Deck builders are great in our opinion, and roguelike deck builders, doubly so. There’s no better feeling that building synergies as you gather together your deck of hard-fought cards, overcoming enemies and bosses that gave you so much trouble previously. That’s why we decided to partner with Slothwerks, the developer of Meteorfall, for this week’s giveaway. The much acclaimed sequel, Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale – our review here – releases on August 27, so we’re giving away some Android copies to celebrate!

For those that don’t know, Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale is a roguelike card-crawler, combining aspects of deck building with good old fashioned dungeon crawling. Each run sees you choose a character and defeat as many dungeons as you can before you die. Along the way, you’ll build a deck of items, abilities, and potions, while also earning perks to increase your survivability.

It’s a super fun take on the roguelike deck building genre, and also features Meteorfall’s signature art style, and quirky approach. If delving dungeons and defeating monsters with card play is your idea of a good time, be sure to enter our giveaway below.

All you have to do in order to enter is fill out the entry box – but please make sure to browse our terms and conditions first.

Android

Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale – Android giveaway

If you simply can’t wait to play Krumit’s Tale, it’s available on Google Play and the App Store from tomorrow. For more similar games, be sure to see our lists of the best mobile card games, the best mobile roguelikes, and just to top it off, the best games like Slay the Spire on mobile.

.NET 5 Preview 8 is now available and is ready for evaluation. Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Azure Active Directory authentication with Microsoft.Identity.Web
• CSS isolation for Blazor components
• Lazy loading in Blazor WebAssembly
• Updated Blazor WebAssembly globalization support
• New InputRadio Blazor component
• Set UI focus in Blazor apps
• Influencing the HTML head in Blazor apps
• IAsyncDisposable for Blazor components
• Control Blazor component instantiation
• Protected browser storage
• Model binding and validation with C# 9 record types
• Improvements to DynamicRouteValueTransformer
• Auto refresh with dotnet watch
• Console Logger Formatter
• JSON Console Logger

See the .NET 5 release notes for additional details and known issues.

Get started

To get started with ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 Preview 8 install the .NET 5 SDK.

You need to use Visual Studio 2019 16.8 Preview 2 or newer to use .NET 5 Preview 8. .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 7 to .NET 5 Preview 8:

• Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.8.*.
• Update all Microsoft.Extensions.* package references to 5.0.0-preview.8.*.
• Update System.Net.Http.Json package references to 5.0.0-preview.8.*.

That’s it! You should be all ready to go.

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

What’s new?

Azure Active Directory authentication with Microsoft.Identity.Web

The ASP.NET Core project templates now integrate with Microsoft.Identity.Web to handle authentication with Azure Activity Directory (Azure AD). The Microsoft.Identity.Web package provides a better experience for authentication through Azure AD as well as an easier way to access Azure resources on behalf of your users, including Microsoft Graph. Check out the Microsoft.Identity.Web sample that take you from a simple login through multi-tenancy, using Azure APIs, using Microsoft Graph, and protecting your own APIs. Microsoft.Identity.Web will be generally available alongside .NET 5.

CSS isolation for Blazor components

Blazor now supports defining CSS styles that are scoped to a given component. Component specific CSS styles make it easier to reason about the styles in your app and to avoid unintentional side effects from global styles. You define component specific styles in a .razor.css file the matches the name of the .razor file for the component.

For example, let’s say you have a component MyComponent.razor file that looks like this:

MyComponent.razor

<h1>My Component</h1> <ul class="cool-list"> <li>Item1</li> <li>Item2</li>

</ul>

You can then define a MyComponent.razor.css with the styles for MyComponent:

MyComponent.razor.css

h1 { font-family: 'Comic Sans MS'

} .cool-list li { color: red;

}

The styles in MyComponent.razor.css will only get applied to the rendered output of MyComponent; the h1 elements rendered by other components, for example, are not affected.

To write a selector in component specific styles that affects child components, use the ::deep combinator.

.parent ::deep .child { color: red;

}

By using the ::deep combinator, only the .parent class selector is scoped to the component; the .child class selector is not scoped, and will match content from child components.

Blazor achieves CSS isolation by rewriting the CSS selectors as part of the build so that they only match markup rendered by the component. Blazor then bundles together the rewritten CSS files and makes the bundle available to the app as a static web asset at the path _framework/scoped.styles.css.

While Blazor doesn’t natively support CSS preprocessors like Sass or Less, you can still use CSS preprocessors to generate component specific styles before they are rewritten as part of the building the project.

Lazy loading in Blazor WebAssembly

Lazy loading enables you to improve the load time of your Blazor WebAssembly app by deferring the download of specific app dependencies until they are required. Lazy loading may be helpful if your Blazor WebAssembly app has large dependencies that are only used for specific parts of the app.

To delay the loading of an assembly, you add it to the BlazorWebAssemblyLazyLoad item group in your project file:

Assemblies marked for lazy loading must be explicitly loaded by the app before they are used. To lazy load assemblies at runtime, use the LazyAssemblyLoader service:

@inject LazyAssemblyLoader LazyAssemblyLoader @code { var assemblies = await LazyAssemblyLoader.LoadAssembliesAsync(new string[] { "Lib1.dll" });

}

To lazy load assemblies for a specific page, use the OnNavigateAsync event on the Router component. The OnNavigateAsync event is fired on every page navigation and can be used to lazy load assemblies for a particular route. You can also lazily load the entire page for a route by passing any lazy loaded assemblies as additional assemblies to the Router.

The following examples demonstrates using the LazyAssemblyLoader service to lazy load a specific dependency (Lib1.dll) when the user navigates to /page1. The lazy loaded assembly is then added to the additional assemblies list passed to the Router component, so that it can discover any routable components in that assembly.

@using System.Reflection

@using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Routing

@using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.Services

@inject LazyAssemblyLoader LazyAssemblyLoader <Router AppAssembly="typeof(Program).Assembly" AdditionalAssemblies="lazyLoadedAssemblies" On‌NavigateAsync="@OnNavigateAsync"> <Navigating> <div> <p>Loading the requested page...</p> </div> </Navigating> <Found Context="routeData"> <RouteView RouteData="@routeData" DefaultLayout="typeof(MainLayout)" /> </Found> <NotFound> <LayoutView Layout="typeof(MainLayout)"> <p>Sorry, there is nothing at this address.</p> </LayoutView> </NotFound>

</Router> @code { private List<Assembly> lazyLoadedAssemblies = new List<Assembly>(); private async Task OnNavigateAsync(NavigationContext args) { if (args.Path.EndsWith("/page1")) { var assemblies = await LazyAssemblyLoader.LoadAssembliesAsync(new string[] { "Lib1.dll" }); lazyLoadedAssemblies.AddRange(assemblies); } }

}

Updated Blazor WebAssembly globalization support

.NET 5 Preview 8 reintroduces globalization support for Blazor WebAssembly based on International Components for Unicode (ICU). Part of introducing the ICU data and logic is optimizing these payloads for download size. This work is not fully completed yet. We expect to reduce the size of the ICU data in future .NET 5 preview updates.

New InputRadio Blazor component

Blazor in .NET 5 now includes built-in InputRadio and InputRadioGroup components. These components simplify data binding to radio button groups with integrated validation alongside the other Blazor form input components.

Opinion about blazor:

<InputRadioGroup @bind-Value="survey.OpinionAboutBlazor"> @foreach (var opinion in opinions) { <div class="form-check"> <InputRadio class="form-check-input" id="@opinion.id" Value="@opinion.id" /> <label class="form-check-label" for="@opinion.id">@opinion.label</label> </div> }

</InputRadioGroup>

Set UI focus in Blazor apps

Blazor now has a FocusAsync convenience method on ElementReference for setting the UI focus on that element.

<button @onclick="() => textInput.FocusAsync()">Set focus</button>

<input @ref="textInput"/>

IAsyncDisposable support for Blazor components

Blazor components now support the IAsyncDisposable interface for the asynchronous release of allocated resources.

Control Blazor component instantiation

You can now control how Blazor components are instantiated by providing your own IComponentActivator service implementation.

Thank you Mladen Macanović for this Blazor feature contribution!

Influencing the HTML head in Blazor apps

Use the new Title, Link, and Meta components to programmatically set the title of a page and dynamically add link and meta tags to the HTML head in a Blazor app.

To use the new Title, Link, and Meta components:

1. Add a package reference to the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Web.Extensions package.
2. Include a script reference to _content/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Web.Extensions/headManager.js.
3. Add a @using directive for Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Web.Extensions.Head.

The following example programmatically sets the page title to show the number of unread user notifications, and updates the page icon a as well:

@if (unreadNotificationsCount > 0)

{ var title = $"Notifications ({unreadNotificationsCount})"; <Title Value="title"></Title> <Link rel="icon" href="icon-unread.ico" />

}

Protected browser storage

In Blazor Server apps, you may want to persist app state in local or session storage so that the app can rehydrate it later if needed. When storing app state in the user’s browser, you also need to ensure that it hasn’t been tampered with.

Blazor in .NET 5 helps solve this problem by providing two new services: ProtectedLocalStorage and ProtectedSessionStorage. These services help you store state in local and session storage respectively, and they take care of protecting the stored data using the ASP.NET Core data protection APIs.

To use the new protected browser storage services:

1. Add a package reference to Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.Web.Extensions.
2. Configure the services by calling services.AddProtectedBrowserStorage() from Startup.ConfigureServcies.

3. Inject either ProtectedLocalStorage and ProtectedSessionStorage into your component implementation:

   @inject ProtectedLocalStorage ProtectedLocalStorage
   
   @inject ProtectedSessionStorage ProtectedSessionStorage
   
   

4. Use the desired service to get, set, and delete state asynchronously:

   private async Task IncrementCount()
   
   {
   
   await ProtectedLocalStorage.SetAsync("count", ++currentCount);
   
   }
   
   

Model binding and validation with C# 9 record types

You can now use C# 9 record types with model binding in an MVC controller or a Razor Page. Record types are a great way to model data being transmitted over the wire.

For example, the PersonController below uses the Person record type with model binding and form validation:

“`C# public record Person([Required] string Name, [Range(0, 150)] int Age);

public class PersonController { public IActionResult Index() => View();

[HttpPost] public IActionResult Index(Person person) { // … } }

<br />*Person/Index.cshtml* ```razor
@model Person Name: <input asp-for="Model.Name" />
<span asp-validation-for="Model.Name" /> Age: <input asp-for="Model.Age" />
<span asp-validation-for="Model.Age" />

Improvements to DynamicRouteValueTransformer

ASP.NET Core in .NET Core 3.1 introduced DynamicRouteValueTransformer as a way to use use a custom endpoint to dynamically select an MVC controller action or a razor page. In .NET 5 Preview 8 you can now pass state to your DynamicRouteValueTransformer and filter the set of endpoints chosen.

Auto refresh with dotnet watch

In .NET 5, running dotnet watch on an ASP.NET Core project will now both launch the default browser and auto refresh the browser as you make changes to your code. This means you can open an ASP.NET Core project in your favorite text editor, run dotnet watch run once, and then focus on your code changes while the tooling handles rebuilding, restarting, and reloading your app. We expect to bring the auto refresh functionality to Visual Studio in the future as well.

Console Logger Formatter

We’ve made improvements to the console log provider in the Microsoft.Extensions.Logging library. Developers can now implement a custom ConsoleFormatter to exercise complete control over formatting and colorization of the console output. The formatter APIs allow for rich formatting by implementing a subset of the VT-100 (supported by most modern terminals) escape sequences. The console logger can parse out escape sequences on unsupported terminals allowing you to author a single formatter for all terminals.

JSON Console Logger

In addition to support for custom formatters, we’ve also added a built-in JSON formatter that emits structured JSON logs to the console. You can switch from the default simple logger to JSON, add to following snippet to your Program.cs:

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)

+ .ConfigureLogging(logging =>

+ {

+ logging.AddJsonConsole(options =>

+ {

+ options.JsonWriterOptions = new JsonWriterOptions() { Indented = true };

+ });

+ }) .ConfigureWebHostDefaults(webBuilder => { webBuilder.UseStartup<Startup>(); });

Once enabled, log messages emitted to the console are now JSON formatted.

{ "EventId": 0, "LogLevel": "Information", "Category": "Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime", "Message": "Now listening on: https://localhost:5001", "State": { "Message": "Now listening on: https://localhost:5001", "address": "https://localhost:5001", "{OriginalFormat}": "Now listening on: {address}" }

}

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!

A pair of patent applications published Thursday offers hints about how Apple’s rumored location-tracking tag devices, dubbed “Apple Tags” or “AirTags” by leakers, will function.

This blog post was co-authored by Anny Dow, Product Marketing Manager, Azure Cognitive Services.

As schools and organizations around the world prepare for a new school year, remote learning tools have never been more critical. Educational technology, and especially AI, has a huge opportunity to facilitate new ways for educators and students to connect and learn.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Immersive Reader, and shine a light on how new improvements to Azure Cognitive Services can help developers build AI apps for remote education that empower everyone.

Make content more accessible with Immersive Reader, now generally available

Immersive Reader is an Azure Cognitive Service within the Azure AI platform that helps readers read and comprehend text. Through today’s general availability, developers and partners can add Immersive Reader right into their products, enabling students of all abilities to translate in over 70 languages, read text aloud, focus attention through highlighting, other design elements, and more.

Immersive Reader has become a critical resource for distance learning, with more than 23 million people every month using the tool to improve their reading and writing comprehension. Between February and May 2020, when many schools moved to a distance learning model, we saw a 560 percent increase in Immersive Reader usage. As the education community embarks on a new school year in the Fall, we expect to see continued momentum for Immersive Reader as a tool for educators, parents, and students.

With the general availability of Immersive Reader, we are also rolling out the following enhancements:

• Immersive Reader SDK 1.1: Updates include support to have a page read aloud automatically, pre-translating content, and more. Learn about SDK updates.
• New Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) languages: Immersive Reader is adding 15 new Neural Text to Speech voices, enabling students to have content read aloud in even more languages. Learn about the new Neural Text to Speech languages.
• New Translator languages: Translator is adding five new languages that will also be available in Immersive Reader—Odia, Kurdish (Northern), Kurdish (Central), Pashto, and Dari. Learn about the latest Translator languages.

Today, we’re adding new partners who are integrating Immersive Reader to make content more accessible, Code.org and SAFARI Montage.

Code.org is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools. To ensure that students of all backgrounds and abilities can access their resources and course content, Code.org is integrating Immersive Reader into their platform.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Microsoft to bring Immersive Reader to the Code.org community. The inclusive capabilities of Immersive Reader to improve reading fluency and comprehension in learners of varied backgrounds, abilities, and learning styles directly aligns with our mission to ensure every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science.” – Hadi Partovi, Founder and CEO of Code.org

SAFARI Montage, a leading learning object repository, is integrating Immersive Reader to make it possible for students of any language background or accessibility needs to engage with content, and enable families who don’t speak the language of instruction to be more involved in their students’ learning journeys.

“Immersive Reader is a crucial support for CPS students and families. During remote learning, particularly for our younger learners, student learning is often supported by parents, guardians, or other caregivers. Since Immersive Reader can be used to translate the student-facing instructions in our digital curriculum, families can support student learning in over 80 languages, making digital learning far more equitable and accessible than ever before! In addition, read-aloud and readability supports are game-changers for diverse learners” – Giovanni Benincasa, UX Manager, Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Digital Learning, Chicago Public Schools

With Immersive Reader, all it takes is a single API call to help users boost literacy. To start exploring how to integrate Immersive Reader into your app or service, check out these resources:

To see the growing list of Immersive Reader partners and learn more, check out our partners page and Immersive Reader education blog.

Bring online courses to life with speech-enabled apps

With the shift to remote learning, another challenge that educators may face is continuing to drive student engagement.

Text to Speech, a Speech service feature that allows users to convert text to lifelike audio can facilitate new ways for students to interact with content. In addition to powering features like Read Aloud in Immersive Reader and the Microsoft Edge browser, Text to Speech enables developers to build apps that speak naturally in over 110 voices with more than 45 languages and variants.

With the Audio Content Creation tool, users can more easily bring audiobooks to life and finetune audio characteristics like voice style, rate, pitch, and pronunciation to fit their scenarios—no code required. Voices can even be customized for specific characters or personas; the Custom Neural Voice capability makes it possible to build one-of-a-kind voices, starting with 30 minutes of audio. Duolingo, for example, is using the Custom Neural Voice capability to create unique voices to represent different characters in its language courses.

To learn more about how to start creating speech-enabled apps for remote learning, check out the technical Text to Speech blog and other resources:

Improve productivity and accessibility with transcription and voice commands 

AI can also be a useful tool for more seamless note-taking, making it possible for students and teachers to type with their voice. Transcribe in Word uses Speech to Text in Azure Cognitive Services to automatically transcribe your conversations. Now with speaker diarization, you can get a transcript that identifies who said what, when.

In addition, adding voice enables more seamless experiences in Microsoft 365. For students who have difficulties writing things down, they can use AI-powered tools in Office not just for dictation but also for controls such as adding, formatting, editing, and organizing text. Word uses Language Understanding, an Azure Cognitive Service that enables you to add custom natural language understanding to your apps, to make it possible to capture ideas easily. To learn more about Language Understanding and how it is powering voice commands, check out our Language Understanding blog.

For more details on how AI is powering experiences in Microsoft 365, read the Microsoft 365 blog.

Get started today

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build. Get started today with Azure Cognitive Services and an Azure free account.

Never before have we seen enterprises adapt and transform as rapidly as they have since the arrival of COVID-19. In the private sector, these decisions have come relatively easily (even if the execution is hard): meet the customer where they are, expand infrastructure to meet the ballooning digital demand, and enable legions of employees to work remotely. It’s simply a matter of good business.

Sometimes perceived as slow to adopt digital transformation, how can government entities become agile champions of the cloud and cloud analytics? To explore this topic, I spoke with Steve Bennett, Ph.D., formerly with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security where he led teams working in biological surveillance, and currently Director, Global Government Practice, SAS.

Daniel: Steve, based on your experience working in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, what did you see as some of the main challenges the government faces with adopting cloud computing and leveraging the potential of cloud analytics?

Steve: When I worked at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, we were using analytics to understand new health threats, and we had two challenges that were a constant headache. One was how we store data and remain compliant. The other was managing a large collection of tools—one to enable visualization and dashboards, another for optimization, and yet another for machine learning and predictive analytics.

Daniel: Storing data in a compliant manner and then being able to manage a set of analytics tools are two challenges that I have seen as well. People may not think of a government or a city council as having a large amount of data to store and analyze. However, government Internet of Things (IoT) estates are quite large. Think of light poles, luminaires, air quality sensors, water meters, and water quality management systems. All of these are connected and generating a huge amount of data. For the government to digitally transform, government analysts will need to make sense out of all that data on a large scale. They will need to see patterns, and eventually make predictions. How do you recommend government teams get started?

Steve: With the vast amount of data generated by government IoT projects and the performance requirements, cloud computing makes sense. Cloud computing provides the ability to scale elastically and on-demand, it supports policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen security, and it eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software.

In terms of analytic tools, teams should evaluate how tools model data, the process used for extract transform load (ETL), and the simplicity of the user interface. They should make sure the analytics tools democratize the analysis process.  All types of users (business, engineering, data science, and IT) should be able to access, explore, visualize, and transform data into insights.

Daniel: Can you give an example of how cloud-based analytics has been applied in the government?

Steve: Let’s look at a solution that was implemented by SAS and Microsoft for the Town of Cary, North Carolina, USA. During storm events, Cary had no visibility into nearby river levels or how quickly the water was rising. Traditionally, the town relied on citizens to alert them of floods through phone calls, text messages, and other means. The town staff processed these requests manually dispatching public work personnel to erect barriers and close roads.

A key requirement for the Town of Cary was that their new flood prediction system needed to integrate with existing business systems. These included using the SAS Visual Analytics dashboard integrated with ArcGIS for real-time visualization, Salesforce for alerts, automated notifications, and work orders, and data sharing for regional partner response systems.

The Town of Cary installed water level sensors at various points along the Walnut Creek stream basin and rain gauges at several Town of Cary owned facilities. Data on stormwater levels were transferred to the Azure cloud over an LTE wireless connection.

Azure IoT Hub was used to provision, authenticate, and manage the two-way communication to the sensors. SAS Analytics for IoT combined streaming data from sensors and gauges with weather data for real-time scoring, dashboarding, and historical reporting. SAS Visual Analytics provided an interactive dashboard, reports, business intelligence, and analytics. The dashboard integrated with ESRI ArcGIS for additional geographic analysis and data visualization.

With the end-to-end IoT solution, town staff can now visualize flooding events in real-time. Stormwater personnel receive notifications and can generate work orders automatically. The data is also shared with regional partners.

“The Azure IoT platform has been a critical piece of our technology ecosystem and accelerates our ability to scale.” —Terry Yates, Smart City Strategist, Town of Cary

These predictive analytics applications have immense effects on city budgets, and more importantly, human lives—but they wouldn’t be possible without the scale of the cloud.

“We’re still connecting some of the dots, but we’re already seeing real benefits in the automation of formerly manual processes. Previously, we might get a call from a citizen, which would cause us to dispatch public works or emergency services depending on the type of flooding. Now the data triggers alerts that automatically notify stormwater personnel, who can react and address the flooded areas. It’s much more efficient and could ultimately save lives.” —Nicole Raimundo, Chief Information Officer, Town of Cary

Daniel: That’s an excellent example. How do you see cloud computing and analytics playing a role as governments address climate change?

Steve: As governments are compelled by climate change to make commitments around sustainability, carbon management, transportation, or emergency response, the importance of a connected data system that can drive predictive insights becomes clear. Natural disasters are increasing at unprecedented rates and can cost local government tens or even hundreds of millions to recover.

Daniel: Thanks, Steve. How would you like to close our discussion today?

Steve: Governments have a wide range of motivations for adopting analytics in the cloud. Analytics help governments identify fraud and help police become more efficient in investigations. And in the healthcare space, we’re using analytics to find anomalies in public health, figure out how to optimize hospital bed usage, and manage a supply chain for personal protective equipment in the wake of COVID-19.

The possibilities of powerful analytics in government are truly exciting. I recommend that public institutions embrace the cloud quickly to drive tangible results.

From connecting and drawing insight out of city-wide IoT footprints to reversing entire tax systems in a matter of days, only the cloud can meet the new demands placed on the government. It’s simply a matter of good government.

Next steps

Learn more about how Microsoft and its partners like SAS are promoting citizen well-being, influencing positive societal change, and enhancing government services.

Learn how SAS and Microsoft are partnering to further shape the future of analytics and AI.

Famitsu

Earlier this month, during a special Comic-Con at home video stream, the Hot Wheels team revealed it would be bolstering its existing Mario Kart line with some new products – including the characters Cat Peach and Diddy Kong, glider karts and a special mystery Yoshi egg line.

Now, in the latest update, Famitsu has shared a glimpse of one of the upcoming sets launching in Japan (for 6,500 yen) at the end of this month. It contains a blue Yoshi racer, Mario racer, and a two-player track featuring Bowser. Here’s a look:

Famitsu

Famitsu

Famitsu

Famitsu

It would appear that these products have actually already made their way to stores in the west, such as this listing found at Target in the US. Here’s hoping even more come our way in the future.

What do you think of this latest set? Tell us down below.

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