Hi! I’m sorry this month’s edition is a little later than usual - I’ve been crunching to finish this latest Dometrain course, so I struggled for time. Speaking of which! 😊 …

…I’m very excited to announce that it’s now complete and released!!! This is my fourth Dometrain course, and is about the amazing .NET Aspire! It’s entitled “Getting Started: .NET Aspire”, but it’s more than just getting started. It covers everything you need to know, and more!

Now that it’s finished, it would be nice to say that I’m resting and enjoying the sun we’ve been having - I’m now busy playing todo-list-catchup! (including writing this newsletter! 😆). Better than being bored, I guess!

The main social platform I use is Bluesky. My handle is @danclarke.com. Feel free to either message me there or reply to this email to say hello! 🙂

📰 News items and dev picks

Here are my dev picks this month…

• AutoMapper, MediatR, and MassTransit are going commercial! - Two announcements right at the start of April - intentionally not timed on the 1st! Also, Jimmy did a follow-up post that can be found here. As usual with this kind of thing, there were some VERY opinionated views on the internet!

• Aspire 9.2 gets released - This was timed perfectly, a few days before the weekend I had set aside for recording the course! 🙂 A lot of new goodies - including a cool-looking resource graph to visualise your resources, a new way of publishing your solutions called ‘publishers’, a new Aspire CLI, and more!

• C#14 adds extension members - Basically, instead of having a first parameter of an extension method being the type an extension method is targetting (using the this keyword) - there’s now a new extension {} block that can wrap one or more extension methods, meaning that the first ‘this’ parameter is no longer needed. Nick did a video about it here.

• Proposal for dotnet run on a single .cs file (no csproj) - This would be awesome! Very useful for just knocking up scripts in C#.

• GitHub Copilot: Agent mode and MCP support rolling out to all VS Code users - This is insane! Check out this video for a demo.

• Microsoft partners with Anthropic to create official C# SDK for Model Context Protocol

• Bill Gates published the original Microsoft source code

• Git turns 20! 🎂

• GitHub adds sub-issues

• JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2025

• New Docker Extension for Visual Studio Code

• Introducing the Azure MCP Server

• Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license

• OpenAI makes its upgraded image generator available to developers

• OpenAI Codex CLI - A lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

Dev Comic pick of the month

This one cracked me up! 😆 Created by David Neal (reverentgeek.com). Check out his website for his other awesome content/artwork!

(source post)

Dev Tip - Microsoft PowerToys

Sorry, a Windows-only tip this time. If you are a Windows user, and aren’t using Microsoft PowerToys, you’re missing out! And even if you have got it installed, have you spent time looking through all of its features? There’s LOADS! I’d recommend just taking a minute or two to browse through all the features. I’m enjoying using the new Command Palette feature, which replaces the PowerToys Run (ie. one of these “launch anything” tools).

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.

A big thank you to Google for sponsoring the upcoming podcast episode! The Google Patch Rewards Program is focused on incentivising proactive improvements to security in open source projects. So far, the Patch Rewards Program, which is run by a small team of devs based in Switzerland and the US, has awarded over a million dollars to security-minded contributors worldwide. Want to get involved and contribute to improving the security of open-source and get a financial reward for doing so? All you need to do is submit a security improvement to an in-scope open source project; if the patch is accepted, you’ll get paid anything from $100 to $45,000, depending on the complexity and impact of your patch. It's really that simple. Head over to g.co/prp to find out more and submit your first patch.

The Podcast 🎙

Whilst there have been no episodes released this month - I have recorded an episode I’m very excited about, which should come out in the next week or so!

This episode was with Maddy Montaquila! She joined me to chat about .NET Aspire (which is timed well, given the course!). This was really fun to record, and we had a great chat. Keep an eye out in your favourite podcast app :)

Also, the podcast hit 100k downloads!!! 🤯

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

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!

.NET Aspire

.NET Aspire is Microsoft's vision for how every .NET developer will develop systems. It is a cloud-ready stack for production-ready, distributed applications using .NET, and it makes it extremely easy to develop, run, and test your systems locally. With unmatched dev-time orchestration, integrations with third-party services, and excellent tooling, .NET Aspire aims to make working with the cloud and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes easier than ever.

.NET Oxford

We’ve now announced the next meetup. As usual, this is an in-person lightning talk event. We run the events quarterly, but missed the last one due to time constraints. So will be good to be back after a 6-month gap!

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! 👋

My socials…

Bluesky (my primary place)
Twitter (using less nowadays)
LinkedIn
Discord
Mastodon (rarely used)
Threads (rarely used)