News round up for the week - .NET, JQuery, HTML

We live in an era of information overload. At no other time in human history have we received communication and messages on anywhere near the current level. Our cell phones are constantly with us; colleagues, friends and family email, call and text us all the time. The Internet - where many of us spend our days working - is saturated with articles and content screaming “read me!”, advertisements and distraction. And that’s not without taking into account ‘traditional’ information - from billboards to newspapers, television, radio and beyond.

While this can all be a little overbearing, it’s undeniably useful to be able to find out whatever we want at the touch of a button or the tap of a screen. However, sifting out what is and isn't useful to us, hunting information down and analyzing it is time consuming. In our hyper-busy lives, keeping up to date with information relevant to our work - developments in .NET, jQuery and HTML - is hardly at the top of most developers’ to-do lists. Nonetheless, having a good idea of what’s going in our field is a ‘must’ for anyone wanting to stay at the top of their game.

 

In this week’s news round up we’ll save you the time spent hunting this information out. Major recent events in .NET include Microsoft’s continued open sourcing of parts of the framework; in the jQuery world Esprima 2.1.0 has just been released while in HTML land we’ve seen Google take further steps to banish Adobe’s Flash player to the history books. Read on for more.

.NET CoreCLR open sourcing doesn’t look like closing

It was a big deal when Microsoft announced they’d be open sourcing CoreCLR, representing a real change in direction for the corporation’s strategy. Since then GitHub has been a veritable hive of activity, with many updates, new features and builds. Given all this activity, it’s no surprise that some members of the community have been asking for a more visible and transparent view of what the Microsoft team are doing with CoreCLR. Naturally no one wants to spend hours working on some solution or another only to find Microsoft have already been working on it. Microsoft are aware of this and have begun publishing issues and information on work they’re carrying out on a publicly visible branch. You can get up to date with issues here, otherwise keep an eye on the blog - they plan on making all this easier to follow soon.

Otherwise, there’ve been some important improvements on support for CoreCLR on Linux and Mac OS X. For more information on Microsoft’s current and future open sourcing schedule, see here.

What does this mean for you?

Microsoft are showing a real willingness to listen to the community, react to their requests and work together going forward. If you want to get involved, this is a great time to participate in work which could have real long term impacts.

JQuery: parser update released

Looking for news in the world of jQuery? The release of Esprima 2.1.0. Esprima is an impressive parser and this update introduces support for various pieces of ES6 syntax. The folks at jQuery have also modified Esprima’s testing infrastructure and have collaborated with other JavaScript parsers to help define community standards. Looking forward, a 2.2 version of the parser will be released in the coming weeks. In the meantime, version 2.1.0’s release note includes:

 

• Support ES6 class #1001
• Support ES6 rest parameter #1011
• Support ES6 computed property name #1037
• Support ES6 lexical declaration #1065
• Expand the location of property getter, setter, and methods #1029
• Enable TryStatement transition to a single handler #1031
• Tolerate unclosed block comment #1041

 

What does this mean for you?

Fundamentally, Esprima is just going to make things faster and easier when you use jQuery - and who wouldn’t want that?

HTML5 - the unstoppable rise

Google have thrown their full weight behind HTML5 at the expense of Adobe Flash. That’s nothing new, but Flash’s coffin had another nail knocked in when Google confirmed that they would automatically convert all ads containing flash into HTML5. This basically means advertisers will be able to make ads which target audiences even more consistently (and contribute to their information overload!). On a larger scale this brings us closer to the day when all media on the web will come directly in HTML5.

What does this mean for you?

If you haven’t already stopped using Flash, put it at the top of your ‘to-do’ list!

That’s all folks

Over the coming days we’ll be scanning the forums, blogs and gossip sites to bring together all the freshest news in .NET, jQuery and HTML5 so you don’t have to. Leave your thoughts in the comments section below, and we look forward to catching up with you next time.