004,5_SDT057.qxp_Layout 1 3/1/22 2:01 PM Page 4
4
SD Times
March 2022
www.sdtimes.com
NEWS WATCH Microsoft releases .NET 7 Preview 1 Microsoft has announced the next major milestone for the .NET platform with the release of the first preview of .NET 7. The language recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and according to Microsoft, this release “marks the first step forward towards the next 20 years of .NET.” This release will build off foundations laid in .NET 6, such as a unified set of base libraries, runtime, and SDK; a simplified development experience, and improved productivity for developers.
According to Microsoft, the major areas of focus for .NET 7 include: 1. Improved support for cloud native development 2. Tools that will enable developers to more easily upgrade their legacy projects 3. A simplified experience for working with containers Features included in .NET 7 Preview 1 include annotations to APIs to support nullability, JIT compiler optimizations, new APIs, and support for hot reload scenarios. .NET MAUI will also be a part of .NET 7. The company released .NET MAUI preview 13 earlier this week and is currently in the process of sup-
People on the move
n Tim Berglund has been announced as the VP of developer relations at StarTree. He will start in his new role in April and will work to deepen the company’s ties with the Apache Pinot community. He is known in the industry as a leading advocate for Apache Kafka, and started off as developer relations advisor when he first joined StarTree in September 2021. Previously he held roles at Confluent and DataStax. n CData Software has announced two new executive appointments: Manish Patel as chief product officer and Steven Close as chief information security officer. Patel has over 15 years of product management experience and previously served as CEO of Tier1 Financial Solutions and led product management at Valassis Digital and Ipreo. Close previously was a security executive at SolarWinds, and has worked on joint efforts with the FBI, Australia Cyber Crime, and Missing Kids. n Martha Jenson has joined Sauce Labs as its new chief people officer. In this role she will focus on scaling the company’s operations and culture. She previously established HR operations and people strategy at Ivalua, and has held roles at Facebook, Symantec, HP, VMware, and IBM, as well as having served as an Intelligence Analyst in the U.S. Air Force. n Pepperdata has announced that Maneesh Dhir is its new chief executive officer, replacing Ash Munshi, who will stay on as executive chairman of the board of directors. Dhir spent five years as managing director of Apple’s India business, where he helped grow the company revenue to over $1 billion in India, which was a 15x increase during his time there. He’s also served as chief product strategy officer at FICO and executive vice president at AOL International.
porting .NET MAUI in .NET 6. It expects to have a release candidate (RC) for that soon and will continue to ship RCs until it is ready for general availability. Once it is available in .NET 6, it will be included in .NET 7.
WSO2 releases Swan Lake update to Ballerina language The API management company WSO2 announced that its opensource programming language Ballerina’s Swan Lake release is now generally available. Ballerina is designed specifically for developers interacting with the cloud. It aims to simplify the process of being able to use, combine, and create network services. According to WSO2, it provides “bidirectional mapping of sequence diagrams and code.” This allows developers to switch between working with traditional code and low-code as needed. It also abstracts away a lot of complexity in developing cloud-native applications by providing a way to represent network interactions and streamlining functions related to data usage, configurations, and cloud deployments.
Jetpack Compose 1.1 UI toolkit adds touch target sizing The Android development team has announced the release of UI toolkit Jetpack Compose version 1.1. This release comes with several new features, such as improved focus handling, ImageVector caching, touch target sizing, and support for Android 12 stretch overscroll. Additionally, Compose 1.1 graduates several experimental APIs to stable as well as supports newer versions of Kotlin.
An image vector caching mechanism has been added to painterResource API in order to cache all instances of ImageVectors that are parsed with a certain resource id and theme. The cache will then be invalidated on configuration changes. With touch target sizing, Material components will expand their layout space in order to meet Material accessibility guidelines. This works to align Compose Material to the same behavior of Material Design Components and brings consistency to behavior when mixing Views and Compose. This feature also works to ensure that minimum requirements for touch target accessibility will be met when creating a UI using Compose Material components.
Kong Enterprise 2.7 released with 25% improved performance API company Kong announced the general availability of Kong Enterprise 2.7, which delivers 25% faster performance compared to previous versions, improved security, and streamlined workflows. Kong Enterprise is a service connectivity platform that enables organizations to secure, connect and orchestrate their APIs and services across cloud native, hybrid and on-premise environments. The new version achieved 52,250 transactions per second (TPS) maximum throughput with a 100% success rate (up from 40,625 TPS in 2021), performing 2,886% faster than Apigee X, which achieved 1,750 TPS maximum throughput with 100% success, according to Kong. Additional features include
