16 minute read
News Watch
by d2emerge
NEWSNEWS WATCHWATCH
Cloudflare announces CAPTCHA alternative Asana now tracks progress against strategic initiatives
Turnstile is an easy to use and private replacement for CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
With this, any site can choose to replace CAPTCHA through an API, regardless of whether or not they are a customer of Cloudflare.
According to Cloudflare, this alternative to CAPTCHA is intended to solve the issues of poor user experience and privacy practices through a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that works to preserve the users privacy.
Turnstile works by automatically choosing from a rotating suite of browser challenges that operate behind the scenes, searching for signals that there is a human user. Turnstile can also finetune the difficulty of the challenge, offering more difficult challenges to visitors that exhibit non-human behaviors.
DALL-E now available without waitlist
DALL-E allows users to type infinite combinations of prompts that will each generate a unique set of images generated by ML/AI.
Whether the prompts are as simple as “an armchair in the shape of an avocado” or as elaborate and abstract as “a futuristic cyborg poster hanging in a neon lit subway station, ” the model generates digital images from natural language descriptions.
DALL-E was originally revealed by OpenAI in a blog post in January 2021, and it uses a version of GPT-3, another project by OpenAI that can generate original writing, modified to generate images.
More than 1.5 million users are now actively creating over 2 million images a day with DALL-E, according to OpenAI.
The offerings are intended to assist organizations in shifting priorities as business needs change with new goals reporting, decrease repeated cross-functional work and wasted costs with an integrated tech stack, and scale global security with enterprise security features.
With this release, enterprises have access to advanced reporting and dashboards for goals, built on the proprietary Asana Work Graph.
This provides executives with a birds eye view into the status of their company’s goals, which projects and portfolios are helping with the progress of those goals, impact on business outcomes, and roadblocks. Additionally, with new ways to bring data from several external tools into Asana, Asana becomes a centralized place for cross-functional teams to better track work being done together, avoid time-consuming redundancies, minimize costs, and decrease errors. According to the company, these new features also work to improve security by auditing what information is entered, flagging vulnerabilities, and maintaining compliance within highly-regulated industries.
Google supports passkeys on Android, Chrome
Google has announced that it will be supporting passkeys on Android and Chrome. Passkeys are an authentication method that offers an alternative to passwords, and the technology was announced by Apple over the summer at its WWDC conference.
For users, using a passkey is similar to confirming the use of a saved password by scanning one’s fingerprint or using facial recognition.
The company has enabled two capabilities related to passkeys. First, users will now be able to create and use passkeys on Android. The passkeys are synced through Google’s Password Manager.
Second, developers can incorporate passkey support into their applications using the WebAuthn API for Chrome applications. Google’s next major milestone towards supporting passkeys will be to offer an API for native Android apps.
According to Google, the passkeys that are created through that API will work with apps that are affiliated with the same domain. Google believes that the API will also provide a unified way to let users choose if they want to use a passkey or password.
Ubuntu 22.10 focuses on the IoT ecosystem
Canonical, the publishers of Ubuntu, have announced Ubuntu’s latest interim release. Ubuntu 22.10, also named Kinetic Kudo, focuses mainly on the IoT ecosystem.
“Connected devices are an exciting area of innovation that also create new digital risks in the home and the business. We are focused on enabling a new generation of easy to use and highly secure IoT, so these developers in particular will find a number of quality of life improvements for embedded device and remote development in Ubuntu 22.10” , said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. ”This release also brings new capabilities to our enterprise management story. The new Landscape beta makes it easier than ever to administer your entire Ubuntu estate across any architecture. ”
Ubuntu 22.10 adds support for MicroPython on microcontrollers, such as the Raspberry Pi Pico W. The graphics stack has been transitioned to kms, which means that developers can also run Pi-based graphical applications outside of a desktop session, such as on an embedded display.
Landscape 22.10 is in beta and it allows developers to run and manage Ubuntu on any architecture and the monitoring, management, patching, and compliance reporting is handled on the server. Landscape Server can now be installed on Arm or Armbased computers.
This release also supports RISC-V processors and hardware, which will enable Landscape to be deployed as a portable management system.
The team at the monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, Datadog, has announced the general availability of Datadog Continuous Testing. This helps developers and quality engineers create, manage, and run end-to-end tests for their web applications.
This release is intended to simplify test creation in order to speed up software release cycles by providing users with a complete testing workbench that simplifies test creation and maintenance.
According to the company, this release allows engineers to create tests directly from the UI without the need for scripting, run tests in parallel, and integrate with CI tools so tests can become a part of their existing CI process.
Node.js 19 updates V8 JavaScript engine
The Node.js team has released Node.js 19, which updates the V8 JavaScript engine to version 10.7 and enables HTTP(s)/1.1 KeepAlive by default.
Version 10.7 of the V8 JavaScript engine adds to the JavaScript API the latest version of Intl.NumberFormat, which lets developers create a formatter instance that is reusable and that supports locale-aware number formatting.
By having HTTP(s)/1.1 KeepAlive enabled by default, any outgoing connection will automatically use it and it will provide better throughput. This is because connections are reused.
According to the team, Node.js 19 will become the “Current” release line after Node.js 18 enters Long-Term Support at the end of the month, and it will remain that way through April 2023.
Tricentis introduces portfolio updates
The continuous testing company Tricentis announced the release of version 9.0 of Tricentis NeoLoad as well as new products Tricentis Test Management for Jira and Tricentis Test Automation for Salesforce.
These solutions work to further expand the company’s capabilities in continuous performance testing, test management, and test automation in order to bring organizations improved application quality and delivery time.
Key benefits of NeoLoad 9.0 include browser-based testing to allow users to leverage RealBrowser to scale their performance engineering practice into Agile, a standard solution for browser and protocol testing, efficient technology that consumes around 30% fewer memory and CPU resources than legacy tools, an easy-to-use low code/no code approach, and CI/CD integration ability.
With Test management for Jira, users gain the ability to establish and maintain traceability between requirements from the development team and tests to validate requirements, performance and usability for several teams and projects at scale, and an intuitive UI.
Lastly, Test Automation for Salesforce offers customers context-aware pre-built functions in order to lower the time to set up reusable test components; no code, stable, language and release agnostic automation to lower the time to identify Salesforce Lightning elements; and profile-based testing to test Salesforce functionality for each profile.
PostgreSQL 15 targets developers
According to the project maintainers, this release builds on the performance improvements of recent releases with gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, including improved sorting.
PostgreSQL 15 is intended to improve the overall developer experience with the addition of the MERGE command for writing conditional SQL statements that can include INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE actions within one statement as well as several capabilities for observing the state of the database.
This latest release improves on PostgreSQL’s in-memory and on-disk sorting algorithms, with benchmarks showing speedups of 25% – 400% depending on which data types are sorted.
Additionally, using row _ number(), rank(), dense _ rank(), and count() as window functions also bring performance benefits in PostgreSQL 15.
This release also provides heightened flexibility for managing logical replication with row filtering and column lists. These features allow users to choose to replicate a subset of data from a table.
It also introduces a new logging format: jsonlog which outputs log data using a defined JSON structure, allowing PostgreSQL logs to be processed in structured logging systems. z
People on the move
n Red Hat has named Carolyn Nash as its new senior vice president and chief operating officer. Previously she served as the company’s chief financial officer, a role that will be taken over by Robert Leibrock, who will report to Nash. Before joining Red Hat, Nash held leadership roles at Cisco, Hewlett Packard, and KPMG.
n Mike Burkland has been announced as the CEO of Five9. Burkland was previously CEO of the company, but stepped down after being diagnosed with cancer in 2017, remaining involved with the company as Chairman. He is resuming the role as a result of current CEO Rowan Trollope leaving the company. The role transition will be effective on November 28.
n PagerDuty has announced two new executive appointments: Sesh Tirumala as chief information officer (CIO) and Heather Hinton as chief information security officer (CISO). Tirumala has over 25 years of experience in the industry and has held leadership roles at Anaplan and Cisco. Hinton has over 30 years of experience, with her most recent role being CISO at RingCentral after holding several leadership roles at IBM.
What’s new in Visual Studio in 2022
BY JENNA SARGENT BARRON
Visual Studio is Microsoft’ s integrated development environment (IDE) that is used by developers all around the world.
According to Stack Overflow ’ s 2022 development survey, 32% of developers preferred Visual Studio as their IDE, coming in second to the more lightweight IDE Visual Studio Code, which was used by 74% of respondents.
Given its popularity, we ’ re going back through the past year to highlight what’ s new in Visual Studio. There were several releases in 2022, so it’ s possible to have missed a new feature here or there that you could be taking advantage of.
While many new features were added to the platform in 2022, Simon Calvert, partner director of product management for Visual Studio at Microsoft, explained that the customer themes the Visual Studio team focused on this past year were productivity and performance, enterprise success and scale, support for modern workloads, and innovation in AI-assistance, collaboration, and Git tools.
On the performance front, one significant change of note is that Visual Studio 2022 is the first 64-bit version. This will enable it to be used for larger scale projects.
According to Tim Huckaby, a Microsoft global regional director, a previous critique of Visual Studio was that it struggled when handling large and complex projects, and the 64-bit version makes it more capable of taking on those complex projects. “So the really huge projects, you know, the multimillion lines of code, or complex machine learning and AI tech stuff, now can perform and actually use these powerful CPUs that computers are shipping with, ” he said.
Other performance additions that came this year include reducing the time it takes to load in large solutions, reducing the time it takes to search for text in files, and ensuring that typing is responsive.
On the developer productivity side, Microsoft introduced a number of AIassisted capabilities that make coding easier for developers. These include things like suggesting code or applying repeated edits, Calvert explained. .NET Hot Reload was another capability that became generally available in Visual Studio 2022. It enables developers to modify code while the application is running, rather than having to pause or hit a breakpoint.
“Regardless of the type of app you ’ re working on, our goal with Hot Reload is to save you as many app restarts between edits as possible, making you more productive by reducing the time you spend waiting for apps to rebuild, restart, re-navigate to the previous location where you were in the app itself, etc, ” Dmitry Lyalin, principal program manager for .NET, wrote in a blog post explaining the feature.
Calvert believes that Hot Reload combined with the previously mentioned AI-assisted capabilities make Visual Studio "the best place for developers to rapidly create and innovate. ”
“The productivity is just so good, ” said Huckaby. “You can actually learn how to build software from the tool itself, and I think that’ s great. I’ ve always made these predictions that software development will ultimately become easy and we ’ll get software architecture for free, and it seems like my predictions are coming true. The difficulty these days is actually the definition of the business problem you solve it, as opposed to the code you ’ re going to write to do it. ”
.NET MAUI released this year
Another major introduction into Visual Studio this year is .NET MAUI, which stands for multi-platform App UI. .NET MAUI allows developers to create applications for different operating systems and devices using a single codebase.
According to Calvert, these apps will look and feel like the operating system they belong on and the layouts are fully adapted to each device, without the developer having to write additional code.
“The GA release of .NET MAUI was a notable moment because of the simplification it brings developers targeting different platforms for their apps, ” said Calvert. “We had many different control vendors and library developers provide support for .NET MAUI from day one and this continues to grow day by day. ”
The team also had accessibility in mind when developing .NET MAUI. It introduced semantic properties, which allow anyone developing with .NET MAUI to build accessible applications. “This allows developers to precisely control the accessibility of their application to suit their app needs, ” said Calvert.
The team also published documentation and a blog series to get developers up to speed on these accessibility features quickly.
Accessibility in Visual Studio 2022
Accessibility wasn ’t just a consideration in .NET MAUI, but in Visual Studio as a whole. This past year, Microsoft put a lot of effort and resources into both, making Visual Studio more accessible.
Within Visual Studio, one new feature is font ligatures, which can help
reduce cognitive load and improve readability. Ligatures are characters that are combined together to make them easier to read. For example, a ligature of “Th” would appear as if the tops of the two letters touch, rather than as separate characters with a gap in between them.
Calvert also went on to explain that the new colorized tabs and themes may be helpful for developers with different visual disabilities. The team also recently added audio cues that can be used by developers using a screen reader, which plays a sound when the caret comes to a line containing a breakpoint, error, or warning.
And code synthesis tools, such as IntelliCode and Whole Line Completion, can help developers with motor disabilities by reducing keystrokes, Calvert explained.
An upcoming feature for developers with reading disabilities is the spell checker. According to Calvert, this has been a frequently requested feature “from our users with reading disabilities to reduce anxiety that comes from spelling mistakes. ”
What’s next?
The Visual Studio team ’ s next goal is to accelerate developers ’ journey to the cloud, according to Calvert. This includes making sure Visual Studio works well with Microsoft Azure. They are also working to reduce friction in deploying container-based applications to scalable platform services.
Building on the release of Microsoft Dev Box, which is an Azure service that gives access to dev environments, developers can also expect more developer-focused optimizations for the cloud to come as well.
“Visual Studio remains the absolute best-in-class fully integrated development environment for .NET development of any kind, and we will continue to deliver updates in productivity in coding workflows, more AI-assisted development improvements, performance, and improving the inner loop for API development for developers, keeping them closer to their code in a single development tool, ” said Calvert. z
Key features in each preview release
While this article has gone over the broad changes to the language this year, here are several of the specific additions to Visual Studio that came out in the various preview releases this year.
Visual Studio 2022 17.1
1. Find in Files is now enabled by default, which creates an index of files when an application is loaded in order to make search faster. 2. Git updates include the ability to compare the current Git branch against other branches, and the ability to checkout a commit or the tip of any remote branch to more easily review history. 3. New visualizations for embedded registers and RTOS threads. 4. Solution Filters allow developers to choose what projects to load, which helps avoid loading entire solutions if all you want is an individual project.
Visual Studio 2022 17.2
1. Embedded source and Source Link can now be surfaced as part of ‘Go to Implementation. ’ This allows you to navigate to original source files that implement a target symbol. 2. You can now convert normal or verbatim string literals to a raw string literal, which is a new language feature in C# 11 that does not require escaping. 3. A new visualizer for IEnumerable object types has been added to the debugging experience, providing a clearer view of information and easier navigation. 4. In the Razor editor, they’ve added the ability to collapse region, support for snippet functionality in C# code, and a shortcut for ‘wrap div. ’ 5. Web Live Preview for ASP.NET Framework allows you to turn the application you’re working on into your design surface. It also provides code synchronization across source and web surface. 6. Expanded capabilities in Connected Services to extend development to Azure.
Visual Studio 2022 17.3
1. Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio: Allows you to develop apps that embed UI in a tab, send a notification to a channel, trigger a task from a command in the chat, and more. 2. Azure Container Apps: Allows you to run microservices and containerized applications on a serverless platform, so that they can receive the benefits of containers without worrying about configuring the underlying infrastructure. 3. Live Unit Testing now scales better by scoping the builds to only what is necessary, and improvements to the build mechanism make builds more reliable and support a bigger range of solutions. 4. Git Line-staging allows you to stage lines of code from the editor and the diff view. 5. Tabs can be wrapped into multiple rows, allowing for more horizontal tabs to be opened at the same time. 6. You can now easily re-open your most recently closed tab by right-clicking on another tab, using the Ctrl + K or Ctrl + Z shortcut, or by navigating through the menu.
What’s next for Visual Studio?'
While not out yet, the next release is Visual Studio 17.4. It will be a longterm servicing channel release and will receive updates through July 2024.
Here are some of the highlights from the various preview releases for 17.4: 1. Rollback and Remove out-of-support components are two features being added to the installer. Rollback allows you to return to a previously installed version of Visual Studio and Remove lets you remove all the components that have transitioned to no longer being supported. 2. The Document Outline window in .NET shows the file structure as a symbol tree for easy navigation 3. Support for Arm64 on Windows 11 4. An early preview of the markdown editor 5. Inline Rename UI in .NET allows you to rename a type 6. Filtering, sorting, exporting, and theming have been added to the DataTable visualizer.
