Microsoft is providing more insight into how it goes about handling over 500 feature suggestions every month on the Developer Community website and a breakdown of what those suggestions are.
Suggestions go through a filtering process that automatically routes incoming suggestions to the appropriate teams.
Microsoft found that 15 percent of the suggestions from the past 6 months are challenging to act on, while 85 percent are currently moving their way through the system. Six percent of all actionable suggestion tickets end up marked as ‘completed,’ which amounts to about one suggestion finished per weekday.
“It’s in the best interest of our product and customers to complete as many suggestions as possible, and we strive to do so,” Mads Kristensen, senior program manager for Visual Studio Extensibility, wrote in a blog post.
A detailed outline of the process is available here.
Google announces major Android update to measure and analyze core statistics
Google launched new features that will enable Android developers to better measure and analyze their core statistics.
According to the company, for the first time, the data analysis will include data on returning users and devices, which Google said is important to many developers’ growth strategies. Also, new install methods offer the ability to aggregate and dedupe over periods that suit the business’ needs.
Other updates include an enhanced statistics page on the Play Console to show change over time, more granular configurations and exclusive benchmarks for core stats coming soon.
The detailed description of all of the recent changes are available here.
AndroidX for Xamarin
Microsoft announced that Xamarin will now have initial support for AndroidX packages.
The company explained that the migration steps will affect Android applications built with the Android Support Library because AndroidX is a redesign of the Android Support Library.
The Android Support Library to AndroidX Migration package can be used to handle applications that include dependencies that have not been migrated to the AndroidX namespace and for those applications without dependencies, the AndroidX libraries are now available on NuGet.
The full details of AndroidX support are available here.
Microsoft announces company-wide code samples browser
Microsoft announced a new unified, company-wide code samples browser to make it easier for developers to discover relevant code examples no matter what Microsoft product or service is used.
This new experience enables the ability to deploy Azure with one click and to download the relevant code without having to code the entire repository, the company explained. It also offers instant search results and filtering and the ability to navigate directly to the code using ‘browse code’.
