On 16th November 2016, Nat Friedman and James Montemagno introduced Visual Studio for Mac, the newest member of the Visual Studio family at Connect(); 2016 event. I thought let's give it a try so I installed the same and went through the project templates available in it. This blog is kind of a getting started guide to install Visual Studio For Mac. 

Here are some of the reasons why nullable reference types are less than ideal:

• Invoking a member on a null value will issue a System.NullReferenceException exception, and every invocation that results in a System.NullReferenceException in production code is a bug. Unfortunately, however, with nullable reference types we “fall in” to doing the wrong thing rather than the right thing. The “fall in” action is to invoke a reference type without checking for null.
• There’s an inconsistency between reference types and value types (following the introduction of Nullable<T>) in that value types are nullable when decorated with  “?” (for example, int? number); otherwise, they default to non-nullable. In contrast, reference types are nullable by default. This is “normal” to those of us who have been programming in C# for a long time, but if we could do it all over, we’d want the default for reference types to be non-nullable and the addition of a “?” to be an explicit way to allow nulls.
• It’s not possible to run static flow analysis to check all paths regarding whether a value will be null before dereferencing it, or not. Consider, for example, if there were unmanaged code invocations, multi-threading, or null assignment/­replacement based on runtime conditions. (Not to mention whether analysis would include checking of all library APIs that are invoked.)
• There’s no reasonable syntax to indicate that a reference type value of null is invalid for a particular declaration.
• There’s no way to decorate parameters to not allow null. 

%USERPROFILE%/.omnisharp

{
  "RoslynExtensionsOptions": {
    "LocationPaths": [
      "C:\\lib\\roslynator"
    ]
  }
}

Write-Host "Download, unzip and enable Roslynator for Visual Studio Code"

$name = "josefpihrt.Roslynator2017"
$url = "https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=$name"
$currentDir = $PSScriptRoot
$file = "$currentDir\Roslynator.zip"

$pattern = "<script class=`"vss-extension`" defer=`"defer`" type=`"application\/json`">(.*?)<\/script>"
$regex = [regex]"(?m)$pattern"
Write-Host "Grab the home page of the $name."
$dom = (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadString($url); 
if($dom -and $dom -match $pattern) 
{
    $matches = $regex.Match($dom)
    $jsonText = $matches[0].Groups[1]

    $json = ConvertFrom-Json $jsonText

    $version = $Json.versions[0].version # Parse the json in the page for the latest version number
    $parts = $name.Split(".")
    $publisher = $parts[0]
    $package = $parts[1]

    # Assemble the url for the vsix package
    $packageUrl = "https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/$publisher/vsextensions/$package/$version/vspackage"
    Write-Host "Download the vsix package: $packageUrl"
    (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile($packageUrl, $file)

    Write-Host "Using $currentDir as the current dir."
    Write-Host "Unzip $file."
    $shellApp = new-object -com shell.application 
    $zipFile = $shellApp.namespace($file) 
    $destination = $shellApp.namespace($currentDir) 
    $destination.Copyhere($zipFile.items(), 0x14)# overwrite and be silent

    Write-Host "Delete VS specific files. Otherwise they will interfere with the MEF services inside OmniSharp."
    Remove-Item "$currentDir\Roslynator.VisualStudio.Core.dll","$currentDir\Roslynator.VisualStudio.dll", "$currentDir\Roslynator.VisualStudio.pkgdef"

    $omnisharpJsonFilePath = "$env:USERPROFILE\.omnisharp\omnisharp.json";
    Write-Host "Create $omnisharpJsonFilePath file."
    $omnisharpJson = @" 
{{
  "RoslynExtensionsOptions": {{
    "LocationPaths": [
      "{0}"
    ]
  }}
}}
"@ -f $currentDir -Replace "\\","\\"
    $omnisharpJson | Out-File "$omnisharpJsonFilePath" -Confirm

    Write-Host "Done!"
}
else
{
    Write-Host "Failed to find the packageUrl!"
}

PS D:\Prog\1396\RoslynatorVSCode> .\update.ps1
Download, unzip and enable Roslynator for Visual Studio Code
Grab the home page of the josefpihrt.Roslynator2017.
Download the vsix package: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/publishers/josefpihrt/vsextensions/Roslynator2017/1.7.0/vspackage
Using D:\Prog\1396\RoslynatorVSCode as the current dir.
Unzip D:\Prog\1396\RoslynatorVSCode\Roslynator.zip.
Delete VS specific files. Otherwise they will interfere with the MEF services inside OmniSharp.
Create C:\Users\Vahid\.omnisharp\omnisharp.json file.

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Performing the operation "Output to File" on target "C:\Users\Vahid\.omnisharp\omnisharp.json".
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"):
Done!

The Bosque programming language is designed for writing code that is simple, obvious, and easy to reason about for both humans and machines. The key design features of the language provide ways to avoidaccidental complexity in the development and coding process. The goal is improved developer productivity, increased software quality, and enabling a range of new compilers and developer tooling experiences. 

.NET 8 Preview 4 is now available and includes many great new improvements to ASP.NET Core.

Here’s a summary of what’s new in this preview release:

Blazor

Streaming rendering with Blazor components

Handling form posts with Blazor SSR

Route to named elements in Blazor

Webcil packaging for Blazor WebAssembly apps

API authoring

Expanded support for form binding in minimal APIs

API project template includes .http file

Native AOT

Logging and exception handling in compile-time generated minimal APIs

ASP.NET Core top-level APIs annotated for trim warnings

Reduced app size with configurable HTTPS support

Worker Service template updates

Additional default services configured in the slim builder

API template JSON configuration changes

Support for JSON serialization of compiler-generated IAsyncEnumerable unspeakable types

Authentication and authorization

Identity API endpoints

Improved support for custom authorization policies with IAuthorizationRequirementData

ASP.NET Core metrics

For more details on the ASP.NET Core work planned for .NET 8 see the full ASP.NET Core roadmap for .NET 8 on GitHub. 

When a VM is loaded, it contains

• Windows 10, version 2004 (10.0.19041.0)
• Windows 10 SDK, version 2004 (10.0.19041.0)
• Visual Studio 2019 (latest as of 6/15/20) with the UWP, .NET desktop, and Azure workflows enabled and also includes the Windows Template Studio extension
• Visual Studio Code (latest as of 6/15/20)
• Windows Subsystem for Linux enabled with Ubuntu installed
• Developer mode enabled 

Top Issues Fixed in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4.1

• Fixed "the write operation failed. you must first acquire write access from dataschemamodelcontroller" error trying to publish a database
• Fix ExecutionEngineException exceptions when using SignalR on iOS devices in some configurations
• Runtime Fix "CEE_RET: value type stack" crash when interpreter was enabled with some libraries
• TypeScript 3.7.3 is now included by default, which contains several fixes for issues that effect the JavaScript and TypeScript editing experience.
• May allow mitigation of a Per-Monitor awareness related crash in Visual Studio

Security Advisory Notice

CVE-2019-1349 Git for Visual Studio Remote Excecution Vulnerability due to too lax restrictions on submodule names

CVE-2019-1350 Git for Visual Studio Remote Excecution Vulnerability due to incorrect quoting of command-line arguments

CVE-2019-1351 Git for Visual Studio Arbitrary File Overwrite Vulnerability due to usage of non-letter drive names during clone

CVE-2019-1352 Git for Visual Studio Remote Excecution Vulnerability due to unawareness of NTFS Alternate Data Streams

CVE-2019-1354 Git for Visual Studio Arbitrary File Overwrite Vulnerability due to not refusing to write out tracked files containing backslashes

CVE-2019-1387 Git for Visual Studio Remote Execution Vulnerability due to too lax validation of submodule names in recursive clones

CVE-2019-1486 Live Share extension URL redirection vulnerability