Hello, I'm   Jason

Microsoft announced the release date and price for the Surface Duo yesterday. The Surface Duo has a 5.6” (3:2) screen when closed in single screen mode and an 8.1” (4:3) screen when fully opened in dual screen mode. The unlocked device is available for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless in the US. The device boasts an all-day battery, USB-C, 11MP adaptive camera with 4k video recording, and a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 855 Mobile Platform processor. It also includes 6GB DRAM and 128GB or 256GB of internal storage.

GitHub has published their roadmap for GitHub.com and GitHub services. You can see what’s upcoming through the first quarter of 2021 and beyond by visiting github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1. I think I was most surprised not to see a migration from GitHub Pages to Azure Static Web Apps. GitHub is definitely looking to continue to expand what’s available in GitHub Actions by enabling them for GitHub Enterprise Server and also for private repositories.

Since Microsoft switched Microsoft Edge to use Chromium, they are releasing nearly every 6 weeks and have aligned both Beta and Stable major releases with the related Chromium release. So, version 85 will be released the week of August 27, 2020. They have the release schedule through version 89 (week of 3/4/2021) published at docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployEdge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule.

It’s hard to believe but when I started posting back on April 11, 2003, I would have never expected that I’d have 1000 posts ever, let alone in less than 20 years! Over the years my posts have varied from web and application development to system administration and security. They’ve also included sports, business, and personal related posts. Back then I rolled my own site completely in .NET and using Microsoft SQL Server:

I saw a post online awhile back mentioning that Python can be used for everything including for the web. Out of curiosity I started looking into this more and came across Brython. Brython is Python for the browser and allows you to replace JavaScript with Python 3. For more examples, be sure to check out the Brython website by clicking the image below:

axe is a standard in accessibility testing that is trusted by Google, Microsoft, and several others. axe is available as a Chrome extension, Microsoft Edge (Chromium edition), and an Android application. They also have a web testing API, Android testing API, and Windows testing API.

Last month at Microsoft Inspire 2020, Microsoft made several Microsoft Teams announcements. Some of the changes include a new 24/7 management and monitoring service called Teams Rooms Premium that costs $50 per device per month. Microsoft also announced several new frontline worker features as well as DataFlex. For a complete list, read the post by Computer World.

My current site uses Jekyll, as I’ve indicated before. Jekyll uses the Liquid template language which is common within Jekyll, Salesforce desk, Zendesk, and many other platforms. While Jekyll uses Liquid, it does not use the most current version and does not support all of the appropriate templating filters. Therefore, you should check out the Liquid section of the Jekyll site which can be found at jekyllrb.com/docs/liquid/.

Microsoft has released a best practice or design principle to encourage developers to build RESTful APIs. This guide provides a good list of “SHOULDs” to ensure a consistent design of the APIs. Even better, the team is keeping their recommendations updated by using a GitHub repository. You can check out the guidelines by visiting https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/vNext/Guidelines.md.

If you are an Angular developer and you also use Visual Studio, you should be using the Angular Language Service extension for Visual Studio. This extension provides rich editing and Intellisense for both inline and external templates. Last week I posted about this extension being available for VS Code. Previously it was unavailable for Visual Studio. By using this extension in both, you’ll have a consistent experience.