>> Twenty years of .NET,
PWA Studio for VS Code,
and a ridiculously indulgent example of WebAssembly,
all that and more this week on The Download.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome back to another episode of The Download,
I'm your host, Christina Warren, Senior Cloud Advocate.
I decided to go back to one of my favorites this week,
which means I'm repping some Taylor Swift merch.
Did you know that there is now a Taylor Swift themed Wordle clone?
It's very cool. Speaking of Wordle,
quick update on that, it's been acquired. That's right.
Forget about Microsoft buying
Activision Blizzard or even Sony buying Bungie.
The big news is that the New York Times has acquired Wordle.
What a world or what a word, I guess, I don't know.
Anyway, congrats to Josh Wardell.
Enough of all that, let's do this thing.
First up, I want to talk about the big news.
This both very amazing,
but it also makes me feel ridiculously old
and that's that .NET is turning 20.
That's right, 20 years ago this
month, .NET was introduced to the world.
On February 14th at 9:00 a.m. Pacific,
the .NET team is going to be throwing a huge celebration.
It's basically a 30-minute event,
and it's going to feature interviews with
luminaries and Microsoft alumni,
stories from customers and
developers who are building amazing things.
Memories of building .NET with Scott Hunter
and everyone's favorite developer, Scott Hanselman,
as well as special guests and
much more from Open Source contributors,
MEPs, .NET team members,
go over to dotnet.Microsoft.com for more information.
Additionally, the .NET team has actually
put some really great swag on GitHub,
including desktop and teams backgrounds.
There's even like some files if you want to get a sheet cake made,
which is apparently a thing.
Also, if you want to start diving into the history of .NET,
I want to give the .NET Rocks podcast shout out my pal
Richard Campbell and his amazing host,
Carl Franklin talk .NET every week,
but this week they talk with
one of my favorite people on the planet.
Miguel de Icaza about his experiences with .NET over the years.
Miguel actually created Mono,
which was the first Open-Source implementation
of .NET back in the day.
It's a great lesson,
so I've got links in the show notes in the description for
details on all the .NET 20th anniversary festivities.
The GitHub repo and Richard's podcast. Good stuff.
Speaking of really fun events on February 15th,
which is like the day after the .NET event,
it's Azure Open Source Day,
and this is going to be a really cool event
that I encourage anyone
who is interested in the OS side of Azure to check out.
That definitely includes me.
This event, you'll learn about how
Microsoft is committed to Open Source and
how they work with the Open Source community
to develop new technologies,
and you'll also hear about some of
the latest trends and capabilities
using Linux and Azure together direct to Microsoft Insiders.
It's also going to be
a feature really great people
like Sarah Novotny and Brendan Byrnes,
and it's going to include details on Siebel Mariner,
which is a Linux distribution built by
Microsoft to host Azure Open Source services.
Very cool stuff. I've got links for
the event in the show notes in the description down below.
Be sure to check it out.
Next up.
This is some breaking news that I literally
had to write right before I got ready to record this show.
The latest version of Visual Studio Code is out so this is
Visual Studio Code 1.64 is the January 2022 release,
and it's the first release in the year and it's a big one.
Some of the new highlights include a new side panel,
so you can display more views at once with the side panel.
There's also a Settings Editor search.
There are now audio cues.
There is a unicode highlighting,
which is cool so you can avoid highlighting
characters in supported languages.
There are some improvements to
the Notebook UI, so you can now search,
text and markdown,
add an output cells,
there's the ability to debug binary data.
There are markdown paths suggestions.
There are some JavaScript and TypeScript snippet features.
VS Code for the web is now supported for
signed GitHub commits at both VSCode.dev and GitHub.dev.
Anyway, there's a lot of great stuff.
The new side panel looks really slick.
You can check all that out in details
on what's new in the show notes and the description down below,
and you can also download the latest version of VS code there too.
Moving right along, speaking of updates,
PowerToys, one of our favorite apps,
got another update, and it also brought
some brand new features in addition to bug fixes.
First, there's a new mouse utility that was
co-developed with the accessibility team at Microsoft,
and there's also a new File Explorer add on for the preview pane,
and it's from Erin Junker,
a member of our community,
and it supports previewing like
150 different developer file types in
the File Explorer preview pane using the Monaco editor.
It's really cool stuff.
Check out the release notes and the download links in
the show notes and the description down below.
In a return to a segment that I used to call Bruno's Java Corner.
I wanted to give a shout-out to the open JDK team for adding
two new additions to the Microsoft Build of
open JDK family long-term support binaries,
we've got open JDK 11 and open JDK 17 for
Alpine Linux and open JDK 11 for Mac OS using Apple Silicon.
I love it. Details are in the show notes and the description.
Speaking of stuff that I love,
huge shout out to the PWA Builder team,
that is the progressive web app builder team
who has just released a brand new vs code extension
called PWA Studio that allows you to build
your progressive web apps in just a couple of clicks in VS Code.
It also offers tips, debugging,
and it'll even help you package
your PWA for distribution on Android or iOS.
You can even submit it to the Microsoft Store,
and you can even launch it directly to an Astrobotic Web App.
Plus, the extension is on GitHub,
and the team would love your feedback.
This is great. Kudos to this team. It's excellent.
Now, speaking about Azure Static Web Apps,
let's talk about a great blog post from
John Riley on how you can use
bySAP and GitHub actions to deploy
static website directly to Azure Static Web Apps.
Even better, John shows you how you can migrate
an existing static solution
like GitHub pages to Azure Static Web Apps.
This actually came at a perfect time for
me because I've been wanting to migrate
a couple of things that I have on GitHub pages
to Azure Static Web Apps,
and the post goes through all the steps.
It's also a great primer if you're
new to the whole Azure Static Web Apps thing,
so great work John.
Links from the show notes and the description down below.
Now, speaking of GitHub,
we've got a ton of GitHub news to plow
through so let's get into it.
First, GitHub announced
some updates to its GitHub Sponsors program,
and GitHub Sponsors is
a really great way to support the open-source community,
or to get support for the projects that
you contribute back to the community as a whole.
Some of the biggest new additions are
the ability for developers and organizations who
have GitHub Sponsors to be able to attach
a private repository to each of their sponsorship tiers.
This will grant respective funders access to that repository.
I'm going to go ahead, make the same jokes
that everyone on Twitter was making.
Yes, it's like only fans,
but for Open Source.
Honestly, I really actually think this is great for devs and
organizations because you can do release previews.
You could have no more closed group discussions. It's great.
You can also now set minimum amounts of sponsorships,
and GitHub Sponsors will now calculate sales tax and that.
There are a lot more details about what's
coming up in a blog post,
which I've linked in the show notes
and the description down below,
but if you're not a GitHub contributor to sponsor projects,
do it and it feels good.
In more GitHub news,
the npm team announced they are rolling out mandatory to obey on
all maintainer for the top 100 npm projects.
This is going to go a long way to make sure that
npm is more secure than ever,
and in the future,
this is actually going expand even more than the top 100 projects.
I've got more information about that in
the links and description down below.
Finally, shout out to Brian Douglas
over GitHub for his great guide on how you can set
up a CICD Pipeline using GitHub Actions in four easy steps.
Brian's guide is really thorough,
and it includes some videos.
I really like it, so links again for all of this stuff,
it's in the show notes and the description.
Now it's time for my pick of the week.
Sometimes I see something so audacious, so ridiculous.
You just need to smile.
This is one of those times.
The folks over at
Leaning Technologies did something pretty slick with WebAssembly.
They made a serverless virtual Linux environment that runs
unmodified Debian binaries in the browser.
It's so cool it's powered by CheerpX,
which is a WebAssembly
virtualization platform that they've created.
You can check out the demo over at WebVM.io,
and this is a little utility,
but this is like,
George Mallory said they ask him,
"Why are you trying to climb Mount Everest?"
He said, "Because it's there." Why would you create this?
Because you can. I love the audacity of this stuff. Plus it works.
You can check out
the blog post in the show notes to see how it was built,
and you can also have some fun playing around with it yourself.
You can do what I did,
which was break my machine by trying to install
node in the Wassim WebVM.
That does it for me this week.
Let me know the most ridiculous things you've seen on
the internet in the show notes and the description down below.
If you also leave
a comment on any of the other stories that we had,
if you like this episode,
go ahead and give us a thumbs up on YouTube.
It really does help us out and go ahead subscribe
to Microsoft Developer for all your nerd needs.
See you next time!
[MUSIC]