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Showing posts from March, 2022

GitHub Copilot now available in Visual Studio 2022

GitHub Copilot , which is a solution that uses AI to make code suggestions to developers, is now available in Visual Studio 2022.  The solution first launched as a technical preview last June , and according to GitHub, Visual Studio 2022 was the most requested IDE by the community.  The solution makes suggestions to developers as they type, suggesting the code it thinks they might want. It can suggest whole lines or entire functions based on the context from the code being written.  RELATED CONTENT: GitHub Copilot sparks debates around open-source licenses Developers will need to be in the technical preview in order to get access to the extension. If not already in the technical preview, they can request to be added and will gain access as more capacity is added to the service.  If already a part of the technical preview, developers can search for the GitHub Copilot extension and install it.  More information on how to get started with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code 2022

Serverless360 – Ultimate Solution for All Custom Logging and Tracking Needs Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

Distributed tracing is a method used to trace messages flowing through your business applications built using various Azure services, where they are well-suited for tracking and identifying any unexpected performance failures. For instance, consider an employee onboarding application that involves multiple Azure services and on-premises components. Then, it might be challenging to trace and get complete visibility of data transferred between those services. That is where exactly distributed tracing can help you! Hence, this blog aims to provide you with an ultimate solution that can meet all your logging and tracing needs, especially for cloud-native and hybrid applications involving Microsoft Azure. Why Distributed Tracing for Azure and Hybrid Applications? Distributed tracing is one best way to achieve ‘real-time’ visualization of how the message flows within your system, helping your Azure operations team better analyze your business process’s performance. In all business s

React 18 now available with new concurrency features

React 18 was launched with out-of-the-box improvements like automatic batching, new APIs like startTransition, and streaming server-side rendering with support for Suspense.  The new features are built on top of the new opt-in concurrent renderer which is only enabled when someone uses a concurrent feature. Concurrency enables React to prepare multiple versions of a UI at the same time and it uses advanced techniques in its internal implementation such as priority queues and multiple buffering. “When we design APIs, we try to hide implementation details from developers. As a React developer, you focus on what you want the user experience to look like, and React handles how to deliver that experience. So we don’t expect React developers to know how concurrency works under the hood,” the React team wrote in a blog post . “However, Concurrent React is more important than a typical implementation detail — it’s a foundational update to React’s core rendering model. So while it’s not supe

Octopus Deploy enables configuration as code in latest update

Continuous deployment orchestration provider Octopus Deploy has announced the release of its configuration as code feature as part of its 2022.01 release According to the company, typically DevOps engineers don’t have visibility into their CI/CD pipeline configurations, preventing them from adding new features to that configuration. Many of the available “as code” implementations often compromise on usability and require developers to learn a new language in order to use them.  With Octopus Deploy’s configuration as code capability, developers will be able to see the deployment process in Git alongside their application code. This makes it easier to evolve them both alongside each other.  Developers can also work in the environment they prefer, or use the Octopus UI to do tasks like configure a Git repository, select a branch, and commit changes. Octopus Deploy has also built a Visual Studio Code extension for editing configuration files.  Other features of configuration as code in

WSO2 announces general availability of Choreo

WSO2 , provider of open-source technology, today announced the general availability of Choreo , a digital platform as a service. This release is intended to help teams quickly transition digital apps from ideation to production. According to WSO2, Choreo allows organizations to rapidly deliver new digital experiences by creating and deploying services, integrations, and APIs in hours or days rather than weeks or months. Because Choreo is built on the Ballerina cloud-native, open-source programming language and runtime, it enables developers of differing skill levels to create apps using varying views of the code.  This allows users to focus on building only the core logic they need while AI assisted development helps to increase productivity and decrease time to market.    This release also brings simplification to DevOps and deployment by replacing custom tooling and scripting with built-in multi-stage, CI/CD delivery as well as deep observability for automatically building, te

Blueprint Software announces Business Transformation Platform

Blueprint Software announced its new Business Transformation Platform which is designed to be a command center for company-wide process improvement initiatives. The platform delivers process intelligence that enables enterprise organizations to analyze and assess process value, identify hidden inefficiencies, and execute on data-driven improvement strategies with speed and precision.  “Blueprint’s initial use case in the automation space focused heavily on simplifying and supporting RPA design processes for large organizations. Through our work, however, we found that organizations which were focusing on process automation were encountering upstream problems that Blueprint was uniquely suited to fill,” says Dan Shimmerman, CEO of Blueprint. “For process automation initiatives to be successful, organizations need to start with process improvement, a discovery that ultimately helped drive development of our Transformation Platform.” Key features include the process hub, which offers p

Mirage 4.0 available with updates to the compiler

The library operating system MirageOS 4.0 has been released with better integrations and a significant change in how MirageOS compiles projects.  The project constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance, low-energy footprint applications across various hypervisor and embedded platforms. The MirageOS networking code powers Docker Desktop’s VPNKit and is also in use in Citrix Hypervisor, Nitrokey, Robur, Tarides, and many more solutions.  As of the new release, parts of MirageOS are now merged into the OCaml ecosystem to make it easier to deploy OCaml applications into a unikernel. Cross-compilation support has also been improved with more compilation targets to MirageOS.  The new release also includes a significant change in how MirageOS compiles projects with the ‘opammonorepo’ tool, which separates package management from building the resulting source code.  The new tool creates a lock file for the project dependencies, downloads and extracts the dependency sources locally,

Contrast Security and Red Hat announce partnership on deploying secure cloud native applications

The code security company, Contrast Security , announced that it will be entering into a partnership with Red Hat OpenShift to allow users to deploy secure, containerized applications by integrating within native CI/CD pipelines.  With these integrations, customers will be able to retain the scalability of the OpenShift Container Platform and gain automated security testing as a part of the software delivery process.  This partnership works to ensure that security is built in as a core component of the software delivery value stream.  Additionally, cloud developers can embed Contrast Security’s Assess and Protect agents within their source code image in order to allow for continuous vulnerability detection with runtime context.  This works to ensure that applications are properly protected from targeted attacks in production.  This partnership also brings teams the ability to trigger automated security tests within native Jenkins pipelines and be sure that security policy gates

The Importance of Having Proper DMARC Records Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

The email validation system, known as DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance), is meant to safeguard your company’s email domain from being exploited for phishing, email spoofing , and other cybercrimes. For email authentication, DMARC records use SPF and DKIM. With DMARC, you can do reporting, which is a critical feature. By publishing a DMARC record in their domain’s DNS, domain owners may see who is sending emails on their behalf. Using this information, you may receive further information about the email channel. A domain owner may take control of the email sent on his behalf using this information. Your domain may be protected against phishing and spoofing attacks by using DMARC. You, as the owner of a website, want to be certain that only emails that you have sent will be seen by your visitors or customers. As a result, DMARC is a must for all domain registrants. DMARC provides email recipients with the assurance that an email they receive fro

Microsoft encourages early conversations on how to secure metaverse

The metaverse has been one of the industry’s latest buzzwords over the past few months, but recognizing the need to figure out metaverse security early on, Microsoft has released some guidelines.  The company compared this stage of the metaverse to the early days of the web. The web made it easy for anyone to set up a website, which led to a lot of bad actors committing fraud by setting up websites that impersonated banks, government agencies, and other brands.  This is still a problem to this day, despite decades of progress on the web. Microsoft encourages the industry to learn from past mistakes and join together to secure the metaverse.  “The culture of information-sharing and collaboration in the defender community today has been a monumental achievement that did not happen overnight. Today ISPs, cloud providers, device manufacturers — even industry rivals in these markets — recognize the need to work together on security issues. Sitting now at the gateway of a new dimension in

Indico 5 launched to accelerate automation on unstructured data

Indico Data, the unstructured data company, unveiled Indico 5 to allow companies to better make use of automation and intelligent document processing (IDP) on unstructured data.  Despite 90% of enterprise data being unstructured according to a December 2021 IDC report, only 2% of it is being utilized based on additional Google research.  The platform uses a proprietary training data corpus, composite AI technology, and machine teaching application interface to scale automation and enable companies to take advantage of this unstructured data.  The new version includes linked relationship labeling and a new visual interface that enables organizations to easily automate and apply unstructured data. “Indico 5 is another major advance in our strategy of putting game-changing AI solutions for unstructured data in the hands of business users,” said Tom Wilde, the CEO of Indico Data. “The real promise of automation in Indico 5 is using AI to augment human expertise, not replace it. The ra

The Best Kept Secrets About Html Editors For Windows Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

Currently, the HTML editor Windows has already undergone many developments. But with all these changes, there are still many people who do not know about the secrets of HTML editors for this operating system. If you are one of them, then this article is for you. Here, we will tell you the best-kept secrets about HTML editors for Windows that will make your life easier. The best part is that there is no need to install any software besides your current HTML editor to use these secret features. Many HTML editors for Windows have these hidden features built-in that make them far more valuable than a simple text editor. But before we go ahead and tell you all about them, let’s look at some of the reasons why you should use an HTML editor for Windows. What is an HTML Editor And Why Should You Use It? HTML editor is an application that helps you create, edit, and publish your website. It supports all major web browsers and works with any Windows computer. You can use an HTML editor to

PlanetScale addressing migration data loss and downtime with new Rewind feature for quickly undoing changes

The database company PlanetScale announced a new Rewind feature that will allow developers to roll back changes to data migrations to prevent downtime or data loss. According to the company, it’s possible to make a schema change to a database that causes unexpected issues like downtime or a full-scale outage. Any data that gets added during the period in which the database was down has the potential to be lost.   This new Rewind capability allows developers to revert schema changes in less than a minute, compared to the hours that it would previously take to fix it.  Databases that are enrolled in PlanetScale’s limited beta will now see a “Revert changes” button that will stay active for 30 minutes after changes have been made. If selected, changes will be reverted immediately.  As an example, if you were to remove a column and associated data, then revert that request with Rewind, the column and its data will reappear in a matter of seconds.  “Rewind opens the door to a new level

Python One Line for Loop Gorakh Gupta The Crazy Programmer

In our daily life, we often write some big programs and some small level programs to solve the different problems. Whenever we try to solve a complex level problem, then we have to write so many lines of code. In that code, we often use different types of loops like for, while, or any conditional statements like if, if-else or if-elif-else. Sometimes we have to write the whole loop to process a single statement in the loop or a minimum of two or three statements. When we write this in our code it generally takes approx 4 to 5 lines to complete a general for loop in which we have to perform a single operation. Case 1: For example, I am showing you the code where we are trying to print whole numbers upto 5. for i in range(5): print(i) Output: PS C : \ Users \ ASUS \ Desktop \ TheCrazyProgrammer Work > python -u " c : \ Users \ ASUS \ Desktop \ TheCrazyProgrammer Work \ test.py " 0 1 2 3 4 As we can see in the loop we are only printing the i value, it takes 2 line

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: xGitGuard

xGitGuard is a tool built by Comcast to keep inadvertently uploaded authentication secrets out of GitHub repositories that is now available as open-source software.  It can be used to scan GitHub at scale and identify proprietary authentication secrets, specifically passwords, API keys, and tokens. Development teams can use xGitGuard to identify credentials in their own repositories. xGitGuard uses advanced natural language processing to detect authentication secrets and has one mode for detecting credentials and another for detecting API tokens and keys. The tool follows a six-step process: search GitHub at scale, filter results, detect and extract secrets, developer identification, validate secrets and then submit for remediation.  Search: xGitGuard uses primary keywords which search for documents that are related to the organization and secondary keys to target documents that potentially contain secrets. Filter Results is a query engine within the project that runs multiple quer

Catchpoint launches new user experience monitoring platform

Observability company Catchpoint has announced its newest user experience monitoring platform, Catchpoint Symphony.   This new platform was designed based on input from hundreds of users and usability studies. According to Catchpoint, Symphony is intuitive to use, which makes it easy to get started with. It provides a common toolset with simplified workloads.  Customers can use it to perform advanced testing and monitoring, and analyze and correlate broader data sets.  This will allow them to visualize user experience, service, application, and network performance across data sources like real user monitoring data, BGP and network data, and user sentiment and proactive tests. According to tests by the company, Catchpoint Symphony outperforms other UX systems by 83%. Issues can be identified within 10 seconds using the platform.  “Enterprises increasingly rely on public infrastructure to deliver services and reach users globally – commercial Internet, multi-access edge computing (M

The benefits of Cypress

With so many different testing frameworks and tools on the market today, it can be a challenge to determine which is the right fit for you and your organization. Recently, there has been a great deal of talk about Cypress , the open-source end-to-end testing framework for web test automation.  Andrew Knight, developer advocate at Applitools and an avid user of Cypress, said that Cypress is his preferred testing framework due to the user experience that it offers. “I’ve done a lot of test automation… and Cypress comes in and offers things like a very concise syntax and automatic waiting for elements with a page to protect you from having flaky scripts,” he said. Cypress has recently received an update, enhancing the features that Knight likes about the tool even more. Cypress Test Runner v9 5.1 has added a “Ready” event to the Plugins process in order to be sure that all of the plugins have started successfully before the configuration is loaded and the tests start.  This update als

Low-code speeds up development time, but what about testing time?

Low-code has been experiencing widespread adoption across the industry over the past several years, but testing apps created using low-code tools is unfortunately falling behind. According to Raj Rao, chief strategy officer for Sauce Labs low-code solution AutonomIQ , often companies set up citizen development programs where employees with no technical background can use low-code or no-code tools to build applications. However, when it comes time to test those applications, a lot of testing tools use traditional code that citizen developers don’t necessarily understand. For those companies, testing is a bottleneck because the citizen developers who write the application then can’t test them. This bottleneck results in a number of issues, such as test fatigue and test debt.  Test fatigue sets in when users are required to perform a full battery of tests repeatedly in a manual fashion. This is when the users responsible for testing start to make mistakes or give up due to pre-defin

GitLab 14.9 now generally available

The team at GitLab recently announced the release of GitLab 14.9, bringing users new features such as epic to epic linking, integrated security training, a new Environments page design, and rule mode for scan result policies. This update supports linking epics using “related,” “blocking,” or “blocked” relationships, allowing users to track and manage epic dependencies across GitLab groups. According to GitLab, this works to reduce variability and increase predictability in delivering value. GitLab 14.9 also enables users to use rule mode when designing and editing scan result policies without the need to edit the policies YAML directly. This results in simplicity when creating and managing merge request approval rules that are triggered based on a certain threshold of vulnerabilities. Additionally, the Deployment Approval capability is now available in the GitLab interface. This allows deployment approvers to view a pending deployment and approve or reject it right from the Enviro

Once a refugee himself, Caspio CEO now helping Ukrainians

The devastating events transpiring in Ukraine have been at top of mind for many in the last few weeks. For several global software development organizations with employees operating in Ukraine, these tragedies hit far too close to home.  According to a recent tweet , Frank Zamani, CEO of Caspio , was once a refugee himself, fleeing from Iran 36 years ago to escape religious persecution. Today, Zamani finds himself in the position to help Ukrainian refugees who are leaving the country and heading for Poland.  Caspio is a no-code software company with offices in California, Poland, Ukraine, and the Philippines; currently, the company has 70 employees living and working in Dnipro, Ukraine. Zamani arrived in Poland on Friday, March 4th and has been traveling between Krakow and Przemysl in order to help Ukrainian Caspio employees and their families find adequate housing, food, and supplies after fleeing their home country.  At this time, approximately 30 Caspio employees have made it s

Java 18 release introduces Simple Web Server for testing and prototyping

The latest version of Java, Java 18, is now available, with nine new approved enhancements.  A Simple Web Server is now available in Java 18, and it can be used for prototyping and testing purposes.  “It’s sort of a representation of our continued efforts to make Java more approachable for students and educators and developers that are just getting started in their careers are just starting to learn to program, we want to continue to make it easy, easily easy to consume and learn Java,” said Chad Arimura, VP of developer relations at Oracle.  One other new enhancement is that developers will now be able to add code snippets within API documentation.   In addition, in this version of Java, UTF-8 has been set as the default charset for Java APIs. This means that any APIs dependent on the default charset will behave consistently on all implementations, operating systems, locales, and configurations.  Another update, JEP 416, makes method handles the underlying mechanism for r

Secure Code Warrior launches GitLab integration

Secure Code Warrior , a global security organization, has joined GitLab’s global partner program . This new partnership means that Secure Code Warrior will make its learning platform available to developers on GitLab’s DevOps platform.  This integration will work to enhance real-time secure coding guidance, which is an important piece of the process of detecting and fixing vulnerabilities. “Developers are expected to deliver code faster than ever before, which can make security oftentimes an afterthought. However, if developers can get actionable secure coding guidance throughout their workflows, they’ll be enabled to find and fix vulnerabilities whilst taking their security knowledge to the next level. We’re proud to partner with GitLab to give millions of developers an easier pathway to make this a reality,” said Pieter Danhieux, co-founder and CEO of Secure Code Warrior.  This partnership is geared at further embedding security into the developer workflow in order to ensure a hi

Report: Data sprawl is a major challenge for almost half of companies

Data sprawl is getting worse and worse, with 43% of respondents to a new survey claiming that they use an average of four to six platforms to manage their data . Another 11% use an average of 10-12 platforms.  The survey, “ The State of Data and What’s Next ,” was commissioned by Red Hat and Starburst and conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). The research also revealed that companies are continuing to add new data types to their environments. For example, 65% of respondents plan to collect streaming data and 60% plan to collect video and event data.  Another key highlight of the report is that there are still bottlenecks in data pipelines. Forty-eight percent of respondents take over 24 hours to create a data pipeline and then another 24 hours to actually move those pipelines into production. This pain point is pushing many organizations towards a more decentralized model such as data meshes.  AI and machine learning are placing increasing pressure on these syst

Harness acquires ChaosNative, bringing leading chaos engineering solution to award-winning software delivery platform

Harness  Inc., the software delivery platform company, today announced the acquisition of  ChaosNative Inc ., the original creator of the popular  Cloud Native Computing Foundation  project  LitmusChaos TM , which is used by hundreds of  leading organizations , including Intuit, Mercedes, NetApp, Orange, RedHat, and VMWare. ChaosNative Litmus TM  is ChaosNative’s highly scalable and secure enterprise platform for chaos engineering, offered both in the cloud and on-premises. Together, the companies are integrating the advanced testing capabilities of ChaosNative Litmus into the award-winning Harness Software Delivery Platform, providing customers with the ability to reduce downtime across distributed environments, track reliability improvements, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and provide a better end-user experience. This new Harness Software Delivery Platform module, Harness Chaos Engineering powered by Litmus, enables development teams to take full control of their service re