A revamp of "hot reload" functionality headlines a bevy of improvements to Xamarin that were highlighted by Microsoft this week as it launched Visual Studio 2019 v16.8 and .NET 5 during the .NET Conf 2020 online developer event.
Along with .NET 5, Microsoft today shipped Visual Studio 2019 v16.8, which sees Git turned on by default as the version control experience in the latest update of the company's flagship IDE.
While it doesn't reflect the full vision of unification that Microsoft originally sought, the milestone .NET 5 release has arrived to consolidate many of the moving parts of the .NET ecosystem.
Google updated its Cloud Shell online development and operations environment that has been characterized as an alternative to GiHub Codespaces, which also provides cloud-hosted dev environments with a focus on Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code developers.
The October 2020 update to Visual Studio Code brings the open source, cross-platform code editor to version 1.51 as the dev team focused on "housekeeping" tasks, so it's light on exciting new features.
Python, surely the most important programming language to users of Visual Studio Code (except for perhaps C#), has for the first time passed Java to secure the No. 2 spot in the latest TIOBE Index ranking of popularity.
Syncfusion's latest update to its various third-party development controls and tools provides preview support for WinUI, Microsoft's UI framework for all Windows apps across both Win32 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP)
Uno Platform, an open source project that enables coding single-codebase, multi-platform web, mobile and desktop apps with .NET-centric technologies like C# and XAML, highlighted preview support for the development of Linux applications in a new version 3.1 update.
Microsoft shipped a new preview of its experimental project, Mobile Blazor Bindings, with a UI unification across the web and mobile/desktop spaces.
Microsoft is changing the model for Visual Studio extensions with the goal of making them easier to write, safer to use and more cloud-friendly.
The new Debugpy debugger for Python in Visual Studio Code hits version 1.0 in the latest update of the Python tooling for the open source, cross-platform code editor.
Kite, which provides a code completion tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI), has expanded the number of programming languages that it supports in IDEs and code editors like Visual Studio Code.
The open source project .NET for Apache Spark has debuted in version 1.0, finally vaulting the C# and F# programming languages into Big Data first-class citizenship.
Android is playing a little catch-up to iOS regarding in-app review functionality, just now coming to Microsoft's Xamarin.Forms implementation.
"The fact that C# lost three places in the ranking of language communities during the last three years is mostly explained by its slower growth compared to C/C++ and PHP."
Progress announced an update to its Telerik UI for Blazor components, targeting Microsoft's open source Blazor framework that lets C# coders create web apps without having to rely upon JavaScript.
Infragistics, specializing in third-party UI/UX controls and tools, unveiled a new offering targeting Blazor, Microsoft's red-hot open source framework that allows for C#-based web development instead of traditional mainstay JavaScript.
Leading cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services open sourced the it announced in July for helping users port old .NET Framework applications to the new .NET Core framework.
Uno Platform has ported the famed Windows Calculator, open sourced last year, to Linux as part of a continuing "proof point" effort to demonstrate the reach of what it describes as the sole UI offering available to target Windows, WebAssembly, iOS, macOS, Android and Linux with single-codebase applications coded in C# and XAML.
ASP.NET Core OData, which debuted in July 2018, is out in a v8.0 preview that for the first time supports the upcoming .NET 5 milestone release.