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- Newsletter 019 - December
Happy New Year! 🥳 I hope you had a great time celebrating! Sorry this edition is a bit late - I was focusing on finishing my next Dometrain course, which I’m very excited to say is now available for purchase! 🎉 It’s on the amazing JetBrains Rider IDE, and is 6 hours of content - covering hotkeys, refactoring, navigation, debugging, git, testing, AI, profiling, remote collaboration, and much much more! And, the first 200 to use code RIDER20 will get 20% off.
Also, a quick reminder that I’ve now stopped using X-Twitter, and mainly use Bluesky. It’s way better - and such a great community. 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…
GitHub launches a free version of Copilot - This is pretty huge! There are limitations, as you’d expect, but a great starting point! See here for their pricing page.
Critical: .NET Install links are changing - A CDN has gone bankrupt. If your CI/CD setup depends on the
azureedge.netdomain, then check out the article.SpecFlow end of life - SpecFlow has been a popular choice for a long time in BDD, but they’ve now announced its EoL. An interesting open-source alternative is Reqnroll.
C# Advent Calendar 2024 - A daily dose of dotnet content each day of December up until Christmas day.
Advent of Code 2024 - Advent of Code is an annual series of programming puzzles published each December, created and run by Eric Wastl.
ZoomIt v9.0 is now available - I’m a huge fan of ZoomIt, the free tool that allows annotating on the screen. Great for both recording videos, and also pair-programming, screen-sharing, and demos. This new version adds support for live zooming. Ie. you can zoom in, and still use your applications, and also draw ontop of that zoomed-in view.
XUnit v3 released - Definitely my unit testing framework of choice, and it’s a major version release!
Dev Comic pick of the month
I saw this one on Reddit. I love that everyone on Reddit is taking it super-seriously and explaining why it’s not as clear-cut as that 😄 It might not be - but it’s funny and very relatable given a lot of codebases I’ve seen! 🙈
Dev Tip - Use IDE bookmarks
My dev tip this month is to leverage bookmarks in your IDE more. I pair a lot with other developers, and have literally NEVER seen anyone else use bookmarks! They can save so much time and cognitive load whilst developing. I created a YouTube video last year talking about this…
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’m afraid no episodes were released or recorded in December! This was because I needed to get my head down and focus on the Rider course. Now that I’ve completed it, I aim to get back right to it! So make sure you’re subscribed in your podcast app of choice to be notified when new episodes drop! 🙂 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 the Docker and Kubernetes 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.
JetBrains Rider
Rider is an amazing .NET IDE by JetBrains. This course is 6 hours of content - covering hotkeys, refactoring, navigation, debugging, git, testing, AI, profiling, remote collaboration, and much much more! And, the first 200 to use code RIDER20 will get 20% off.
.NET Oxford user-group
We had our quarterly .NET Oxford meetup in December, and it was great! I’m afraid it wasn’t recorded though. Our sponsors, Corriculo Recruitment, provided drinks and refreshments - including mulled wine and minced pies. I did a joint talk with two others - with my talk covering .NET Aspire and Kafka. We had the audience controlling motorised gig lights from their phones (leveraging Blazor and Kafka). And both myself and another speaker played guitars too. Was great fun! If you’re interested in doing an in-person (Oxford, UK) lightning talk at our next one in March, then drop me a message.
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)
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LinkedIn
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Mastodon (rarely used)
Threads (rarely used)
