AvaloniaUI features using the custom MessageBox


The art of creating computer programs


Some days ago the Windows team announced the May 2019 Update for Windows 10. In this post we’re going to look at what we, the Python team, have done to make Python easier to install on Windows by helping the community publish to the Microsoft Store and, in collaboration with Windows, adding a default “python.exe” command to help find it. You may have already heard about these on the Python Bytes podcast, at PyCon US, or through Twitter.

I guess one of the most important issues in this topic is building an exception handling architecture in your application. This is interesting for many reasons. And the main reason, I think, is an apparent simplicity, which you don’t always know what to do with. All the basic constructs such as IEnumerable, IDisposable, IObservable, etc. have this property and use it everywhere. On the one hand, their simplicity tempts to use these constructs in different situations. On the other hand, they are full of traps which you might not get out. It is possible that looking at the amount of information we will cover you’ve got a question: what is so special about exceptional situations?
However, to make conclusions about building the architecture of exception classes we should learn some details about their classification. Because before building a system of types that would be clear for the user of code, a programmer should determine when to choose the type of error and when to catch or skip exceptions. So, let’s classify the exceptional situations (not the types of exceptions) based on various features.
QueryProvider can’t deal with this:
var result = _context.Humans
.Select(x => $"Name: {x.Name} Age: {x.Age}")
.Where(x => x != "")
.ToList();It can’t deal with any sentence using an interpolated string, but it’ll easily deal with this:
var result = _context.Humans
.Select(x => "Name " + x.Name + " Age " + x.Age)
.Where(x => x != "")
.ToList();The most painful thing is to fix bugs after turning on ClientEvaluation (exception for client-side calculation), since all Automapper profiles should be strictly analyzed for interpolation. Let’s find out what’s what and propose our solution to the problem.

It’s time to talk about exceptions or, rather, exceptional situations. Before we start, let’s look at the definition. What is an exceptional situation?
This is a situation that makes the execution of current or subsequent code incorrect. I mean different from how it was designed or intended. Such a situation compromises the integrity of an application or its part, e.g. an object. It brings the application into an extraordinary or exceptional state.
But why do we need to define this terminology? Because it will keep us in some boundaries. If we don’t follow the terminology, we can get too far from a designed concept which may result in many ambiguous situations. Let’s see some practical examples:
struct Number
{
public static Number Parse(string source)
{
// ...
if(!parsed)
{
throw new ParsingException();
}
// ...
}
public static bool TryParse(string source, out Number result)
{
// ..
return parsed;
}
}This example seems a little strange, and it is for a reason. I made this code slightly artificial to show the importance of problems appearing in it. First, let’s look at the Parse method. Why should it throw an exception?


February 2019 marked the release of ReactiveUI 9 — the cross-platform framework for building GUI applications on the Microsoft .NET platform. ReactiveUI is a tool for tight integration of reactive extensions with the MVVM design pattern. You could familiarize yourself with the framework via a series of videos or the welcome page of the documentation. The ReactiveUI 9 update includes numerous fixes and improvements, but probably the most crucial and interesting one is integration with the DynamicData framework, allowing you to work with dynamic collections in Reactive fashion. Let’s find out what we can use DynamicData for and how this powerful reactive framework works under the hood!
This week I spent coding my very first public pet-app based on Telegram chat bot which acts as a Bitcoin wallet and allows to send and receive tips between Telegram users and other so-called “Lightning Apps”. I assume that you are familiar with Bitcoin & Telegram in general, i’ll try to post short and without deep jump into details. More resources about Bitcoin can be found here and Telegram is simply an instant messenger that allows you to create your custom apps (chat-bots) using their platform.
something like this…


Code search and navigation are important features of any IDE. In Java, one of the commonly used search options is searching for all implementations of an interface. This feature is often called Type Hierarchy, and it looks just like the image on the right.
It's inefficient to iterate over all project classes when this feature is invoked. One option is to save the complete class hierarchy in the index during compilation since the compiler builds it anyway. We do this when the compilation is run by the IDE and not delegated, for example, to Gradle. But this works only if nothing has been changed in the module after the compilation. In general, the source code is the most up-to-date information provider, and indexes are based on the source code.
Finding immediate children is a simple task if we are not dealing with a functional interface. When searching for implementations of the Foo interface, we need to find all the classes that have implements Foo and interfaces that have extends Foo, as well as new Foo(...) {...} anonymous classes. To do this, it is enough to build a syntax tree of each project file in advance, find the corresponding constructs, and add them to an index.

From idea to implementation: modifying the existing elliptic curve signature scheme to be deterministic and providing functions on it to obtain verifiable within the blockchain pseudorandom numbers.

Earlier this week, we released Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1 Preview 1 (see release notes). It’s the first preview of the first update to Visual Studio 2019. If you’re not already set up to get preview releases, then please do that now. The preview channel installs side-by-side with the release channel and they don’t interfere with each other. I highly recommend all extension authors install the preview.

Got the 16.1 preview installed now then? That’s great. Here are some features in it you might find interesting.

ML.NET is an open-source and cross-platform machine learning framework (Windows, Linux, macOS) for .NET developers. Using ML.NET, developers can leverage their existing tools and skillsets to develop and infuse custom AI into their applications by creating custom machine learning models for common scenarios like Sentiment Analysis, Recommendation, Image Classification and more!.
Today we’re announcing the ML.NET 1.0 RC (Release Candidate) (version 1.0.0-preview) which is the last preview release before releasing the final ML.NET 1.0 RTM in 2019 Q2 calendar year.
Soon we will be ending the first main milestone of a great journey in the open that started on May 2018 when releasing ML.NET 0.1 as open source. Since then we’ve been releasing monthly, 12 preview releases so far, as shown in the roadmap below:

In this release (ML.NET 1.0 RC) we have initially concluded our main API changes. For the next sprint we are focusing on improving documentation and samples and addressing major critical issues if needed.
The goal is to avoid any new breaking changes moving forward.
In this post we'd like to share an interesting way of dealing with configuration of a distributed system.
The configuration is represented directly in Scala language in a type safe manner. An example implementation is described in details. Various aspects of the proposal are discussed, including influence on the overall development process.
