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- Newsletter 018 - November
Hi everyone! 👋
So the main news this month is that I’m currently mid-way through creating my third Dometrain course! And it’s a full course covering everything you need to know about the amazing JetBrains Rider IDE - packed with tips and tricks throughout! Perfect timing, given JetBrain’s announcement last month that it’s now free for non-commercial use!!! The course is expected to be finished and released in the latter half of December. I’ll send a separate email letting you know when it’s out. And don’t forget that today’s the last day of the Black Friday sale for my other courses!
Another thing I wanted to mention is Bluesky! You’ve probably heard that there’s been a mass exodus from X to Bluesky. It’s now a really great community - just like Twitter used to be in the good ol’ days! I rarely look at Twitter now, and Bluesky is where I’m most active. My handle is @danclarke.com. Hopefully, see you there! Feel free to message me there and say hello! 🙂
Table of Contents
📰 News items and dev picks
Here are my dev picks this month…
.NET 9 released! - Well, this first news-item was a fairly obvious pick! Every November, at the .NET Conf, they GA the next major version of dotnet!
Local Azure Service Bus emulator! - This is amazing news, and very long overdue. For local development when doing messaging, I end up having to use RabbitMQ instead of ASB (I use ASB in deployed environments). Thankfully, using MassTransit as an abstraction layer means I can use both for the same codebase. But I’d rather spin up ASB locally in Docker, given that’s what I’m using in deployed environments. Now I can!
Cosmos DB emulator - Similar to the above, they’ve now also released a Linux-based Cosmos emulator that you can spin up locally in Docker.
.NET Aspire 9 - There are plenty of changes - but for me, these are the big ones that jump out:
Workloads have been dropped - it’s now just nuget packages, so you no longer need an Aspire workload installed.
Persistent containers - so your local databases, etc don’t get recreated each time you restart your app, which is much better!
You can specify one service (your app for example) has to wait for another service to be up and running (your database for example).
.NET Conf videos - Did you miss it live? Well, there are plenty of videos to peruse offline!
Ultra - new .NET profiler - Announced by Alexandre Mutel here.
Visual Basic 6 rebuilt in C# – complete with form designer and IDE in the browser! - This is incredible. See it running here.
Steve Sanderson video “Adding realtime voice AI to an app” - Just a short 3-minute video, but wow, it’s really impressive!
JetBrains AI Assistant 2024.3 - Choose your preferred LLM!
Microsoft Previews Copilot AI in SQL Server Management Studio
Dev Comic pick of the month
Given I’m currently working on a Rider course - when I saw this, I knew it HAD to be this month’s comic pick! And if you’re using the IdeaVim plugin with Rider, then that bar doubles! 😆
Dev Tip - Readwise
I’ve recently discovered Readwise. A big thanks to Frans Lytzen for mentioning this to me! This is amazing, and I’m finding I’m reading a lot more blog posts because of it, which in turn means that I’m learning more! It has two parts - one area manages highlights and can sync from various places - Kindle, websites (via browser extension), and much more - then you get daily digests of your past snippets to remind you. Then there’s also the Reader webapp and mobile app - which is a read-it-later kind of service. You can send articles to it from anywhere. It’s a great reading experience and is designed with the power-user in mind. There are tons of shortcuts - and the reader has a really nice “current paragraph” indicator in the gutter, which makes it easy to stay focused whilst you’re reading and also not lose your place if you get pulled away.
If you do signup - please use this referral link. Note, that this being my dev tip isn’t sponsored or related to this referral link. It’s because I’m getting a lot of value from it, and reading a lot more dev articles because of it :)
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 🎙
Just one podcast episode was published this month. I was joined by Rob West to chat about using mindfulness, nutrition, and exercise to improve productivity and focus as a developer. Tips and mind-hacks littered throughout! Worth a listen - developer or not!
Note that this will be the last episode this year, as I’m currently focusing on the next Dometrain course (mentioned in the intro to this email). I’ll aim to increase the frequency of podcast episodes in the new year!
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!…
Podcast Discord community
My Dometrain Courses
Below are details of my Dometrain courses. There’s also a bundle that includes both courses which can be found here.
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.
.NET Oxford user-group
Our next quarterly .NET Oxford is in December! I’m afraid this is in-person only - but if you’re close enough to Oxford in the UK, it would be great to see you there! Our sponsors, Corriculo Recruitment, will be providing drinks and refreshments - including mulled wine and minced pies! And talks will involve motorised gig lights that the audience can remotely control from their phones (leveraging Blazor and Kafka) - plus guitars and live music from myself and John Parkins!
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! 👋
Bluesky (my primary place)
Twitter (using less nowadays)
LinkedIn
Discord
Mastodon (rarely used)
Threads (rarely used)
