News

Forms, WPF and UI Go Open Source  
Wednesday 05 December

.NET used to be one of the biggest things in town and then Microsoft decided to go in other directions with WinRT. Part of the .NET system was WPF, arguably the most advanced GUI framework ever. Now the unbelievable has happened - it has been open sourced along with Windows Forms and Windows UX. 

DataGrip Adds Cassandra Support  
Wednesday 05 December

Support for Cassandra has been added to DataGrip, JetBrain's IDE for databases and SQL. The 2018.3 release also improves PostgreSQL support, and the ability to generate SQL for selected objects. 

Why Mozilla Matters  
Wednesday 05 December

Mozilla revenue rose by over $40 million USD in 2017 which sounds good until you notice that its expenses went up by over $80 million. Why, you might ask, are we covering financial results?It's because Mozilla is unique and Mozilla remaining financially secure is in all our interests.

Microsoft To Go Chromium - Who Needs A Browser?   Tuesday 04 December

Microsoft hasn't confirmed this rumor, but it seems reasonable and contemplating it throws interesting light on the current browser landscape. Who needs Edge? Not even Microsoft! 

Amazon Releases Corretto - OpenJDK Distribution  
Tuesday 04 December

Amazon has released a preview of Corretto, a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. The announcement was made soon after Amazon promised to continue long-term support for the OpenJDK 8 and 11 runtimes in Amazon Linux. Amazon plans to make Corretto the default OpenJDK on Amazon Linux in 2019. 

Go 2 Details Revealed  
Monday 03 December

Details are emerging of what the next version of the Go language will look like, along with concrete information on which of the future changes are going to make it into the next incremental release. 

OpenCV 4.0 Says Goodbye To C  
Monday 03 December

If you want to do computer vision and don't want to spend years developing the code from scratch, you probably need OpenCV. After a wait of nearly 4 years, OpenCV 4.0 has arrived. 

Insane Linux Kernel Patches Resulting From Code Of Conduct   Sunday 02 December

A misguided attempt to remove swearwords from comments embedded in Linux kernel code has itself been greeted with a torrent of comment.  It has to be noted that most of the discussion on the Linux mailing list is remarkably moderate in tone and  comes to an acceptable conclusion. 

Amazon's DeepRacer - Careful What You Wish For  
Saturday 01 December

This sounds wonderful. If only it was going to be available to order in time for the holiday season.  However, it might cost you a lot more than the $400 price tag suggests. Reinforcement racing anyone? 

TypeScript 3.2 Gets Stricter Checking  
Friday 30 November

There's a new version of TypeScript that has tightened up type-checking for methods on functions, and added a way to handle spreads of existing objects into new objects.

Dart 2.1 Is Smaller And Faster  
Friday 30 November

Google has updated Dart with a new version, 2.1, that has smaller code size, has faster tools, and offers faster type checks. 

Machine Learning At All Levels On Coursera  
Thursday 29 November

Andrew Ng's inaugural presentation of an introductory course on machine learning will begin on Coursera early in 2019. Meanwhile the courses he teaches at intermediate to advanced level have just re-started for their final presentation for 2018.  

RedisGraph Reaches General Availability  
Thursday 29 November

RedisGraph is now generally available, adding a fast graph database to the Redis line-up. RedisGraph is based on linear algebra and matrix multiplication to perform fast calculations. 

The Core

Fundamental C - Dependent v Independent & Undefined Behavior   Monday 03 December

Lots has been written about undefined behavior in C, but not much about the reasons why it exists. This extract is from C for the IoT: Low-Level C Programming (to be published January 2019 by Harry Fairhead, provides a very helpful explanation. 

Javascript Jems - Active Logic, Truthy and Falsey  
Thursday 29 November

JavaScript takes an interesting view of logic, the way that it is implemented and what sorts of use you can put it to. Instead of just thinking about And and Or as logic tables you can think of them as variations on the procedural if..then..else.  So if you don't know about the active approach to logic - read on. Ian Elliot is the author of Just JavaScript: An Idiomatic Approach and this article is extracted from his new book due to be published in 2019.