Microsoft has announced the availability of UWP Community Toolkit 1.2, which focuses on stabilizing features and added the most requested features that were missing.

A quick preview of the release: seven new helpers were added to help with everyday tasks. There is a new BackgroundTaskHelper, which helps developers work with background tasks, and there is a new HttpHelper to help developers deal with HTTP requests in a secure way, according to a blog post by David Catuhe, principal program manager.

Microsoft also added new controls, such as MasterDetailView, which helps developers create master/detail user experiences. There were also updates to certain features, like ImageCache, HeaderedTextBlock, and PullToRefreshListView. Facebook service now supports paging when requesting data, and BladeControl was renamed to BladeView. BladeView will allow for more common conventions like data binding, and it can make the control align with SDK naming, wrote Catuhe.

JS++’s new release comes with support for debugging via source maps
JS++ 0.4.2.2 was released with support for in-browser debugging via source maps. With source maps, developers can set breakpoints, log messages, and debug JS++ programs from a web browser of choice.

This release of JS++ has improved Microsoft Windows integration, and it now has a Windows context menu integration. However, “due to restrictions in Windows, this only allowed compilation of one file. JS++ is a multi-file, modular programming language,” according Roger Poon, creator of JS++ in a blog post.

IBM launches global Watson consulting service
IBM has announced new services and capabilities aimed at helping enterprises and developers transform products by using Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

This announcement follows IBM being named a leader for IoT software platforms. In “The Forrester Wave: IoT Software Platforms, Q4 2016,” Forrester analyzed and scored 11 IoT software platform vendors, naming IBM a leader for its strong commitment to open-source standards and a “robust” global ecosystem, according to an IBM press release.

Besides being named an IoT leader, IBM is also launching its global IBM Watson IoT Consulting Solutions practice today, which will feature 1,500 experts across IBM Watson IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany. There will also be eight other IBM IoT centers in other parts of the world. Global clients, developers, and startups will have free access to the platform so they can explore IoT innovations.

IBM is also working with more than 6,000 clients to help them with their IoT initiatives.

More information on the features announced today can be found here.

Ruby 2.3.3 released
Ruby 2.3.3 has been released, containing several bugfixes that were reported by developers, users and committers.

According to the release notes, Ruby 2.3.3 contains a fix for Refinements and Module#prepend. The release notes page reads: “The mixture use of Module#refine and Module#prepend to the same Class could cause unexpected NoMethodError. This is a regression on Ruby 2.3.2 released last week.”

The rest of the bugfixes can be found on the ChangeLog.