The University of Michigan is joining the autonomous car movement. The university has opened Mcity, a controlled environment designed to test connected and driverless cars.

“We believe that this transformation to connected and automated mobility will be a game-changer for safety, for efficiency, for energy and for accessibility,” said Peter Sweatman, director of the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center. “Our cities will be much better to live in, our suburbs will be much better to live in. These technologies truly open the door to 21st-century mobility.”

Mcity provides 32 acres of simulated urban and suburban environments that incorporate a network of roads, intersections, traffic signs and signals, streetlights, buildings, sidewalks, and obstacles. In addition, researchers testing their vehicles will have the ability to make changes to test areas where they feel the cars will have the most trouble.

Google announces the Application Default Credentials feature
Google wants to make it easier for developers to get authorization credentials for its APIs. The company has introduced the Application Default Credentials (ADC) feature, designed to allow developers to use a single line of authorization code in their apps.

“When you write applications that run on Google Compute Engine instances, you might want to connect them to Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, and other Google Cloud Platform services. Those services use OAuth2,” wrote Vijay Subramani, technical program manager for Google Cloud Platform, in a blog post. “Unfortunately, OAuth2 has traditionally been hard to use. It often requires specialized knowledge and a lot of boilerplate auth setup code just to make an initial API call.”

According to Subramani, ADC is meant to take away all the complexity of OAuth 2 and package it behind a single API call.

Visual F# 4.0 RTM announced
Microsoft has announced that Visual F# 4.0 has reached RTM along with the release of Visual Studio 2015. Visual F# 4.0 is a milestone release for the F# language and Visual Studio tools, according to the Visual F# team.

“F# 4.0 is as much about a change in culture for the language as updates to the language specification, library and tools,” the team wrote in a blog post. “There are numerous new technical features, but in many ways the most significant changes are in how we have extended the core library, and how we’ve changed the way we are doing language design, implementation and delivery.”