– Added Beta support for Vulkan on macOS (requires installing Vulkan DLC). Vulkan for macOS DLC provides improved performance and reduced stutters on macOS 10.13+ with a Metal-capable GPU. Vulkan support on macOS still in beta, please file any issues at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Dota-2-Vulkan

It’s finally time for the Update Aquatic pre-release!

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

• New Update Aquatic title screen
• Three brand new pieces of music by C418
• You can now tab-complete in command blocks again
• Fixed bugs!

FIXED BUGS IN 1.13-PRE1

• MC-122134 – Tab-completion in command blocks no longer works
• MC-122940 – After executing the /reload command, clicking on recipe book recipes does not work
• MC-124123 – Crash upon loading world: Non [a-z0-9/._-] character in path of location: minecraft:Zombie
• MC-124972 – Game crashes during the loading world, when creating a superflat world with oceanmonument tag
• MC-127142 – Failed to create block entity DUMMY (path of location: minecraft:DUMMY)
• MC-129625 – Sea grass changes to air pockets when upgrading from 18w16a to 18w20a+
• MC-130463 – Sponges do not absorb bubble columns
• MC-130521 – Leaves placed by hand disappear if not touching log or bark after a reload

To get pre-releases, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Pre-releases can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.13 is shaping up in the comments below!

June 20, 2018

Crowne Plaza Nanjing Jiangning

Jiangning

china 32 2111100

China

The Xen Developer and Design Summit brings together the Xen Project’s community of developers and power users for their annual conference. The conference is about sharing ideas and the latest developments, sharing experience, planning, collaboration and above all to have fun and to meet the community that defines the Xen Project.

Click Here!

COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

Here’s a set of new and interesting projects in COPR.

Ghostwriter

Ghostwriter is a text editor for Markdown format with a minimal interface. It provides a preview of the document in HTML and syntax highlighting for Markdown. It offers the option to highlight only the paragraph or sentence currently being written. In addition, Ghostwriter can export documents to several formats, including PDF and HTML. Finally, it has the so-called “Hemingway” mode, in which erasing is disabled, forcing the user to write now and edit later.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Ghostwriter for Fedora 26, 27, 28, and Rawhide, and EPEL 7. To install Ghostwriter, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable scx/ghostwriter sudo dnf install ghostwriter

Lector

Lector is a simple ebook reader application. Lector supports most common ebook formats, such as EPUB, MOBI, and AZW, as well as comic book archives CBZ and CBR. It’s easy to setup — just specify the directory containing your ebooks. You can browse books in Lector’s library using either a table or book covers. Among Lector’s features are bookmarks, user-defined tags, and a built-in dictionary.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Lector for Fedora 26, 27, 28, and Rawhide. To install Lector, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable bugzy/lector sudo dnf install lector

Ranger

Ranger is a text-based file manager with Vim key bindings. It displays the directory structure in three columns. The left one shows the parent directory, the middle the contents of the current directory, and the right a preview of the selected file or directory. In the case of text files, Ranger shows actual contents of the file as a preview.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Ranger for Fedora 27, 28, and Rawhide. To install Ranger, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable fszymanski/ranger sudo dnf install ranger

PrestoPalette

PrestoPalette is a tool that helps create balanced color palettes. A nice feature of PrestoPalette is the ability to use lighting to affect both lightness and saturation of the palette. You can export created palettes either as PNG or JSON.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides PrestoPalette for Fedora 26, 27, 28, and Rawhide, and EPEL 7. To install PrestoPalette, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable dagostinelli/prestopalette sudo dnf install prestopalette

I recently learned about FRRouting (FFR), an IP routing protocol suite for Linux and Unix platforms. FRR has been under rapid development since the first release in April 2017. So, they just turned one, and they recently released version 4.0 of the software. According to the website, this release brings various enhancements aimed at creating the best routing protocol stack available.

How did I not know about all this? Doubtless due to a personal defect. In any case, the contributors designed FRR to streamline the routing protocol stack. FRR can be used for connecting hosts, virtual machines, and containers to the network, for network switching and routing, and much more. Here’s what I learned about the excellent FRRouting project and how it came to be.

FRR has its roots in the Quagga project, which I covered here. In fact, it started as a fork by some long-time Quagga developers who combined their efforts to improve on that project’s well-established foundation.

Why Fork?

Anyone can fork an open source project, which can be either an advantage or a disadvantage. A fork can double the workload, divide the contributor community, or make two “meh” projects instead of one great one. It can create hard feelings. Or, a fork can succeed, by reviving a moribund project and bringing new energy and enthusiasm. It can also rescue a code base from the clutches of a bad commercial steward. Forking a project is rarely done on a whim because it’s a such a big step.

Examples of successful forks include Ubuntu, forked from Debian (although arguments rage over whether it is really a fork or some other weird thing nobody can think of a word for), the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice, and my favorite, the MariaDB fork of MySQL.

MariaDB is the all-time great “having your cake and eating it” story. The short version is Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for a cool billion dollars and hired the talent that built it. But the MySQL executive team, including Monty Widenius and Marten Mickos, were publicly unhappy with Sun. They left Sun, taking their billion dollars with them. Then Oracle bought Sun, which motivated Widenius to fork MySQL and found MariaDB, which has been a clear success. (A longer version is here: Migrating to MariaDB from MySQL.)

Why Fork Quagga?

Quagga was created as a fork of the GNU Zebra project, which had died. So, FRR is a fork of a fork. I asked on the FRR developer’s mailing list about this and received a wealth of interesting answers. (You can read the whole thread on the dev list archive.)

Here’s what people said:

“There was a desire for a project that was governed by community consensus and documented process.”

“I find the FRR community very welcoming, very friendly, extremely helpful and respectful. It is very rare I come across communities like this and it is a real pleasure to engage in conversation and work on issues with them. If one needs a few eyes on a bit of code all you have to do is ask and you get constructive input, almost all of the time from multiple people.”

“The easy and pleasant direct access to the developers is a great bonus.”

Community-driven development

There was a point in time where Quagga was running on a skeleton crew, and thousands of patches were backed up from a variety of contributors, sitting, aging, and going nowhere. Thus, working through the backlog and creating a fast-paced, community-oriented project governed by consensus and documented process are some of the primary FRR drivers. A lot of the work on FRR is devoted to implementing new protocols and features, including cloud networking technologies.

Governance

Governance is also a necessary part of any OSS project, and it can make or break a project. FRRouting managed this by joining the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation, which is home to many important projects including the Node.js Foundation, Let’s Encrypt, and of course the Linux kernel.

FRRouting has a six-member technical steering committee, and members are elected to one-year terms. Maintainers have regular open meetings, and there is an official charter. This governing structure helps the project handle the numerous issues that any large, complex, and essential software project has to deal with, such as development direction and priorities, differences of opinion, licensing, finances, and so on.

Getting and Using FRR

FRR is hosted on GitHub. You may clone the repository, download source tarballs, or download .deb and .rpm packages. The documentation is quite good, and there is detailed information on becoming a contributor. The FRR user guide also provides a great overview of the architecture.
Visit FRRouting to learn more about the project. Also check out FRRouting on Juniper’s Advanced Forwarding Interface for an interesting example of where FRR is already finding a home in advanced networking architectures.

Today, we announced an agreement to acquire GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform. I want to share what this acquisition will mean for our industry and for developers.

The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us. Computing is becoming embedded in the world, with every part of our daily life and work and every aspect of our society and economy being transformed by digital technology.

Developers are the builders of this new era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home.

As every industry – from precision medicine to precision agriculture, from personalized education to personalized banking – is being impacted by technology, the developer community will only grow in numbers and importance. Developer workflows will drive and influence business processes and functions across the organization – from marketing, sales and service, to IT and HR. And value creation and growth across every industry will increasingly be determined by the choices developers make.

In short, developers will be at the center of solving the world’s most pressing challenges. However, the real power comes when every developer can create together, collaborate, share code and build on each other’s work. In all walks of life, we see the power of communities, and this is true for software development and developers.

That is why we are so excited about today’s announcement. More than 28 million developers already collaborate on GitHub, and it is home to more than 85 million code repositories used by people in nearly every country. From the largest corporations to the smallest startups, GitHub is the destination for developers to learn, share and work together to create software. It’s a destination for Microsoft too. We are the most active organization on GitHub, with more than 2 million “commits,” or updates, made to projects.

Microsoft has been a developer-focused company from the very first product we created to the platforms and tools we offer today. Building technology so that others can build technology is core to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Chris Wanstrath (left), Github CEO and co-founder; Nat Friedman, Microsoft corporate vice president, Developer Services; Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO; and Amy Hood, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer.

Microsoft is also committed to empowering communities, from the world’s professionals to IT professionals to gamers. We believe in the power of communities to achieve much more than what their members can do on their own. It’s our ability to work together that helps our dreams become reality, and we are dedicated to cultivating and growing communities to do just that.

And Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.

Given all of this, together with GitHub, we see three clear opportunities ahead.

First, we will empower developers at every stage of the development lifecycle – from ideation to collaboration to deployment to the cloud. Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.

Second, we will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services.

Finally, we will bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.

Most importantly, we recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement. We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform. We will always listen to developer feedback and invest in both fundamentals and new capabilities.

Once the acquisition closes later this year, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, an open source veteran and founder of Xamarin, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott. You can see how Chris, Nat and I envision the opportunity ahead in this public presentation.

Together we will continue to advance GitHub as a platform loved by developers and trusted by organizations.

Tags: Chris Wanstrath, developers, GitHub, Nat Friedman, Satya Nadella

WWDC

By Andrew O’Hara
Monday, June 04, 2018, 08:23 am PT (11:23 am ET)

Instead of relying on QR or barcodes at WWDC 2018 this year, Apple is using NFC with Face ID or Touch ID authentication of the pass in the user’s Wallet.

In years past, attendees would all get a physical pass with barcodes, designed to be worn at all times. The past several years those physical badges relied on NFC for entry, but this is the first time that the Wallet pass has used the same technology for access control.

When an attendee goes to redeem their wallet pass for their badge, the pass appears on the lock screen. Following the pop-up, it will then have the user authenticate the pass with Face ID or Touch ID, in the same fashion as a Apple Pay transaction.

Using NFC for passes isn’t entirely new, but it is rare. Apple does allow passes and loyalty information to support NFC, but few have adopted the process.

This also seems similar to using NFC to make your way into a hotel room, a feature rumored to arrive with iOS 12. It has been suggested that Apple will open up NFC access for additional functionality including accessing hotels, offices, and more.

Apple has been slow to evolve its NFC policies since adopting the technology nearly four years ago, but the company has made moves to expand its limited feature set over the past year.

This isn’t Apple’s first adoption of the technology, though. In 2017, Apple released watchOS 4 with GymKit, a platform that enables a two-way sync of data between an Apple Watch and a stationary workout machine. The authentication and pairing process is conducted via NFC.

The launch of iOS 11 brought Core NFC, a framework that lets developers tap into iPhone’s onboard NFC chip to scan NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) data tags. So far, only a few companies have taken advantage of Core NFC, one of the first being glucose reader manufacturer Abbott.

Stay abreast of Apple’s announcements by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos from the event.

Can’t watch Apple’s livestream of the keynote? AppleInsider has you covered with a live blog covering all the announcements.

Provider pattern was introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 and it gives the developers the flexibility of where to store the state of ASP.NET features (e.g. Session State, Membership, Output Cache etc.). In ASP.NET 4.6.2, we added async support for Session State Provider and Output Cache Provider.  These providers provide much better scalability, and enables the web application to adapt to the cloud environment.  Furthermore, , we also released SqlSessionStateProviderAsync, CosmosDBSessionStateProviderAsync, RedisSessionStateProvider and SQLAsyncOutputCacheProvider.  Through these providers the web applications can store the Session State in Azure resources like, SQL Azure, CosmosDB, and Redis Cache, and Output Cache in SQL Azure.  With these options, it may be not very straightforward to pick one and configure it right in the application.  Today we are releasing ASP.NET Providers Connected Service Visual Studio Extension to help you pick the right provider and configure it properly to work with Azure resources.  This extension will be your one-stop shop where you can install and configure all the ASP.NET providers that are Azure ready.

How to install the extension

The ASP.NET Providers Connected Service Extension can be installed on Visual Studio 2017. You can install it through Extensions and Updates in Visual Studio and type “ASP.NET Providers Connected Service” in the search box. Or you can download the extension from Visual Studio MarketPlace.

How to use the extension

To use the Extension, you need to make sure that your web application targets to .NET Framework 4.6.2 or higher.  You can open the extension through right clicking on the project, selecting Add and clicking on Connected Service. You will see all the Connected Services installed on your VS which apply to your project.

After clicking on Microsoft ASP.NET Providers extension. You will see the following wizard window, you can choose the provider you want to install and configure for your ASP.NET web application. Currently we have two sets of providers, Session State providers and Output Cache provider.

Select a provider and click on the Next button. You will see a list of providers that apply to your application, which connects with Azure resources. Currently we have SQL SessionState provider, CosmosDB SessionState provider, RedisCache Sessionstate provider and SQL OutputCache provider.

After the provider is chosen, the wizard window will lead you to select an Azure instance which will be used by the provider selected.  In order to fetch the Azure instances that apply to the selected provider, you will need to sign in with your account in Visual Studio.   Then Select an Azure instance and click on the Finish button, the extension will install the relevant Nuget packages and update the web.config file to connect the provider with that selected Azure instance.

Things to be aware of

1. If the application is already configured with a provider and you want to install a same type of provider, you need to remove that provider first. E.g. your application is using SQL SessionState provider and you want to switch to CosmosDB SessionState provider. In this case, you need to remove the SessionState Provider settings in the web.config, then you can use ASP.NET Providers Connected Services to install and configure the CosmosDB SessionState provider.
2. If you are installing Async SQL SessionState provider or Async SQL OutputCache provider, you need to replace the user name and password in the connection string in web.config added by ASP.NET Providers Connected Services. As you may have multiple accounts in your Azure SQL Database instance.

Summary

ASP.NET Providers Connected Services helps you install and configure ASP.NET providers for your web application to consume Azure services. Our goal of this Visual Studio extension is to make it easier and provide a central place to help you configure different providers for the ASP.NET web applications and connect your web applications with Azure. Please install the extension from Visual Studio Marketplace today and let us know your feedback.