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Microsoft introduced updates to allow for more customizable workflows, including the ability to sync one’s Visual Studio theme with their Windows theme so that reading can become easier depending on background light.  Moving forward, Microsoft said it is looking to increase flexibility for managing tabs and documents through color coding and customizing tabs. The company will also introduce a range of new theming capabilities that will help developers make Visual Studio their own.  Additional details are available here .  SolarWinds DBA xPress now free DBA xPress product is now available as a free tool for data professionals who need to understand how a data environment is visually structured. The tool helps compare, synchronize, script, and navigate data and schemas while enabling data pros to seamlessly adopt DataOps and automate their releases.  “To succeed in migrating from one environment to another, teams need to optimize their data to maximize the performance of cloud-hos

Developers today are faced with an ever-changing landscape. Their responsibilities continue to expand into areas like software QA, security, and governance. In an SD Times Live! webinar, Brian Fox, CTO of Sonatype and Steve Poole, developer advocate at Sonatype, discuss the ways in which security has become an essential part of a developers job. According to Fox and Poole, one of the biggest struggles for developers entrusted with security practices is that they were not originally trained in the security field. This lack of proper training leads to mismatched expectations on both ends. When two teams have to work together but do not speak the same language, this is an almost unavoidable problem.  A key solution to this problem would be for organizations to better enable their developers to understand security practices. Investing time into this would help to bridge the gap between development and security and make for a better outcome in the long run.  Sonatype provides tools to de

dtSearch announced a new version of its enterprise and developer text retrieval product with a preview multithreaded indexer for multicore 64-bit Windows and document filter enhancements.  The dtSearch Engine for macOS release candidate adds support for Apple Silicon M1/ARM; the dtSearch Engine developer SDKs for macOS, Linux, and Windows share cross-platform. The beta also adds Hancom Office HWPX support to the many data types covered by dtSearch’s proprietary document filters. Postman raises $225 million in Series D funding  Postman closed a $225 million series D round, bringing its total valuation to $5.6 billion.  The company said it will use the funding to further its growth and to invest in its community of developers across the globe, support students through innovative API literacy programs, and contribute toward open-source projects to foster a strong and thriving API ecosystem.  Postman is an API platform that is used by more than 17 million developers and 500,000 organ

A number of major companies are coming together to form a foundation to advance eBPF technology. EBPF enables sandboxed programs to run in an operating system kernel, which allows developers to extend the kernel’s capabilities without having to change source code or load modules for the kernel.  The eBPF Foundation will be hosted as an umbrella under the Linux Foundation. Founding members include Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft, and Netflix.  One reason for the formation of the foundation is that because of the high demand in eBPF, there is a desire in the industry to optimize collaboration. Another reason is the need to ensure that the core of the project is well-maintained and has a clear roadmap.  The eBPF Foundation established a steering committee that will oversee the technical direction and vision of the technology.  EBPF was first introduced in 2014 and since then it has made its way into the infrastructure layer of many large data centers. For example, Facebook’s

Recently, Agile Consultant, Enterprise Agile Coach, and Transformation Lead, Jon Ward announced the new Agile framework for non-software teams: Agile Lineout. The framework functions as an alternative to Scrum and is designed for business teams managing transformations, marketing initiatives or corporate change, and mergers or acquisitions. While Agile Lineout is designed to operate for non-software teams, the framework was developed with the help of novice development teams. According to Ward, the idea behind Agile Lineout came from projects he ran with these development teams using tools from W. Edwards Deming’s book, “The System of Profound Knowledge,” in combination with systems theory. After seeing the progress these teams made when employing these strategies, Ward started to consider how this method could work for non-software teams as well. Ward explained, “As a coach I constantly get asked questions like: ‘I work in marketing, I don’t do software but could Agile help me?’… And

Microsoft announced the release candidate of TypeScript 4.4, and said it expects no further changes apart from critical bug fixes for the stable release.  Major highlights of the release candidate include control flow analysis of aliased conditions and discriminants, symbol and template string pattern index signatures, defaulting to the ‘unknown’ type in catch variables, and more.  Instead of having to convince TypeScript of a variable’s type whenever it is used, the type-checker leverages control flow analysis to deduce the type within every language construct. Additional details on the new release are available here .  AWS announces cross-account data sharing for Amazon Redshift This new feature offers users a simple and secure way to share fresh, complete, and consistent data in their  Amazon Redshift data warehouse with any number of stakeholders across AWS accounts. Users can now share data across organizations and collaborate with external parties while meeting compliance

JetBrains Academy launched its new Kotlin Basics program as a free introduction for people getting into software development to get started on the most popular language for building Android apps.  In this track, students will get familiarized with the language syntax, concepts, and libraries, as well as with the basics of object-oriented programming.  Students will also get familiar with helpful tools like Java and Kotlin libraries and learn how to work with the file system.  During the course, students can ask questions, interact with the community and learn together with others. They can also view solutions posted by other learners, learn from them, or help others by publishing their solution. “Kotlin Basics presents 10 real-world projects of different proficiency levels, over 120 educational topics, and more than 300 coding challenges! It also allows you to use all the powerful features of JetBrains Academy platform while learning Kotlin,” JetBrains stated in a post. “For ins

CodeFlare is IBM’s open-source framework that simplifies the integration and scaling of big data and AI workflows onto the hybrid cloud.  It drastically reduces the time to set up, run, and scale machine learning tests and expands on the functionality of Ray.  Also, CodeFlare pipelines run with ease on IBM’s new serverless platform IBM Cloud Code Engine and Red Hat OpenShift to allow users to deploy anywhere and extend the benefits of serverless to data scientists and AI researchers.  It also makes it easier to integrate and bridge with other cloud-native ecosystems by providing adapters to event triggers (such as the arrival of a new file), and load and partition data from a wide range of sources, such as cloud object storages, data lakes, and distributed filesystems. “CodeFlare should also mean developers aren’t having to duplicate their efforts or struggle to figure out what colleagues have done in the past to get a certain pipeline to run,” Carlos Costa and Priya Nagpurkar, res

Machine Learning is quickly becoming an important tool for automation, but failing models and improper background knowledge are creating more issues than they are solving.  “I think to build a good machine learning model… if you’re trying to do it repeatedly, you need great talent, you need an outstanding research process, and then finally you need technology and tooling that’s kind of up to date and modern,” said Matthew Granade, co-founder of machine learning platform provider Domino Data Lab. He explained how all three of these elements have to come together and operate in unity in order to create the best possible model, though Granade placed a special emphasis on the second aspect. “The research process determines how you’re going to identify problems to work on, find data, work with other parts of the business, test your results, and deliver those results to the business,” he explained.  According to Granade, the absence of the essential combination of those aspects is the reas

Google launched the fourth beta of the Android operating system, Android 12, which has now achieved the Platform Stability milestone. The changes impacting Android app developers are now finalized. One major change is a new dashboard in Settings that lets users see which apps are accessing which type of data and when. Android 12 also shows an indicator in the status bar when an app is using the camera or microphone and offers new toggles in Quick Settings, letting users instantly disable microphone and camera access for all apps. Additional details are available here.  LANSA launches portal development acceleration with Portalize The hybrid low-code platform provider LANSA announced Portalize, which simplifies and accelerates application development for developers using Visual LANSA. The solution includes advanced features that make it easy for users to navigate safely, security features such as IP monitoring and banning, and numerous user and admin features. “We’ve taken Visua

Split has announced new functionality in its platform: Statuses and Rollout board. This addition is designed to help software development teams move with greater speed, safety, and data-driven focus. These new updates are intended to make it easier for teams to collaborate on releases and manage their feature flags and experiments at scale.  With Statuses, teams can assign a feature the stage — in testing, for example — it is at in the release process. This, according to the company, saves the time of having to dig into its configuration when checking the status for any flag or experiment.  The Rollout board visualizes the release process by status; whenever a feature flag has a status assigned to it, the flag will automatically appear in the board. This allows teams to know what to do next so that they never forget to update or remove a feature flag. Here, the team can access information such as the number of days since a status was last updated, traffic received across environments

Betty Blocks announced that it raised $33 million in funding, led by European Private Equity and SmartFin Capital.   The platform enables fusion teams from the business side and IT to quickly build software, and Betty Blocks stated that it is planning to make the platform easier to use, enhance the citizen development governance features, introduce more templates, and enrich its Block Store with more standard integrations. “We’re on a mission to unlock the potential of all those new-breed citizen developers within enterprises who really want to get more control over their software needs, and to provide IT departments with more control while doing so. All offered on our powerful cloud-native platform, offering the best possible customer experience,” said Chris Obdam, the CEO of Betty Blocks. Microsoft introduces feature support in Direct3D 12 Microsoft announced the new “CD3DX12FeatureSupport” class to improve the experience with feature checking in Direct3D 12. The previous API wa

Transformations take time. People think you can bring in a tech transformation coach, change everybody’s job title, and get them on a quick “sheep dip” of a certified scrum team member. But in organizations, transformation happens incrementally. The good news is that the benefits of transformation can start to be delivered straight away. The goal is to find a way of producing the software that’s needed at an affordable cost with high enough quality that it stays useful over time. This is where Behavior-driven development (BDD) and automated testing and quality practices come in. Go Fast, Start Slow One challenge to achieving quality at speed is that people want to dive into a project without knowing what they need to do. Discovery, the first practice of BDD, helps you work in a more effective way and focus on the most important aspects of your project. Discovery ensures that we don’t start doing something and then say, “Oh, I didn’t think about that,” or, “I misunderstood what I was

OAKLAND, Calif., Aug. 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform for software development teams, announced today that it has closed $200 million in Series D financing led by Lead Edge Capital with new investors Top Tier Capital Partners and New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners as well as existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint, Threshold, Uncork Capital and Bloomberg Beta participating. This new funding triples LaunchDarkly’s post-money valuation to $3 billion, representing more than three times growth since its last funding round in January 2020. The new capital will be used to scale its core feature management platform and accelerate customer acquisition across verticals, continue its global expansion, and recruit and hire top-tier talent across engineering, marketing and business development. The announcement is accompanied by the company’s second consecutive recognition on the 

The newest Java update includes a user experience for Visual Studio Code’s testing, Maven dependency management, and project management features. Developers can now access a new layout of buttons in the left area of the editor that enables easy access to run and debug test cases.  Also, the Test Explorer has been completely revamped to now allow developers to customize the display mode and sorting order of the testing explorer for different scenarios and habits. Additional details on all the UI changes are available here.  Applitools ties in to e-learning platforms Applitools’ Visual AI helps software engineering and product teams validate an eLearning platform’s user experience and uncover bugs in the UI. As the demand for e-learning is risking in a hybrid work environment, many platforms are adopting Applitools’ solution.  The tool uses machine learning from more than one billion images analyzed in addition to AI enhancing data from over 130 different web browser and version c