My last post investigated ways to build a .NET Core desktop/console app with a web-rendered UI without bringing in the full weight of Electron. This seems to have interested a lot of people, so I decided to upgrade it to newer technologies and add cross-platform support.

The result is a little NuGet package called WebWindow that you can add to any .NET Core console app. It can open a native OS window (Windows/Mac/Linux) containing web-based UI, without your app having to bundle either Node or Chromium. 

Rider EAP 20 fixes a number of bugs, improves .NET Core support, has better NuGet performance, supports Xamarin Android applications, comes with Node.js tooling from WebStorm (including SpyJS), can generate ResX files, executes T4 templates (needs Windows and Visual Studio SDK), adds support for scratch files, … Too much for one sentence, as you can see from the full list of fixes. We’ll highlight a few, read on! 

• C++ Linux project - Remote header sync is broken in Visual Studio 16.3
• Visual Studio 16.3 opens some files with notepad
• Fixed an issue with the Show Output window either closing too quickly.
• Fixed an issue where Visual Studio 2019 stops responding in several scenarios, including opening a solution, changing solution configuration, and closing a solution. 

It can be difficult  to write unit tests for code that accesses the file system. 

Entity Framework Core (EF Core) is the latest version of Microsoft's recommended data access technology for applications based on the .NET Core framework. It has been designed to be lightweight, extensible and to support cross platform development. 

Here’s a look at a handful of the changes since our last alpha:

• Overhauled spacing utilities to use a numerical tiering (to avoid confusion with grid tiers).
• Continued refactoring efforts to replace markup-specific selectors with classes across several components (including pagination, lists, and more). Still more to do here with additional components.
• Reverted media queries and grid containers from rems to pixels as viewports are not affected by font-size. See #17403 for details. We’ve got a ton of grid work left, too. Feel free to follow along with#18471.
• Reverted .0625rem width borders to 1px for more consistent component borders that avoid zoom and font-size bugs across browsers.
• Renamed .img-responsive to .img-fluid to avoid future confusion on the various responsive image solutions out there.
• Replaced ZeroClipboard with clipboard.js for Flash-independent copy buttons.
• Inputs and buttons now share the same border variable to ensure components are always sized similarly.
• Updated all pseudo-element selectors to use the spec’s preferred double colon (e.g., ::before as opposed to :before).
• Cards now have outline variants and mixins to support extending base classes further.
• Utility classes for floats and text alignment now have responsive ranges. This means we’ve dropped the non-responsive classes to avoid duplication.
• Added support for jQuery 2.
• And hundreds more Sass improvements, bug fixes, documentation updates, and more. 

My Top 8 Visual Studio Code Tips and Features 

Over the last decade, Android's open platform has created a thriving community of manufacturers and developers that reach a global audience with their devices and apps. This has expanded beyond phones to tablets, cars, watches, TVs and more—with more than 2.5 billion active devices around the world. As we continue to build Android for everyone in the community, our brand should be as inclusive and accessible as possible—and we think we can do better in a few ways. 

Microsoft is continuing its long deprecation of VBScript in its Internet Explorer 11 Web browser for security reasons.