Shenmue I & II is Now Available on Steam!

SEGA®’s most requested re-release of all time finally comes to a new generation. Shenmue delivers an epic story of revenge within a unique open world that is still unrivalled in depth and detail. Return to the epic saga that defined modern gaming. The saga begins…again.

“I have the benefit of working for a lot of different indie devs, so I notice patterns that a developer who’s only putting out their one game wouldn’t seeAU.”

– Emily Morganti speaking to Kotaku about key scammers trying to take advantage of independent developers.

Before a game is launched, it’s likely that a strange email address requesting a free copy for review purposes will show up in the inbox of an unsuspecting indie dev.

Key scammers utilize this method constantly, and it’s no secret that it’s an issue within the industry. 

In a recent interview with Kotaku, Emily Morganti, who handles PR for adventure games, discusses how key scammers continue to be a problem for indie devs trying to market their titles without being conned.

Morganti explains the subtleties that lie in every odd request, which takes the form of misleading email addresses and copy that seems off.  

“Some of these people email about every game that comes out, using the same copy-and-paste email. Some people do a blanket request for multiple games on the same day—so multiple developers are getting the exact same email about how excited someone is to stream their game,” she explains.

“There was one guy a few years ago with a long sob story about how he’d lost his job and had a big tax bill to pay and couldn’t afford games but a free copy of [insert game name here] would make his life complete.”

Despite sharing a few similarities, every scammer works differently when it comes to execution. The last notable scammer Morganti encountered made waves, as he reached out to many devs for free codes.

Going by the name Dmitry Tseptsov, he sent several emails to Morganti asking for codes, explaining that he operated a coffee shop in Ukraine where he’d give out video games as prizes for trivia. Unsurprisingly, the request turned out to be a ploy for free codes despite the cafe being a legitimate business. 

Morganti admits that its becoming difficult to parse which review requests are honest and which ones are malicious. She recalls an instance where an editor for a publication reached out for a code the same time a scammer (who was impersonating the editor) did as well.

“I heard from the editor first and added him to my list for a review copy, and then I heard from the scammer on the day we got keys, and I sent it to him thinking it was the same person,” she says. “A few days after that, the real editor emailed me to ask where his key was, and we pieced it together.”

“I’ve been doing PR since 2006 and always had a policy of sending a key to anyone who asked for one, no matter how small the site, but I’m a lot more suspicious now,” Morganti continues.

“The work involved in vetting people to figure out if they’re legit or not isn’t worth the effort and I think writers from smaller sites and freelancers are paying the price.”

She was speaking as part of a longer discussion around scammers trying to take advantage of independent developers and how it affects smaller contet creators, so be sure to read the entire piece over at Kotaku.

Cosmoscope, the studio behind Switch newcomer Morphies Law, has submitted a patch to Nintendo in order to fix some of the issues experienced by early players.

If you missed the news, Morphies Law recently ‘did a Fortnite‘, surprising everyone by launching on the system without any real warning; the game was shown off during the 2018 Indies Showcase, and was available on the console just hours later.

The premise is incredibly creative, and the game offers up an interesting twist on the shooter genre with its changing body mass mechanic. Players have noticed some frustrating issues early on, however – a fact that we confirmed in our review.

If you’ve been playing the game and faced the odd issue or two, here are the full patch notes currently under review by Nintendo. Assuming it’s approved, these changes should soon be implemented to improve the game’s performance:

– Changed online settings to enforce geographical proximity – this should alleviate the lag while we continue working on setting up dedicated servers, please let us know your feedback.
– Fixed spawn protection – now you’ll be invincible for 5 seconds or until you leave your base.
– Fixed gunshot sounds looping infinitely sometimes on death.
– Fixed loud sounds that would sometimes play before the map intro.
– Fixed XP gains for private games – it is now 75% of the regular online XP instead of 25%.
– Increased the daily cap on XP and Nuts that can be gained from offline/private/local games to 5000XP and 500Nuts.
– Fixed bug in Tanker Town where exiting tunnels at certain inclinations would sometimes kill you.
– Fixed the recharge time of weapon part “Sonic Punch” – it is no longer spammable.
– Disabled the ability to “unready” in private/LAN matches to avoid potential 5v3 scenarios.

Did you grab a copy of the game on day one? How have you found the experience? Let us know how you’ve been getting on in the comments below.

Phantom Doctrine is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

The year is 1983. The world teeters on the verge of destruction as the Cold War tightens its icy grip. East or West: trust no one, question everything. The fate of humanity rests in your hands as you pit spy versus spy in tactical Phantom Doctrine.

*Offer ends August 21 at 10AM Pacific Time

1.13.1 is now available! It improves performance and fixes a bunch of bugs that made their way into 1.13. There’s also a few changes in this update that are listed below.

A full changelog for this release can be found on Minecraft.net.

CHANGES

• Performance optimizations
• Added dead coral
• Fish now have a 5% chance of dropping bonemeal when killed
• Squids now only spawn in rivers and oceans
• Added a concept of force-loaded chunks to the game, and a command (/forceload) to toggle force-loading on and off

BUGS FIXED IN 1.13.1

• MC-73 – Green arrow bug on maps in frames
• MC-1357 – Logged out players appear on maps
• MC-1489 – Dismounting a horse with a fence on the player’s right leaves the player on the wrong side of the fence
• MC-1528 – Maps in item frames’ markers aren’t persistent
• MC-3715 – Beds and the /teleport command
• MC-3927 – Iron golems spawning in slabs, glass, farmland and grass path
• MC-4488 – Mobs don’t drop cooked meat if last damage is from fire, lava or fire charge
• MC-31681 – Fog and clouds darken when indoors or under trees (<16 Chunk Render Distance)
• MC-33383 – Lag while taking screenshot with F2 in singleplayer
• MC-51150 – Swimming in water, riding a minecart or standing on soul sand and snow layers 8 darkens the sky at day time
• MC-59517 – TNT explode=true blockstate drops TNT item when fused by hit in survival mode
• MC-67780 – Standing on/flying above a block placed at y:255 makes sky dark
• MC-73361 – Exiting a minecart / boat can put the player outside the border
• MC-74764 – Particle “largeexplode”, “hugeexplosion” and “sweepattack” not showing when using the front view (twice F5)
• MC-75465 – Vignette effect’s visibility is not being updated according to light level when GUI is hidden
• MC-76615 – Lightning bolt summoned by /summon is offset +0.5x and +0.5z
• MC-76649 – Thrown item in hand and as entity
• MC-78963 – Command completion fails with multiple possibilities and other arguments set
• MC-79697 – Entities don’t render properly when next to invisible spider, charged creeper, or wither boss with armor
• MC-80041 – Signs with long text freeze the game
• MC-81237 – stat.damageTaken fails to increment when player has absorption.
• MC-84005 – Book and quill doesn’t save changes when edited in offhand
• MC-86943 – Cooldown overlay is solid white on item stacks > 1
• MC-88099 – Slimes/magma cube with NoAI-Tag still can damage the player
• MC-88230 – When feeding a tamed horse or llama with a golden apple/carrot or hay bale, the cursor moves to the right
• MC-88356 – Bow animation broken in off-hand in third person
• MC-90842 – Sweep attack knocks back marker armor stands
• MC-96998 – End Cities / Woodland Mansions don’t generate completely when interrupting generation
• MC-98796 – Armor loses durability when blocking damage with shield
• MC-105512 – Cracks appear inside dragon head instead of outside
• MC-108592 – Witches do not despawn correctly if they have a potion effect
• MC-109311 – Woodland mansion failed to generate
• MC-112533 – Dispenser can equip shield for armor stand without arms
• MC-112801 – Players on the death screen still cause spawners to spawn.
• MC-114074 – Some non-full cube blocks don’t cull the faces of the same block next to them
• MC-114218 – Dispensers and droppers don’t offset smoke particles when facing up or down
• MC-114246 – Item in offhand of armor stand with arms cannot be taken back
• MC-118258 – Spelling mistakes in the ‘Commandblock chain tried to execure more than x steps!’ warning message
• MC-119607 – Llamas, unlike horses, can be kept feeding hay bales even if in love mode
• MC-119856 – Slime blocks missing cullface argument
• MC-119971 – Various duplications, deletions, and data corruption at chunk boundaries, caused by loading outdated chunks — includes duping and deletion of entities/mobs, items in hoppers, and blocks moved by pistons, among other problems
• MC-120664 – Tool durability is off-by-one
• MC-120780 – Chunk data packets are sometimes created unnecessarily
• MC-121369 – Holding ESC while clicking “Multiplayer” returns user to main menu
• MC-122563 – Disappearance of the old “punchable” TNT
• MC-122614 – Strange tab completion coloring
• MC-122625 – Order of contents of north- and east-facing double chests changed after update 1.12.2 -> 1.13
• MC-122939 – Statistics for mining banners and beds never increase
• MC-123021 – Crash on open if “Saves” is a link
• MC-123586 – Debug pie chart uses locale specific number formatting
• MC-123806 – Tab-completion/command suggestions only work for the final argument
• MC-123880 – Clientbound play packet 0x0C (Boss Bar) using same byte for different booleans
• MC-124054 – Tab-suggestions don’t disappear when moving cursor
• MC-124543 – JSON-Text formatting in CustomNames of container blocks does not work
• MC-124583 – Cannot place structure void block next to another when right clicking on one
• MC-124681 – Tab suggestion erroneously suggests second closing square bracket on entity selectors
• MC-124690 – Successful “/bossbar set players” doesn’t give success message in chat
• MC-124808 – Blocks don’t pop off when their support blocks are moved by pistons
• MC-124917 – Selector suggestions do not disappear after adding the closing bracket
• MC-124942 – “Invalid book tag” is not translatable
• MC-125134 – Server crashes while generating new chunks – java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: We are asking a region for a chunk out of bound
• MC-125286 – Block state suggester does not include ‘=’ for first key
• MC-125337 – When the double-held trident throws, players will lift both hands
• MC-128547 – Minecraft keeps previously used World in memory if the player has hit any entity in that world
• MC-129754 – Putting down lava freezes everything and then crashes the game when quitting
• MC-130258 – Maps in item frames show shading problems
• MC-130724 – stat.damageDealt does not record damage to absorption health
• MC-131029 – Villager door detection range has changed
• MC-131346 – It’s possible to place buckets of water, lava or fish in adventure mode
• MC-131397 – Sponges cannot remove water from conduits
• MC-131462 – Coordinate math error causes structure not to generate and possibly other issues
• MC-131678 – Setblock property – block and setblock property – value are reversed in error messages
• MC-131868 – Concrete powder next to waterlogged blocks is not converted to concrete
• MC-132061 – Contents of creative menu change when resizing window
• MC-132063 – Stone item appears when resizing window
• MC-132451 – Command Parser – invalid value for block property and property name are reversed in error message
• MC-132457 – Advancement and dimension command suggestions require minecraft namespace
• MC-132496 – Passive Mob Spawning Breaks 1.9+
• MC-132663 – Command blocks kick player when entering certain commands > 256 characters in multiplayer
• MC-132664 – Obfuscated text uses same random character each frame for each input character
• MC-132703 – Iron golems do not spawn in center of village
• MC-132762 – Observed signal strength observer abnormality
• MC-132769 – Detecting a 2 redstone tick repeater with an observer block creates a 2 redstone tick pulse
• MC-132789 – Unexpected piston behavior when chaining repeaters
• MC-132806 – You cannot grant/revoke specific advancement criteria because of a colon in its name
• MC-132870 – Weird lag with large amounts of entities in 1.13 compared to 1.12.2
• MC-132898 – Multiple layers of falling gravity blocks break
• MC-133098 – Loading a world with a corrupted stats file crashes the game
• MC-133127 – Drowned from ocean ruins never spawn with a trident/nautilus shell/fishing rod
• MC-133154 – Placing a slab to stop the water flow doesn’t remove the water
• MC-133158 – Underwater waterlogged blocks still produce water dripping particles
• MC-133181 – Observer Cooldown is broken
• MC-133251 – Curse enchantments don’t use red text
• MC-133260 – Obfuscated text characterset limited to simple ASCII
• MC-133273 – Normal Pistons also spit out theire blocks with a short signal
• MC-133294 – Map Markers blacked out
• MC-133345 – Some bolded obfuscated characters causes text to jitter
• MC-133425 – Missing Glyphs for ‘［’ (U+FF3B) and ‘（’ (U+FF08)
• MC-133452 – Copying, pasting, etc. still insert “c”, “v”, etc.
• MC-133453 – Players can’t stand in “walk-through” blocks after swimming
• MC-133546 – Player becomes “ghost” when dying in the nether or going through the end portal back to the overworld
• MC-133587 – Deleting server format error
• MC-133713 – /spreadplayers and /worldborder <center> suggests X/Y instead of X/Z when nothing is typed
• MC-133715 – Thrown tridents cannot be picked up after dying
• MC-133804 – Coral fans are waterloggable, but coral itself is force-waterlogged
• MC-133839 – Crash when tp/at world border
• MC-133842 – Crash when getting kicked while in Inventory
• MC-133871 – Waterlogged trapdoors do not update properly when opened
• MC-133894 – drowned dont drop items that they picked up as zombie then were converted
• MC-133905 – Large oak trees generate without making block under stump dirt
• MC-133942 – 1.13 Release is called a snapshot when backing up world
• MC-133959 – Credits don’t appear when clicking “Copyright Mojang AB” in the title screen.
• MC-133986 – Non [a-z0-9/._-] character in path of location: minecraft:EntityHorse
• MC-133995 – Transferring world from 1.12.2 to 1.13 isn’t working
• MC-134105 – Cant return from the end after defeating dragon
• MC-134115 – Containers next to chunk borders can lose items when upgrading
• MC-134159 – Saved world causes crash in 1.13
• MC-134166 – Villager door detection order has changed
• MC-134273 – Player Markers on Map after disconnect
• MC-134274 – Map Markers for players holding a different Map
• MC-134297 – Observers detect moved blocks late in 1.13
• MC-134298 – Observers don’t detect retracting sticky pistons
• MC-134300 – Inconsistency with update order when pistons retract other pistons
• MC-134348 – Crash while upgrading: bkv{block=Block{minecraft:acacia_slab}, properties=[type, waterlogged]} has no property: half
• MC-134392 – Spawers will spawn dolphins inside of solid blocks
• MC-134402 – Statistic for cleaning shulker boxes is missing
• MC-134414 – Concrete powder falling onto sea grass just replaces it
• MC-134468 – Map cloning recipe only yields 2 maps
• MC-134555 – Sticky piston does not update gravity blocks
• MC-134570 – Door top half missing when updating to new version
• MC-134587 – Using F3 + T several times will eventually freeze iMac
• MC-134667 – Async Chunk Gen dangerously adding entities to world async
• MC-134668 – Over synchronization in ThreadedAnvilChunkStorage impacts performance
• MC-134702 – Fish spawned from buckets count towards the aquatic mob cap
• MC-134716 – Minecraft Multiplayer – Player kick exploit
• MC-134777 – Bone meal on kelp doesn’t do anything, but still wastes it
• MC-134889 – Iron golems spawn in air blocks
• MC-134903 – Mobs can break turtle eggs by standing on them when gamerule mobGriefing is false
• MC-134916 – Sound event block.pumpkin.carve doesn’t play when carving normal pumpkins
• MC-135049 – Old world doesn’t save map markers in 1.13
• MC-135079 – Purpur stairs and slabs cannot be crafted using purpur pillars
• MC-135126 – Bone meal on underwater grass blocks doesn’t spawn sea grass
• MC-135261 – /setblock for player heads don’t show the texture after the placement
• MC-135468 – Mooshroom disappears when sheared
• MC-135484 – Pressing Q + right click a block while holding a double block only shows the top of the block
• MC-135816 – Trident does not return uppon reload of world
• MC-135857 – Beacon effect icon doesn’t have a blue edge if it overwrites a potion effect
• MC-135878 – Maps delete recently marked banners upon reopening world
• MC-135893 – Upgrading from 1.12.2 to a newer version will cause trapped chests placed in 1.12.2 & earlier to stop triggering redstone through the floor
• MC-136023 – Phantoms attack players in spectator
• MC-136031 – Dispenser (up/down facing) attempting to summon wither crashes the server
• MC-136157 – Explosion radius increased
• MC-136208 – Scute is not affected by doMobLoot
• MC-136226 – Mobs require 2 blocks of air to spawn at all times now

Minecraft will automatically update to the latest version on open, just click “Play”!

The ubiquitous topic of edge computing has so far primarily focused on IoT and machine learning. A new Linux Foundation project called Akraino Edge Stack intends to standardize similar concepts for use on edge telecom and networking systems in addition to IoT gateways. The goal to build an “open source software stack that supports high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications,” says the project.

“The Akraino Edge Stack project is focused on anything related to the edge, including both telco and enterprise use cases,” said Akraino evangelist Kandan Kathirvel, Director of Cloud Strategy & Architecture at AT&T, in an interview with Linux.com.

The project announced it has “moved from formation into execution,” and revealed a slate of new members including Arm, Dell, Juniper, and Qualcomm. New member Ericsson is joining AT&T Labs to host the first developer conference on Aug. 23-24.

Akraino Edge Stack was announced in February based on code contributions from AT&T for carrier-scale edge computing. In March, Intel announced it was joining the project and open sourcing parts of its Wind River Titanium Cloud and Network Edge Virtualization SDK for the emerging Akraino stack. Intel was joined by a dozen, mostly China-based members including China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Docker, Huawei, Tencent, and ZTE.

The Akraino Edge Stack project has now announced broader based support with new members Arm, Dell EMC, Ericsson, inwinSTACK, Juniper Networks, Nokia, Qualcomm, Radisys, Red Hat, and Wind River. The project says it has begun to develop “blueprints that will consist of validated hardware and software configurations against defined use case and performance specifications.” The initial blueprints and seed code will be opened to the public at the end of the week following the Akraino Edge Stack Developer Summit at AT&T Labs in Middletown, New Jersey.

The project announced a lightweight governance framework with a Technical Steering Committee (TSC), composed of “active committers within the community.” There is “no prerequisite of financial contribution,” says the project.

Edge computing meets edge networking

Like most edge computing projects and products, such as AWS Greengrass, the Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry, and Google’s upcoming Cloud IoT Edge, the technology aims to bring cloud technologies and analytics to smaller-scale computers that sit closer to the edge of the network. The goal is to reduce the latency of cloud/device interactions, while also reducing costly bandwidth delivery and improving reliability via a distributed network.

Akraino will offer blueprints for IoT, but it is more focused more on bringing edge services to telecom and networking systems such as cellular base stations, smaller networking servers, customer premises equipment, and virtualized central offices (VCOs). The project will supply standardized blueprints for implementing virtual network functions (VNFs) in these systems for applications ranging from threat detection to augmented reality to specialized services required to interconnect cars and drones. Virtualization avoids the cost and complexity of integrating specialized hardware with edge networking systems.

“One key difference from other communities is that we offer blueprints,” said AT&T’s Kathirvel. “Blueprints are declarative configurations of everything including the hardware, software, operational and security tools, security tools — everything you need to run production in large scale.”

When asked for further clarification between Akraino’s stack and the EdgeX Foundry’s middleware for industrial IoT, Kathirvel said that EdgeX is more focused on the intricacies of IIoT gateway/sensor communications whereas Akraino has a broader focus and is more concerned with cloud connections.

“Akraino Edge Stack is not limited to IoT — we’re bringing everything together in respect to the edge,” said Kathirvel. “It’s complementary with EdgeX Foundry in that you could take EdgeX code and create a blueprint and maintain that within the Akraino Edge Stack as an end to end stack. In addition, the community is working on additional use cases to support different classes of edge hardware.”

Meeting new demands for sub-20ms latency

Initially, Akraino Edge Stack use cases will be “focused on provider deployment,” said Kathirvel, referring to telecom applications. These will include emerging, 5G-enabled applications such as “AR/VR and connected cars” in which sub 20 millisecond or lower latency is required.  In addition, edge computing can reduce the extent to which network bandwidth must be boosted to accommodate demanding multimedia-rich and cloud-intensive end-user applications.

Akraino Edge Stack borrows virtualization and container technologies from open source networking projects such as OpenStack. The goal is to create a common API stack for deploying applications using VNFs running within containers. A VNF is a software-based implementation of the networked virtual machines implemented via closely related NFV (network functions virtualization) initiatives.

In a May 23 presentation (YouTube video) at the OpenStack Summit Vancouver, Kathirvel and fellow Akraino contributor Melissa Evers-Hood of Intel, listed several other projects and technologies that the stack will accommodate with blueprints, including Ceph (distributed cloud storage), Kata Containers, Kubernetes, and the Intel/Wind River backed StarlingX for open cloud infrastructure. Aside from EdgeX and OpenStack, other Linux Foundation hosted projects on the list include DANOS (Disaggregated Network Operating System) and the LF’s new Acumos AI project for developing a federated platform to manage and share models for AI and machine learning.

Akraino aligns closely with OpenStack edge computing initiatives, as well as the Linux Foundation’s ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform). ONAP, which was founded in Feb. 2017 from the merger of the earlier ECOMP and OPEN-O projects, is developing a framework for real-time, policy-driven software automation of VNFs.

Join us at Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, UK on October 22-24, 2018, for 100+ sessions on Linux, Cloud, Containers, AI, Community, and more.

Is your research timeless? It’s time to put disposable research behind us

“We need to ship soon. How quickly can you get us user feedback?”

What user researcher hasn’t heard a question like that? We implement new tools and leaner processes, but try as we might, we inevitably meet the terminal velocity of our user research — the point at which it cannot be completed any faster while still maintaining its rigor and validity.

And, you know what? That’s okay! While the need for speed is valuable in some contexts, we also realize that if an insight we uncover is only useful in one place and at one time, it becomes disposable. Our goal should never be disposable research. We want timeless research.

Speed has its place

Now, don’t get me wrong. I get it. I live in this world, too. First to market, first to patent, first to copyright obviously requires an awareness of speed. Speed of delivery can also be the actual mechanism by which you get rapid feedback from customers.

I recently participated in a Global ResOps workshop. One thing I heard loud and clear was the struggle for our discipline to connect into design and engineering cycles. There were questions about how to address the “unreasonable expectations” of what we can do in short time frames. I also heard that researchers struggle with long and slow timelines: Anyone ever had a brilliant, generative insight ignored because “We can’t put that into the product for another 6 months”?

The good news is that there are methodologies such as “Lean” and “Agile” that can help us. Our goal as researchers is to use knowledge to develop customer-focused solutions. I personally love that these methodologies, when implemented fully, incorporate customers as core constituents in collaborative and iterative development processes.

In fact, my team has created an entire usability and experimentation engine using “Lean” and “Agile” methods. However, this team recognizes that letting speed dictate user research is a huge risk. If you cut corners on quality, customer involvement, and adaptive planning, your research could become disposable.

Do research right, or don’t do it at all

I know, that’s a bold statement. But here’s why: When time constraints force us to drop the rigor and process that incorporates customer feedback, the user research you conduct loses its validity and ultimately its value.

The data we gather out of exercises that over-index on speed are decontextualized and disconnected from other relevant insights we’ve collected over time and across studies. We need to pause and question whether this one-off research adds real value and contributes to an organization’s growing understanding of customers when we know it may skip steps critical to identifying insights that transcend time and context.

User research that takes time to get right has value beyond the moment for which it was intended. I’m betting you sometimes forgo conducting research if you think your stakeholders believe it’s too slow. But, if your research uncovered an insight after v1 shipped, you could still leverage that insight on v1+x.

For example, think of the last time a product team asked you, “We’re shipping v1 next week. Can you figure out if our customers want or need this?” As a researcher, you know you need more time to answer this question in a valid way. So, do you skip this research? No. Do you rush through your research, compromising its rigor? No. You investigate anyway and apply your learnings to v2.

To help keep track of these insights, we should build systems that capture our knowledge and enable us to resurface it across development cycles and projects. Imagine this: “Hey Judy, remember that thing we learned 6 months ago? Research just reminded me that it is applicable in our next launch!”

That’s what we’re looking for: timeless user insights that help our product teams again and again and contribute to a curated body of knowledge about our customers’ needs, beliefs, and behaviors. Ideally, we house these insights in databases, so they can be accessed and retrieved easily by anyone for future use (but that’s another story for another time). If we only focus on speed, we lose sight of that goal.

Creating timeless research

Here’s my point: we’ll always have to deal with requests to make our research faster, but once you or your user research team has achieved terminal velocity with any given method, stop trying to speed it up. Instead, focus on capturing each insight, leveling it up to organizational knowledge, and applying that learning in the future. Yes, that means when an important insight doesn’t make v1, go ahead and bring it back up to apply to v2. Timeless research is really about building long-term organizational knowledge and curating what you’ve already learned.

Disposable research is the stuff you throw away, after you ship. To be truly lean, get rid of that wasteful process. Instead, focus your research team’s time on making connections between past insights, then reusing and remixing them in new contexts. That way, you’re consistently providing timeless research that overcomes the need for speed.

Have you ever felt pressure to bypass good research for the sake of speed? Tell me about it in the comments, or tweet @insightsmunko.

The Command Line Interface (CLI) is now available for Microsoft Library Manager (LibMan) and can be downloaded via NuGet. Look for Microsoft.Web.LibraryManager.Cli
The LibMan CLI is cross-platform, so you’ll be able to use it anywhere that .NET Core is supported (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Install the LibMan CLI

To install LibMan, type:

> dotnet tool install --global Microsoft.Web.LibraryManager.Cli

Once the LibMan CLI is installed, you can start using LibMan from the root of your web project (or any folder).

Using LibMan from the Command Line

When using LibMan CLI, begin commands with “libman” then follow with the action you wish to invoke.
For example, to install all files from the latest version of jquery, type:

> libman install jquery

Follow the prompts to select the provider and destination. Type the values you want, or press [Enter] to accept the defaults.

The install operation creates a libman.json file in the current directory if one does not already exist, then adds the new library configuration. It then downloads the files and places them in the destination folder. See the example below.

To learn more about the LibMan CLI, refer to the LibMan CLI documentation on the Library Manager Wiki.

Happy coding!

Justin Clareburt, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio

Justin Clareburt is the Web Tools PM on the Visual Studio team. He has over 20 years of Software Engineering experience and brings to the team his expert knowledge of IDEs and a passion for creating the ultimate development experience.

Follow Justin on Twitter @justcla78