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AngularJS long-term support discontinued

Four years after announcing discontinuation plans, Angular has officially discontinued long-term support (LTS) for AngularJS. AngularJS is the first version of the Angular framework, which was released in 2010. All subsequent released versions were called Angular.

It had initially planned to end LTS in July 2021, but because of COVID-19, it decided to push that date back by six months to December 31, 2021.

The Angular development team is urging developers to migrate all AngularJS applications to Angular 2 or higher. Last year the team published a blog post detailing ways to prepare applications to migrate, such as using ngUpgrade, which is a library that allows Angular and AngularJS to be run in the same application to allow for incremental migration.

Going forward, CDN links for AngularJS will remain active and AngularJS.org will still stay online. The team will also archive the AngularJS repository on GitHub and provide read-only access to code, issue, and pull request history. Finally, npm packages for AngularJS will still be available on npm and bower, but they will be marked as deprecated.

Aptiv to acquire Wind River

Vehicle technology company Aptiv has announced its intent to acquire the embedded systems company Wind River from TPG Capital. The acquisition is valued at $4.3 billion and is expected to close mid-year.

According to Aptiv, this acquisition will enable the company to expand into several high-value industries and produce innovations across connected devices like vehicles.

Wind River Studio will become integrated into Aptiv’s SVA platform to further innovate on automotive software solutions.

Wind River will continue to operate as a stand-alone unit within Aptiv, led by Wind River’s current CEO Kevin Dallas.

Open Source Institute forms to offer online training

The Open Source Institute (OpenSI) is being formed through a collaboration between the University of Canberra and Instaclustr. OpenSI will focus on open source training, certification, and research and development.

The first online course offered through OpenSI will be Developer Training and Certification for the event streaming platform Apache Kafka. This training will provide software engineers and system admins with the skills to develop and operate Apache Kafka.

The course will include interactive workshops, webinar, online forums, self-paced assignment, and assessments. There will also be an optional exam that can be taken to receive certification through OpenSI for Apache Kafka.

Other courses are in the works for other open source technologies like Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Cadence.

People on the move

n Allstacks has announced the appointment of Jamie Howard as its new VP of Engineering. He previously held roles at companies such as Qualcomm, Red Hat, and WebAssign, and also served as an Army Infantry Squad Leader.

n Sharan Foga has joined Instaclustr as director of community and developer relations. She has over 30 years of experience in the technology industry and has been involved with the Apache Software Foundation since 2008 and is currently one of its board members. She is also an active project management committee member for the Apache ComDev team, Apache OFBiz, Apache Kibble, and the Apache Incubator. n Databricks has made Naveen Zutshi the company’s new chief information officer. He spent the past six years as CIO of Palo Alto Networks where he helped the company expand into new security categories. Before that he was the senior vice president of technology at Gap.

n Palo Alto Networks is working to grow in new markets and is appointing Helmut Reisigner to CEO of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America (LATAM) to drive this growth. He will work closely with company president BJ Jenkins to drive acceleration of the global growth strategy.

.NET MAUI preview supports Fluent UI

Microsoft recently announced the release of .NET MAUI Preview 11. As a part of this release, users will gain access to the first batch of Fluent UI control styling, multi-window implementations, control features, and another set of iOS type alignment.

This preview runs on the latest preview of .NET 6 and is available with Visual Studio 2022 17.1 Preview 2.

Windows 11 brings users new UI styling with the updated Fluent Design System. In .NET MAUI Preview 11, users will experience initial updates to Button, Editor, and Entry.

Visual Studio preview brings productivity features for Git

Microsoft recently announced the second preview of Visual Studio 2022 17.1. This release includes new features that align with themes of Visual Studio 2022, such as productivity.

New Git productivity features will make day-to-day work much easier, according to Microsoft. Developers will now be able to compare the current branch in a repository with other branches. This is useful when preparing for a pull request or before deleting a branch.

Another new Git feature is enhanced detached head support, which allows developers to check out a commit and go back to a previous point in history to run or test code. Developers will also be able to quick-

ly review pull requests and evaluate updates by checking the tip of a remote branch.

Multi-repo support is also enhanced in this preview release through improvements to the inner loop branching experience. According to Microsoft, developers can now use branch pickers on the status bar or Git changes tool window to checkout branches or do certain branch management tasks. Other Git improvements include the ability to create branches across all active repositories at the same time and Line-staging preview functionality.

Facebook releases Create React App 5.0

Create React App 5.0 is a major release bringing users numerous new features and the latest version of all major dependencies.

A few highlights of the release include webpack 5, Jest 27, ESLint 8, and PostCSS 8.

With this, react-scripts@5.0.0 also contains several breaking changes. These changes include dropped support for Node 10 and 12. Node 10 has now reached End-of-Life. And Node 12 will be End-of-Life in April of 2022. Moving forward, only support for the latest LTS release of Node.js will be provided.

Microsoft updates feedback system for Visual Studio

Microsoft recently announced that it is updating its feedback system in order to provide users with a higher quality experience.

With this, older versions of Visual Studio will no longer be compatible to provide feedback. To continue submitting feedback, upgrade to version 16.7 or any LTSC service release after April 2021.

This update brings users an enhancement to the Send Feedback options available in the help menu and feedback center. The new system is designed to make it easier for Microsoft’s engineering teams to track, organize, and transfer tickets. This works to provide a higher level of communication between users and the Visual Studio engineering teams.

White House hosts OS Security Summit

Organizations such as the Linux Foundation, OpenSSF, Google, Akamai, and Red Hat attended a White House Summit meant to address supply chain security challenges following the recent log4j crisis.

“The open-source ecosystem will need to work together to further cybersecurity research, training, analysis, and remediation of defects found in critical open-source software projects. These plans were met with positive feedback and a growing, collective commitment to take meaningful action, ” said Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of the Open Source Security Foundation.

Key considerations for the government and industry include prioritizing investment into tools and technologies that can help increase the visibility of use of open source, optimally through automated tools; support strong privatepublic ownership; and improve information sharing, according to Akamai.

Customized GPT-3 improves models

Creating a custom version of GPT-3 tailored to their application allows for faster and cheaper running of models. GPT-3 is a natural language programming tool developed by AI research laboratory OpenAI.

Users have to run a single command in the OpenAI CLI tool with the file that they provide and a custom version will start training and be immediately available in the API.

It takes less than 100 examples to start seeing the benefits of fine-tuning GPT-3 and performance continues to improve as you add more data, according to OpenAI. Then, doubling of number of examples tends to improve quality linearly.

“Whether text generation, summarization, classification, or any other natural language task GPT-3 is capable of performing, customizing GPT-3 will improve performance, ” the developers behind GPT-3 wrote in a blog post that also has the success stories of four companies that fine-tuned GPT-3.

With the research dataset Grade School Math problems, fine-tuning GPT-3 improved the accuracy 2 to 4 times over what was possible with prompt design.

Microsoft reveals 2022 roadmap for Java in VS Code

Microsoft said in 2022 it plans to focus on improving the fundamental inner-loop experience that impacts developers’ daily productivity. This includes efforts to improve code completion suggestions, provide more relevant code snippet generation, and offer various shortcuts based on user’s preference. The debugging experience will also be improved.

The company will also focus on performance and reliability, with updates like improved reliability of Java Language Server. This will include reducing the number of instances where the Java Language Server becomes unresponsive.

The company will continue to add new features to the Gradle for Java extension and the existing Maven extension.

Also, it will make improvements to core Java extensions and Spring extensions such as making it easier to create workflows of Spring projects, controllers and beans; better visualization of core Spring concepts; and more.

Microsoft also shared new features that are now available, such as the now-embedded JRE in Java extensions and added the ability to configure Java formatter settings. z