Epic Games will attempt to have Fortnite reinstated on the App Store by filling a preliminary injunction against Apple on September 28, 2020.

It’s the latest maneuver in an ongoing legal dispute between Epic and Apple, which began when Epic added an unsanctioned payment method to Fortnite on iOS, prompting Apple to remove the title from its marketplace for breaching platform guidelines.

Apple had also threatened to block Epic from accessing its development SDK, effectively spelling the end for Unreal Engine titles on Mac and iOS devices, but the move was blocked by a U.S. District Court Judge who granted Epic’s request for a temporary restraining order against Apple.

Now the company intends to force Apple to allow Fortnite back onto the App Store by filing an injunction that would prevent the iPhone maker from taking further action, while also rolling back the current restrictions.

“Epic Games, Inc. will move this Court pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65 for a Preliminary Injunction: restraining Defendant Apple Inc. from removing, de-listing, refusing to list or otherwise making unavailable the app Fortnite or any other app on Epic’s Team ID ’84 account in Apple’s Developer Program,” reads the notice of motion filed by Epic.

Epic contests that Apple is inflicting “irreparable damage” to its reputation by blocking Fortnite, harming its business and the game itself, while simultaneously impeding its ability to compete with Apple by offering “competitive app distribution and competitive payment processing on iOS.”

“By removing Fortnite from the App Store, Apple has cleaved millions of users from their friends and family in the Fortnite community, which entirely depends on connectivity. The user outcry has been deafening, showing real harm to the public interest,” explains Epic.

“Daily active users on iOS have declined by over 60 percent since Fortnite’s removal from the App Store. And removal already has resulted in a loss of goodwill and irreparable damage to Epic’s reputation. The continued loss of Fortnite as a gathering place for users on all platforms will lead Epic’s customers to defect. Epic may never see these users again.

“Epic is ideally situated to challenge Apple’s restrictions. Epic is a would-be direct competitor of Apple in the relevant markets, ready to offer competitive app distribution and competitive payment processing on iOS.

“To enable Epic to carry out this challenge without suffering irreparable harm from Apple’s retaliation in the interim, Epic respectfully requests that the Court grant its motion for a preliminary injunction to stop Apple from retaliating further and to undo Apple’s retaliation to date.”

You can hear Epic’s argument in full by checking out the (rather lengthy) court filing. It’ll be interesting to see how the motion is received, considering one judge has already quashed Epic’s claims of irreparable harm relating to Fortnite after finding the current situation is one of its own making.

EA has removed a variety of intrusive in-game advertisements from UFC 4 after being inundated with fan complaints.

As noted by Eurogamer, a number of players took issue with the almost full-screen adverts, which would appear at the beginning and end of replays, after one Reddit user highlighted the contentious design choice on the ‘asshole design’ subreddit.

As this video shows, the large adverts (also pictured below) would flash onscreen to bookend in-game replays, and while EA claims these sort of ad placements aren’t new to the UFC franchise, the implementation is hardly subtle.

It’s also worth noting that EA turned on the ad placements post-launch, meaning critics weren’t able to comment on them during the initial release window.

Explaining its decision to enable and subsequently remove the adverts from UFC 4, EA said it believed the adverts were par for the course for the franchise, but said it valued player feedback and wouldn’t be reinstating them in the future.

“Earlier this week, the team turned on ad placements in UFC 4 that appeared during the ‘Replay’ moments in gameplay. This type of advertising inventory is not new to the UFC franchise, though we have typically reserved displaying ads to specific main menu tiles or Octagon logo placement,” reads a company statement sent to Eurogamer.

“It is abundantly clear from your feedback that integrating ads into the Replay and overlay experience is not welcome. The advertisements have been disabled by the team and we apologize for any disruption to gameplay that players may have experienced.

“We realize that this should have been communicated with players ahead of time and that’s on us. We want to make sure our players have the best possible experience playing UFC 4, so ad integration in the Replay and overlay experience will not be reappearing in the future.”

Sourabh

.NET 5 Preview 7 is now available and is ready for evaluation. Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Blazor WebAssembly apps now target .NET 5
• Updated debugging requirements for Blazor WebAssembly
• Blazor accessibility improvements
• Blazor performance improvements
• Certificate authentication performance improvements
• Sending HTTP/2 PING frames
• Support for additional endpoints types in the Kestrel sockets transport
• Custom header decoding in Kestrel
• Other minor improvements

Get started

To get started with ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 Preview 7 install the .NET 5 SDK.

You need to use Visual Studio 2019 16.7 Preview 5 or newer to use .NET 5 Preview 7. .NET 5 is also supported with the latest preview of Visual Studio for Mac. To use .NET 5 with Visual Studio Code, install the latest version of the C# extension.

Upgrade an existing project

To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core app from .NET 5 Preview 6 to .NET 5 Preview 7:

• Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.
• Update all Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.
• Update System.Net.Http.Json package references to 5.0.0-preview.7.*.

See the full list of breaking changes in ASP.NET Core for .NET 5.

Upgrade existing Blazor WebAssembly projects

To upgrade an existing Blazor WebAssembly project, update the following properties:

From

<TargetFramework>netstandard2.1</TargetFramework>

<RazorLangVersoin>3.0</RazorLangVersion>

To

<TargetFramework>net5.0</TargetFramework>

<RuntimeIdentifier>browser-wasm</RuntimeIdentifier>

<UseBlazorWebAssembly>true</UseBlazorWebAssembly>

Also, remove any package references to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Build, as it is no longer needed.

What’s new?

Blazor WebAssembly apps now target .NET 5

Blazor WebAssembly 3.2 apps have access only to the .NET Standard 2.1 API set. With this release, Blazor WebAssembly projects now target .NET 5 (net5.0) and have access to a much wider set of APIs. Implementing Blazor WebAssembly support for the APIs in .NET 5 is a work in progress, so some APIs may throw a PlatformNotSupportedException at runtime. We’d love to hear from you if you’re blocked by the lack of support for specific APIs.

Updated debugging requirements for Blazor WebAssembly

To enable debugging of Blazor WebAssembly apps in Visual Studio Code, you previously needed to install the JavaScript Debugger (Nightly) extension. This is no longer required as the JavaScript debugger extension is now shipped as part of VS Code. If you’ve previously installed the JavaScript Debugger (Nightly) extension you can now uninstall it. Enabling the preview version of the JavaScript debugger through the Visual Studio Code settings is still required.

Blazor accessibility improvements

The built-in Blazor input components that derive from InputBase now render aria-invalid automatically when the validation fails.

Blazor performance improvements

One of the major areas of investment for Blazor WebAssembly in .NET 5 is improving runtime performance. This is a multifaceted effort. Below are some of the high-level areas being optimized:

• .NET runtime execution
• JSON serialization
• JavaScript interop
• Blazor component rendering

Improving Blazor WebAssembly runtime performance for .NET 5 in an ongoing effort. This release contains some initial performance improvements, and we expect to share more details on the results of this performance work for future .NET 5 updates.

Certificate authentication performance improvements

We have added caching to certificate authentication in ASP.NET Core. Caching certificate validation significantly improves the performance of certificate authentication. Our benchmarks show a 400% improvement in requests per second once caching was enabled.

You don’t need to make any changes to your app to take advantage of performance improvements; caching is on by default. There are options to tune or disable caching if you wish.

Find out more about certificate authentication in ASP.NET Core in the docs.

Sending HTTP/2 PING frames

HTTP/2 has a mechanism for sending PING frames as a way of ensuring whether an idle connection is still functional. This is especially useful to have when working with long-lived streams that are often idle but only intermittently see activity (for example, gRPC streams). We have added the ability to send periodic PING frames in Kestrel by setting limits on KestrelServerOptions.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.ConfigureKestrel(options => { options.Limits.Http2.KeepAlivePingInterval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10); options.Limits.Http2.KeepAlivePingTimeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1); }); webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Support for additional endpoints types in the Kestrel sockets transport

Building upon new API introduced in System.Net.Sockets, the sockets transport (default) in Kestrel now allows you to bind to both existing file handles and unix domain sockets. Support for binding to existing file handles enables using the existing Systemd integration without requiring you to use the libuv transport.

Custom header decoding in Kestrel

We added the ability to specify which System.Text.Encoding to use to interpret incoming headers based on the header name instead of defaulting to UTF-8. You can set the RequestHeaderEncodingSelector property on KestrelServerOptions to specify which encoding to use.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.ConfigureKestrel(options => { options.RequestHeaderEncodingSelector = encoding => { switch (encoding) { case "Host": return System.Text.Encoding.Latin1; default: return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8; } }; }); webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Other improvements

• For preview 7, we’ve started applying nullable annotations to ASP.NET Core assemblies. We intend on annotating most of the common public API surface of the framework during the 5.0 release.
• CompareAttribute can now be applied to properties on Razor Page model.
• Parameters and properties bound from the body are considered required by default.
• We’ve started applying nullable annotations to ASP.NET Core assemblies. We intend to annotate most of the common public API surface of the framework during the .NET 5 release.
• Authorization when using endpoint routing now receives the HttpContext rather than the endpoint instance. This allows the authorization middleware to access the RouteData and other properties of the HttpContext that were not accessible though the Endpoint class. The endpoint can be fetched from the context using context.GetEndpoint().
• The default format for System.Diagnostics.Activity now defaults to the W3C format. This makes distributed tracing support in ASP.NET Core interoperable with more frameworks by default.
• CompareAttribute can now be applied to properties on a Razor Page model.

• FromBodyAttribute now supports configuring an option that allows these parameters or properties to be considered optional:

  C# public IActionResult Post([FromBody(EmptyBodyBehavior = EmptyBodyBehavior.Allow)] MyModel model) { ... }

Give feedback

We hope you enjoy this release of ASP.NET Core in .NET 5! We are eager to hear about your experiences with this latest .NET 5 release. Let us know what you think by filing issues on GitHub.

Thanks for trying out ASP.NET Core!

© Nintendo Life

Nintendo Australia has confirmed that a new shipment of Animal Crossing Switch consoles will be launching across Australia and New Zealand next month.

The console, which features Animal Crossing-inspired designs across the main unit and dock, as well as exclusive, gorgeously coloured Joy-Con, will be available from selected retailers once more starting from 9th October.

A similar restock arrived for Australia back in June, with stock then starting to appear in other regions such as the UK shortly afterwards. Hopefully we’ll see a similar deal here, with other countries also getting restocks over the coming weeks.

Did you manage to secure one of these beauties when they first launched? Have you been keeping an eye out for one ever since? Tell us below.

The FizzBuzz problem is a common exercise posed in code interviews to test your proficiency in writing simple Python code.

Problem: Print all numbers from 1-100 to the shell with three exceptions:

• For each number divisible by three you print "Fizz",
• For each number divisible by five you print "Buzz", and
• For each number divisible by three and five you print "FizzBuzz".

Example: The first 15 numbers of the FizzBuzz sequence are the following.

1

2

Fizz

4

Buzz

Fizz

7

8

Fizz

Buzz

11

Fizz

13

14

FizzBuzz

...

How to write a Python one-liner that solves this problem?

Here’s an interactive overview:

Exercise: Do both one-liners produce the same results? Run the code to check!

Let’s dive into those one-liners to gain a deeper understanding and improve your Python skills!

FizzBuzz One-Liner 1: Generator Expression + String Concatenation + Short Circuiting

The following one-liner solves the problem in an elegant way using a fine understanding of more advanced Python features (source).

print('\n'.join('Fizz' * (i%3==0) + 'Buzz' * (i%5==0) or str(i) for i in range(1,101)))

The one-liner creates a string using the join function with the newline character as a delimiter. Here’s a short explanation of the function:

The string.join(iterable) method concatenates all the string elements in the iterable (such as a list, string, or tuple) and returns the result as a new string. The string on which you call it is the delimiter string—and it separates the individual elements. For example, '-'.join(['hello', 'world']) returns the joined string 'hello-world'.

So, what’s the iterable, you pass into the join() function? It’s a generator expression of the form: expression for variable in context. You go over all integer values in the context 1 to 100 using the range() function. So, you obtain the remaining expression for i in range(1, 101). What’s the expression part?

It consists of three elements:

• 'Fizz' * (i%3==0) — The modulo expression i%3==0 returns True only if the integer i is divisible by 3, otherwise it returns False. So, you multiply the string 'Fizz' either with True (=1) or with False (=0). As a result, you obtain the empty string '' in all cases except if the integer i is divisible by 3—in which case you obtain the string 'Fizz'.
• 'Buzz' * (i%5==0)— The modulo expression i%5==0 returns True only if the integer i is divisible by 5, otherwise it returns False. So, you multiply the string 'Buzz' either with True (=1) or with False (=0). As a result, you obtain the empty string '' in all cases except if the integer i is divisible by 5—in which case you obtain the string 'Buzz'.
• You use string concatenation to glue together the previously obtained strings. In most cases, this will be the empty string. If i is divisible by 3, you obtain the string 'Fizz'. If i is divisible by 5, you obtain the string 'Buzz'. And if i is divisible by 3 and 5, you obtain the string 'FizzBuzz'.
• or str(i) — In the case you obtained a non-empty string in {'Fizz', 'Buzz', 'FizzBuzz'} in the previous step, the or operation simply returns this string. This is called short circuiting—and it’s used in many programming languages such as Python to improve efficiency of logical operations.
• But if the string is empty, it is interpreted as a logical False. Thus, Python returns the second operand of the or operation. The second operand simply is the string representation of the integer i.

A very interesting implementation of the FizzBuzz problem indeed!

FizzBuzz One-Liner 2: Slicing

An alternative is given in the following nice one-liner (source):

for i in range(1, 101): print('FizzBuzz'[i*i%3*4:8--i**4%5] or i)

Wow—what a short and concise one-liner solution! But how does it work?

• You iterate over all values from i=1 to i=100 and print a string. So far so good.
• You use the or operation and slicing to determine the string 'FizzBuzz'[start:end] or i generates the output.
• You use the property of short circuiting in Python: If 'FizzBuzz'[start:end] is empty, the integer i is returned, otherwise, the non-empty string is returned.
• You carve out a substring from 'FizzBuzz' using slicing as follows.

Slicing is a concept to carve out a substring from a given string. Use slicing notation s[start:stop:step] to access every step-th element starting from index start (included) and ending in index stop (excluded). All three arguments are optional, so you can skip them to use the default values (start=0, stop=len(lst), step=1). For example, the expression s[2:4] from string 'hello' carves out the slice 'll' and the expression s[:3:2] carves out the slice 'hl'.

In the example, you have the slicing operation 'FizzBuzz'[i*i%3*4:8--i**4%5].

• start = i*i%3*4 — Note that the multiplication * and modulo operation % have the same priority, so they are evaluated from left to right. If integer i is divisible by 3, i*i is also divisible by 3, and the start index is 0. In all other cases, the start index is 4. Thus, the slice either starts with 'Fizz' or 'Buzz'.
• stop = 8--i**4%5 — This is 4 in all cases except if the number i is divisible by 5, in which case this is 8.

So, there are four cases:

• The number is divisible only by 3: start=0, stop=4 –> 'Fizz'
• The number is divisible only by 5: start=4, stop=8 –> 'Buzz'
• The number is divisible by both 3 and 5: start=0, stop=8 –> 'FizzBuzz'
• The number is divisible by neither 3 nor 5: start = 4, stop=4 –> ''

Phew! This was a hard nut to crack, wasn’t it?

Python One-Liner 3: Map + Lambda

You can find detailed tutorials on the map and lambda functions here:

• Mastering the Python Map Function
• Lambda Functions in Python

Those two functions can be used to solve the FizzBuzz problem (source):

print(list(map(lambda i: "Fizz"*(i%3==0)+"Buzz"*(i%5==0) or str(i), range(1,101))))

It’s similar to Method 1 and by now you’re able to figure it out. Think of the different values the integer i can take.

Python One-Liners Book

Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners.

Python One-Liners will teach you how to read and write “one-liners”: concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You’ll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert.

The book’s five chapters cover tips and tricks, regular expressions, machine learning, core data science topics, and useful algorithms. Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You’ll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments. You’ll also learn how to:

•  Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution
•  Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics
•  Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning
•  Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators
•  Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting

By the end of the book, you’ll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of “Python art” in merely a single line.

Get your Python One-Liners Now!!