Hi everyone! 👋 

Welcome to the September edition of my newsletter!

Well, the big news this time is that my Docker course is now out! 🥳 In fairness, unless you’ve only just subscribed to this newsletter - you should have already received an off-schedule mid-month email about it. But no harm in me mentioning it again just in case you forgot to click that buy button the last time! 😉 If interested in knowing more, you can find the course below…

If I could ask everyone a huge favour, and help me promote this newsletter (or the podcast or YouTube) on social media - that would be amazing! 🙂🙏

I’ve also recently started a Patreon. Supporters get early-access to podcast episodes; additional monthly patreon-only new-items episodes; and more! So if you’d like to help me support the podcast, YouTube, and this newsletter - then head over to patreon.com/danclarke for more details.

And feel totally free to reply to this email and reach out. Or you can find me on the following socials…

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(Discord is my preferred method for DMs)

The Podcast 🎙

In the podcast this month, I was joined by Laila Bougria, and we chatted about NServiceBus! We chatted about various topics - from NSB’s support for observability (including OTel) and dashboarding, to sagas and pub/sub. Even zombie and ghost messages! (spooky! 👻). And as has been known to happen on the show - we did end up going on a tangent and geeking out about the awesome Jetbrains Rider too! This was such a fun conversation, and you know the recording has gone well when we can’t finish the episode because we both can’t stop laughing 😆 (listen to the ending to hear what I mean! 🙈).

Whilst the episode with Laila was the only episode to be releases in September - I did also recorded a couple of other episodes… one with Jamie Taylor from the Modern .NET Show (formally the .NET Core Podcast), which will be out next. And another with Nick Chapsas, where we chatted about his Dometrain training platform (which is what my Docker course is hosted on).

The observant amongst you may have noticed that I said last month I was also due to record with Marc Duiker to chat about Dapr. Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling well on that date - so we had to postpone, and that’ll be a bit later on in the year now.

Remember to click subscribe in your favourite podcast app. The links can be found on the podcast website.

Also, remember that we have a Discord community for the podcast!…
👉 Podcast Discord

.NET Oxford

This month’s .NET Oxford meetup was going to be a virtual event with Bryan Hogan, the host of the No dogma podcast. Sadly, he had to pull out a couple of days before due to other commitments. So we didn’t end up having a meetup in September.

In other .NET Oxford news - we’ve made a decision that we’ll be moving to quarterly in-person events only (and those will mostly be lightning talks). This obviously isn’t ideal for our members who can’t attend in person, and I can only apologise. However, both Matt and I are finding that after a long day behind the computer attending virtual meetings all day - we weren’t very motivated to then jump on another 2-hour Zoom call for the virtual events. We were also finding doing it monthly was too often, given all our other commitments. We don't want to stop .NET Oxford altogether, so we decided that going back to in-person again like it used to be, and doing it less frequently will work best for us. We'll certainly be keeping the Discord going as on online community though.

👉 .NET Oxford Discord

YouTube Channel

In September’s video, I show the ins and outs of using Git within the Awesome Jetbrains Rider! As you probably know, I’m a huge fan of both Rider and Git - however, it’s only recently I’ve started embracing Git within Rider. In this video, I share what I learnt.

To be notified as I create them (and also support the channel), please remember to click subscribe and that notification bell icon 🔔🙂🙏

https://www.youtube.com/@danclarkeuk

5 years as a Microsoft MVP!

I didn't realise MVPs get an additional disc to celebrate 5 years! Look what arrived through the post! 😍 A huge thank you to Microsoft for the recognition - it’s a huge honour to be part of such an amazing group of people!

Upcoming in October

The main event I’ll be attending in October will be the DDD East Midlands conference, where I’ll be doing a short talk on “Git under the covers”, as well as taking part as a mentor in a Friday-evening “Speed Mentoring” event there! Which sounds interesting! I’ll update you on how it went in next month’s newsletter!

I also have a couple of podcast recordings planned. And will hopefully get another YouTube out! I just need more hours in the day! 😆⌚️

News items and dev picks

Here are my dev picks this month…

• Performance Improvements in .NET 8 - Every year, Stephen Toub does an insanely detailed blog post about the performance improvements that have gone into that years’ release of .NET. And this year has been no exception. I really can’t do it justice here - so just click on the link and scroll down! 🤯

• docker init now supports ASP.NET - The docker init command creates initial Docker files (eg. Dockerfile, compose.yaml, .dockerignore, etc). In Docker Desktop 4.23.0, they added ASP.NET as a docker init option.

• DALL-E 3 (with ChatGPT integration!) - OpenAI has now released its 3rd version of DALL-E, which is a text-to-image AI. And ChatGPT integrates with it - which will also help generate prompts, so you no longer need to be a prompt expert to create great images. Apparently, it’ll be first released to ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise users in October. Time to cancel my Midjourney subscription?!

• Polly v8 officially released - I’m assuming most readers who are .NET developers will have heard of Polly! The go-to retry-handling library for .NET devs. Well, there’s now a new major release!

• How to install and use Podman Desktop on Windows - I talk a lot about Docker (have I mentioned that I’ve just released a course on it? 😉) - but remember that it’s not the only container technology. And thanks to the OCI standard, they’re compatible! This blog post talks about installing Podman Desktop.

• Announcing Public Preview of Free Hosting Plan for WordPress on App Service - This one’s for John Parkin - the world’s largest WordPress fan ;)

Dev Comic pick of the month

(Source: XKCD)

Please help me share this newsletter 🙏

If you’ve made it this far into the newsletter - I’m hoping that means you’ve
both enjoyed it and found it useful. If you can help me out and share with your developer friends at work and on social media, that would be amazing!

Again - feel totally free to reach out to me, and let me know your thoughts on the newsletter. And see you back in your inbox next month for the next edition! 👋

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