Development

Today, we’re excited to introduce GitHub Package Registry, a package management service that makes it easy to publish public or private packages next to your source code.

GitHub Package Registry is fully integrated with GitHub, so you can use the same search, browsing, and management tools to find and publish packages as you do for your repositories. You can also use the same user and team permissions to manage code and packages together. GitHub Package Registry provides fast, reliable downloads backed by GitHub’s global CDN. And it supports familiar package management tools: JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet), and Docker images, with more to come.

You can try GitHub Package Registry today in limited beta. It will always be free to use for open source—more pricing details will be announced soon.

Sign up for the beta

We are pleased to announce that the April 2019 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.

In this release we made a series of improvements that are listed in our changelog, closing a total of 84 issues including:

• Variable Explorer and Data Viewer
• Enhancements to debug configuration
• Additional improvements to the Python Language Server

Keep on reading to learn more!  

Disclaimer: This is a translation of an article. All rights belongs to author of original article and Miro company.

I'm a QA Engineer in Miro. Let me tell about our experiment of transferring partially testing tasks to developers and of transforming Test Engineer role into QA (Quality assurance).

First briefly about our development process. We have daily releases for client side and 3 to 5 weekly releases of server side. Team have 60+ people spitted onto 10 Functional Scrum Teams.

I'm working in Integration team. Our tasks are:

• Integration of our service into external products
• Integration of external products into our service
  For example we have integrated Jira. Jira Cards — visual representation of tasks so it's useful to work with tasks not opening Jira at all.
  
  

How the experiment starts

All starts with trivial issue. When someone of Test Engineers had sick leave then team performance was degraded significantly. Team was continued working on tasks. However when code was reached testing phase task was hold on. As a result new functionality didn't reach production in time.

Going onto vacation by Test Engineer is a more complex story. He/she needs to find another Test Engineer who ready to take extra tasks and conduct knowledge sharing. Going onto vacation by two Test Engineers at the sane time is not an applicable luxury.

With macOS Mojave, Apple introduced support for Hardened Runtime and Notary service. These two services are designed to improve application security on macOS. Recently Apple has stated:

“Beginning in macOS 10.14.5, all new or updated kernel extensions and all software from developers new to distributing with Developer ID must be notarized in order to run. In a future version of macOS, notarization will be required by default for all software.”

As application requirements grow more complex, so do our solutions. Keeping developers’ environments configured across our organizations grows equally complex. Developers need to install specific workloads and components in order to build a solution. Some organizations add these requirements to their README or CONTRIBUTING documents in their repositories. Some organizations might publish these requirements in documents for new hires or even just forward emails. Configuring your development environment often becomes a day-long chore. What’s really needed is a declarative authoring model that just configures Visual Studio like you need it.

In Visual Studio 2017 Update 15.9 we added the ability to export and import workload and component selection to a Visual Studio installation configuration file. Developers can import these files into new or existing installations. Checking these files into your source repos makes them easy to share. However, developers still need to import these to get the features they need.

Automatically install missing components

New in Visual Studio 2019: you can save these files as .vsconfig files in your solution root directory and when the solution (or solution directory) is opened, Visual Studio will automatically detect which components are missing and prompt you to install them.

Reporting has been an important capability for Azure DevOps customers who rely on Analytics to make data driven decisions.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the following Analytics features listed below will be included in our Azure DevOps Services offering at no additional cost. Customers will start to see these changes rolled out to their accounts soon.

 Intro

At Microsoft, we’re investing in helping our customers as they move to the cloud. We see an opportunity to help support companies in this changing environment by bringing our security, privacy, compliance and intellectual property assets and expertise to bear in order to help them be more successful. We’re excited to now take an additional step that expands innovation protections.

Today, we are pleased to announce the expansion of the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program to include new benefits for Azure IoT innovators and startups. We first announced Azure IP Advantage in February 2017, to provide comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks for our cloud customers. A trend we saw at the time – and one that continues today – is a growing risk to cloud innovation from patent lawsuits. Last year, we joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) and the License on Transfer (LOT) Network to help address patent assertion risk for our customers and partners.

Some days ago we announced the availability of our release candidate (RC) of TypeScript 3.4. Our hope is to collect feedback and early issues to ensure our final release is simple to pick up and use right away.

To get started using the RC, you can get it through NuGet, or use npm with the following command:

npm install -g typescript@rc

You can also get editor support by

• Downloading for Visual Studio 2017 (for version 15.2 or later)
• Following directions for Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text.

Let’s explore what’s new in 3.4!

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 3 introduces a new feature to reduce the binary size of C++ exception handling (try/catch and automatic destructors) on x64. Dubbed FH4 (for __CxxFrameHandler4, see below), I developed new formatting and processing for data used for C++ exception handling that is ~60% smaller than the existing implementation resulting in overall binary reduction of up to 20% for programs with heavy usage of C++ exception handling.

START is an open-source LLM designed for precise calculations and code verification. It addresses two major issues that most standard models face: hallucinations and errors in multi-step calculations. This article explains why these problems arise and how START solves them.

Declarative partitioning may sound complex, but in reality it’s just a way to tell your database how best to organize large tables — so it can optimize queries and make maintenance easier. Let’s walk through how it works and when declarative partitioning can save the day.

Picture this: a mission-critical SQL query is crawling along. Not for an hour. Not for two. Fifteen hours. A full workday of the system slowly grinding through data while the business bleeds money and users teeter on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And then — cue the dramatic music — in walks the performance engineer.

After a few hours of intense analysis and a couple of pinpoint code tweaks, the same query that took 15 hours now completes in just… two minutes. Sounds like magic? Nope. This is the thrilling (and very real) world of performance engineering.

How to compare the efficiency of SQL query plans? “Measure the execution time, of course!” — an experienced reader would say. And they would be absolutely right: from a practical perspective, the more efficient DBMS is the one that delivers higher TPS. However, sometimes we need to design a system that doesn't exist yet or predict behavior under loads that haven't occurred yet. In such cases, we need a characteristic that allows us to perform a qualitative analysis of a plan or compare two plans. This post is dedicated to one such characteristic — the number of data pages read.

We at Verilog Meetup constructed an exam/interview problem that has an interesting property: if a student tries to figure out a solution by thinking by himself, he usually succeeds; however if he dumps the problem on ChatGPT, the solution fails (does not pass the automated test), and the student goes into a death spiral of futility, kicking ChatGPT to get the solution right.

There is nothing weird about the problem, we do this in the industry all the time:

Hi all! The dev.family team is in touch. In this article, we are sharing a short guide on how to install Splash Screen in a cross-platform app written in React Native with support for multiple themes.

Splash screen is the first screen that users see before loading into the main application. This screen is perhaps the best way to make the name of your app, and in general, its entire name, more memorable.

But this is not the main role of the splash screen. Under it, for example, you can hide receiving data from the API and loading the main application. We do this when we show the loader on the screen when loading the same data. This allows you to improve the UX and immediately demonstrate the finished application to the user. And as a result, remove the extra loader when opening it for the first time.

In this short guide, we will look at installing splash screens for iOS and Android using the react-native framework using the react-native-splash-screen library.

Last week I was doing a seminar on SystemVerilog, ASIC and FPGA at ADA University in Baku, Azerbaijan. I will replicate the last two sessions of this seminar, on RISC-V CPU simulation and synthesis, at the Verilog Meetups on March 3 and March 10 at Hacker Dojo, Mountain View, California. For this reason I am combining the information about Azerbaijan and California seminars in a single post.

First, let's talk about ADA University.

The team developing a set of portable SystemVerilog examples decided to organize the first event in Silicon Valley on Sunday, January 14 from 2PM till 5PM at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA. If the first event is successful we are going to make it recurrent. You can register for the event on Meetup or LinkedIn.

The current directions of the group:

Ссылка на русскую версию / link to Russian version

Understanding valid/ready protocol is extremely important for every microarchitect.

Valid/ready is one of the main protocols used to organise flow-control inside a logic block as well as on inter-block (SoC) level.

In the last lesson, we explored FIFO buffer using hdlgadgets - human-in-the-loop HDL training tool.

This time we will take two FIFO buffers (which form a pipeline with valid/ready handshakes) and will experiment with it by changing flow-control logic of the pipeline.

We will show that valid/ready is not only a mechanism for transferring data from one FIFO queue to another, but also a method for organizing various kinds of logical functionality between queues.

If you have not worked with valid/ready protocol before, you will be surprised how easy it is to achieve desired functionality of the design by simply writing couple of lines of Verilog code in the handshaking logic block between two FIFOs.