Vasara Collection, the upcoming shoot ’em up bundle featuring both Vasara and Vasara 2, will soon be available to pre-order. It’ll be ready very soon in fact, with orders scheduled to go live this Saturday.

A limited physical run, and an even more limited Collector’s Edition, will be available to purchase exclusively from Strictly Limited Games. The standard release will cost 29.99€ and will be limited to 2,500 copies, while the Collector’s Edition will cost €49.99 and will be limited to just 1,500 copies. The contents of the Collectors Edition are expected to be revealed tomorrow, 25th July.

Strictly Limited Games notes that the product should ship between August and September; the game still hasn’t received an official digital release date, so we expect that both the physical and digital releases will launch around that time.

Excited to play these Japanese arcade titles on your Switch? Let us know if you plan to pick up a physical copy with a comment below.

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The upside artificial intelligence (AI) opportunity is undeniable for every health ecosystem stakeholder. You can feel the anticipation. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 70% of healthcare provider CIOs will cite advanced analytics as their top priority. By now, nearly every senior leader is evangelizing the value of a comprehensive, enterprise-wide AI strategy to accelerate their digital transformation.

It feels like AI is on the verge of going mainstream with 50% reporting AI as a top strategic priority to improve performance and cost effectiveness, yet only 4% of CIOs in their survey consider it a top priority for funding.  So what exactly are these AI leaders doing that is substantially different and putting them ahead of the pack?

Foundation first

A recent HIMSS Media Report pinpoints what these AI leaders are doing to create a culture of innovation.  In short, AI leaders start their AI journey by first building an AI foundation of innovation readiness and processes. To become “innovation ready”, Chief Data Officers will tell you that a critical piece of AI work is the groundwork for data preparation. It’s hard to imagine building a house without first preparing the foundation, and most organizations start construction on their AI house before doing the foundational data preparation work needed for AI to succeed.

Preparing data to be AI-ready involves more than just correcting errors, duplicates, or reformatting. Data needs to be extracted, organized, and labeled in ways that allow machine learning tools to generate the kind of enterprise-grade AI models that can drive transformative business or clinical process change.

Microsoft is reducing the time, cost, and complexity of laying your AI foundation

Very few health organizations are equipped with the tools, skills, and resources they need to do the data preparation groundwork that AI needs to succeed. That’s why Microsoft chose to host HL7® FHIR® DevDays 2019 in the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, WA earlier in June.  HL7 FHIR, or Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, is an open interoperability standard that can extract and organize siloed data from disparate sources (20 or more databases for many organizations) into AI-ready data sets.  Collaborating with HL7 and industry experts, we hosted over 100 hands-on tutorials and hackathons, as well as keynotes to upskill our customers and partners to be able to install their AI foundation. We also joined top interoperability and AI experts from around the world to find ways to further improve the HL7 FHIR standard.

Beyond preparing data for AI, health systems also need a simple and safe way to protect, control, and track access to protected health data at scale. Open cloud platforms coupled with new AI dev tools are making it easier for developers to create innovative applications and to collaborate in powerful ways at scale.  At Microsoft, we share the same commitment and challenges to deliver better care so we we’re taking the same approach with healthcare development to help improve operational outcomes. For example, we first developed our Azure API for FHIR®as an open source project, and we’re doing the same with our recent FHIR® R4 and our SQL persistence provider projects.

We are also growing our open source healthcare team at Microsoft Healthcare with a focus on high-impact approaches to health data interoperability, working with stakeholders across the ecosystem of hospitals, care providers, insurers, electronic health record system developers. With an open source project backed by an in-house engineering team, the gang has been able to add features at an impressive rate.

Get started on your AI foundation

Check out AI Business School for a leadership crash course on AI strategy, culture, and responsibility.

FHIR® is the registered trademark of HL7 and is used with the permission of HL7 

Ken

We just shipped 1.1.0 Preview 1 of Azure SignalR Service SDK to support some new features in ASP.NET Core 3.0, including endpoint routing and server-side Blazor. Let’s take a look how you can use them in your Azure SignalR application.

Here is the list of what’s new in this release:

• Endpoint routing support for ASP.NET Core 3
• Use SignalR service in server-side Blazor apps
• Server stickiness

Endpoint routing support for ASP.NET Core 3

For those who are using Azure SignalR, you should be familiar with AddAzureSignalR() and UseAzureSignalR(). These two methods are required if you want to switch your app server from self-hosted SignalR to use Azure SignalR.

A typical Azure SignalR application usually looks like this in Startup.cs (note where AddAzureSignalR() and UseAzureSignalR() are used):

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)

{ ... services.AddSignalR() .AddAzureSignalR(); ...

} public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)

{ ... app.UseAzureSignalR(routes => { routes.MapHub<Chat>("/chat"); }); ...

}

ASP.NET Core 3.0 introduced a new endpoint routing support which allows routable things like MVC and SignalR to be mixed together in a unified UseEndpoints() interface.

For example, you can call MapGet() and MapHub() in a single UseEndpoints() call, like this:

app.UseEndpoints(routes =>

{ routes.MapGet("/foo", async context => { await context.Response.WriteAsync("bar"); }); routes.MapHub<Chat>("/chat");

});

This new syntax is also supported in the latest Azure SignalR SDK so you don’t need to use a separate UseAzureSignalR() to map hubs.

Now your Azure SignalR application looks like this:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)

{ ... services.AddSignalR() .AddAzureSignalR(); ...

} public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)

{ ... app.UseRouting(); app.UseEndpoints(routes => { routes.MapHub<Chat>("/chat"); }); ...

}

The only change you need to make is to call AddAzureSignalR() after AddSignalR().

This will be very useful in the case that SignalR is deeply integrated in your code base or the library you’re using. For example, when you’re using server-side Blazor.

Use SignalR service in server-side Blazor apps

Server-side Blazor is a new way to build interactive client-side web UI in ASP.NET Core 3. In server-side Blazor, UI updates are rendered at server side, then sent to browser through a SignalR connection. Since it uses SignalR, there is a natural need to use Azure SignalR service to handle the SignalR traffic so your application can easily scale.

If you look at some server-side Blazor code samples, you’ll see they have a call to MapBlazorHub() to setup the communication channel between client and server.

app.UseEndpoints(endpoints =>

{ ... endpoints.MapBlazorHub(); ...

});

The implementation of this method calls MapHub() to create a SignalR hub at server side. Before this release there is no way to change the implementation of MapBlazorHub() to use SignalR service. Now if you call AddAzureSignalR(), MapBlazorHub() will also use SignalR service to host the hub instead of hosting it on the server.

Please follow these steps to change your server-side Blazor app to use SignalR service:

1. Open your Startup.cs, add services.AddSignalR().AddAzureSignalR() in ConfigureServices().
2. Create a new SignalR service instance.
3. Get connection string and set it to environment variable Azure:SignalR:ConnectionString.

Then run your app you’ll see the WebSocket connection is going through SignalR service.

Check out this repo for a complete code sample.

Server stickiness

The typical connection flow when using SignalR service is that client first negotiates with app server to get the url of SignalR service, then service routes client to app server.

When you have multiple app servers, there is no guarantee that two servers (the one who does negotiation and the one who gets the hub invocation) will be the same one.

We hear a lot of customers asking about whether it’s possible to make the two servers the same one so they can share some states between negotiation and hub invocation. In this release we have added a new “server sticky mode” to support this scenario.

To enable this, you just need to set ServerStickyMode to Required in AddAzureSignalR():

services.AddSignalR().AddAzureSignalR(options => { options.ServerStickyMode = ServerStickyMode.Required;

});

Now for any connection, SignalR service will guarantee negotiation and hub invocation go to the same app server (called “server sticky”).

This feature is very useful when you have client state information maintained locally on the app server. For example, when using server-side Blazor, UI state is maintained at server side so you want all client requests go to the same server including the SignalR connection. So you need to set server sticky mode to Required when using server-side Blazor together with SignalR service.

Please note in this mode, there may be additional cost for the service to route connection to the right app server. So there may be some negative impact in message latency. If you don’t want the performance penalty, there is another Preferred mode you can use. In this mode stickiness is not always guaranteed (only when there is no additional cost to do the routing). But you can still gain some performance benefits as message delivery is more efficient if sender and receiver are on the same app server. Also when sticky mode is enabled, service won’t balance connections between app servers (by default SignalR service balances the traffic by routing to a server with least connections). So we recommend to set sticky mode to Disabled (this is also the default value) and only enable it when there is a need.

You can refer to this doc for more details about server sticky mode.

Ken Chen

Principal Software Engineering Manager

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By Joe Robinson 15 Jul 2019

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As Xbox Insiders, your feedback helps inform the decisions and updates we make on Xbox, from new features to how gamers interact with the console itself. Based on your valuable feedback, we’ve been continuing to iterate on two key experiences on Xbox, delivering you a faster Home experience and evolving the way we support Xbox voice commands to improve the voice experience.

Evolving Home

The Home on Xbox One is the first thing you see when you turn on your Xbox One, and we want to deliver an easy and seamless experience for you to navigate your console. We’ve heard your feedback and have continued to iterate on Home to get you into your gaming experiences faster and keeping more of your content front and center. With today’s update, we’re experimenting with a streamlined user interface.

With this new experimental Home design, the first thing you’ll notice is we’ve removed the Twists from the top of Home in favor of separate buttons that launch your gaming experiences. The goal is to let you jump into Xbox Game Pass, Mixer, Xbox Community and Microsoft Store quicker than ever. We’ve also shifted things around to make more room for your recently played titles.

We need your help testing out the new interface. The new experimental Home rolls out this week to select Xbox Insiders in our Alpha and Alpha Skip Ahead rings. For more details on rollout, keep an eye on the Xbox Insiders section of Xbox Wire. The Home experience will continue to evolve and change based on your feedback, so please let us know what you think and share your ideas for Home at the Xbox Ideas Hub. You may see this layout change and even come and go as we iterate on your feedback.

Changes to voice commands on Xbox One

Last fall, we expanded Xbox voice commands to hundreds of millions of smart devices by enabling Xbox One to connect with Xbox Skill for Cortana and Alexa-enabled devices. Xbox Skill continues to grow and change based on your feedback, including new updates that rolled out earlier this month.

Building on these efforts, we are now further evolving the way we support voice commands on Xbox and are moving away from on-console experiences to cloud-based assistant experiences. This means you can no longer talk to Cortana via your headset. However, you can use the Xbox Skill for Cortana via the Cortana app on iOS, Android, and Windows or via Harmon Kardon Invoke speaker to power your Xbox One, adjust volume, launch games and apps, capture screenshots, and more —just as you can do with Alexa-enabled devices today. We’ll also continue to improve the Xbox Skill across supported digital assistants and continue expanding our Xbox voice capabilities in the future based on fan feedback.

Starting this week, this update will roll out to our Alpha Skip Ahead ring and will fully rollout to all users this fall.  As part of these changes, this update will temporarily disable dictation for the virtual keyboard on Xbox One. Don’t worry though, our team is working to provide an alternative solution and will have more details to share soon.

As always, your feedback is important to us and our partners as we continue to evolve the Xbox One Home and shape the digital assistant and voice command experience on Xbox. We have some exciting updates in the works and can’t wait to share what’s next, so stay tuned for more.

By Roger Fingas
Wednesday, July 17, 2019, 08:20 pm PT (11:20 pm ET)

A showcase title for the Apple TV, thatgamecompany’s “Sky: Children of the Light” — also available for iPhones and iPads — is now finally in wide release, including the U.S.

Players become one of the game’s namesake children, exploring seven realms as they work to solve puzzles and return fallen stars to their constellations. Later expansions will include new realms and seasonal events.

The title is highly focused on its social aspects, the idea being that people will run into each other in the world and team up for exploration, saving spirits, and finding treasure. Players can customize their characters, gift each other candles, and even create music.

The game is free to play, but does offer a range of in-app purchases ranging from $0.99 to $49.99, such as bundles and season passes.

“Sky” first premiered during Apple’s September 2017 press event, when it was used to demonstrate the power of the Apple TV 4K. It arrived in the Philippines in December that year as “Sky: Light Awaits,” but then saw its rollout slow to a crawl. In June 2019, thatgamecompany announced July 11 as a global launch date —a last-minute delay pushed the timing to July 18. The app is out in the U.S. despite it being the 17th as of this writing.

iPhone and iPad owners must be running iOS 9 or later. Apple TV users must have a device with tvOS.