If you’re a fan of games that do something a little different, with art styles and soundtracks that are genuinely unique, you might want to watch out for Art Sqool which has just been announced for Switch.

Art Sqool is an experimental school simulation game that combines exploration with a series of creative tasks for the player to complete. You take on the role Froshmin, a freshman who just wants to create art, explore the quirky campus, and get to work on the tasks given to you by the professor.

The professor serves as your advisor and also judges your work, giving you grades depending on how well you’ve managed to complete each task. The Switch version of the game could prove to be the best way to play, too, with new touchscreen and stylus support being implemented to make the most out of Nintendo’s machine.

Here’s a feature list:

KEY FEATURES:
BE CREATIVE. The professor is a really cool dude. And painting is all about having fun, so go crazy! Over 200 inspiring prompts will help you break through any creative block.

EXPLORE AMAZING CAMPUS. You’ve never seen anything like it.

RELAX. OK, there might be some challenges in the game, but it also gives the players an opportunity to unwind: you can relax to chillout music and slow tempo of the game.

BECOME A COLLECTOR. Find and collect cool brushes to help you in your artistic process. There are numerous extras hidden around the map, like a wiggle brush, rainbow pencil, and… a mop.

Julian Glander, the artist and developer behind the game, says, “Art Sqool is definitely saying something about the state of arts education, and how art and creativity relate to and often pushes against the rigid systems of our world. But you could also just turn your brain off and have a great time drawing and exploring and listening to the music”.

We don’t have a release date for this one just yet, so keep your eyes peeled for more news over the coming months.

© Ubisoft

Update #2 (Wed 9th Sep, 2020 13:50 BST): According to Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia Remake – which is expected to be announced this week – will not be coming to Nintendo Switch, nor will it arrive in November, as has been reported (thanks, VGC).

Update #1 (Sun 6th Sep, 2020 07:30 BST): According to Bloomberg’s video game reporter, Jason Schreier, Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia Remake will supposedly be revealed at next week’s Ubisoft Forward, airing on 10th September.

Schreier shared this information on the most recent Triple Click podcast. Here’s what he had to say, (thanks, Pure Xbox):

“…they had been planning a new Ubisoft Forward, where they were going to announce a bunch of games like the Prince of Persia remake that was leaked a couple of weeks ago. That [event] is planned, it was announced today as being for next week, September 10th.”

VGC has also backed up Schreier with its “own Ubisoft sources”, which indicate the claim is correct.

To find out more about the next Ubisoft Forward, view the full schedule in our previous post. You can also expect to learn more about Immortals: Fenyx Rising (formerly known as Gods & Monsters).

Original story (Thu 20th Aug, 2020 03:15 BST): According to an online and local retailer in Guatemala known as “MAX“, a Prince of Persia Remake is coming to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 this November.

Bloomberg’s video game reporter, Jason Schreier, has seemingly backed up this listing over on Twitter:

“Video game retailers sure love leaking Ubisoft’s surprise announcements”

One individual said they didn’t believe it and the industry insider then told them their tweet wouldn’t age well.

So, what is this supposed remake? Video game historian and Nintendo Life contributor Liam Robertson thinks it might be based on the “original” Prince of Persia game (if it is real). Of course, there have been many reboots over the years as well.

Ubisoft is hosting its next online broadcast (Ubisoft Forward) in September. If this listing is legitimate, we guess we’ll hear more about it then.

Would you like to see the return of the Prince of Persia series? Tell us down below.

Sebastien

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core RC2 is now available.

What is Orchard Core?

Orchard Core Framework is a community-based application framework for building modular, multi-tenant applications on ASP.NET Core. It has been created by more than 150 contributors and has over 4K stars on GitHub.

Orchard Core also includes Orchard Core CMS, a Web Content Management System (CMS), that is built on top of the Orchard Core Framework. It allows you to build full websites, or headless websites using GraphQL.

Getting Started

Installing the templates

You can install the recommended templates by running:

dotnet new -i OrchardCore.ProjectTemplates::1.0.0-*

Creating a new modular application

Using the templates, a modular MVC application can be created by running:

dotnet new ocmvc -n MySite

And a module is created by running:

dotnet new ocmodulemvc -n MyModule
dotnet add MySite reference MyModule

Creating an Orchard CMS website

To create a new site based on the Orchard Core CMS run:

dotnet new occms -n MySite
dotnet run --project .\MySite\MySite.csproj

After going through the setup form you get a working Blog.

What’s new

Some notable improvements include:

• Content localization support, and pre-configured localized Setup experience

• Improved block content management experience

• Sitemaps management
• Azure support improvements

Resources

Development plan

The Orchard Core source code is available on GitHub.

There are still many important pieces to add and you might want to check our roadmap, but it’s also the best time to jump into the project and start contributing new modules, themes, improvements, or just ideas.

Feel free to drop on our dedicated Gitter chat and ask questions.

Open Liberty is a lightweight, production-ready Java runtime for containerizing and deploying microservices to the cloud, and is now available as part of a Red Hat Runtimes subscription. If you are a Red Hat Runtimes subscriber, you can write your Eclipse MicroProfile and Jakarta EE apps on Open Liberty and then run them in containers on Red Hat OpenShift, with commercial support from Red Hat and IBM.

Develop cloud-native Java microservices

Open Liberty is designed to provide a smooth developer experience with a one-second startup time, a low memory footprint, and our new dev mode:

Open Liberty provides a full implementation of MicroProfile 3 and Jakarta EE 8. MicroProfile is a collaborative project between multiple vendors (including Red Hat and IBM) and the Java community that aims to optimize enterprise Java for writing microservices. With a four-week release schedule, Liberty usually has the latest MicroProfile release available soon after the spec is published.

Also, Open Liberty is supported in common developer tools, including VS Code, Eclipse, Maven, and Gradle. Server configuration (e.g., adding or removing a capability, or “feature,” to your app) is through an XML file. Open Liberty’s zero migration policy means that you can focus on what’s important (writing your app!) and not have to worry about APIs changing under you.

Deploy in containers to any cloud

When you’re ready to deploy your app, you can just containerize it and deploy it to OpenShift. The zero migration principle means that new versions of Open Liberty features will not break your app, and you can control which version of the feature your app uses.

Monitoring live microservices is enabled by MicroProfile Metrics, Health, and OpenTracing, which add observability to your apps. The emitted metrics from your apps and from the Open Liberty runtime can be consolidated using Prometheus and presented in Grafana.

Learn with the Open Liberty developer guides

Our Open Liberty developer guides are available with runnable code and explanations to help you learn how to write microservices with MicroProfile and Jakarta EE, and then to deploy them to Red Hat OpenShift.

Get started

To get started with Open Liberty, try the Packaging and deploying applications guide and the Deploying microservices to OpenShift guide.

The post Open Liberty Java runtime now available to Red Hat Runtimes subscribers appeared first on Red Hat Developer.

A lambda function allows you to define a function in a single line. It starts with the keyword lambda, followed by a comma-separated list of zero or more arguments, followed by the colon and the return expression. For example, lambda x, y: x+y calculates the sum of the two argument values x+y in one line of Python code.

Problem: How to define a function in a single line of Python code?

Example: Say, you’ve got the following function in three lines. How to compress them into a single line of Python code?

def say_hi(*friends): for friend in friends: print('hi', friend) friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Ann']

say_hi(*friends)

The code defines a function say_hi that takes an iterable as input—the names of your friends—and prints 'hi x' for each element x in your iterable.

The output is:

'''

hi Alice

hi Bob

hi Ann '''

Let’s dive into the different methods to accomplish this! First, here’s a quick interactive overview to test the waters:

Exercise: Run the code—is the output the same for all four methods?

Next, you’ll learn about each method in greater detail!

Method 1: Lambda Function

You can use a simple lambda function to accomplish this.

A lambda function is an anonymous function in Python. It starts with the keyword lambda, followed by a comma-separated list of zero or more arguments, followed by the colon and the return expression. For example, lambda x, y, z: x+y+z would calculate the sum of the three argument values x+y+z.

friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Ann'] # Method 1: Lambda Function

hi = lambda lst: [print('hi', x) for x in lst]

In the example, you want to print a string for each element in an iterable—but the lambda function only returns an object. Thus, we return a dummy object: a list of None objects. The only purpose of creating this list is to execute the print() function repeatedly, for each element in the friends list.

You obtain the following output:

hi(friends) '''

hi Alice

hi Bob

hi Ann '''

Method 2: Function Definition

A similar idea is employed in this one-liner example—but instead of using a lambda function, we define a regular function and simply skip the newline. This is possible if the function body has only one expression:

friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Ann'] # Method 2: Function Definition

def hi(lst): [print('hi', x) for x in lst]

The output is the same as before:

hi(friends) '''

hi Alice

hi Bob

hi Ann '''

This approach is more Pythonic than the first one because there’s no throw-away return value and it’s more concise.

Method 3: exec()

The third method uses the exec() function. This is the brute-force approach to one-linerize any multi-liner!

To make a Python one-liner out of any multi-line Python script, replace the new lines with a new line character '\n' and pass the result into the exec(...) function. You can run this script from the outside (command line, shell, terminal) by using the command python -c "exec(...)".

We can apply this technique to the first example code snippet (the multi-line function definition) and rename the variables to make it more concise:

friends = ['Alice', 'Bob', 'Ann'] # Method 3: exec()

exec("def hi(*lst):\n for x in lst:\n print('hi', x)\nhi(*friends)")

If you run the code, you’ll see the same output as before:

hi(friends) '''

hi Alice

hi Bob

hi Ann '''

This is very hard to read—our brain cannot grasp the whitespaces and newline characters easily. But I still wanted to include this method here because it shows how you or anyone else can compress complicated algorithms in a single line of Python code!

Watch the video if you want to learn more details about this technique:

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!!

Last modified on August 16th, 2020.

If you have to come this article now with an intention to migrate your website from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7, first please be aware. Your time is already over. This is too late. Somehow you should get this done now. Do not postpone this work beyond this moment.

This is an overwhelming task. We never know what will break. For now things are running smooth with the website. If we migrate the version to PHP 7, we do not know if it will run or not. So everybody keeps postponing this sensitive task.

Fear not, I will guide you through this migration journey. I have done it for many shopping cart, financial domain and critical websites. I have sound experience doing this and you can bank on me. I will present you my experience doing these migrations.

Upgrading the setup or development or server environment to PHP 7

I will guide you for the migration of the PHP application or website only. Upgrading the server environment like Apache version or the installed PHP version can be dealt with another article. It is a sysadmin thing.

If you are on a shared web hosting server, you will have an option in your control panel. It should be a single click easy work. Otherwise your hosting provider will do it for you. You may have to raise a ticket to get it done. Unless if you are in a dedicated server environment, you need not worry about.

Whatsoever, migration of the website or the PHP application should be done by you. It is not in the hosting provider or sysadmin’s scope. It should be done by the PHP developer.

PHP versions, support and EOL

Why now? What is the necessity to migrate PHP 5.6 to PHP 7 now? Before going into why, you should know about the PHP versions, their support duration and EOL details. It will give you the answers.

Ref: https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

Why should you migrate from PHP 5.6?

PHP 5.6 version active releases ended in early 2017 and reached its end of life (EOL) by 2018 end. That was once upon a time and long long ago. After PHP 5.6, we had PHP 7.0, 7.1, … and the current live version is 7.4

My longtime client recently forward an email he got from his hosting provider. His website is hosted with a popular shared hosting server.

The hosting provider has given ten days time to upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2 Even they have asked to migrate PHP 7.0 and PHP 7.1 to PHP 7.2 If the upgrade is not done within the given time frame, the hosting provider will upgrade the PHP version to 7.2 themselves.

This timeframe is to allow migrate the website to be compatible with 7.2. The control panel allows to change the PHP versions back and forth.

If you are in a shared hosting server environment, you will be forced to migrate anytime soon. You better make the move yourself, so that you can plan and execute at your convenience.

Security

If there is one reason that stands on top of everything is security. There are many vulnerabilities that are being exposed to public daily. When there is a known vulnerability, PHP team will release a fix.

But if the PHP version has reached it EOL, then there will not be a release. Your website will stand exposed inviting the hackers. So it is important to migrate your website to a PHP version that is being supported. Upgrade your old PHP now!

Performance

There are numerous studies published and circulated widely. PHP 7 has, “100%+ performance gain on most real-world applications” says Rasmus Lerdorf (Ref: http://talks.php.net/fluent15#/php7) This is from his slides from PHP 7 talk at fluentconf. The good performance due to low latency is widely acknowledged.

So how does good performance help your website? For one second lag, you will loose a minimum of 10% visitors. Search engines give priority to fast loading websites. Are these two reasons not enough?

As published by Christian Vigh, PHP 7 is faster by a whooping 400% than PHP 5.2

Ref: https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evolution.html#performance

New PHP features

Developers should be armed with good set of tools. When the language gives a good set of features, that enables the developer to produce a good product. Following are some of the features that are available in PHP 7.

• The null coalescing operator
• Return and scalar type declarations
• Anonymous Classes
• Zero cost asserts
• Typed properties 2.0
• Preloading
• Null coalescing assignment operator
• Improve openssl_random_pseudo_bytes
• Weak references
• New custom object serialization mechanism
• Password hash registry
• Covariant returns and contravariant parameters
• Spread operator in array expression
• Multi-catch exceptions
• Keys usable in lists

Backwards compatibility

This is the key thing to focus on website migration. You might have used a feature that is available only in the lower version and removed in the newer version. Here is a list of backward incompatible changes between PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0

• set_exception_handler() is no longer guaranteed to receive Exception objects
• Internal constructors always throw exceptions on failure
• Parse errors throw ParseError
• list() no longer assigns variables in reverse order
• Empty list() assignments have been removed
• list() cannot unpack strings
• Array ordering when elements are automatically created during by reference assignments has changed
• Parentheses around function arguments no longer affect behaviour
• foreach no longer changes the internal array pointer and more changes.
• Changes to Division By Zero and more integer handling changes.
• Hexadecimal strings are no longer considered numeric and more string handling changes.
• All ext/mysql functions and more list of functions removed.
• New objects cannot be assigned by reference
• Switch statements cannot have multiple default blocks
• JSON extension replaced with JSOND

The above list is a summary only. Go through Ref: https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.incompatible.php for the complete list.

Deprecated features in PHP 7.0

So you are going to move forward. Know about what you should not use going forward. If you have already used the deprecated features, then it is better to migrate them also. Here is a list the deprecated list.

• PHP 4 style constructors
• Static calls to non-static methods
• password_hash() salt option
• capture_session_meta SSL context option
• ldap_sort() function is deprecated.

More list of changes to keep an eye on

Steps to do the PHP website migration

1. Backup your website, application, database, data in disk.
2. Check if your hosting provider or your environment will allow to rollback the PHP version. This will be helpful if in case you are stuck at some point.
3. Check the PHP compatibility for the respective version of the dependent vendor applications, plugins, modules and extensions.
4. Prepare a checklist for items to be changed for backwards incompatibility. Refer above for consolidated list.
5. Add the deprecated items to the checklist. Refer above for consolidated list.
6. Use a well equipped IDE. Detach the old dependent PHP library and then add the new to be migrated PHP library. The IDE will warn and show errors. I promise, this will be helpful. If you are a person using a plain texteditor, then now is the time to dump it.
7. Refactor the code.
8. Deploy in a staging environment.
9. Test.
10. Go live.

↑ Back to Top

Sourabh

.NET 5 Preview 6 is now available and is ready for evaluation. Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Blazor WebAssembly template now included
• JSON extension methods for HttpRequest and HttpResponse
• Extension method to allow anonymous access to an endpoint
• Custom handling of authorization failures
• SignalR Hub filters

Get started

To get started with ASP.NET Core in .NET 5.0 Preview 6 install the .NET 5.0 SDK.

You need to use Visual Studio 2019 16.7 or Visual Studio 2019 for Mac 8.6 to use .NET 5.0. Install the latest version of the C# extension, to use .NET 5.0 with Visual Studio Code.

Upgrade an existing project

To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core 5.0 Preview 5 app to ASP.NET Core 5.0 Preview 6:

• Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.6.*.
• Update all Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.6.*.

See the full list of breaking changes in ASP.NET Core 5.0.

That’s it! You should now be all set to use .NET 5 Preview 6.

What’s new?

Blazor WebAssembly template now included

The Blazor WebAssembly template is now included in the .NET 5 SDK along with the Blazor Server template. To create a Blazor WebAssembly project, simply run dotnet new blazorwasm.

JSON extension methods for HttpRequest and HttpResponse

You can now easily read and write JSON data from an HttpRequest and HttpResponse using the new ReadFromJsonAsync and WriteAsJsonAsync extension methods. These extension methods use the System.Text.Json serializer to handle the JSON data. You can also check if a request has a JSON content type using the new HasJsonContentType extension method.

The JSON extension methods can be combined with endpoint routing to create JSON APIs in a style of programming we call “route to code”. It is a new option for developers who want to create basic JSON APIs in a lightweight way. For example, a web app that has only a handful of endpoints might choose to use route to code rather than the full functionality of ASP.NET Core MVC.

endpoints.MapGet("/weather/{city:alpha}", async context =>

{ var city = (string)context.Request.RouteValues["city"]; var weather = GetFromDatabase(city); await context.Response.WriteAsJsonAsync(weather);

});

Find out more about the JSON extension methods in a recent On .NET interview about route to code.

Extension method to allow anonymous access to an endpoint

You can now allow anonymous access to an endpoint using the simpler AllowAnonymous extension method when using endpoint routing.

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)

{ app.UseRouting(); app.UseAuthentication(); app.UseAuthorization(); app.UseEndpoints(endpoints => { endpoints.MapGet("/", async context => { await context.Response.WriteAsync("Hello World!"); }) .AllowAnonymous(); });

}

Custom handling of authorization failures

Custom handling of authorization failures is now easier with the new IAuthorizationMiddlewareResultHandler interface that is invoked by the AuthorizationMiddleware. The default implementation remains the same, but a custom handler can be be registered in DI which allows things like custom HTTP responses based on why authorization failed. A sample that demonstrates usage of the IAuthorizationMiddlewareResultHandler can be found here.

SignalR Hub filters

Hub filters, called Hub pipelines in ASP.NET SignalR, is a feature that allows you to run code before and after Hub methods are called, similar to how middleware lets you run code before and after an HTTP request. Common uses include logging, error handling, and argument validation.

You can read more about this Hub filters on the docs page.

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!

Taito and Natsume Atari have just announced that a new entry in the KiKi KaiKai series (known as Pocky & Rocky in the west) is coming to Switch.

According to Weekly Famitsu, KiKi KaiKai: Kuro Mantle no Nazo (that’s a tentative title) is being developed by Tengo Project, a team within Natsume Atari which is formed of staff who worked on the 1992 SNES title KiKi KaiKai: Nazo no Kuro Mantle, including Toshiyasu Miyabe.

Miyabe had this to say about the announcement:

We started work on a sequel with the thought that if we didn’t respond to requests for a remake now, we wouldn’t have the chance in the future considering the staff’s age. While you may think it’s a remake, it’s a completely new title. It’s loaded with new elements.

The KiKi KaiKai series began life in arcades in 1986. The aforementioned SNES title gave the franchise global fame and would inspire a 16-bit sequel called KiKi KaiKai: Tsukiyo Soushi (Pocky & Rocky 2 in the west) as well as a Game Boy Advance entry called KiKi KaiKai Advance (Pocky & Rocky with Becky).

Tengo Project also worked on The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors and Wild Guns Reloaded, both of which updated existing series for a new generation, to great success.