Microsoft brings 8,000 royalty-free images and icons to Office for Windows users

Enrico
Microsoft Office stock pictures

Microsoft yesterday released the new Version 2004 update (Build 12730.20024) for Office for Windows Desktop Insiders in the Fast Ring. This new update brings high quality, curated images, stickers, and icons to Office 365 subscribers. Over 8,000 royalty-free images and icons will be available in Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint apps for users. In the coming months, Microsoft will be adding more premium content for Office 365 subscribers. Here’s how this feature works: Select Insert > Pictures > Stock Images. Select the content type you want to explore: Stock Images, Cutout People, Icons, or Stickers. Enter some keywords in the Search box.…

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Windows 10: The new hidden features found in preview builds

Enrico
Windows10 What's new settings

With the latest Windows 10 Insider build, new hidden features have been found that add long-awaited media controls to the volume flyout and a new settings page that shows a ‘What’s New’ section for the current Windows release. As Microsoft developers work on new features for Windows 10, they hide them from being used by users. These features, though, can be enabled by the developers as needed for testing. These hidden features can be enabled using tools like Mach2 or ViVe (ViVe is a C# library you can use to make your own…

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A guide to remote development with Visual Studio Live Share

Enrico
Visual Studio Live Share

Working in a fully distributed, remote team requires sophisticated collaboration technology, which needs to be both supercharged and frictionless. Visual Studio Live Share was built on the bold principle of making remote developer collaboration as powerful and natural as in-person collaboration. We knew that our paradigm: “share your context, not your screen,” was only feasible, if we allowed the power of the modern IDE translate to remote collaboration sessions. Just then the world changed drastically and everyone was forced to be remote. It wasn’t just professional developers who needed Live Share; there were students, teachers, and interview candidates who needed a real-time collaboration service. So the Live…

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Microsoft Editor, an alternative to Grammarly

Enrico
Microsoft Editor Explain

Last week Microsoft announced a new service called Microsoft Editor, an AI-powered writing assistant that takes on Grammarly, available for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. Microsoft Editor helps you write with confidence in 20+ languages. Since it is a browser add-on, it will help you whenever you are on the web, right from writing emails to posting your story on Facebook. Microsoft Editor tiers Microsoft Editor has two different tiers. The free edition includes basic features such as spelling and basic grammar across Word, Outlook.com and the web. But with…

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New Xamarin Application Developed to Track and Manage COVID-19 in Real-time

Enrico
Xamarin Application Developed to Track and Manage COVID-19 in Real-time

Volunteers re-engineer cancer treatment software to monitor coronavirus pandemic using Microsoft’s Xamarin mobile framework with Azure Mobile Angel has released a new mobile application built on the Xamarin platform to manage potential and at-risk coronavirus patients in real-time.  The free application monitors patients in clinics across the country through self-reported symptoms and prioritizes them in a triage list based on fever and other symptoms. With built-in telemedicine features, clinic staff can directly monitor patients while reducing in-person visits and potential exposure. The application also aggregates reports across the country so…

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Microsoft News Bar beta now available

Enrico
Microsoft News Desktop beta

Microsoft launched a new app for newshounds on the Microsoft Store today, dubbed Microsoft News Bar. The app is essentially a persistent news ticker for your desktop, serving up the latest headlines as they happen. There’s also a fair bit of customization to get the right fit for your desktop setup. On launch, News Bar takes up a portion of the right side of your screen with a list of images for each news story. Hovering over each image will give you a preview of the story’s headline and a…

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A successful Git branching model

Enrico

In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for some of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management. Why git? For a thorough discussion on the pros and cons of Git compared to centralized…

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WHO encourages people to game #PlayApartTogether

Enrico
Word Health Organization

According to a report by USA Today, Activision-Blizzard and other game makers kicked off an initiative called #PlayApartTogether to entertain themselves while practicing social distancing. The initiative, supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), is particularly noteworthy because WHO previously designated video game addiction as an official mental health disorder. But the group hopes that the industry can “reach millions with important messages to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” said Ray Chambers, the WHO ambassador for global strategy in a statement. Game companies will encourage players to stay distanced and observe other safety measures including hand hygiene, he…

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Are Windows 10 Control Panel’s days numbered?

Enrico
windows10 settings

Ever since the Windows 8 days, Microsoft has had two settings apps built into Windows. A modern Settings app, and a legacy settings app known as Control Panel. Microsoft has been slowly working to replace the legacy Control Panel with the modern Settings app on Windows 10, but as Windows Control Panel has been part of the OS for decades, transferring all those settings to the new app takes a lot of time. It’s been five years, and that process still isn’t done. With that said, the latest Windows Insider builds of…

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Getting started with GitHub Sponsors

Enrico

Are you interested in GitHub Sponsors but don’t know where to start? Do you have questions about whether you should sign up as an individual or as an organization? This guide walks you through several ways you can start pursuing funding for your open source work. We’ll cover how to sign up and receive funds, as an: Individual  Organization with a bank account Organization without a bank account And we’ll review a few other topics on how to: Display your Sponsors profile or external funding links with a button on your project Add sponsor…

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Microsoft warns of Windows zero-day exploited in the wild

Enrico

Hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows 7 OS to take over systems, Microsoft said in a security alert today. The zero-day is located in the Adobe Type Manager Library (atmfd.dll), a library that Microsoft uses to render PostScript Type 1 fonts inside multiple versions of the Windows OS. Microsoft says there are two remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in this built-in library that allow attackers to run code on a user’s system and take actions on their behalf. “There are multiple ways an attacker could exploit the vulnerability, such…

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Windows Subsystem for Linux is making inroads with developers

Enrico

Last week, Microsoft and Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution) were scheduled to host a developer conference focused on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Ars was invited, and I had plane tickets in hand—but the physical conference was canceled at the last minute due to the coronavirus. Note that I did say the physical conference was canceled—WSLconf itself went on, with 22 speakers and 21 talks given. Virtual attendees were reportedly more than double the (sold out) physical attendee registration and included developers…

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Facebook is moving to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code for internal development

Enrico

Facebook is adopting Visual Studio Code for all of its software engineers, and is currently in the process of finishing the migration from its mix of Nuclide and Emacs for internal development. As part of the partnership with Microsoft, the company will also help improve remote development extensions, which is ultimately going to benefit many more developers around the world.

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Amazon’s own Echo Buds may have revealed a future fitness tracking feature

Enrico

Amazon’s truly wireless Echo Buds earbuds are excellent for their $130 price, to the point that they were the elephant in the room when we reviewed Apple’s new AirPods Pro. And they managed that resounding feat without one of their biggest rumored features — the ability to double as a fitness tracker and measure the calories you’ve burned. But don’t rule out fitness tracking just yet, because CNBC and The Verge both spotted a new “Fitness” tab in the Echo Buds section of the Alexa app today. You can see…

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Xamarin build error: defining a default interface method requires –min-sdk-version >= 24

Enrico

I added to my project Xam.Plugins.Android.ExoPlayer and then I received this error: java/lang/Object;I)V: defining a default interface method requires –min-sdk-version >= 24 (currently 13) for interface methods: com.google.android.exoplayer2.Player$EventListener.onTimelineChanged : (Lcom/google/android/exoplayer2/Timeline;Ljava/lang/Object;I)V Looking around, I discovered that other people had the same issue and the problem sits in the Android Options in Project Properties. No Dex compiler was specified, select D8 Dex compiler in the Android project properties: In code: <AndroidDexTool>d8</AndroidDexTool> Happy coding!

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Accessing the OIDC tokens in ASP.NET Core 2.0

Enrico

In ASP.NET Core 1.1 So, for example, in ASP.NET Core 1.x, if you wanted to access the tokens (id_token, access_token and refresh_token) from your application, you could set the SaveTokens property when registering the OIDC middleware: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 // Inside your Configure method app.UseOpenIdConnectAuthentication(new OpenIdConnectOptions(“Auth0”) {     // Set all your OIDC options…     // and then set SaveTokens to save tokens to the AuthenticationProperties     SaveTokens = true }); You would then subsequently be able to retrieve those tokens by calling GetAuthenticateInfoAsync inside your controllers, and…

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Microsoft’s Chromium Edge browser is now officially available to test

Enrico

Microsoft is making its Chromium-powered Edge browser available to developers today. The software giant is releasing its Canary and Developer builds, offering daily or weekly updates to the changes that are coming to Edge. Both downloads are available on Microsoft’s new Edge insider site, and they are designed for developers to get an early look at how Edge is changing. Microsoft has focused on the fundamentals of browsing, reliability, and extension support for this early version of Edge built on Chromium, and the company is looking for feedback about the…

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