Why do so many programmers hate UI work? Because it is tedious. Especially, for the Web, but other types of UI are only slightly easier. Layouts, margins, paddings — neverending stream of little tweaks to make it look OK on all sane environments, and somehow this freaking button sometimes overlaps that input field. Rrrr! And yes, it should not hang on button clicks, which means a lot of asynchronous programming, which is a nightmare.

And don’t even speak about aesthetics and usability! Choose right colours, element sizes and locations, find/draw images and put them where they fit, think about user workflows — isn’t it a designers’ or Ux specialists’ job?! Leave me alone, I’m a programmer. I work with backend layers, where everything is straightforward and linear, there are no buttloads of different environments to adjust to, and design is guided by mere logic without pesky fussing with ‘user friendliness’ and ’beauty’!

First, let’s talk about Reference Types and Value Types. I think people don’t really understand the differences and benefits of both. They usually say reference types store content on the heap and value types store content on the stack, which is wrong.

Let’s discuss the real differences:

• A value type: its value is an entire structure. The value of a reference type is a reference to an object. – A structure in memory: value types contain only the data you indicated. Reference types also contain two system fields. The first one stores 'SyncBlockIndex', the second one stores the information about a type, including the information about a Virtual Methods Table (VMT).
• Reference types can have methods that are overridden when inherited. Value types cannot be inherited.
• You should allocate space on the heap for an instance of a reference type. A value type can be allocated on the stack, or it becomes the part of a reference type. This sufficiently increases the performance of some algorithms.

However, there are common features:

• Both subclasses can inherit the object type and become its representatives.

Let’s look closer at each feature.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

Origins

Visual Studio 2019 pushes the boundaries of individual and team productivity. We hope that you will find these new capabilities compelling and start your upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 soon.

As you are considering this upgrade, rest assured that Visual Studio 2019 makes it distinctively easy to move your codebase from previous versions of Visual Studio. This post captures the reasons why your upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 will be pain-free.

• You can install the latest IDE side-by-side with any older VS versions
• You can continue building your C++ code with the MSVC v140 (VS 2015.3) or v141 (VS 2017) toolsets
• You can upgrade to the latest MSVC v142 (VS 2019) and maintain binary compatibility with any of your 3rd party libraries that haven’t migrated yet
• Regardless of the toolset you’re on, you get access to the full collection of OSS libraries available in Vcpkg

Every year there are a lot of articles dedicated to Valentine's Day. I also decided to get involved in this topic and create something original and unusual. The idea was to create a simple Android application with hearts that would have their physical models and interact with each other. Then I added text, sounds, particles and some other effects. The resulting app was working and quite original! In this article I will describe the creation process, as well as the capabilities and pitfalls of the libgdx library.

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Overview

Microsoft’s Quantum team is excited to announce the Q# Coding Contest – Winter 2019! In this contest you can put your quantum programming skills to the test, solving quantum computing tasks in Q#. Winners will receive a Microsoft Quantum T-shirt!

Quantum computing is a radically different computing paradigm compared to classical computing. Indeed, it is so different that some tasks that are believed to be classically intractable (such as factoring integers or simulating physical systems) can be performed efficiently on a quantum computer. In 2017 Microsoft introduced the Quantum Development Kit which includes the Q# programming language. Q# can be used with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code or the command line, on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Introduction & Recap

In the previous blog post, we learned how to create a second level of drill-down (detail of detail) and how to interact with OData and ODataModel (v2) in order to delete a database record.

What will be covered on this exercise

With Part 5 of this series of blog posts, we will learn how to create a SimpleForm within a Dialog that will allow us to update the information of a Sales Order Item.

Before updating the database order we have to check that everything typed by the user validates our constraints.

• ODataModel: we have already used it to display server-side information about our Business Partner, Sales Order, and Sales Order Items. We’ve also used it to delete a database record. We’re now going to use it to update a record thanks to the submitChanges method or remove what we’ve done with the resetChanges method.
• Expression Binding: an enhancement of the SAPUI5 binding syntax, which allows for providing expressions instead of custom formatter functions
• SimpleForm: a layout that allows users to create a pixel-perfect form

This post was written by Lena Hall, a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft.

F# Software Foundation has recently announced their new initiative — Applied F# Challenge! We encourage you to participate and send your submissions about F# on Azure through the participation form.

Applied F# Challenge is a new initiative to encourage in-depth educational submissions to reveal more of the interesting, unique, and advanced applications of F#.

If you’re unfamiliar with TypeScript, it’s a language that brings static type-checking to JavaScript so that you can catch issues before you even run your code – or before you even save your file. It also includes the latest JavaScript features from the ECMAScript standard on older browsers and runtimes by compiling those features into a form that they understand. But beyond type-checking and compiling your code, TypeScript also provides tooling in your favorite editor so that you can jump to the definition of any variable, find who’s using a given function, and automate refactorings and fixes to common problems.

10 Tips for Being a Good Tech Lead

We’re excited to announce that Visual Studio 2019 will ship a new version of F# when it releases: F# 4.6!

F# 4.6 is a smaller update to the F# language, making it a “true” point-release. As with previous versions of F#, F# 4.6 was developed entirely via an open RFC (requests for comments) process. The F# community has offered very detailed feedback in discussions for this version of the language. You can view all RFCs that correspond with this release here:

• F# 4.6 RFCs
• FSharp.Core 4.6.0 RFCs

This post will detail the feature set and how to get started.

The C++ Core Guidelines’ Lifetime Profile, which is part of the C++ Core Guidelines, aims to detect lifetime problems, like dangling pointers and references, in C++ code. It uses the type information already present in the source along with some simple contracts between functions to detect defects at compile time with minimal annotation.

• December 2018

Hi. My name is Michael Kapelko. I've been developing software professionally for more than 10 years. Recent years were dedicated to iOS. I develop games and game development tools in my spare time.

Overview

Today I want to share my experience of teaching kids to program. I'm going to discuss the following topics:

• organization of the learning process
• learning plan
• memory game
• development tools
• lessons
• results and plans

Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta

Swift

Apple Swift version 5.0 (swiftlang-1001.0.45.7 clang-1001.0.37.7)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin18.2.0
ABI version: 0.6

Swift apps no longer include dynamically linked libraries for the Swift standard library and Swift SDK overlays in build variants for devices running iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, and tvOS 12.2. As a result, Swift apps can be smaller when deployed for testing using TestFlight, or when thinning an app archive for local development distribution.