InfoQ Homepage News
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MailKit Officially Replaces .NET’s SmtpClient
For the second time, Microsoft has officially marked a .NET class as being replaced by an open source library. The documentation for SmtpClient now reads, “Obsolete("SmtpClient and its network of types are poorly designed, we strongly recommend you use MailKit and MimeKit instead")”.
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Amazon Adds Cross Region and Encrypted Replication Support for Aurora
In a recent blog post, Amazon announced updates to its MySQL-compatible Database Engine, Aurora. In this update, Amazon is including support for cross region snapshot copy, cross region replication for encrypted databases, cross account encrypted snapshot sharing, adding a region where Aurora can be provisioned and a new instance size called T2.Small.
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Visual Studio 2017 Update Focuses on Stability
The redesigned installer and setup engine featured in Visual Studio 2017 allows Microsoft to more rapidly deploy fixes to their flagship development software. The first named update to the recently released tool has just been deployed, and brings with it the standalone version of Visual Studio Team Explorer.
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Improving Work Life with Organizational Hacks
Visualize everything, pair up, open Friday, and no training budget; these are some of the "work hacks" that have improved work life at Sipgate, a telephone provider using Scrum.
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Atlassian Opens up Team Health Monitors and Team Playbook Blueprints
After introducing a tool-agnostic version of its Team Health Monitors at Summit 2016, Atlassian now also bundles Team Playbook blueprints with the recently released Confluence Server 6.1. A Health Monitor workshop is a team self-assessment aiming to identify pain points and formulate a plan to address weak spots by running low-ceremony "plays" that "can help improve a team's overall health".
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Apple TestFlight Now Supports A/B Testing of iOS Apps
With its recent update to TestFlight, Apple has introduced a number of features, such as multiple builds and enhanced groups, that make it possible to do A/B testing for iOS apps.
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Azure Service Fabric SDK Becomes Open Source
Microsoft recently announced it opened the source code of its Azure Service Fabric SDK. Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform to package, deploy, and manage and microservices. The SDK exposes Service Fabric APIs to integrate .NET applications in the Service Fabric platform.
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.NET Futures: Type Classes and Extensions
Another feature being considered for future versions of .NET are type classes. Referred to as “shapes” in the Shapes and Extensions proposal, they would greatly increase the capabilities of .NET generics.
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New Language Features in Visual Basic 15
Visual Basic 15 brings with it partial implementations of two important C# features: tuples and ref returns. Neither feature is “complete”, but they do offer enough work-arounds that VB applications can consume C# libraries that make use of these features.
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Doing Safe-to-Fail Experiments
Safe-to-fail experiments can be used in complex environments to probe, sense, and respond. You have to know what success and failure look like and need to be able to dampen or amplify the effect of probing to handle potential failures. Safe-to-fail experiments can help you to deal with risks and uncertainty, learn, and keep your options open.
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Google Announces Cloud Machine Learning API Updates
Google recently announced the Cloud Machine Learning API updates at the Google Cloud Next Conference. This includes a set of APIs in the areas of vision, video intelligence, speech, natural language, translation and job search.
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.NET Futures: Multiple Inheritance
A controversial new proposal for .NET suggests the introduction of a limited form of multiple inheritance via abstract interfaces. This feature was inspired by Java’s default methods.
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How Google Uses Espresso to Connect to the Public Internet
At the Open Networking Summit, Google engineers highlighted the capabilities of their Software Defined Networking (SDN) strategy, including the peering edge architecture named Espresso. Espresso is the fourth pillar of Google's SDN strategy and focuses on optimizing the performance and availability of peering connections with major Internet Service Providers around the globe.
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Microsoft Adds Application Insights Support for Azure Functions
Microsoft recently announced an initial preview of Application Insights support for Azure Functions. As a result of this integration between the two services, developers now get built-in instrumentation for their code and a portal to view trends in their code’s performance. Developers are also able to set monitoring thresholds which can be used to create alerts or a callout to external webhooks.
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Intel Launch Optane SSD
Intel recently launched their 3D XPoint non-volatile memory (NVM) under the brand name of Optane. The SSD label in some of the branding might imply that it’s a different type of durable storage, but the technology is aimed at applications that would normally use RAM. This marks the beginning of the end of the compromise between in memory and persistent.