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- Newsletter 024 - May
Hi, and welcome to the May edition of this newsletter! Hope you’ve had a good month! For me, busy as usual, but also had a nice break camping with the family 🏕️. Shame that within all of this nice weather we’re having - it decided to rain and be really windy during our camping holiday! 🤦♂️ Was fun all the same though 😊
This month, Microsoft has had their Build conference, which has given me a few more news items! Not that there aren’t plenty of news items regardless! Things certainly aren’t moving slowly in the land of AI! 🙈
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…
Dotnet news
dotnet run app.cs - .NET 10 Preview 4 lets you execute a single
.csfile withdotnet run app.cs, removing the need for a project file!ReSharper comes to Visual Studio Code - before I switched to Rider years ago, I was a huge fan of ReSharper. It always stood out when looking at code written by devs that didn't use ReSharper/Rider because the code would be full of squiggles - ie. suggested improvements and cleanups. So it's pretty cool to hear that it's now coming in VS Code! I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but here's a video from Nick Chapsas with his thoughts on it, where he compares it to C# Dev Kit. It sounds like he’s not a fan! Remember that this is just the preview version though. Also, Resharper in Visual Studio was never about being a debugger, Solution Explorer, etc. - so feels like R# in VsCode suddenly has to take on a bigger role.
.NET Aspire 9.3 + GitHub Copilot - Aspire 9.3 is now out! And because we all need a bit more AI in our lives 🤔 - it now embeds GitHub Copilot directly in the dashboard! There are also other changes like Resource Graph context menus, better tracing, and more. Looks like I’ll need to start thinking about updates for my Aspire course! (see below for details).
Getting Started with .NET Aspire (Preview) on Azure App Service - The deployment story for .NET Aspire, at the moment, is quite early days. For Azure, mostly focusing on Azure Container Apps. This article is a step-by-step guide for deploying to Azure App Services (preview).
AI news
JetBrains AI Assistant in VS Code - As well as the new above-mentioned ReSharper vscode extension, JetBrains have also added an extension for their AI Assistant.
OpenAI Codex - OpenAI has launched Codex, a cloud-based software engineering agent that writes features, fixes bugs, and creates PRs - powered by the new codex-1 model. There's also the Codex CLI that brings it all to your terminal!
OpenAI to buy Windsurf (Codeium) - OpenAI plans to purchase Windsurf (a very popular AI coding editor) for $3 billion!
GitHub MCP exploit - A good example of prompt injection. Basically they created a GitHub issue where the content was a prompt getting the AI agent to read private information and put it into a PR for the attacker to see.
Introducing NLWeb - Microsoft proposes NLWeb, an open protocol to embed natural-language chat into any site.
Conferences
Microsoft Build 2025 sessions on-demand - Catch up on all Build 2025 sessions.
Microsoft Build 2025 Book of News - After each Build conference, Microsoft publish their "Book of News", which bundles every Build 2025 announcement.
Google I/O 2025 - Google showcases Gemini Live, Project Astra, and a raft of AI-powered features rolling out across Search, Meet, and Android.
Others
WSL goes open source - Microsoft releases the WSL source code on GitHub.
Obsidian Bases - Early-access Obsidian 1.9 adds "Bases", a core plugin that adds Notion-like database tables to Obsidian. I use both Notion and Obsidian very heavily - and this is great news that Obsidian will get the database functionality that Notion has!
Angular v20 - I'm not an Angular developer, but version 20 sounds like a milestone work mentioning!
Microsoft lays off 3% of workforce - You've probably seen posts about this on LinkedIn where those affected are now looking for work. The article implies it's mainly middle management, but I know there have been developers let go too 😔
Dev Comic pick of the month
Remember the Bobby Tables XKCD? This is a new LLM take on it by Philippe Schrettenbrunner…
Dev Tip - Get LLMs to test you!
The most common use for LLMs is when the user asks the model questions. However, asking it to ask you questions is very powerful. In March’s newsletter, the devtip was about Anki and the power of active retrieval from your own memory and using spaced repetition. Re-reading material over and over again is not an efficient way of remembering what you learn (called passive review). Actively retrieving information from your own memory is far better for committing things to long-term memory. Testing yourself on things is a great way of achieving this. And what a great use-case for LLMs like ChatGPT, etc!
You can use a simple prompt like this…
“Test my Terraform knowledge by asking me 20 questions.”
Or… even better, here’s an example where I asked ChatGPT to create a prompt for me. It’s pretty nice that the prompt it generated got it to ask one question at a time and judge if it’s correct or not! 🔥Remember that not only can it come up with questions for you, but it can give you feedback on your answers! And all without the stress of feeling you’re being judged by someone when you get answers wrong.
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 dropped in May - but it was a BIG one! I was honoured to be joined by Maddy Montaquila to chat about .NET Aspire! Such a fun episode to record, and we covered a lot of content. Also, great timing given my new Dometrain .NET Aspire course! :)
I was also due to record an episode with Shawn Wildermuth in May, but we had to postpone. We’ll be recording this episode in June instead. Let me know if you have anything you’d like me to ask him.
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!
.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
If you’re local to Oxford, just a reminder that our next quarterly event is in June. As usual, this is an in-person lightning talk event. I’ll be doing a talk on VsCode Agent mode and MCP Servers.
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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