Today, LEAD released a major update to its Document, Medical, and Xamarin technologies. There is a lot to talk about in this release so stay tuned to future posts where we will dive deeper into these features.

A good product is always evolving and maturing. Sometimes that comes as completely new features, like doing the impossible with our new plugin-free 3D Medical Web Viewer. Other times, it is taking something we do well and re-imagining how it can be applied in more complex and challenging scenarios. Here are some examples of both that are included in today's release:

We are once again pleased to announce that LEAD Technologies and multiple LEADTOOLS products are the recipients of several top awards from ComponentSource. This global distributor has been a partner with us since 1996, serving thousands of LEADTOOLS customers throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Australia.

LEAD Technologies has joined the TWAIN Working Group as an Associate Member. For many years, LEAD has included imaging toolkits that follow the TWAIN standards and this membership helps ensure an even higher level of support and a commitment to future development. More specifically, LEAD's membership in the TWAIN Working Group paves the way for early development access to the new TWAIN Direct standard, enabling imaging workflow applications for the desktop, mobile, or in the cloud.

To learn more, read the full press release.

There are still over two million desktop application developers—i.e., currently writing or maintaining Windows desktop apps, whether written in C++ or .NET. Regardless of your targeted platform and environment, be it Winforms and C#, or WPF or UWP, Visual Studio is the IDE of choice. VS Code is gaining popularity, and our devs use it for some projects, but VS is the bread and butter around here.

One the thing that makes VS2017 such an amazing IDE is its extensibility, allowing a vast ecosystem of add-ins to flourish. You can find them in the Visual Studio Marketplace, or by searching from inside VS: Just go to Tools -> Extensions and Updates... and select the "Online" option:

Today is the first day of the highly anticipated .NET Conference, a free, online conference for everyone in the .NET community from beginners to seasoned engineers. This 3-day virtual conference has a packed agenda covering the latest in development technologies for the .NET ecosystem including ASP.NET, Xamarin, C#, Azure, AI/ML, and new things just over the horizon. Make sure you tune into social media as well (#DotNetConf) because there will be a virtual attendee party hosted by LEAD and other .NET Conference sponsors in which you can learn more and win prizes.

Watch it Here!