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Source Generators Will Enable Compile-Time Metaprogramming in C# 9
Source generators are a new feature of the C# compiler that enables inspecting user code using compiler-generated metadata and generating additional source files to be compiled along with the rest of the program.
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Microsoft and Google Release New Benchmarks for Cross-Language AI Tasks
Research teams at Microsoft Research and Google AI have announced new benchmarks for cross-language natural-language understanding (NLU) tasks for AI systems, including named-entity recognition and question answering. Google's XTREME covers 40 languages and includes nine tasks, while Microsoft's XGLUE covers 27 languages and eleven tasks.
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Microsoft Announces General Availability for UI Flows, Enabling Robotic Process Automation
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of UI Flows on April 2nd, for customers worldwide. UI Flows is an addition to Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, that enables democratized access to automation and workflow. In this this latest release, Microsoft is enabling robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities in the Power Automate service.
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GitHub to Acquire Npm in an Effort to Provide Continuity and Improvement
GitHub's CEO Nat Friedman has announced an agreement to buy npm, the default package manager for the Node.js ecosystem. Npm will remain free to use and will get the required investments to keep it fast and reliable, says Friedman, as well as more secure.
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Q&A with Martijn Verburg and Bruno Borges of Microsoft Regarding Contributing to the OpenJDK
InfoQ caught up with Martijn Verburg, principal group SWE manager, Java and Bruno Borges, principal program manager, Java at Microsoft, about the specifics of the intended contribution from Microsoft to the OpenJDK.
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Microsoft Open-Sources Project Petridish for Deep-Learning Optimization
A team from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University has open-sourced Project Petridish, a neural architecture search algorithm that automatically builds deep-learning models that are optimized to satisfy a variety of constraints. Using Petridish, the team achieved state-of-the-art results on the CIFAR-10 benchmark with only 2.2M parameters and five GPU-days of search time.
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Microsoft Announces Experimental gRPC-web Support for .NET
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced experimental support for gRPC-Web with .NET Core. The new addition allows Blazor WebAssembly clients to call gRPC applications directly from the browser, enabling gRPC features such as server streaming to be used by browser-based applications.
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Microsoft Open-Sources ONNX Acceleration for BERT AI Model
Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning team recently open-sourced their contribution to the ONNX Runtime library for improving the performance of the natural language processing (NLP) model BERT. With the optimizations, the model's inference latency on the SQUAD benchmark sped up 17x.
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Database Access Misconfiguration Exposes 250M Customer Records at Microsoft
Comparitech security firm reported a major data breach at Microsoft that exposed 250 million customer records over a period of a couple of days. Microsoft said the leaked data, which did not include personally identifiable information, was not used maliciously.
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Microsoft Patches Severe Crypto32.dll Vulnerability
Microsoft has released patches for various versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019 and 2016 to fix a severe vulnerability affecting system validation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. This vulnerability enables an attacker to spoof the validity of a certificate chain and signature validation and requires prompt patching.
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Microsoft Introduces Power Virtual Agents, a No-Code Solution to Building AI Bots
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of Power Virtual Agents, a service designed to democratize building conversational chatbots using a no-code graphical user interface. The service is part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which includes Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate and democratizes access to building artificial intelligence-powered bots.
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Microsoft Releases .NET Core 3.1 LTS
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the release of .NET Core 3.1 on their development blog, together with ASP.NET Core 3.1 and EF Core 3.1. The new releases are mostly composed of fixes and refinements over their previous version (3.0). However, these are long-term supported (LTS) releases, which means they will be supported for at least three years.
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Microsoft Exploring Rust as the Solution for Safe Software
Microsoft has been recently experimenting with Rust to improve the safety of their software. In a talk at RustFest Barcelona, Microsoft engineers Ryan Levick and Sebastian Fernandez explained the challenges they faced in using Rust at Microsoft. Part of Microsoft's journey with Rust included rewriting a low-level Windows component, as Adam Burch explained.
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Microsoft Announces 1.0 Release of Kubernetes-Based Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA)
Microsoft has announced the 1.0 version of the Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling (KEDA) component, an open-source project that can run in a Kubernetes cluster to provide "fine grained autoscaling (including to/from zero)" for every container. KEDA also serves as a Kubernetes Metrics Server and allows users to define autoscaling rules using a dedicated Kubernetes custom resource.
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Microsoft Releases DialogGPT AI Conversation Model
Microsoft Research's Natural Language Processing Group released dialogue generative pre-trained transformer (DialoGPT), a pre-trained deep-learning natural language processing (NLP) model for automatic conversation response generation. The model was trained on over 147M dialogues and achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.