Visual Basic continues to rank highly in various popularity and salary indices despite being deprecated by Microsoft, with the most recent examples coming from freelance development platform Upwork and popularity index TIOBE.
With .NET 5 release candidates on tap ahead of an official November GA debut, Microsoft has published new documentation for some of the hottest ASP.NET Core components, including Blazor and gRPC.
While highlighting new development work on Microsoft's F# programming language alongside the latest .NET 5 preview, the company announced that, except for one minor enhancement, "we are finished with F# 5!"
Lack of native ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation in .NET Core is a sore spot for Microsoft, which just published results of a survey indicating that this missing option is holding developers back from using the framework more.
Mobilize.Net, an "automated modernization" specialist headed by a former Microsoft corporate VP, has upgraded its Visual Basic upgrade tool to target .NET Core, the open source, cross-platform successor of the Windows-only .NET Framework.
Blazor enhancements show strongly in the list of ASP.NET Core updates included in this week's release of .NET 5 Preview 8, with lazy loading of assemblies for the client-side component heading the list of improvements to the open source framework that allows for web development in C# instead of JavaScript.
The milestone .NET 5.0 release is now feature complete with the new Preview 8, Microsoft announced, with a couple of go-live release candidates on tap ahead of the official November ship date.
On the March to .NET 5 in November, Microsoft shipped the second preview of Visual Studio 2019 v16.8, boosting functionality surrounding Git, .NET productivity and Xamarin.
Notwithstanding Microsoft's death knell for Visual Basic, a new project scheduled to debut this fall aims to keep at least some semblance of the iconic programming language going and evolving.
"We have been working tirelessly to enable IntelliCode for more programming languages and, in the meantime, researching ways to improve the model precision and coverage to deliver an even more satisfying user experience."
Developer feedback gathered by Microsoft led to the JavaScript/TypeScript Tools team developing a Visual Studio extension to boost programming projects based on Angular, Google's popular TypeScript-based web application framework.
TypeScript hit the v4.0 milestone, featuring a bevy of new features, improvements and fixes as the latest edition of Microsoft's popular open source programming language was said to represent the "next generation" of releases focusing more on expressivity, productivity and scalability.
Microsoft's latest monthly updates to its Azure SDKs for cloud computing include many new features, updates and fixes, highlighted by Azure Identity graduating to general availability.
"Our vision is to enable you to develop pixel-perfect, multi-platform applications using C# and WinUI," says Uno Platform, which recently announced it's getting closer to that goal with the new v3.0 update.
It's well known how Microsoft has transformed from a proprietary, monolithic software "Evil Empire" to an inclusive, open source champion, but just in case you didn't get the message yet, a new company site will do the trick.
The July 2020 release of Visual Studio Code, or version 1.48, is out with the usual bevy of improvements in accessibility, the workbench, source control, debugging and more.
Code cells from Python scripts by default will still be executed in a same interactive window, but developers can now configure the Python extension to run separate files in separate interactive windows.
Microsoft's dev team responsible for the Java on Visual Studio Code extensions released a new update that eases the "getting started" experience, addressing feedback from new users who want an easier onramp.
Microsoft officially launched its new dual-screen Android device, Surface Duo, presenting new challenges -- and opportunities -- for developers to leverage the new form factor.
Here's a quick look at what four major third-party Blazor tooling vendors have offered lately for Microsoft's red-hot project that allows for web development with C# instead of JavaScript.