windows Tools for embedding data and packaging releases Currently, the release only supports desktop applications. For more info, read Fyne’s blog. You may also check out Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go to learn more about Go programming. Introducing Web High-Level Shading Language (WHLSL): A graphics shading language for WebGPU State of Go February 2019 – Golang developments report for this month released Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary

Yesterday, the team at Kubernetes released Kubernetes 1.14, a new update to the popular open-source container orchestration system. Kubernetes 1.14 comes with support for Windows nodes, kubectl plugin mechanism, Kustomize integration, and much more. https://twitter.com/spiffxp/status/1110319044249309184 What’s new in Kubernetes 1.14? Support for Windows Nodes This release comes with added support for Windows nodes as worker nodes. Kubernetes now schedules Windows containers and enables a vast ecosystem of Windows applications. With this release, enterprises with investments can easily manage their workloads and operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of the operating systems. Kustomize integration With this release, the declarative resource config authoring capabilities of kustomize are now available in kubectl through the -k flag. Kustomize helps the users in authoring and reusing resource config using Kubernetes native concepts. kubectl plugin mechanism This release comes with kubectl plugin mechanism that allows developers to publish their own custom kubectl subcommands in the form of standalone binaries. PID Administrators can now provide pod-to-pod PID (Process IDs) isolation by defaulting the number of PIDs per pod. Pod priority and preemption in this release enables Kubernetes scheduler to schedule important pods first and remove the less important pods to create room for more important ones. Users are generally happy and excited about this release. https://twitter.com/fabriziopandini/status/1110284805411872768 A user commented on HackerNews, “The inclusion of Kustomize[1] into kubectl is a big step forward for the K8s ecosystem as it provides a native solution for application configuration. Once you really grok the pattern of using overlays and patches, it starts to feel like a pattern that you'll want to use everywhere” To know more about this release in detail, check out Kubernetes’ official announcement. RedHat’s OperatorHub.io makes it easier for Kuberenetes developers and admins to find pre-tested ‘Operators’ for applications Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issues Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub  

The Qt team released Qt Design Studio 1.0 yesterday. Qt Design Studio 1.0 explores features such as Qt photoshop bridge, timeline-based animations, and Qt live preview among other features. Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development environment which allows designers and developers around the world to rapidly prototype as well as develop complex and scalable UIs. Let’s discuss the features of Qt Design Studio 1.0 in detail. Qt Photoshop Bridge Qt Design Studio 1.0 comes with Qt photoshop bridge that allows users to import their graphics design from photoshop. Users can also create re-usable components directly via Photoshop. Moreover, exporting directly to specific QML types is also allowed. Other than that, Qt photoshop Bridge comes with an enhanced import dialog as well as basic merging capabilities. Timeline-based animations Timeline-based animations in Qt Design Studio 1.0 come with a timeline-/keyframe-based editor. This editor allows designers to easily create pixel-perfect animations without having to write a single line of code. You can also map and organize the relationship between timelines and states to create smooth transitions from state to state. Moreover, selecting multiple keyframes is also enabled. Qt Live Preview Qt Live Preview lets you run and preview your application or UI directly on the desktop, Android devices, as well as the Boot2Qt devices. You can also see how your changes affect the UI live on your target device. Moreover, it also comprises a zoom in and out functionality. Other Features You can insert a 3D studio element to preview it on the end target dice with the Qt Live Preview. There’s a Qt Safe Renderer integration that uses Safe Renderer items and also map them in your UI. You can use states and timeline for the creation of screen flows and transitions. Qt Design Studio is free, however, you will need a commercial Qt developer license to distribute the UIs created with Qt Design Studio. For more information, check out the official Qt Design Studio blog. Qt 3D Studio 2.1 released with new sub-presentations, scene preview, and runtime improvements Qt creator 4.8 beta released, adds language server protocol Qt Creator 4.7.0 releases!

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

On Tuesday, the GitHub team announced that they will be making life easy for developers by getting Git right into our editor. The insights on this extension will be announced on Day 2 (17th October, 2019) of the two-day GitHub Universe conference. GitHub, in collaboration with the Visual Studio Code Team at Microsoft will brief users about this update during their talk Cross Company Collaboration: Extending GitHub to a New IDE. Sarah Guthals, the Engineering Manager at GitHub in her post mentions, “We’ve been working since 2015 to provide a GitHub experience that meets you where you spend the majority of your time: in your editor.” What’s in store for developers from different communities? For .NET developers In 2015, GitHub brought all Visual Studio developers an extension that supports GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise engagements within the editor. Sarah says, “today you can complete an entire pull request review without ever leaving Visual Studio.” For the Atom community GitHub also support a first class Git and GitHub experience for Atom developers. Users can now access basic Git operations like staging, commiting, and syncing, alongside more complex collaboration with the recently-released pull request experience. For game developers Unity game developers can now use Git within Unity for the first time to clone and sync with GitHub.com and lock files. The Conflux : GitHub and Visual Studio Code In the talk which will be presented in the coming week, Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft and the editor tools team at GitHub will share their experience on how both these teams began exploring the possibility of an integration between their two products. The team at Microsoft started to design a pull request experience within Visual Studio Code, while the GitHub team prototyped one modeled after the same experience in the Visual Studio IDE. This brought users an integrated GitHub experience in Visual Studio Code supported by the Visual Studio Code API. This new extension gives developers the ability to: Authenticate with GitHub within VS Code (for GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise) List pull requests associated with your current repository, view their description, and browse the diffs of changed files Validate pull requests by checking them out and testing them without having to leave VS Code GitHub applies machine intelligence to its GitHub security alerts Github also announced that it has built a machine learning model that can scan text associated with public commits (the commit message and linked issues or pull requests) to filter out those related to possible security upgrades. With such smaller batch of commits, the model uses the diff to understand how required version ranges have changed. Further, it aggregates across a specific timeframe to get a holistic view of all dependencies that a security release might affect. Finally, the model outputs a list of packages and version ranges it thinks require an alert and currently aren’t covered by any known CVE in their system. To know more about these updates, visit the GitHub blog. Also know more about GitHub and Visual Studio Code integration in Sarah Guthals’ GitHub post. GitHub’s new integration for Jira Software Cloud aims to provide teams a seamless project management experience 4 myths about Git and GitHub you should know about 7 tips for using Git and GitHub the right way

Yesterday, the Qt team released Qt Design Studio 1.1, a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to prototype and develop complex UIs. Qt Design Studio makes collaboration between developers and designers easy and streamlined. Qt Design Studio 1.1 comes with the availability of Linux packages. What’s new in Qt Design Studio 1.1? Qt Design Studio 1.1 is available for Linux The developers who are using Linux can now use Qt Design Studio 1.1 directly on their development system. Qt Photoshop Bridge The team at Qt updated the Qt Photoshop Bridge (which allows sanitizing documents) for Qt Design Studio 1.1. But the PSD (Photoshop Document) files containing annotations from the Qt Photoshop Bridge 1.0, require to be sanitized. Annotations are added for exporting from a PSD file using the Qt Photoshop Bridge. Qt Photoshop Bridge and merging when importing It is now possible to merge the existing QML files with the newly re-imported QML while re-importing from Photoshop to an existing Qt Design Studio project. It is highly used when the user made changes to the exported .ui.qml files using Design Studio. The merging option can be enabled by using a checkbox in the import dialog. Update projects to Qt Design Studio 1.1 Users can update their projects to Qt Design Studio 1.1 by copying the controls from a newly created Qt Design Studio 1.1 project into the existing project from Qt Design Studio 1.0. The folder that needs to be replaced is “imports/QtQuick”. Replacing this folder will update the Qt Design Studio specific components that are used in the project. Major Changes Timeline The local record button has been fixed. The timeline has now been prevented from claiming too much space. Custom colors have been added to the timeline bar items. The issue with the status bar update has been fixed. Property Editor The issue with invalid access to network paths has been addressed. Item Library This release comes with an added support for enums in .metainfo files. The issue with Image.PreserveAspectFit has been fixed. Form Editor The issue with the visibility of the selection rectangle has been fixed. Components This release comes with an added support for negative length of zoom blur and for dash pattern. This release also features added cap style to components. Platform Specific This release features added support for the dark theme on macOS Mojave and Linux package for Linux. Major bug fixes The error messages have been fixed. The clamping keyframe positions to the animation range have been fixed. It is now possible to reset the status bar when changing the QML file. To know more about this news, check out Qt’s blog post. Qt for Python 5.12 released with PySide2, Qt GUI and more Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS Qt Design Studio 1.0 released with Qt photoshop bridge, timeline based animations and Qt live preview  

Last week three IDEs were ported to Haiku OS. Now, Haiku OS users can build applications with Netbeans, Intellij IDEA, and PyCharm. Haiku is an offspring of BeOS which was created by an ex-Apple executive, Jean Luis Gassee. Haiku’s development began in 2001, the first beta was released in September 2018. It is a single user system targeted specifically for personal computing. It uses a custom kernel, a fully threaded design, and a cohesive interface. Haiku houses the progressive concepts from BeOS and delivers it in a free and open source package. Now, let’s look at the package ports to Haiku. Haiko OS users can now run both Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA with the OpenJDK8 x86_64 port. This is not in the depot yet, only in the haikuports recipe. Moreover, due to the efforts of another community member, a package for PyCharm Community Edition 2018.3 is also available. There are some minor issues and users have to work around a few settings to get things working. The addition of NetBeans IDE 8.2 and Intellij IDEA Community Edition 2018.3 to Haiku OS has many of its users excited. A comment on Hacker news says: “That's a really impressive achievement I think, those are complex applications running on complex stacks. It's certainly a big step in the direction of making Haiku a system that a developer could plausibly run for the development of cross-platform applications. This coupled with the Libre Office port last year means there's a pretty strong selection of applications for it cropping up.” Note that, by default Haiku comes with the dying Python 2.7 and the next major version, Python 3 can be installed via the package manager. To keep an eye on updates of these IDEs, head over to the Haiku forums. Haiku beta released with package management, a new preflet, webkit and more The Haiku operating system has released R1/beta1 Haiku, the open source BeOS clone, to release in beta after 17 years of development

Apple announced Swift 5 for their Xcode 10.2 compiler. Swift in Xcode 10.2 beta brings a couple of new features like smaller app sizes when testing, new library, compiler features, and more. The application binary interface (ABI) is stable in Swift 5. Smaller app size App sizes on Swift 5 in Xcode 10.2 beta can be smaller now when deployed for testing. This is true when using TestFlight or when thinning an app for local distribution. Smaller app sizes are possible as Swift apps don’t include dynamically linked libraries for the Swift standard library anymore. Moreover, Swift SDK overlays for devices running iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, and tvOS 12.2. Apple calls this concept ‘App thinning’. New features in Swift 5 A new attribute named @dynamicCallable allows dynamic language interoperability. Key paths support the identity keypath \.self. You can no longer write functions that take variadic arguments. Now you can change the enumeration case to ‘take an array explicitly and pass an array in.’ A try? block with an Optional type does not return a nested optional, instead of flattening the resulting option Literal types are modified so that expressions don’t overflow the default integer literal where the type is Int. String interpolation is now simpler, has better performance and efficiency. Changes in the Swift standard library The DictionaryLiteral type is now KeyValuePairs Swift strings bridged into Objective-C code can now return a non-nil value in certain cases The Sequence protocol is now disassociated from SubSequence. Native encoding in the string structure is now UTF-8 instead of UTF-16. What’s new in Swift package manager? When using Swift 5, targets can now declare commonly used build settings that are target-specific. In the Swift 5 Package.swift tools-version, packages can customize minimum deployment target settings. Top level packages can override dependency URLs The --enable-code-coverage flag helps other tools to use code coverage data generated by a tool Support for Swift 3 Package.swift tools-version has been dropped Larger packages are handled better by the package manager Package resolution for incompatible dependency versions are forced to fail A new --repl option in swift run launches the Swift REPL. This supports importing library targets of a package. Swift compiler Exclusive memory access is imposed at runtime by default. Swift 3 is removed. In Swift 5, switches on enumerations declared in Objective-C/system frameworks have to handle unknown cases For Swift modules, default arguments are printed in SourceKit-generated interfaces Support for Optional types is now added in unowned and unowned(unsafe) variables To know more details and bug fixes, visit the release notes. Swift is now available on Fedora 28 ABI stability may finally come in Swift 5.0 Swift 4.2 releases with language, library and package manager updates!

ClojureCUDA is a CUDA that supports parallel computations on the GPU with CUDA in the Clojure programming language. With this library, you can access high-performance Computing and GPGPU in Clojure. Installation ClojureCUDA 0.6.0 now has support for the new CUDA 10. To start using it: Install the CUDA 10 Toolkit Update your drivers Update the ClojureCUDA version in project.clj All the existing code should work without requiring any changes. CUDA and libraries CUDA is the most used environment for high-performance computing on NVIDIA GPUs. You can now use CUDA directly from the interactive Clojure REPL without having to wrangle with the C++ toolchain. High-performance libraries like Neanderthal take advantage of ClojureCUDA to deliver speed dynamically to Clojure programs. With these higher-level libraries, you can perform fast calculations with just a few lines of Clojure. You don’t even have to write the GPU code yourself. But writing the lower level GPU code is also not so difficult in an interactive Clojure environment. ClojureCUDA features The ClojureCUDA library has features like high performance and optimization for Clojure. High-performance computing CUDA enables various hardware optimizations on NVIDIA GPUs. Users can access the leading CUDA libraries for numerical computing like cuBLAS, cuFFT, and cuDNN. Optimized for Clojure ClojureCUDA is built with a focus on Clojure. The interface and functions fit into a functional style. They are also aligned to number crunching with CUDA. Reusable The library closely follows the CUDA driver API. Users translate examples from best CUDA books easily. Free and Open Source It is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) which is the same license used for Clojure. ClojureCUDA and other libraries by uncomplicate are open source. You can choose to contribute on GitHub or donate on Patreon. For more details and code examples, visit the dragan Blog. Clojure 1.10.0-beta1 is out! Stable release of CUDA 10.0 out, with Turing support, tools and library changes NVTOP: An htop like monitoring tool for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux

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

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    

Facebook is seemingly working on a new messaging app called Threads that would help users to share their photos, videos, location, speed, and battery life with only their close friends, The Verge reported earlier this week. This means users can selectively share content with their friends while not revealing to others the list of close friends with whom the content is shared. The app currently does not display the real-time location but it might notify by stating that a friend is “on the move” as per the report by The Verge. How do Threads work? As per the report by The Verge,  Threads app appears to be similar to the existing messaging product inside the Instagram app. It seems to be an extension of the ‘Close friends’ feature for Instagram stories where users can create a list of close friends and make their stories just visible to them.  With Threads, users who have opted-in for ‘automatic sharing’ of updates will be able to regularly show their status updates and real-time information  in the main feed to their close friends.. The auto-sharing of statuses will be done using the mobile phone sensors.  Also, the messages coming from your friends would appear in a central feed, with a green dot that will indicate which of your friends are currently active/online. If a friend has posted a story recently on Instagram, you will be able to see it even from Threads app. It also features a camera, which can be used to capture photos and videos and send them to close friends. While Threads are currently being tested internally at Facebook, there is no clarity about the launch of Threads. Direct’s revamped version or Snapchat’s potential competitor? With Threads, if Instagram manages to create a niche around the ‘close friends’, it might shift a significant proportion of Snapchat’s users to its platform.  In 2017, the team had experimented with Direct, a standalone camera messaging app, which had many filters that were similar to Snapchat. But this year in May, the company announced that they will no longer be supporting Direct. Threads look like a Facebook’s second attempt to compete with Snapchat. https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1128875881462677504 Threads app focus on strengthening the ‘close friends’ relationships might promote more of personal data sharing including even location and battery life. This begs the question: Is our content really safe? Just three months ago, Instagram was in the news for exposing personal data of millions of influencers online. The exposed data included contact information of Instagram influencers, brands and celebrities https://twitter.com/hak1mlukha/status/1130532898359185409 According to Instagram’s current Terms of Use, it does not get ownership over the information shared on it. But here’s the catch, it also states that it has the right to host, use, distribute, run, modify, copy, publicly perform or translate, display, and create derivative works of user content as per the user’s privacy settings. In essence, the platform has a right to use the content we post.  Facebook open-sources Hyperparameter autotuning for fastText to automatically find best hyperparameters for your dataset Twitter and Facebook removed accounts of Chinese state-run media agencies aimed at undermining Hong protests   Facebook must face privacy class action lawsuit, loses facial recognition appeal, U.S. Court of Appeals rules

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

Fedora has always been shipping Mono 4.8, the open source development platform for building cross-platform applications, with each Fedora release. Even after shipping Mono 5.0 in May 2017, the company still continued with Mono 4.8. But it seems the idea will be changing now with the release of Fedora 31. With Fedora 31, the team at Fedora is finally planning to switch to Mono 5.20 which is expected to release later this year. An effort was made in the past few months by the Fedora team to build Mono from source. The build was also done for Debian using msc instead of csc and the reference assemblies were rebuilt from source. In case of Mono, it requires itself to build. The Mono version 4.8 which is included in Fedora currently, is too old to build version 5.20. Currently, the team has been using monolite and a little version of mono compiler, .NET 4.7.1 reference assemblies for first build time. The sources for the required patch files are maintained on Github. The transition from Mono 4 to Mono 5 was on halt because of the changes required in their compiler stack and its dependency upon some binary references. These binaries are available as a source but treated as pre-compiled binaries for simplification and speed. The Fedora developers are now working towards getting Mono 5 into Fedora 31. This will also let the cross-platform applications that are relying upon Microsoft's .NET framework 4.7 and later to now work. Mono 4.8 is also not compatible for PowerPC 64-bit but it is expected that Mono 5 will be. To know more about this news, check out the change proposal. Fedora 29 released with Modularity, Silverblue, and more Swift is now available on Fedora 28 Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes

GitLab 11.3 was released on Saturday with support for Maven repositories, Code Owners, Protected Environments and other changes. These new added features help in automation of controls around environments and code while also providing further efficiencies for Java developers. Maven repositories in GitLab 11.3 Maven repositories are now directly available in GitLab. This gives Java developers a secure, standardized way to share version control in Maven libraries. It also saves time by reusing these libraries across projects but it is available only on GitLab premium. Lower-level services can now have their packaged libraries published to their project’s Maven repository. They can share a simple XML snippet with other teams to utilize the library while Maven and GitLab do the rest. Code owners and protected environments GitLab Starter now supports assignment of Code Owners to files indicating the appropriate team members contributing to the code. This is a primer for future releases, which will enforce internal controls at the code level. Operators can also use Protected Environments for setting permissions to determine which users can deploy code to production environments. This significantly reduces the risk of an unintended commit. This feature is also available only on premium. Epic forecasting with integrated milestone dates The new Portfolio Management feature in GitLab Ultimate forecasts an epic's start and end dates automatically based on the milestone dates of its issues. Portfolio managers will be able to compare their planned start and end dates against the scheduled work enabling faster decisions on delivery and plan adjustments. In older versions, fixed values could be set for the planned start and end dates of an epic. This was useful for high-level planning of epics. However, as issues are attached to the epic and the issues are scheduled for work with actual milestones, it is useful to have epic dates reflecting those milestones. In this version, the static values for the dates can be changed to a dynamic value called ‘From milestones’. The dynamic version of epic planned end dates are analogous. This is a useful feature to have if you want seamless transition from high-level, top-down planning to micro-level, and bottom-up planning. For more information, visit the GitLab website. GitLab raises $100 million, Alphabet backs it to surpass Microsoft’s GitHub Gitlab 11.2 releases with preview changes in Web IDE, Android Project Import and more GitLab is moving from Azure to Google Cloud in July