The JavaScript development community has become quite comfortable with the new language constructs introduced with ECMAScript 2015 (aka ES6). But work on ECMAScript didn't stop there. Here are some highlights from ES7, 8, 9 and 10.

More on Blazor – Microsoft’s experimental .NET web framework using C#/Razor and HTML that runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly. The TAB reviews the Blazor community, Razor Components and the Blazor workshop put together by the ASP .NET team. Plus tips from the coalface on building .NET Standard applications.

The TAB reviews new features in Xamarin.Forms V4.0, including the Shell framework for quickly putting together a cross-platform application, Visual for look and feel consistencies across platforms and CarouselView for a vertical or horizontal flow of “cards”. Plus the TAB’s view of Visual Studio App Center, a front end on Azure DevOps for building and deploying apps.

The TAB discusses TLS, https and W3C’s Feature Policy.

DBA Julian Fletcher on the key points of good indexing practice in SQL Server.

The SQL Server Query Store feature provides you with insight on query plan choice and performance. It simplifies performance troubleshooting by helping you quickly find performance differences caused by query plan changes.

.NET Standard isn’t a framework or library: it’s a set of APIs that a platform has to implement or a library has to constrain itself to in order to claim to be compliant with the standard.

Aspect-oriented programming is an expansion on the principle of separation of concerns. It aims to extract cross-cutting concerns, such as authorisation or logging, that are often intermingled with other code.

Coding standards are increasingly something we can automate but guidelines, learned through hard experience, direct our craft.

Insights into updates on Xamarin and Visual Studio App Center mobile development tools.

The TAB’s feedback on JavaScript front-end frameworks and TypeScript Front-end frameworks OCC has been experimenting with feature-rich JavaScript frameworks. One of the current forerunners is React, which we used in our Pegasus project to enable component-based dynamic web UI. For a new ContrOCC web project, we compared React to Vue.js, which is increasing in popularity and offers several advantages over React. However, although Vue.js does solve some of the issues we found using React on Pegasus, this does not outweigh[...]

DBA Julian Fletcher discusses some easy ways to improve database performance As anybody who has worked on projects involving a large amount of in-database processing will know, performance is a top priority. Clients usually consider poor performance to be a bug in much the same way as ‘traditional’ bugs (unhandled errors, getting the numbers wrong, things simply not working, etc). So our product and custom development release cycles include tasks to ensure we get good performance out of new features[...]

Software consultant Matthew Clarke writes about how Visual Studio 2017’s cross targeting makes it easier to mix projects based on new technologies with existing code. Our new wave of product development projects has been steaming ahead with the latest in Microsoft technologies: .NET Standard v2, .NET Core v2, ASP.NET Core v2, Entity Framework Core v2. Quite fittingly then, sometimes you need two target frameworks. It’s not possible to forget about the whole of the product’s legacy codebase and sadly it’s[...]

OCC database expert Julian Fletcher describes how SQL’s ForceSeek can be used to combat database deadlocking and blocking. One particular way of using tables in a SQL database can make them particularly prone to deadlocking (and deadlocking’s sickly cousin, blocking). This is where ‘working data’, generated by and used in a complex set of calculations, is temporarily stored in one or more tables. Whereas any one process will probably access only a very small percentage of the rows in a[...]

Software consultant Matthew Clarke shares his experience of moving to version 2.5 of Xamarin.Forms. Despite only being a minor version bump over Xamarin.Forms 2.4, version 2.5 has made some rather radical breaking changes. These are currently only “Obsolete” warnings but I’d advise you to act now before they become build failures. The most disruptive of deprecations affect Android but they touch all parts of your code. The chances are they’ll affect you, as they touch some fundamental areas of Xamarin.Forms.[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Articulate.js Articulate.js is a simple, free (MIT license) jQuery plugin that uses the Web Speech API to speak the content of a web page. This could be useful in a broad range of circumstances, but particularly as an assistive technology for those that have problems reading text on[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Xamarin & .NET Standard (Core) .NET Standard is now supported by Xamarin. The .Net Standard is the specification of which .NET APIs are available on all .NET runtimes – including the full framework, Core and now Xamarin. The upshot is that if you use a library or assembly[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Test your production code Things can go wrong between debug and release builds: conditional compilation linking incorrect project configuration/build dependencies This means we need to test the production build. However, this is not always as simple as it sounds. Apple makes it almost impossible to test release builds[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Security in the news Data breaches are on the rise and the media is increasingly publishing news stories on the subject. Some of the breaches happened years ago and are only just coming to light. For example, Yahoo had two hacks three years ago that have only recently[...]