If you’re on Windows using Visual Studio, for the best experience we recommend installing the latest preview of Visual Studio 2019 16.4. Installing Visual Studio 2019 16.4 will also install .NET Core 3.1 Preview 2, so you don’t need to separately install it. For Blazor development with .NET Core 3.1, Visual Studio 2019 16.4 is required.
Alongside this .NET Core 3.1 Preview 2 release, we’ve also released a Blazor WebAssembly update. To install the latest Blazor WebAssembly template also run the following command:
dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::3.1.0-preview2.19528.8
Upgrade an existing project
To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core 3.1 Preview 1 project to 3.1 Preview 2:
Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 3.1.0-preview2.19528.8
That’s it! You should now be all set to use .NET Core 3.1 Preview 2!
New component tag helper
Using Razor components from views and pages is now more convenient with the new component tag helper.
Previously, rendering a component from a view or page involved using the RenderComponentAsync HTML helper.
@(await Html.RenderComponentAsync<Counter>(RenderMode.ServerPrerendered, new { IncrementAmount = 10 }))
The new component tag helper simplifies the syntax for rendering components from pages and views. Simply specify the type of the component you wish to render as well as the desired render mode. You can also specify component parameters using attributes prefixed with param-.
The different render modes allow you to control how the component is rendered:
RenderMode
Description
Static
Renders the component into static HTML.
Server
Renders a marker for a Blazor Server application. This doesn’t include any output from the component. When the user-agent starts, it uses this marker to bootstrap the Blazor app.
ServerPrerendered
Renders the component into static HTML and includes a marker for a Blazor Server app. When the user-agent starts, it uses this marker to bootstrap the Blazor app.
Prevent default actions for events in Blazor apps
You can now prevent the default action for events in Blazor apps using the new @oneventname:preventDefault directive attribute. For example, the following component displays a count in a text box that can be changed by pressing the “+” or “-” keys:
<p>Press "+" or "-" in change the count.</p>
<input value="@count" @onkeypress="@KeyHandler" @onkeypress:preventDefault /> @code { int count = 0; void KeyHandler(KeyboardEventArgs ev) { if (ev.Key == "+") { count++; } else if (ev.Key == "-") { count--; } }
}
The @onkeypress:preventDefault directive attribute prevents the default action of showing the text typed by the user in the text box. Specifying this attribute without a value is equivalent to @onkeypress:preventDefault="true". The value of the attribute can also be an expression: @onkeypress:preventDefault="shouldPreventDefault". You don’t have to define an event handler to prevent the default action; both features can be used independently.
Stop event propagation in Blazor apps
Use the new @oneventname:stopPropagation directive attribute to stop event propagation in Blazor apps.
In the following example, checking the checkbox prevents click events from the child div from propagating to the parent div:
When your Blazor app isn’t functioning properly during development, it’s important to get detailed error information so that you can troubleshoot and fix the issues. Blazor apps now display a gold bar at the bottom of the screen when an error occurs.
During development, in Blazor Server apps, the gold bar will direct you to the browser console where you can see the exception that has occurred.
In production, the gold bar notifies the user that something has gone wrong, and recommends the user to refresh the browser.
The UI for this error handling experience is part of the updated Blazor project templates so that it can be easily customized:
_Host.cshtml
An error has occurred. This application may no longer respond until reloaded. An unhandled exception has occurred. See browser dev tools for details. Reload?
Validation of nested models in Blazor forms
Blazor provides support for validating form input using data annotations with the built-in DataAnnotationsValidator. However, the DataAnnotationsValidator only validates top-level properties of the model bound to the form.
To validate the entire object graph of the bound model, try out the new ObjectGraphDataAnnotationsValidator available in the experimental Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.DataAnnotations.Validation package:
The Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.DataAnnotations.Validation is not slated to ship with .NET Core 3.1, but is provided as an experimental package to get early feedback.
Give feedback
We hope you enjoy the new features in this preview release of ASP.NET Core! Please let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 11-04-2019, 08:26 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
How autonomous systems use AI that learns from the world around it
Millions of engineers across industries such as automotive, aerospace, industrial machinery and medical devices have already built models of the systems they work on using MATLAB or Simulink. This new partnership allows users to bring simulation models built using MATLAB and Simulink to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, enabling unprecedented scalability and making it easier for developers and engineers building autonomous systems.
“Our core interest really comes down to engineering productivity — the ability to succeed at a task in the least amount of time possible,” said Loren Dean, MathWorks senior director of engineering for MATLAB products. “This partnership allows engineers to stay in a familiar workflow to learn and apply AI without having to do the things that are non-traditional for them, like setting up the infrastructure to run a bunch of simulations at once. They’re shielded from all that.”
By running hundreds or thousands of simulations in parallel in Azure and learning from massive amounts of data at once, deep reinforcement learning algorithms can find optimal solutions to chaotic, real-world control problems that other types of AI still struggle to solve.
It turns out these problems are everywhere, said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Business AI. Microsoft received three times more interest than it expected after opening its autonomous systems limited preview program in May.
The companies who have applied to work with Microsoft’s autonomous systems team and partners are looking to develop control systems to intelligently stitch fabric, optimize chemical engineering processes, manufacture durable consumer goods and even process food. The potential goes far beyond robotics or autonomous vehicles, Microsoft says.
“These are the kinds of diverse use cases for autonomous systems that we’re starting to see emerge,” Pall said. “As customers learn about the capabilities of our toolchain, we’re seeing them apply it in really interesting ways because these control problems exist almost everywhere you look.”
Most customer use cases Microsoft has seen so far involve helping existing employees do their jobs more efficiently, safely or with higher quality, said Mark Hammond, Microsoft general manager for Business AI and the former CEO of the startup Bonsai, which Microsoft acquired last year. As sensors in modern workplaces collect ever more data, it can become difficult for any one operator — such as someone who is guiding a drill bit or calibrating expensive equipment — to track it all. AI tools can process that data and bring the most relevant patterns to that operator’s attention, enabling them to make more informed decisions.
“The journey from automated to autonomous systems is a spectrum of solutions, and very few of the engagements we’re seeing are in that fully autonomous with no humans in the loop zone,” Hammond said. “The vast majority are assistive technologies that work with people.”
Training AI systems in virtual worlds
Traditionally, AI models have often relied on labor-intensive labeled data for training, which works well for many problems but not for those that lack real-world data. Now, Microsoft and partners like MathWorks are expanding the use of AI into more areas such as those that require learning from the three-dimensional physical world around them — through the power of reinforcement learning and simulation.
Engineers have long used simulations to mathematically model the systems they work with in the real world. This allows them to estimate how a particular change in a chemical, manufacturing or industrial process may affect performance, without having to worry about slowing production or putting people or equipment at risk.
Now, those same simulations can be used to train reinforcement learning algorithms to find optimal solutions, Dean said.
“The AI is really augmenting how these traditional systems have worked — it just gives you greater confidence in your design and gives you additional capabilities that either had to be done manually before or were difficult to solve,” Dean said.
Imagine a building engineer whose job is to calibrate all the heating and cooling systems in a large commercial building to keep each room at a comfortable temperature as people stream in and out for meetings and outside weather fluctuates — while using as little energy as possible. That could involve tuning dozens of different parameters and might take many cycles of modeling and measuring changes for that engineer to find the best balance of controls.
With the new Microsoft and MathWorks partnership, that engineering expert could use machine teaching tools to help an AI system focus on the most important dimensions of the problem, set safety limits and figure out how to reward success as the algorithms learn. This allows for greater transparency and trust in how the AI system is making decisions and also helps it work more efficiently than randomly exploring all possibilities.
The engineer could train the AI using models that he or she already developed in MATLAB or Simulink. The simulations can be automatically scaled up in the Azure cloud — which means the engineer doesn’t have to worry about learning how to host and manage computing clusters.
The end result is the building engineer uses AI to zero in on promising solutions much faster — but still uses his or her judgment to decide what works best.
“This partnership really marries the best of MathWorks’ capabilities for modeling and simulation with the best of Microsoft’s capabilities for cloud computing and AI,” Microsoft’s Hammond said.
If you ever attach to a WiFi system outside your home or office, you often see a portal page. This page may ask you to accept terms of service or some other agreement to get access. But what happens when you can’t connect through this kind of portal? This article shows you how to use NetworkManager on Fedora to deal with some failure cases so you can still access the internet.
How captive portals work
Captive portals are web pages offered when a new device is connected to a network. When the user first accesses the Internet, the portal captures all web page requests and redirects them to a single portal page.
The page then asks the user to take some action, typically agreeing to a usage policy. Once the user agrees, they may authenticate to a RADIUS or other type of authentication system. In simple terms, the captive portal registers and authorizes a device based on the device’s MAC address and end user acceptance of terms. (The MAC address is a hardware-based value attached to any network interface, like a WiFi chip or card.)
Sometimes a device doesn’t load the captive portal to authenticate and authorize the device to use the location’s WiFi access. Examples of this situation include mobile devices and gaming consoles (Switch, Playstation, etc.). They usually won’t launch a captive portal page when connecting to the Internet. You may see this situation when connecting to hotel or public WiFi access points.
You can use NetworkManager on Fedora to resolve these issues, though. Fedora will let you temporarily clone the connecting device’s MAC address and authenticate to the captive portal on the device’s behalf. You’ll need the MAC address of the device you want to connect. Typically this is printed somewhere on the device and labeled. It’s a six-byte hexadecimal value, so it might look like 4A:1A:4C:B0:38:1F. You can also usually find it through the device’s built-in menus.
Cloning with NetworkManager
First, open nm-connection-editor, or open the WiFI settings via the Settings applet. You can then use NetworkManager to clone as follows:
For Ethernet – Select the connected Ethernet connection. Then select the Ethernet tab. Note or copy the current MAC address. Enter the MAC address of the console or other device in the Cloned MAC address field.
For WiFi – Select the WiFi profile name. Then select the WiFi tab. Note or copy the current MAC address. Enter the MAC address of the console or other device in the Cloned MAC address field.
Bringing up the desired device
Once the Fedora system connects with the Ethernet or WiFi profile, the cloned MAC address is used to request an IP address, and the captive portal loads. Enter the credentials needed and/or select the user agreement. The MAC address will then get authorized.
Now, disconnect the WiFi or Ethernet profile, and change the Fedora system’s MAC address back to its original value. Then boot up the console or other device. The device should now be able to access the Internet, because its network interface has been authorized via your Fedora system.
The Overwatch 2 Leak Was Extremely Demoralising For The Development Team
Like many other Blizzcon announcements this weekend, the Overwatch 2 one was leaked ahead of the opening ceremony.
In a follow-up interview with Kotaku Australia, Overwatch lead designer Jeff Kaplan expressed how leaks can be “extremely demoralising” for developers and explained how lack of context can often result in worst-case scenario concerns:
When you’re trying so hard to deliver something for somebody and to have it be spoiled in a way that’s not coherent. That’s the part that bothers us the most, where people are not given all the information and all of the context that they need to understand what we’re doing.
When the Overwatch 2 leaks started to happen, immediate worries raised by the community were in regards to progression and cosmetics carrying across – along with how a sequel could potentially divide the game’s playerbase.
Kaplan also noted how the artists working on the PvE focused entry were “heartbroken” when leakers began uploading low-quality screenshots:
Our artists are heartbroken: They take such care to make the art look beautiful, and then we get some crappy version of what the art looks like … and then people are like, ‘I don’t know it doesn’t look that good’ and we’re like, no it does, it looks amazing! It’s just a crappy screenshot that someone took, so it can be a bit demoralising.
Be sure to check out yesterday’s announcement post, officially confirming Overwatch 2 for the Nintendo Switch.
What are your thoughts about leaks? Tell us in the comments.
Feature: Nintendo Life eShop Selects – October 2019
With Halloween now safely out of the way, we’ve somehow stumbled right into November – seriously, where does the time go? The good news is, however, that the end of the month means it’s time to dig out the ol’ Nintendo Life eShop Select Awards!
These awards aim to celebrate the best of Nintendo’s digital store, giving some love and attention to the games that could so easily be missed in the Switch’s ever-growing library.
So, let’s get started! Here are the best Switch eShop games of October 2019!
Honourable Mentions:
While these titles didn’t quite make our top three this month, they’re still certainly worth checking out.
Publisher: 3909 / Developer: 3909
Release Date: 18th Oct 2019 (USA) / 18th Oct 2019 (UK/EU)
Taking third place this month is Return of the Obra Dinn, which actually walked away with an incredibly strong 9/10 from us just over a week ago. This is a beautifully crafted detective mystery which we described as being “unlike anything you’ve played before”. It’s captivating, and while discovering its secrets can take time and patience, the overall experience is absolutely worth it. Definitely one to consider if you like what you see in our review.
Publisher: Game Freak / Developer: Game Freak
Release Date: 16th Oct 2019 (USA) / 16th Oct 2019 (UK/EU)
In second place is Game Freak’s latest – not counting those upcoming games from that other series you might have heard of – RPG, Little Town Hero. While not scoring as highly in our review, the game still managed to charm enough of our team to earn this place thanks to its refreshing, small-scale take on the RPG formula and its imagination, even if it does have several flaws, too. Not an essential purchase, then, but one to think about if you love RPGs and are as strapped for time as we apparently are!
Release Date: 3rd Oct 2019 (USA) / 3rd Oct 2019 (UK/EU)
Maybe it’s because we can all relate to awkward taxi rides, or maybe it’s because cyberpunk is all the rage right now, but taking our top spot this month is Neo Cab. We gave it an 8/10 in our review, praising it for its genuinely meaningful conversations and gripping visual novel-style gameplay. It’s one of those games that we wouldn’t necessarily have imagined being glued to, but after our first few pick-ups as a new cab driver, we were instantly hooked. Try it for yourself – we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.
How we decide our eShop Selects top three: As we reach the end of every month, the Nintendo Life staff vote on their favourite titles from a list of games selected by the editorial team. To qualify for this list, these games must have been released primarily as a digital Nintendo Switch eShop title in that particular month, and must have been reviewed on Nintendo Life; we select the qualifying games based on their review scores.
Staff are then asked to vote for three games that they think deserve to sit right at the very top of that list; first choice gets 3 points, second choice gets 2 points, and third choice gets 1 point. These votes are then tallied to create a top three list, with the overall winner taking that month’s top prize.
Terminator: Dark Fate Flops At Box Office, Could Lose $100 Million
The new Terminator movie, Dark Fate, opened in theatres this weekend--and it came up short. The action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Mackenzie Davis, made only $29 million at the US box office. That makes it a flop, given the film reportedly cost close to $200 million to produce, according to Deadline. Variety reports that the movie cost $185 million to make, with up to $100 million more in marketing costs.
The site said a $29 million opening for the movie--which was directed by Deadpool's Tim Miller--is a "terrible result" and just the latest struggle for the Terminator franchise. 2015's Terminator: Genisys, which ultimately grossed just $90 million domestically, made only $27 million for its opening weekend in the US.
The Terminator movies are made by film companies Paramount and Skydance, and Dark Fate is just their latest poorly performing movie. Their previous release, the Will Smith-starring Gemini Man, also bombed at the box office and is predicted to lose money.
Dark Fate was No. 1 at the US box office this weekend, but its $29 million opening was the lowest No. 1 first-weekend result for any movie since 2013's Ender's Game ($27 million).
Dark Fate was financed mainly by three companies--Paramount, Skydance, and Disney (via Fox). Each company put in 30 percent, with China's Tencent adding the rest. Variety reported that Dark Fate could end up losing $100 million at the box office, though those losses could be mitigated through deals for TV and streaming, along with rentals and other sources.
Dark Fate picked up decent review scores from critics, while the movie received a very solid B+ rating on CinemaScore (which measures audience reaction). If Paramount was trying to reinvigorate the series with a younger audience, that didn't really work. The movie's domestic box office was made up of only 25 percent of people in the 18-24 age bracket.
Behind the scenes, Dark Fate ran into problems as well. James Cameron, who wrote and directed the first Terminator movie and remains attached to the series as a producer, told CinemaBlend that there were "many" disagreements during the editing process.
"The blood is still being scrubbed off the walls from those creative battles. This is a film that was forged in fire," he recalled.
According to Cameron, Miller--the director--wanted more control over the direction of the film. "Tim wanted to make it his movie. And I'm like, 'Yeah, but I kind of know a little about this world.' So I had the matter and the anti-matter version of that producorial experience," he said.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 11-04-2019, 09:27 AM - Forum: Lounge
- No Replies
Microsoft Shares Sneak Peek At Its Black Friday 2019 Deals
Black Friday isn't until the end of the month, but that hasn't stopped multiple stores from giving sneak peeks at their upcoming discounts. Microsoft is next out of the gate for Black Friday, revealing the kind of deals we can expect on that fated day of sales.
Microsoft's Black Friday sneak peek details plenty of deals on its Surface devices--Pro, Laptop, Book, and Go--in addition to gaming laptops, monitors, and headphones. The sneak peek is light on Xbox One deals, but there are still a few. Discounts on Xbox One controllers, headsets, and hard drives are advertisted, in addition to 50% off Sea of Thieves: Anniversary Edition. All Xbox One deals will kick off on November 24, and thankfully, there is still more to be revealed.
More Xbox One Black Friday deals will be announced at the company's X019 event in London. For those at home, the Inside Xbox livestream kicks off at 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET on November 14. You can watch on Mixer, Twitch, or YouTube, but if you can't watch at that time, then don't worry: we'll report back on all the deals that get revealed.
We've collected some of the best upcoming deals and laid them out below, but be sure to head over to Microsoft.com to see the full list of offerings. Note that some of the exact sale prices haven't been revealed yet, but we've listed the discounts as shown on Microsoft's deals page and will update with exact pricing when available.
TexGraph is a free procedural texture generation tool that runs on the Windows platform. TexGraph is described as follows:
TexGraph is a procedural texture creation tool that let you create textures by connecting nodes in a graph. It is designed to be similar to other tools in the market but at the same time be very simple and easy to use and extent by users.
If you are a shader programmer you can create your own nodes or edit the existing ones. Check the github page https://github.com/galloscript/TexGraph-Public and the Programming Custom Nodes section of the user manual for more information.
TexGraph is available for download on Itch.io here. While not open source, TexGraph is very easy to customize. New nodes are simply GLSL scripts, while new models and HDR maps can easily be added to the project.
You can learn more about TexGraph and see it in action in the video below. Another similar tool to TexGraph is the Godot based Material Maker project that you can learn more about here.
Bad North has a comically understated name and ‘tastefully’ understated gameplay to match. It manages to be as interesting as possible while remaining extremely simple, or rather, clear-cut. Moving ever eastward, the player sends groups of nordic soldiers to islands to escape an encroaching hoard. As they move along, rewards will bulk up the makeshift army with reinforcements, equipment and veterancy upgrades.
This is a short campaign with roguelike elements and it strikes a nice balance between duration and progression. The real-time-with-pause control scheme is brisk yet effortless, and the replayability is fair. While not entirely novel, the game is extremely refined and well-balanced. It’s a real keeper with staying power.
Buyer buyer:this review’s stout recommendation only goes into effect once they squash some truly vile bugs in the current version.
As a style philosophy, minimalism means maximum engagement; nothing comes between the individual and the pure experience. Bad North is minimal because it presents itself as directly to the player as possible, with little extra narration or theme, simple readable graphics and design. More than anything, the combat is easy to navigate and understand. Waves of invaders land on the shores and move to raze the buildings and their inhabitants.
Your forces play defense, scuttling from space to space to slay the invaders before this happens. Each island is procedurally generated, with a unique mixture of terrain, enemy composition and potential rewards. Your rag-tag band of soldiers will be built up provisionally; roguelikes are about assembly and flexibility as much as hardcore strategy.
To spice things up, there are archers, pikemen and swordsmen as unit classes, and a smattering of active abilities. Each has its place, both in the heat of battle and also as part of a larger campaign strategy. Archers excel at range, pikemen from a stationary position, and swordsmen as jack-of-all-trades. The enemies come in analogous forms, as well as some beefy mini-boss types and meatshields. What you see is what you get: no real numbers or stats obscure combat, so watching the action become the primary source of intel and feedback. It’s liberating.
The game also scales incredibly smoothly. It has three difficulty settings initially, along with an unlockable Very Hard setting for the masochists. Additionally, the challenge of the islands ramps up at such a goldilocks pace, throwing out perks and curveballs with equal measure. A given island will only take a few minutes to clear, but these pebbles build up to a mountain of a campaign. It makes me nostalgic for the bygone era of well-made Flash games you could play on the web.
Bad North has that same sense of flow as FTL or Binding of Isaac, with the nagging urge to just push things a little further. Stretching forces thin when island-hopping gets more loot, because commanders must recharge after a fight. Once a fifth commander joins, or one gets a jug letting it fight every turn without pause, the player can try to snap up smaller islands on off-turns by deliberately using a smaller fighting force. The encroaching fleet only advances when the player pauses to let their troops, recharge, see, so you can effectively move twice with a little luck. Suffice to say there are edge cases where the player can take on extra risks for a little boost.
90% of this game’s fun factor come from the attention paid to its balance and pacing. The gameplay is good but, let’s be honest, hardly groundbreaking. All these disparate elements combine to offer a game that is decently challenging but feels breezy. Casual, even. The hard modes just means turning up the heat; changing the difficulty through degree and not by introducing new mechanics. It makes the acceptable margins of performance narrower, demanding the same skill set turned up to eleven. ‘Harder’ just means utilizing better technique, not really finding creative solutions.
The game is direct to a fault. The movement and terrain are easy to assess at a glance, and if anything they are too forgiving. Still, theirs is a subtle influence. The travel time and pathing sometimes create chokepoints which archers can exploit. If the troops are too close to a landing party they get stunned by the boat’s impact. The Archer’s range is contingent on elevation, so a high perch means unilateral firing power. Larger houses heal troops to full health faster. These small flourishes of mechanics are all the game has to offer. All this is just to say that micromanaging the units second-by-second is pretty much mandatory beyond a certain point.
Now for the caveat emptor. This is a very buggy release, at least by my reckoning. There are fairly common reports of unfixable crashes and fail states which ruin runs part of the way through. It appears to be something where the system gets stuck on a particular island generation and just cannot load it. Oh, and I witnessed some broken textures. Because the most common bug often makes the game unplayable past a certain point, everyone needs to wait until they patch this sucker out. I finished a campaign in around three hours but also had to abandon some.
Bad North is a gorgeous and chill game. Strangely enough for a game about the bleak, inhospitable north, it would make a perfect game paired with a leisurely vacation somewhere indolent and sunny. The matches are short and the campaign is only medium-length. It taxes the fingers more than the gray matter, honestly. It wears its influences smartly, and polishes more than it innovates, but is still an engaging and thoughtful experience. Unfortunately the buggy release state and slight repetitiveness of additional runs mean that Bad North has gone south. Visit it again before the Solstice and I do believe it will be excellent once more.
Editor’s Note: In Michael’s notes, he mentioned that this game would score a 3/5 with bugs, 4/5 without bugs. Since all indications point to Raw Fury hard at work on fixing these issues and it not being totally wide spread (I didn’t encounter them on Android, for example), I’ve gone with the higher score on the assumption that these issues won’t be for much longer.
