Logging is an essential feature for any application, as it is necessary for detecting, investigating, and debugging issues. Serilog is a third-party, open source library that allows .NET developers to log structured data to the console, to files, and to several other kinds of data stores. You can learn more about Serilog from my earlier post here.
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(Insider Story)Quantum isn’t the next big thing in advanced computing so much as a futuristic approach that could potentially be the biggest thing of all.
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(Insider Story)The running joke is that raspberry Pis are cheaper than an actual raspberry pie. Although I wouldn’t pay $50 to $100 for a pie to eat, the idea is to provide a very capable computer, with a small footprint, with built-in networking, running open source software, at a price that hobbyists, as well as professionals, can afford.
Next.js, positioned as a React framework for the enterprise, is available in a new version that emphasizes static site generation. The update, Next.js 9.3, was released on March 9.
Next.js 9.3 includes API additions that provide built-in, optimized static site generation through new data-fetching methods. These methods include `getStaticProps`, which is used to fetch data at build time and specify dynamic routes to pre-render based on data, and `getServerSideProps`, which fetches data on each request.
It seems everywhere you look nowadays, you will find an article that describes a winning strategy using deep learning in a data science problem, or more specifically in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). However, clear explanations of deep learning, why it’s so powerful, and the various forms deep learning takes in practice, are not so easy to come by.
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(Insider Story)Azure’s Cosmos DB is one of its best features. A multimodel distributed database, it gives you a foundation for building truly cloud-native applications with a series of consistency models that can be mapped to how your application works. But it’s not easy to get started, and a badly configured or designed application can quickly get expensive.
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(Insider Story)For the most part, cloud architecture is not that exciting. By now we know basically what works, what does not, and the process to get to the right target architecture. This means both the meta or logical architecture and added technology to get to the physical architecture.
Although we know the best patterns for most of what cloud architecture requires, some problems are still being debated. No de facto solution or best practice has emerged yet. Here are my top three:
First, what goes on the edge? Edge computing has benefits, such as placing data processing closer to the source of the data. However, the question remains: How does one partition data and processes between a cloud-based server and an edge computer?
A new upgrade to Kotlin, the JetBrains-created statically typed programming language for JVM and Android development, puts an emphasis on improving existing functionality in areas such as the standard library while not adding new features.
Highlighting the Kotlin 1.3.70 release, which became available March 3, are experimental enhancements to the standard library. One such enhancement is ArrayDeque, a generic data structure described as useful in many algorithms and applications.
Imagine walking into a grocery store that specializes in hamburgers—all kinds of hamburgers, but only hamburgers. When it comes to hamburgers, though, the store’s options are endless.
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(Insider Story)Asynchronous programming has been around for quite a while now. The introduction of the async and await keywords in .NET enabled us to write programs that could take advantage of asynchrony with ease. However, there hasn’t been any way to consume streams of data asynchronously until the arrival of IAsyncEnumerable<T> in C# 8.0.
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(Insider Story)Jenkins offers a simple way to set up a continuous integration or continuous delivery environment for almost any combination of languages and source code repositories using pipelines, as well as automating other routine development tasks. While Jenkins doesn’t eliminate the need to create scripts for individual steps, it does give you a faster and more robust way to integrate your entire chain of build, test, and deployment tools than you can easily build yourself.
“Don’t break the nightly build!” is a cardinal rule in software development shops that post a freshly built daily product version every morning for their testers. Before Jenkins, the best a developer could do to avoid breaking the nightly build was to build and test carefully and successfully on a local machine before committing the code. But that meant testing one’s changes in isolation, without everyone else’s daily commits. There was no firm guarantee that the nightly build would survive one’s commit.
You’ve pushed the code through all of the tests and they came back green. The continuous integration pipeline ran all of the way through. All of the check boxes on the feature list are checked. All of the Post-it notes have moved to the completed part of the wall. Phew.
It’s tempting to call the code finished and head off on vacation. You’ve earned it. The team has earned it. Let the code do its thing for a bit. Isn’t that the whole reason we wrote it? To throw it over the wall where it could just hum along and do its thing?
Alas, the days of being complacent and sitting still are over. Nothing is ever finished these days. Just because you’ve squeezed out the bugs and delivered a working program doesn’t mean that you should relax. There are dozens of things you can still do to improve your code. Some are the mark of the good citizen who cleans up for the next team to come along. Some are opportunities for growth and capturing new markets. Some are the start of a new journey.
Microsoft is shipping PowerShell 7.0, a major update to the cross-platform automation tool and configuration framework. Highlights of the new version, introduced March 4, include pipeline parallelization and new operators.
PowerShell 7.0 introduces the new Parallel parameter for the ForEach-Object cmdlet, allowing you to run a script block in parallel for each element in a collection by using the ForEach-Object -Parallel syntax.
PowerShell 7.0 introduces new operators as well, including a ternary operator identified as a ? b :c, and pipeline chain operators, || and &&. Null conditional operators include ?? and ??=.
.NET Core 3.0, an implementation of Microsoft’s open source development platform that first debuted nearly 18 months ago, reached its end of life on March 3, 2020.
Microsoft advises users to move applications and environments over to .NET Core 3.1. Upgrade instructions can be found on devblogs.microsoft.com. With the end-of-life status, .NET Core updates will no longer will include updates and patches for version 3.0.
Superseded by .NET Core 3.1, which was released on December 3, 2019, .NET Core 3.0 was considered a “Current” release. As a long-term supported (LTS) release, .NET Core 3.1 will be supported by Microsoft for at least three years.
R data.table code becomes more efficient — and elegant — when you take advantage of its special symbols and functions. With that in mind, we’ll look at some special ways to subset, count, and create new columns.
For this demo, I’m going to use data from the 2019 Stack Overflow developers survey, with about 90,000 responses. If you want to follow along, you can download the data from Stack Overflow.
If the data.table package is not installed on your system, install it from CRAN and then load it as usual with library(data.table). To start, you may want to read in just the first few rows of the data set to make it easier to examine the data structure. You can do that with with data.table’s fread() function and the nrows argument. I’ll read in 10 rows:
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the governing body of the definition of what it means to be Open Source and which licenses are accepted as Open Source licenses. It coined the modern use of the term “open source” and maintains the Open Source Definition.
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(Insider Story)Microsoft has updated its roadmap for the Visual Studio IDE through June 2020. Improvements planned for the coming months range from better Git integration and snappier performance to enhancements for C++ and diagnostics.
Better Git integration is cited as an improvement eyed for the IDE core. Plans for Visual Studio core also include using Visual Studio as a client for online environments and boosting support for networks using conditional access. Improving the IDE’s performance when opening and working with large solutions also is a goal. Microsoft also cites a button to refresh search results and references windows.
When working on web applications, you will often need to execute certain tasks in the background. In some cases, these will be tasks that should be executed at predefined intervals of time.
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(Insider Story)Mozilla is using WebAssembly-based memory sandboxing technology to improve security in the Firefox browser. Called RLBox, the technology allows Mozilla to quickly convert Firefox components to run inside a WebAssembly sandbox.
Developed by university researchers, RLBox is a toolkit for sandboxing third-party libraries. It combines a WebAssembly-based sandbox and an API to retrofit existing application code to interface with a sandboxed library. The isolation offered by RLBox is planned for inclusion in Firefox 74 on Linux and Firefox 75 on macOS, with Windows support to follow soon afterward. Firefox 74 and Firefox 75 are scheduled to arrive in March and April, respectively.
Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, powered by machine learning, are an easy way to add artificial intelligence to your apps, offering pay-as-you-go access to a selection of useful algorithms. Unlike many other web services, they’re continuously evolving, improving as they ingest more and more labeled data.
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(Insider Story)
