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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.
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Microsoft Announces .NET Support for Jupyter Notebooks
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the public preview of .NET Core support to Jupyter Notebooks, allowing the use of code written in C# and F#. This release is part of the Try .NET project, an interactive documentation generator for .NET Core.
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Microsoft Visual Studio Online: Distributed Development for Visual Studio
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the public preview of Visual Studio Online (VSO) at its Ignite conference. The service provides managed development environments that can be used with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. It also features an online code editor with IDE capabilities such as debugging, code completion, and collaborative sessions.
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Stateful Programming Models in Serverless Functions: Chris Gillum at QCon San Francisco
Chris Gillum, principal engineering manager at Microsoft, presented at QCon San Francisco on Serverless Programming Models in Azure Functions. In his presentation, he discussed two stateful programming models, workflow and actors on Azure Functions - Microsoft’s implementation of serverless compute.
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Managing Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Platforms with Microsoft Azure Arc
During Microsoft’s premier event Ignite for IT-professional and decision-makers, the company announced several new hybrid cloud products and services. One of the most significant announcements was Azure Arc, a service in preview that allows enterprises to bring Azure services and management to any infrastructure including AWS and Google Cloud.
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Microsoft Releases Azure API for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) as GA
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure API for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR), making it the first cloud vendor providing native support for this format in a managed cloud service. With the API, customers can quickly ingest, persist, and manage healthcare data in the cloud.
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Microsoft Concludes the .NET Framework API Porting Project
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the conclusion of the .NET Framework API porting project for .NET Core 3.0. That means the official development team won't port any other APIs from the .NET Framework to .NET Core 3.0. Microsoft also stated their intention to open-source more of the .NET Framework code, allowing the creation of community-driven porting projects in the future.
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Microsoft and University of Maryland Researchers Announce FreeLB Adversarial Training System
Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Maryland (UMD) announced Free Large-Batch (FreeLB), a new adversarial training technique for deep-learning natural-language processing (NLP) systems that improves accuracy, increasing RoBERTa's scores on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark and achieving the highest score on AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) benchmark.
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Dapr Aims to Simplify the Creation of Resilient and Portable Microservices
Microsoft Dapr is an open-source, event-driven framework aimed to build resilient and portable microservices for Cloud and Edge applications. Dapr encapsulates the best practices for building microservices, Microsoft says, and allows developers to focus on the business logic of their application.
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Facebook Open-Sources CraftAssist Framework for AI Assistants in Minecraft
Facebook AI researchers open-sourced CraftAssist, a framework for building interactive assistants for the Minecraft video game. The bots use natural language understanding (NLU) to parse and execute text commands from human players, such as requests to build houses in the game world. The framework's modular structure can be extended by researchers to perform their own ML experiments.