You may well be aware that a little thing called ‘E3’ is happening next week – a premier trading event where the biggest names in the video game world host presentations of the biggest titles we can expect to see in the coming months. Alongside Nintendo’s main presentation, the Nintendo Direct: E3 2018, several games will be on display for attendees to play.

Slightly surprisingly, one of those titles (or two, in a way) is Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!. Despite only being officially revealed last week, Nintendo has announced that E3 attendees will be able to get some hands-on time with the games at the Nintendo booth. Whether this may lead to more snippets of information being revealed about the new titles remains to be seen, but it’ll be interesting to get hands-on impressions before the launch in November.

As a reminder, players will also get to experience the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Switch which is set to be making a grand appearance during the main showcase, although a reservation is required to play this one. If you’re attending the show and want to get your hands on the new Smash, make sure to check out this FAQ which has all the info you’ll need.

Are you feeling the E3 hype yet? Are you lucky enough to be attending this year? Share your thoughts with us in the lovely comment section below.

NBA 2K19 is Now Available for Pre-Purchase on Steam!

NBA 2K celebrates 20 years of redefining what sports gaming can be, from best in class graphics & gameplay to groundbreaking game modes and an immersive open-world “Neighborhood.” NBA 2K19 continues to push limits as it brings gaming one step closer to real-life basketball excitement and culture.

Game Director Christopher Barrett:

It’s time to talk more about the second year of Destiny 2. This September, we’re adding core systems that will reinforce the Destiny hobby. We’re also planning to deliver much requested features centered around customization and end-game pursuits. Now that Forsaken has been revealed, we can be more specific about what Year Two will deliver to every player of Destiny 2.

We’ll be talking about these things all summer long. You’ll learn more about Forsaken and Year 2 at events, on streams, and on the blog.

Educators face an array challenges, not least of which is ongoing classroom management. As more and more teachers use Class Notebooks, stand alone or integrated with Microsoft Teams, the most common request we’ve heard from teachers is the ability to “lock” a page. This capability allows educators to have control and make the OneNote page read only for students while still allowing the teacher to add feedback or marks.  Today, we are excited to deliver on this request and begin rolling out page locking broadly to help teachers manage their classrooms and save time.

Page Locking—To further simplify classroom workflows, we are delivering on the number-one request from teachers for OneNote Class Notebooks—enabling lock pages. With our new page locking, the following capabilities are enabled:

• Teachers can now lock all the pages of a distributed page as read-only after giving feedback to the student.
• Teachers can unlock or lock individual pages by simply right clicking on the page on a student.
• Teachers using Microsoft Teams to create OneNote assignments can have the page of the OneNote assignment automatically lock as read only when the due date/time passes

During our early testing process, we’ve had teachers trying out the page locking in their classrooms.  Robin Licato, an AP Chemistry and Forensic Science from St. Agnes Academy, Houston, TX had this to say: “This feature is an absolute game changer.  I am enjoying the ability to unlock a specific student who has an extension on an assignment due to illness or absence while keeping the page locked for students who did not complete the assignment on time!”

Scott Titmas, Technology Integration Specialist Old Bridge Township Public Schools, NJ was also an early beta tester of the new page locking feature. “The page locking feature is extremely intuitive, easy to use, and opens a whole new world of possibilities for teachers. It will be a welcomed feature addition for all teachers.  More encouraging than just this feature is the fact that Microsoft has consistently shown they listen to their users and user voice drives the direction of product development”

Platforms supported – Initially, we are rolling this out for OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote 2016 Desktop Addin, OneNote Online, and OneNote for iPad. Most platforms will provide page locking built in to the toolbar. For OneNote desktop, download the new free add in.

For additional details on which version of OneNote is required for both teacher and students, please visit this new OneNote Class Notebook page locking support article.  It is important to read this article to understand the details before rolling this out.

Important Note #1: for OneNote 2016 Desktop MSI customers, you must deploy this Public Update first before student and teacher pages will properly lock.  Please work with your IT Admin to ensure you properly deployment this patch first.  Page Locking is not supported for OneNote 2013 Desktop clients 

Important note #2: Page Locking works best when a page is distributed or made into an assignment. For example, if students copy the pages manually from the Content Library into their own notebooks and change the page title, the teacher will have to manually right click on the student page to lock it, instead of being able to use the single checkbox to lock all pages.

Page Locking in OneNote for Windows 10

Page Locking in OneNote 2016 Desktop

Teacher right click to unlock a page

Class Notebook Addin version 2.5.0.0

• Page Locking support to allow teachers to make a page of set of student pages read-only
• Bug fixes and performance improvements

We hope you enjoy these new updates! Share any feedback at @OneNoteEDU, and if you need support or help, you can file a ticket here: http://aka.ms/edusupport.

This post was originally published on this site.

For some people, the terminal can be scary. But a terminal is more than just a black screen to type in. It usually runs a shell, so called because it wraps around the kernel. The shell is a text-based interface that lets you run commands on the system. It’s also sometimes called a command line interpreter or CLI. Fedora, like most Linux distributions, comes with bash as the default shell.  However, it isn’t the only shell available; several other shells can be installed. This article focuses on the Z Shell, or zsh.

Bash is a rewrite of the old Bourne shell (sh) that shipped in UNIX. Zsh is intended to be friendlier than bash, through better interaction. Some of its useful features are:

• Programmable command line completion
• Shared command history between running shell sessions
• Spelling correction
• Loadable modules
• Interactive selection of files and folders

Zsh is available in the Fedora repositories. To install, run this command:

$ sudo dnf install zsh

Using zsh

To start using it, just type zsh and the new shell prompts you with a first run wizard. This wizard helps you configure initial features, like history behavior and auto-completion. Or you can opt to keep the rc file empty:

First-run wizard

If you type 1 the configuration wizard starts. The other options launch the shell immediately.

Note that the user prompt is % and not $ as with bash. A significant feature here is the auto-completion that allows you to move among files and directories with the Tab key, much like a menu:

Using the auto-completion feature with the cd command

Another interesting feature is spelling correction, which helps when writing filenames with mixed cases:

Auto completion performing spelling correction

Making zsh your default shell

Zsh offers a lot of plugins, like zsh-syntax-highlighting, and the famous “Oh my zsh” (check out its page here). You might want to make it the default, so it runs whenever you start a session or open a terminal. To do this, use the chsh (“change shell”) command:

$ chsh -s $(which zsh)

This command tells your system that you want to set (-s) your default shell to the correct location of the shell (which zsh).

Photo by Kate Ter Haar from Flickr (CC BY-SA).

The i.MX 6 platform has for the past few years enjoyed a large effort to add upstream support to Linux and surrounding projects. Now it is at the point where nothing is really missing any more. Improvements are still being made, to the graphics driver for i.MX 6, but functionally it is complete. The i.MX8 however, is a different story.

By Robert Foss, Software Engineer at Collabora.

The i.MX 6 platform has for the past few years enjoyed a large effort to add upstream support to Linux and surrounding projects. Now it is at the point where nothing is really missing any more. Improvements are still being made, to the graphics driver for i.MX 6, but functionally it is complete.

The i.MX8 is a different story. The newly introduced platform, with hardware still difficult to get access to, is seeing lots of work being done, but much still remains to be done.

That being said, initial support for the GPU, the Vivante GC7000, is in place and is able to successfully run Wayland/Weston, glmark, etc. This should also mean that running Android ontop of the currently not-quite-upstream stack is possible using drm_hwcomposer.

An upstream display/scanout driver does currently not exist, since the display IP in the i.MX 8 is different and more capable than the IP in the i.MX 6 platform, the current imx-drm driver is not capable of supporting it.

A driver is provided by the NXP base support package. This BSP driver is based on KMS Atomic and supports most of the bells and whistles one would hope for, but is currently not in an upstreamable shape.

But patches for the gpio, clk, netdev & arm-kernel subsystems have been submitted to their respective mailing lists by Lucas Stach.

The direct support for the i.MX8 that has landed in the kernel at this point is mostly done by NXP engineers.

But there are lots of components that currently have no support. The Video Processor Unit IP, the Hantro G1/G2, does not have any upstream support.

Looking at bootloader support, U-Boot has good support for the i.MX 8M platform since early 2018, and can be expected to just work.

Looking forward

While lot’s of support is still missing for the i.MX 8, the platform is under active development, with many new pieces of the hardware seeing attention.

Purism is one of the vendors who currently is actively working towards full Open Source support of the i.MX 8 platform.

Devboards

WandPi 8M is a series of 3 different boards based on the i.MX 8M platform.

Nitrogen 8M is another i.MX 8M based option, made by Boundary Devices who also made the popular Sabre Lite series of boards for the i.MX 6.

Dependency Injection design pattern is widely used in modern applications.  It decouples objects to the extent that no client code needs to be changed simply because an object it depends changes to a different one.  It brings you a lot of benefits, like reduced dependency, more reusable code, more testable code, etc.  in the past, it was very difficult to use Dependency Injection in WebForms application before.  Starting from .NET 4.7.2, it is now easy for developers to use Dependency Injection in WebForms applications.  With the UnityAdapter, you can add it to your existing WebForms application in 4 simple steps.

How to enable Dependency Injection in your existing WebForms application

Suppose you have a movie website which lists most popular movies in history.  You use repository pattern to separate the logic that retrieves the data and maps it to the business entity.  Currently you are creating business logic object and repository object in default.aspx page.  The code looks like bellow.

Now simply follow 4 steps below, you will be able to adopt Dependency Injection to decouple the MovieManager from default.aspx page. The sample web application is on this Github repo.  And you can use tag to retrieve the code change in each step.

1. Retarget the project to .NET Framework 4.7.2. (Git Tag: step-1)

Open project property and change the targetFramework of the project to .NET Framework 4.7.2. You would also need to change targetFramework in httpRuntime section in web.config file as illustrated below.

2. Install AspNet.WebFormsDependencyInjection.Unity NuGet package. (Git Tag: step-2)

3. Register types in Global.asax. (Git Tag: step-3)

4. Refactor Default.aspx.cs. (Git Tag: step-4)

Areas that Dependency Injection can be used

There are many areas you can use Dependency Injection in WebForms applications now. Here is a complete list.

• Pages and controls
  
  • WebForms page
  • User control
  • Custom control
• IHttpHandler and IHttpHandlerFactory
• IHttpModule
• Providers
  
  • BuildProvider
  • ResourceProviderFactory
  • Health monitoring provider
  • Any ProviderBase based provider created by System.Web.Configuration.ProvidersHelper.InstantiateProvider. e.g. custom sessionstate provider

Summary

Using Microsoft.AspNet.WebFormsDependencyInjection.Unity NuGet package on .net framework 4.7.2, Dependency Injection can be easily added into your existing WebForms application. Please give it a try and let us know your feedback.

Aristotle, the hero of Minesweeper Genius, takes a rather literal approach to mine disposal, whipping out his broom to sweep the surroundings for deadly devices. He is a peculiar little character, so proud of his superior brainpower that he keeps his smarts in a glass dome that is attached to the top of his head. The silly plot concerns aliens and scientific experiments, but sweep this aside and you are left with a smart update of a game that has its origin’s in the earliest mainframe games of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The most well-known version of Minesweeper dates back to the early 1990’s, when it came bundled alongside Solitaire with Windows 3.1.  It may not have had the same mass appeal as solitaire, but countless hours of productivity were wasted by those bored office workers, who wanted something a little more tactical than just arranging playing cards. Better still, the unobtrusive graphics, consisting of a small grey grid, were much less likely to catch the eye of a wandering manager.

Actually, Minesweeper Genius has just as much in common with number puzzler Sudoku as it does with its original namesake.  Aristotle begins each level placed in a grid, the exit will be marked but the rest of the spaces will be unexplored and could contain deadly mines. You can infer which spaces are safe from the numbers that appear along the edges of the grid. These reveal how many mines are in each row and column. On each level, Aristotle gingerly makes his way from square to square. He is never allowed to backtrack, and should he tread on a mine then he is returned to his starting position.

Minesweeper Genius consists of thirteen islands, each with ten levels apiece. Upon completing a level Aristotle will be awarded a star rating and the next level will unlock. Sometimes, after completing an island, a number of optional advanced levels will also become available.  As you progress, more features familiar to those who played the original minesweeper will become available. From the second island onwards, you can flag squares that you think contain mines. Simply press on a square or drag your finger across multiple squares to place flags. The third island introduces radial indicators; these appear in certain squares at the beginning of some levels and display a number that signifies how many of the adjacent spaces contain mines.

To spice things up, the game also introduces a range of special squares that trigger as soon as Aristotle steps on them. There are ones that allow Aristotle to belie his advanced years and leap over a square. Others will slide squares from one end of the grid to the other or swap entire rows and columns. All of the special squares in a grid must be triggered in order to successfully complete a level.

My initial impressions of Minesweeper Genius were extremely favourable, the graphics are clear, the controls responsive and the puzzling initially feels very rewarding. It is obvious that the developers have spent a lot of time polishing and refining their game. It is also commendable that the game offers a generous amount of levels and comes as a complete package, with no extra purchases required. Unfortunately, after playing for a while things began to go downhill pretty fast. Some of the issues are easily remedied; the background music soon begins to grate, but it can be switched off, as can the annoying sound effects that have Aristotle nodding off and snoring after only the briefest period of inactivity. The old dear’s desire for frequent naps may initially be mildly amusing, but I soon felt like grabbing his broom and whacking him over his stupid fishbowl head.

Unfortunately, the game’s biggest issue is not one that can be so easily resolved with the flick of a switch. Minesweeper Genius really suffers from a lack of variety and challenge. Each island follows a similar pattern, starting on small grid layouts that gradually increase in size. It soon begins to feel very formulaic, even the graphics hardly change from island to island. Minesweeper, like Sudoku, is all about making inferences from the limited information on offer in order to build up a complete picture. A large part of Sudoku’s appeal is down to the leaps of logic that you have to make in order to arrive at the correct conclusion.  In comparison, the decisions here are much more straightforward and consequently less satisfying.

So, whilst you may initially think, wow, that’s a neat twist on an old classic, Minesweeper Genius soon becomes a bit of a slog. It may make a neat casual game that you can play on your daily commute, but, in the long-term, the repetitive gameplay is a big disappointment. I’m no puzzle genius but still managed to cruise through the first sixty levels with ease, racking up a complete set of three-star ratings. Even at this relatively advanced stage it wasn’t really getting any more difficult. It seems that the game is too obliging and eager to help you succeed. This is largely down to the fact that the puzzles aren’t individually designed but procedurally generated.

Initially, this seems to be very neat and clever, an insurance against player frustration. Yet it turns out that it also makes things too easy, even the special squares that should really add some extra challenge turn out to be a big disappointment.  You would think that switching around the grid would really increase the challenge, but actually, the special squares just feel like they are just a point on the board that you have to reach. No matter how drastically they change the layout you can be assured that there will always be a valid move. Consequently, there is never any need to think further ahead than your current move, which is never that taxing, even if you are not a genius.