>> Pin your JavaScript dependencies now.
Also some fun Visual Studio and .NET updates
and the greatest version of Linux that you will ever see.
All that and more on this episode of The Download.
[MUSIC]
Welcome back to another episode of The Download.
I'm your host, Christina Warren
Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft and my hoodie
this week I decided to do a little throwback to a
much loved but now dead brand Blockbuster.
This hoodie is actually a merch from
the last blockbuster in existence.
That is in Bend, Oregon.
Also, if you haven't seen the Netflix documentary
on this VHS Oasis,
you should definitely check it out.
Enough of all that. Let's do this thing.
The first thing that I want
to note is just quick programming note.
We'll be taking a few weeks off
and coming back with a few differences,
and this is all really good stuff,
but I wanted to let you know that we will
be back better than ever,
but we are going to take a couple of weeks off.
While we're gone, I would love to know from you the viewers,
what types of content you'd like to see more of,
and there's always so much news to pick from each week,
and I have my own preferences,
but I would love to hear from you,
so let me know down below or tweet me at film_girl.
Moving along, I'm going to link to a security story from
Bleeping Computer about some stuff
happening in the NPM community right now.
The TLDR is that the maintainer of
the Node IPC Library has made some changes to the package,
which is downloaded over a million times a
week on some ideological grounds
that could have some pretty nasty consequences
for users depending on where they live in the world.
I'm not going to debate the rationale around
this change, that's up to individuals to decide for themselves.
But the net result is that projects that
use this particular library, and there
are a lot of them, could be putting
their users at risk if the latest version is used.
Anyway, this is the second such
"supply chain attack" to hit the node community this year.
As such, I feel that this is an important time to remind
people to pin their dependencies,
at least with this specific library and
possibly with others in their JavaScript projects.
Pinning is essentially telling your project that you want to use
an explicit version of a library your app depends on.
By default, package managers like NPM and
Yarn use some of their ranges in package shots,
JSON files, but that can sometimes lead
to problems in situations like this.
I've got some resources that are linked below that
talk more about the philosophy around pinning
your dependencies and how to think about it,
as well as some articles from
an open source security consultancy
that talks more about this specific attack.
But my gut tells me that this thing is
going to be happening more in the future.
This is just something that you should be thinking about.
Last week I mentioned that Visual Studio was turning
25 and that the 25th anniversary event took place this week.
Links are below and it has some great insights and memories from
the VST team members as well as
some updates to Visual Studio for Mac and Windows.
On the Mac side, Visual Studio for Mac
2022 Preview 7 was released
and it brings back Xamarin Mobile tooling
as a supported experience,
and it introduces Azure Functions,
V4 tooling supporting .NET 6 and M1 processors, which is all great.
But it also brings some very cool remote Mac OS C++ support.
In this latest release,
users who want to develop cross-platform C++ apps for
Mac OS can now make use of
Visual Studio's Linux tools with cmake to target the Mac,
and there is going to be some setup
required on the Mac side to enable the support.
But then the MAC is treated just like any other remote,
like Linux Target, by Visual Studio.
There are still some caveats you'll need to be aware of,
but I think this is just straight-up cool and I've got
more info on all this linked down
below in the show notes and the description.
But of course Mac OS wasn't
the only version of Visual Studio to get some updates.
Preview 14 of .NET MAUI or the .NET Multiple Platform App UI
is now available in
Visual Studio 2022, 17.2 Preview 2. Say that five times fast.
Most of this preview is about fixing various issues,
but there is one new feature that
desktop devs are really going to like and that is the menu bar.
Even though a lot of desktop apps now build
their menus into the content window of their apps,
there's still a strong need for a traditional menu that resides at
the top of the app Window on
Windows and in the title bar on Mac OS.
This is really great to see.
There are some other highlights too,
which you can check out in
full at the site that I've linked to below.
Now just rounding out real quickly,
our Visual Studio adjacent corner.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention
that .NET 7 Preview 2 is now available.
Now, this is the second preview of .NET 7 and it
includes enhancements to reject source generators,
progress moving native AOT from experimental status into
the runtime and it has a major set of
improvements to the .NET new CLI experience.
More details are, well,
you know what I'm going to say, in the show notes on below.
I also want to give a huge congratulations to
the Go team on the release of Go 1.18.
This is a massive release that brings
a bunch of new features and performance improvements.
But it also makes the biggest change ever to the language.
With Go 1.18, the team is introducing a support for
Go's most off requested feature, generics.
This is a big deal and the team has spent a lot of
time thinking about the design and how it'll work.
The Go team says that the majority of
users will be able to use the generic support today,
but that subsequent releases will provide additional support
for some of the more complicated generic use cases.
Insert generic joke here.
The new version of Go also brings fuzzing
as a fully integrated part of its standard toolchain.
There's also a new workspace mode which
will make it simple to work with multiple modules.
I'm going to be honest, I'm not a huge Go person
although I respect the language a lot,
but they have such a killer mascot and this stuff is really great
to see and it makes me excited to
play around and learn more Go going forward.
I'll stop myself now. Now it's time for my Pick of the Week.
For years now, my very favorite version of Linux has been
the Hannah Montana Linux distro that
came out in 2009 or 2010 or something.
I don't know, but it's perfect and it
encapsulates a true vibe. It's the best.
But that all changed this week when I
discovered HOT DOG Linux is based on Slackware,
which means that it actually has serious nerd cred already.
But HOT DOG Linux which stands for
Horrible Obsolete Typeface and
Dreadful On-screen Graphics for Linux,
is a tribute to the best Windows theme
of all time, Hot Dog Stand.
If you're not familiar, hot dog stand was a Windows
3.1 team that should never have been made,
and yet it was released.
It's mustard yellow, ketchup red.
It's the greatest and also the worst thing at the same time,
it's truly something you have to see.
But HOT DOG Linux doesn't stop there.
It also has a user interface that mimics the Amiga,
the Atari, Jim operating system,
and even a bunch of variants of
classic Mac OS and even classic Mac OS 10.
It's amazing. It's on GitHub and I
aspire to live in whatever world that exists then.
To the author of this amazing distro,
Arthur Chong, I salute you.
That's it. Let me know
your favorite desktop theme in the comments down below,
as well as your thoughts on any of the other stories this week.
Be sure to offer your feedback for
the stuff you'd like to see more of in the future.
If you like this episode,
go ahead and give us a like on YouTube and
subscribe to Microsoft Developer for all your nerd needs.
See you next time.
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