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- Newsletter 021 - February
Hi, and welcome to the Feb edition of the newsletter!
The big news item from me this month is that I’ve started work on my 4th Dometrain course! I wasn’t expecting to be doing another one so soon, but the opportunity came up for me to do one on the amazing .NET Aspire! Which was too big an opportunity to turn down. Unlike the previous courses, I’ll be unable to take a big chunk of time from my main client-work to work on it, so the next month or so will involve 5am starts! 😬🙈
In podcast news, it’s been a while since the last episode dropped due to me focusing on the Dometrain courses - but I’ve now recorded/edited another episode, which went live this morning! See further down the newsletter for details.
The main social platform I use is Bluesky. 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 Aspire 9.1 released! - Aspire is amazing! And I’m not just saying that because I’m creating a course on it (see intro above)! It’s dramatically improved my local dev experience for the projects I’m using it with. And 9.1 has just dropped some pretty nice improvements!
Nick Chapsas interviews David Fowler about Aspire - Sticking with the Aspire theme, here’s a great conversation between Nick and David. Definitely worth a watch/listen.
IdentityServer4 wiped from Github by Duende team - This month’s “.NET drama” goes to this news item! Here’s a couple more related links… another Reddit followup, a Nick Chapsas video about it.
In my opinion - Maarten sums it up pretty well in this post, where he says, “There are over 2000 forks available on GitHub for anyone to continue working with. If anyone wishes to maintain a fork, they are fully entitled to under the Apache 2 licence terms. There are multiple important reasons why we made our repositories private. IdentityServer4 went out of support when .NET Core 3.1 reached end of support (December 2022). It contains multiple known security vulnerabilities and bugs, while at the same providing outdated documentation and information. We can not in good faith keep code on the Internet that will cause security issues for users.”
Which is fair enough! They’re a business, and they need to be careful what they have on their company’s GitHub.FluentAssertions introduces 'Small Business License' for $49.95 - Following on from last month’s .NET drama - they’ve introduced a small business licence with a smaller cost. Erm… STILL NO!
Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 - A few quotes…
- “After a nearly 20 year pursuit, we’ve created an entirely new state of matter”
- “We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.”
There’s also a video about it here.
With the recent progression in AI, robotics, and now quantum - we’re going to see some insane changes to our lives over the next decade!!!Amazon Web Services announces a new quantum computing chip - Speaking of quantum, I’ve also just seen this appear in my news feed too.
Warp, the intelligent terminal, now available on Windows - I haven’t tried it, but it does look pretty insane! Not sure if my clients would be happy with me using it on machines with their codebases, though! I haven’t listened to it yet, but this Hanselminutes podcast episode has just dropped where Scott talks to Zach about it. This is going to the top of my listening list!
Azure Data Studio is being retired - They’re basically putting their focus into their VSCode extension instead. And given Azure Data Studio pretty much is a VSCode clone - this makes total sense.
New SLNX file format - This does look WAY better than the horrible format of the current .sln files!
In .NET 10, NuGet package references will be pruned at restore time if it is unneeded - As Jeremy says in this tweet - this is pretty huge!
Sunsetting Create React App - Most devs who have used React, have probably used the “Create React App” tool at some point to bootstrap their projects. This is now being depreciated.
Microsoft celebrates 50 years - 🎂 Older than me! (just!)
Introducing GPT-4.5 - From what I’ve read, I believe this is a fairly big leap! There have also been some other big model updates from the other big players, with the new Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Grok 3, and more. Also, OpenAI announced deep research.
Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian is AMAZING, and now free even for work use!
Dev Comic pick of the month
(source)
Dev Tip - Take notes for the next day
My dev tip this month is to get into the habit at the end of the working day, to always make a few bullet-pointed notes for yourself to read when you start on the next working day. These just outline where you’re currently up to, and any key points to remember. I’ve done this for years now, and it makes a huge difference to how fast I can hit the ground running and get back into the zone when I start working the next day.
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 just published the next podcast episode this morning. I was joined by Jérôme Laban, the CTO of the Uno Platform. We chatted about the Uno Platform, which is a cross-platform framework for building single-codebase applications that run on Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, and the web via WebAssembly. We also discussed a new Hot Design feature, which is a designer/builder that, during development, becomes part your application at runtime, so you can live build/edit your UIs with an easy drag and drop interface, whilst your application is running! Given you’re building your UI at runtime, the designer UI also has access to your real data and its properties for databinding, and renders them as you edit!
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!
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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