Hello, I'm   Jason

Mads Kristensen is at it again creating yet another bundle of extensions that he’s created. You can install the extension pack by visiting the Extension’s page or by navigating to Extensions > Manage Extensions in Visual Studio 2019 and searching for Basic Essentials.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced Pylance is available in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. Pylance offers feature-rich language support for Python inside of VS Code. It depends on the core Python extension and provides type checking, auto imports, type information and more. While Python Language Server will still exist, the long term plan is to migrate users over to Pylance. Be sure to check out Pylance and download from the marketplace.

We’re now officially at the midpoint of 2020. I’m not sure anyone is looking back at the past 6 months thinking it has been a great 6 months. Besides a global pandemic and a fight for freedom, liberation, and justice, it’s hard to believe that anything else has happened. I never thought I’d be raising children in a world that would see these events in such a short period of time. Sure, we’d read about it growing up in history class. But, being naive, never thought this would happen in 2020. I’m sure I join the rest of the world in hoping that the next 6 months are much, much better than the first six. In many cases, when an event at this magnitude hits, we look to sports or entertainment to help us temporarily forget. This time it has been different. There’s no point in dwelling at the past. We are where we are. Let’s push to move forward and fight for better health and equality in the next six months. We can beat 2020.

For a recent camping trip, I needed a new portable power bank as my others have reached their end of life. Since I needed it rather quick, I headed over to Amazon and found the Ekrist Portable Charger Power Bank. Wither over 2500 ratings averaging a 4.4, I felt pretty confident that this would do the trick. I have a Samsung Galaxy S10 5G from Verizon Wireless. I only used it the portable power bank once as I didn’t have cell service and mostly left my device in airplane mode. I was pretty happy with it and noticed that I still had all 4 lights (above 75%) battery left after a single charge of my phone. It also happens to be smaller than my phone. Here’s what it looks like:

.NET Conf: Focus on Microservices is an online, one-day, free event that features speakers from the Microsoft .NET team as well as speakers from the community. This event will focus on microservices within the .NET framework. Learn from the speakers as they share best practices, patterns, tips and tricks for building and deploying native cloud applications. For more information and to stay informed, visit https://jasong.us/2Vs2smj.

UPDATE: This issue has been resolved. Visit https://jasong.us/38EOoLZ for more details.

Back in May, Cortana received many updates. There are still questions about the future of the personal assistant and how it works in future Microsoft products. However, there are some pretty neat features in the latest version. One of my favorites is the ability for Cortana to read emails in Outlook and to respond to emails in Outlook. You can also use Cortana to give you an update on when your next meeting is and to set reminders. For full update information, watch the video below:

This weekend, I took my boys on a camping trip. No, it wasn’t a trip in a camper. We were roughing it in a tent which brings back the fond memories of when I was younger in the Boy Scouts. It was their first camping trip outside of the backyard. One of the things I had to get used to, which was quite refreshing, is that in 2020 there are still locations without Internet or mobile connections.

Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7 Preview 3 was released on 6/23/20. Preview 3 has several new features and bugfixes including enhancements with XAML and .NET refactoring. One of the biggest areas of improvement is surrounding Git.

Microsoft released an experimental tool that allows a consistent method to obtain diagnostic information from .NET Core applications. This new tool is called dotnet-monitor. Depending on the target environment, the setup can differ, but the endpoints for the information collected are the same. This includes on the native OS or inside of a container.