Hi everyone! 👋 

I hope you had a great September! Thank you for the positive feedback from last time re. moving the news items and comic pick to the start - I’ll continue with this moving forward.

I’m sending the email at the start of the day this time, because today’s the last day of the Dometrain back to school sale, where you can get 30% off any course (including my Docker and Kubernetes courses!).

📰 News items and dev picks

Here are my dev picks this month…

• .NET 9 Release Candidate 1 - As you may know, dotnet has a yearly major-version release every November. This coming version will be version 9, and the RC1 version is now available. And they say it “comes with a go-live support license so you can confidently use this release for your production applications.”

• SignalR in .NET 9 now natively supports OpenTelemetry spans - In the link in this Tweet from David Fowler - an Aspire dashboard is shown viewing OpenTelemetry traces with SignalR spans. Very cool!

• MassTransit has more than one hundred million (100,000,000) downloads on NuGet! - I’m a big fan of MassTransit, and the fact that it has hit 100 million downloads is amazing! If you want to hear more about MassTransit, check out this podcast episode where the author, Chris Patterson, joined me to chat about it.

• Stephen Toub’s annual dotnet performance blog post is now out! - Open this blog post; hold down the page-down key; wait and watch in awe over how long and how much detail goes into these posts! Remember that each of these posts covers just the next upcoming dotnet version - ie. just this past year!!!

• TUnit - A new testing framework - This is a Reddit post from the author asking for feedback. At the same time as I saw this, I also saw that Nick Chapsas released a video on it. It uses source generation, and has a bunch of cool features. Definitely one to watch.

• Fluent Assertions has hit 400 million downloads - Another impressive nuget download milestone. I’m sure most of the listeners have heard of Fluent Assertions, as it’s an insanely popular testing library that adds a nice fluent syntax to your asserts, together with a whole bunch of helper extensions!

• Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again - I’m not an Elastic user, but this sounds like something that’s quite a big thing for Elastic users, so I thought I’d include it. Also, if you want to hear more about Elastic, I was joined by Steve Gordon in episode 52 of the podcast to chat about it.

Dev Comic pick of the month

A team I work with has, up until now, been using Azure DevOps for ticket management, but we’ve just moved over to JIRA to align with the rest of the company. Coincidentally, around the same time, I saw someone post this on Twitter 😆

Sponsorship opportunities

I’m looking for sponsors for both the podcast and this newsletter. Details of podcast sponsorship can be found here. Feel free to reply to this email to discuss further.

The Podcast 🎙

I published one episode this month and also recorded another.

The published one was with Scott Sauber, where we chatted about GitHub Actions. We also discussed the differences between “Continuous Integration”, “Continuous Delivery”, and “Continuous Deployment” - including the benefits of your pipeline deploying straight through to prod as soon as your commit goes into the main branch! 🙈🚀 

And in the second episode, which hasn’t yet been released, I was joined for a second time by Callum Linington, this time to, ironically given the name of the podcast, chat about Exceptions! And more importantly - better alternatives. I'm afraid the "monad" word got thrown in too! This should be released in the next week or so. The previous episode where Callum joined me was back in episode 26, where we chatted about Event Sourcing and Event-Driven architectures.

To be notified when the episodes drop, 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!…

.NET Oxford (user-group)

We had our quarterly in-person lightning-talk .NET Oxford event this month.

Great talks, followed by the pub! We have them every quarter, which means that our next one will be in December, where our amazing sponsors, Corriulo Recruitment usually bring lots of Christmas mulled wine and minced pies! 🎄 (as well as paying for the venue and providing drinks, etc like they do every meetup 🙏). If you’re local-ish - then it would be amazing to see you there!

My Dometrain Courses

Below are details of my Dometrain courses. There’s also a bundle that includes both courses that can be found here. And don’t forget that there’s a sale on which ends the end of play today!

Docker for Developers

This course will teach you everything you need to know about Docker and containers. From what containers and images are; to how to build your own; to security and networking; docker-compose; and much more!

Kubernetes for Developers

Once you understand Docker, containers, images, etc - it’s time to move onto the next level and learn a container orchestrator - and Kubernetes has clearly won the battle here! My Kubernetes course is rammed-packed full of demos (pretty much all the way through), which are easy to follow along with downloadable YAML files and scripts. We start with the basics, then later move on to more advanced topics like services meshes and operators.

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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