Hi, and welcome to the June edition of this newsletter! Sorry this one is a few days late - better late than never, I guess! 😳🙈

Could I ask a quick favour? Whilst both the newsletter and podcast are doing well (with the podcast getting thousands of downloads per episode!) - growth has certainly plateaued. I’d love your help getting the word out. A quick post on social media, or even just liking and sharing mine, makes a huge difference. Thanks so much for your help with this! 🙏

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

• AutoMapper and MediatR Commercial Editions launch today - Okay, technically this is a “July” news item - but as a side-effect of my being late publishing the newsletter, I caught Jimmy’s blog post in time. He’d already said he was commercialising Mediatr and Automapper in a blog post in April, but at the time, he said that he didn’t have details. In his latest post, he provides details, including his new company, Lucky Penny Software. It’s worth pointing out that he mentions that there are free community versions that can be used by companies and individuals that are under $5m in gross annual revenue.

• LINQPad 9 early preview - Windows and macOS unified version! - Up until now, LINQPad has been Windows only. Version 9 brings a new unified version that works in both Windows and macOS. Based on this post, the unified version will use WPF on Windows and XPF/Avalonia on macOS. Years ago, I wrote a 3-part blog post series with a bunch of LINQPad tips and tricks. Joe has also been on the podcast talking about LINQPad (link).

• NetPad v0.9 released - This is definitely a “spot the difference” when comparing to LINQPad! I haven’t played with it - but it’s open source and MIT - and also cross-platform - which includes Linux.

• OpenTelemetry Plugin for JetBrains Rider - Two things I love in the same title! This new plugin brings OpenTelemetry visualisations into the Rider IDE.

• Andrew Lock - Exploring the features of dotnet run app.cs - Last month’s news items mentioned the new dotnet run file.cs functionality. In this post, Andrew talks through what it is and explores its features. Unrelated to this feature, but Andrew also joined me on the podcast a few years back, and his episode can be found here.

• Catch Up on Microsoft Build 2025: Essential Sessions for .NET Developers - This post includes a TLDR; list of the main highlights; a “Build in 15 Minutes” video; and a link to the full video playlist.

• NET-NES, A NES emulator, written in C#

• TickerQ - New .NET background scheduling library

AI news

• Sam Altman - The Gentle Singularity - An enjoyable short read, painting a very futuristic vision, in a not-too-distant timeframe. Things are changing very quickly, and I, for one, look forward to seeing what happens and am glad that I’ll see this within my lifetime.

• Anthropic research - Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools - I don’t think enough is said about how even the experts in AI don’t really understand what’s going on inside LLMs. A quote from this article:
  “at present, our understanding of the inner workings of AI lags far behind the progress we’re making in AI capabilities.”
  It’s pretty cool that Anthropic are being very open about this and creating open-source tooling to enable the broader community to also study what’s going on inside language models.

• Introducing Warp 2.0 - I’ve been hearing a lot about Warp lately - and they’ve just announced v2. The video on that page is definitely worth watching. It’s basically a terminal “re-imagined”, adding AI agentic workflows, and even code editing. Although a bit worrying if they have Rust files that are over 20k lines long! 😬 I personally wouldn’t have mentioned that in a promo video!

• Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent - Continuing with the terminal theme, Google has released the Gemini CLI - free and open source.

• Microsoft Learn Docs MCP Server - MCP Servers are amazing, and there are so many different servers being created. See this page for a list to get an idea of how big MCP is becoming (be warned - it’s like scrolling down one of Stephen Toub’s performance blog posts!). This particular news item is about the Microsoft Learn MCP Server. MS Learn is an amazing learning resource, and being able to ask an LLM questions using that MCP Server should hopefully provide better and more up-to-date results than just what the model already knows from when it was initially trained.

Dev Comic pick of the month

This one cracks me up laughing every time I see it 🤣
Makes me think of the famous “this is fine” giphy 😆

Source

Dev Tip - Use mindmaps

I’ve started embracing mind-maps a lot recently. They’re brilliant for planning - whether that be a user-story, project, podcast episode, personal goals, holidays and trips - basically anything. They naturally encourage you to break things down.

I spent a bit of time trying various mind-mapping apps, and have settled on XMind. The mindmaps look great (which IMO is important); there’s a TON of functionality and keyboard shortcuts; and it works across web, desktop, and mobile. You can also choose whether to save maps in their cloud, or you can also save maps locally as files. I have no affiliation and am not getting anything from Xmind for saying this - I’m just sharing the platform I’ve landed on after researching various options.

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 this time. And technically, it dropped on the 1st July, not June - but again, I’m going to take advantage of my late publish!

I was delighted to be joined by Shawn Wildermuth. We chatted about software development in general, careers, AI, and more!

I also recorded an episode with Gui Ferreira. We chatted about productivity, goals, tools, AI, testing, and much more! This should get published in the next week or so.

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 also had our quarterly .NET Oxford meetup. This was an in-person lightning talk event (sorry, I’m afraid it wasn’t recorded). I did a talk on MCP Servers - and I’ll be doing a recorded version this month on YouTube.

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)