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.
"It provides a packaging system, separate from PyPI, which optimizes for self-contained packages, guarantees dependency enforcement, and provides built-in execution environment isolation."
Microsoft's Power Apps low-code development offering was among four market leaders identified in a new report from research firm Forrester.
Two members of Microsoft's Windows Forms dev team appeared in a Channel 9 video on "Supporting VB.NET" in .NET 5," a task that in some ways poses "a huge challenge."
Pylance is now the default language server for Python in Visual Studio Code, providing IntelliSense functionality as of the May 2021 release of the Python Extension for VS Code.
Technical careers specialist Dice published its Q1 2021 Tech Job Report that details the fastest-growing hubs, roles and skills.
"The Rust language projection follows in the tradition established by C++/WinRT of building language projections for Windows using standard languages and compilers, providing a natural and idiomatic way for Rust developers to call Windows APIs."
RemObjects has debuted the Mercury programming language, described as a modern Visual Basic "with a future" for all platforms.
The regular monthly update to Visual Studio Code (April 2021, v1.56) has a bunch of preview features that developers can try out, along with the usual raft of new functionality.
Technical recruiting firm Built In published a report on what developer tech that job candidates are looking for, finding that C# had the biggest year-over-year increase from 2019 to 2020.
As humanity descends into a suicidal climate-change death spiral (some might say), Microsoft-centric software development is increasingly adopting "green" practices such as lowering CO2 emissions in order to slow the roll.
Microsoft dev teams for Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) and Visual Studio Code have improved the developer experience in the super-popular, open source-based, cross-platform code editor.
The dotnet monitor tool that debuted as an experimental tool last year is now fully supported, helping developers access diagnostics information in a dotnet application.