Hi, and welcome to the November edition of this newsletter!
This month, I released a couple of new podcast episodes, and I also appeared on the Azure & DevOps podcast where I chatted about personal productivity. And there are tons of news items below, thanks to November being this year’s .NET Conf!
So with that, let’s move on to the newsletter and news items! As always, feel free to reply to this email to get in touch. Or ping me on any of my socials, which can be found on my personal website, danclarke.com.
If you get value from this newsletter, please help me out by sharing it on your socials and with your tech friends and colleagues - it really helps me spread the word and keep the newsletter going 🙏 (at-mention me, and I’ll repost).
📰 News items and dev picks
Dotnet news
.NET Conf videos - Obviously, the big one for dotnet devs this month is that Microsoft had .NET Conf, which, as always, comes with the next version of .NET, C#/F#, ASP .NET, Entity Framework, etc. This link is their YouTube playlist with the videos from the conference.
.NET 10 - Released at .NET Conf, and this is an LTS release.
C# 14 - Ships with .NET 10. Some key features - Extension members,
fieldkeyword for backing fields, a?.=assignment operator, first-classSpansupport, and more.F# 10 - Of course, we can’t forget good ol’ F# in this update! 😎
Aspire 13! - Lots of new shiny things (including an Aspire MCP Server!). The thing I’ll call out here, though, is the name change. It’s no longer .NET Aspire, but now just “Aspire”. The idea being that it can attract other developers, not just dotnet devs. If you’re new to Aspire, remember I have a Dometrain course on it - details are below.
LINQPad 9 - “LINQPad 9 is a major update that unifies the Windows and macOS codebases, with dozens of new features, a revamped UI, and a brand-new advanced AI agent.”
EF Core 10 - This post details all of what’s new in EF Core 10. However, the one I’ll call out here is the
LeftJoinandRightJoinadditions. So much nicer than the previous hacky way of having to do that.dotnet run <single cs file> and the shebang operator - I’m perhaps going blind, but I struggled to find mention of this in the release notes! Surprising, given it’s pretty huge! (in awesomeness, not size!). Fortunately, Endjin has posted a nice post and video by Ian Griffiths about it, which I’ll link to instead.
Visual Studio 2026 - I’m not a VS user, so I haven’t been following this too closely - but it sounds like this is A LOT faster than the previous version. They also say in that article that it’s AI-native and talk about a new debugger agent for unit testing.
AI news
Claude Opus 4.5 drops! - Sonnet 4.5 has been a big favourite amongst developers, and has definitely been my default model for programming. Well, they’ve now dropped Opus 4.5, and check out the chart in the link! 🤯 It’s described as the "best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use".
GPT 5.1 - OpenAI’s upgrade to the GPT-5 series. They’ve also released GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (their new coding model).
Google Gemini 3 - Google’s most powerful AI model to date - “A major leap in multimodal reasoning: Gemini 3 outperforms leading AI models across every major benchmark (except coding)”.
Google Antigravity - Google’s new AI IDE.
VSCode agent updates - This post describes a few new agent features added to vscode. For example, a new sidebar view called "Agent Sessions", giving you one place to manage all your agents, whether they're running locally or in the cloud. Also, a planning agent, and the concept of sub-agents.
GitMCP - a project to convert any GitHub repository into an MCP Server, or even use their built-in chat interface.
Others
GitLab discovers widespread npm supply chain attack - Well, this is pretty scary! 😲
Microsoft Ignite “Book of News” - Microsoft also had their Ignite conference, and they always release a “book of news” which lists out all of the announcements from the conference.
Cloudflare outage on November 18 - Cloudflare had a pretty huge outage this month, which took down a lot of the internet. This article is a detailed postmortem they posted about it.
Dev Comic pick of the month
(source)
Dev Tip
I saw this on Twitter/X, and it’s such a great piece of advice, I thought I’d include it here…
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 uploaded my podcast banner to Google’s Nano Banana Pro, and told it to make it look awesome! And this was the result!…
I like it! 😂 What do you think?
Two episodes were published this month in the podcast, and another one was recorded that has not yet been published.
The first one was with Jan De Dobbeleer, the creator of Oh My Posh, which is what we geeked out on…
And the second one was with Jeffrey Palermo, where we chatted about AI-driven development and DevOps…
Speaking of Jeffrey Palermo, I was also honoured to have been invited onto his podcast, the Azure & DevOps podcast. We spoke about personal productivity. My episode can be found here.
The episode I mentioned above, which was recorded but not yet released, was with James World, and we also chatted about AI development. That should come out in the next week or so.
Also, just a reminder that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)
Podcast Discord community
.NET Oxford (user-group)
Our next event has now been scheduled and will be on the 9th of December:
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!
Aspire
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.
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)
Twitter (using less nowadays)
LinkedIn
Discord
Mastodon (rarely used)
Threads (rarely used)
Or just go to danclarke.com for links to all my stuff 😊
