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Microsoft Edge Made Available on Linux
Microsoft recently announced the availability of the Microsoft Edge Dev Channel for Linux (initial preview release). The Edge browser is now available on all major operating systems, desktop and mobile. Enterprise developers, many of which use Linux, may now build and test web applications in their preferred platform. The move seeks to further position Edge as the browser for business.
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Microsoft Edge WebView2 Now Generally Available
After publishing last year a preview release of WebView2, a Chromium-based control to host web content within native Windows applications, Microsoft recently announced the general availability of WebView2 for production Win32 C/C++, .NET Framework, .NET Core, and .NET 5 applications. WebView2 provides two distribution models (evergreen/fixed) with a different update policy (automatic/manual).
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Microsoft .NET Conf 2020: .NET 5, C# 9.0, F# 5.0, and More
At the 2020 edition of .NET Conf, streamed online last week, Microsoft released the much-awaited .NET 5, along with new major .NET language versions (C# 9 and F# 5), ASP.NET 5, and EF Core 5.0. New versions of Visual Studio 2019 were also released, with support for .NET 5 and improved Git tooling. The event also featured sessions covering tools and frameworks such as Blazor and Project Tye.
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Microsoft Releases Playwright Cross-Browser End-to-End Test Runner
Microsoft released (in preview) a dedicated test runner for Playwright, its test automation tool. The Playwright test runner provides zero-config cross-browser end-to-end testing for web apps, Jest-like assertions, and built-in support for TypeScript. The new test runner leverages Folio, a customizable test framework to build higher-level test frameworks.
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Microsoft Introduces Azure Space to Further Push the Boundaries of Cloud Computing
Recently Microsoft launched its Azure Space initiative as a further push of cloud computing towards space. This initiative by the public cloud vendor consists of several products and partnerships to position Azure as a critical player in the space- and satellite-related connectivity and compute part of the cloud market.
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Test-Automation Playwright Tool Now Records and Replays Interaction Scripts, Captures Test Videos
Newly released Playwright 1.4 brings key improvements to the cross-browser test-automation tool. Using the now public Playwright command line interface, developers and testers will be able to record user interactions and replay them with automatically generated Playwright scripts, generate page screenshots, inspect Playwright selectors, and record videos of test scripts.
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Microsoft Innovates Its Azure Multi-Cloud, Multi-Edge Hybrid Capabilities
During the recent Ignite virtual conference, Microsoft announced several updates for their Azure multi-cloud and edge hybrid offerings. These updates span from security innovations to new edge capabilities.
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Microsoft Obtains Exclusive License for GPT-3 AI Model
Microsoft announced an agreement with OpenAI to license OpenAI's GPT-3 deep-learning model for natural-language processing (NLP). Although Microsoft's announcement says it has "exclusively" licensed the model, OpenAI will continue to offer access to the model via its own API.
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Microsoft Introduces Its Quantum Intermediate Representation
Based on LLVM, IBM Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) extends LLVM IR to better suit the representation of quantum constructs.
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Microsoft to Contribute to Java on Windows and Mac ARM
Microsoft is working to help port Java to Windows and Mac ARM on the AARCH64 chipset. The improvement should help enable Java applications to run on upcoming commercial ARM hardware.
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Microsoft Announces New Technologies to Combat Disinformation
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced two new technologies to combat disinformation: a Video Authenticator tool, and technology to either detect manipulated content or assure people that the media they're viewing is authentic.
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Open Service Mesh: a Service Mesh Implementation from Microsoft
Microsoft has released open service mesh (OSM), an alpha service mesh implementation compliant with the SMI specification. OSM covers standard features of a service mesh like canary releases, secure communication, and application insights, similar to other service mesh implementations like Istio, Linkerd, or Consul. Additionally, the OSM team is in the process of donating the project to the CNCF.
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Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Others Join the Open Source Security Foundation
Supported by The Linux Foundation, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) aims to create a cross-industry forum for a collaborative effort to improve open source software security. The list of initial members includes Google, Microsoft, GitHub, IBM, Red Hat, and more.
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PyTorch 1.6 Released; Microsoft Takes over Windows Version
PyTorch, Facebook's open-source deep-learning framework, announced the release of version 1.6 which includes new APIs and performance improvements. Along with the release, Microsoft announced it will take over development and maintenance of the Windows version of the framework.
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AI Conference Recap: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Others at ACL 2020
At the recent Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), research teams from several tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce presented nearly 200 papers out of a total of 779 on a wide variety of AI topics related to Natural Language Processing (NLP).