Project Reunion 0.8 was announced during this week's Microsoft Build 2021 developer conference, leading a raft of win-dev news items.
The new Entity Framework Core 6.0 Preview 4 is described as a "performance edition," with the dev team turning from years-long concerns -- such as catching up to the old Entity Framework and adding new features -- to focus on speed.
The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, an open source kit for Java featuring "backported fixes and enhancements we deem important to our customers and our internal users," has reached general availability.
F# and F# tools updates listed in the just-released Visual Studio 16.10 include finally addressing a feature request from 2016 and more.
ASP.NET Core, the web-dev component of .NET, received a bunch of new functionality in the new NET. 6 Preview 4, including Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilation for Blazor WebAssembly, Hot Reload and the capability to host Blazor components in .NET MAUI.
During this week's Microsoft Build 2021 developer conference, .NET MAUI Preview 4 was announced with new controls and features getting the framework ready for general availability in November along with .NET 6.
Many features in the just-shipped .NET 6 Preview 4 are close to being in final form, Microsoft says, making it "ready for real world testing if you haven't yet tried .NET 6 in your environment."
Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2019 v16.10 and the first preview of v16.11 during the start of the Build 2021 developer conference.
Much-requested and long-awaited Hot Reload functionality has hit .NET, supported in an early, incomplete form in the new Visual Studio 2019 version 16.11 (Preview 1).
Microsoft published the roadmap for the next milestone release of its flagship IDE, Visual Studio 2022, following themes of personal and team productivity, modern development and constant innovation.
A Forrester Research analyst says the tide may be changing for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), which make web apps look and act like native apps. This is news for <i>Visual Studio Magazine</i> readers because Microsoft's open source Blazor web framework -- enabling web development with C# instead of just JavaScript -- is used to create PWAs.
Microsoft helped out Qualcomm Technologies with the chip maker's new Snapdragon Developer Kit to support power-efficient mobile processors.
A new quality-of-service level for Windows lets developers throttle their power consumption when it makes sense, contributing to Microsoft's Sustainable Software and carbon negative initiatives.
It's also said to improve readability while offering full-text search.
Microsoft's big Build developer conference stays online this year for perhaps the last time as the country opens up from pandemic restrictions, with the schedule showing a marked focus on the company's Azure cloud platform.
Google's popular cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit is out in a v2.2 update that furthers support for creating Universal Windows Platform (UWP) desktop applications.
Azure user reaction pales in comparison to a VS Coders revolt that thwarted a 2017 icon change.
Call it low-code for the web: Azure Static Web Apps has reached general availability, providing a quick onramp to full-stack projects with static front ends and dynamic back ends powered by Azure Functions serverless computing.
Improvements make it easier to create pull requests from the IDE.
The April 2021 update to Java on Visual Studio Code mainly improves debugging and testing.