Hi, and welcome to the December edition of this newsletter! I hope you had a great break in the lead-up to the New Year’s celebrations tonight! And, if you celebrate Christmas, I hope you had a great Christmas too! 🎄
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
Aspire 13.1 – “Our holiday gift to you” - “Aspire 13.1 is packed with improvements to make your AI coding assistants first-class citizens in your development workflow, along with CLI enhancements, dashboard refinements, and streamlined Azure deployments.”
Cancellation Tokens with Stephen Toub - Another deep-dive YouTube video where Scott Hanselman and Stephen Toub chat about cancellation tokens.
.NET Lab - Shared on the podcast’s Discord by David Wengier, so I’ll just quote his description: “Since SharpLab mostly died, let me start off with .NET Lab, a tool to see internal details about Razor and C# files/projects. Things like decompilation, syntax trees, IL and even ASM if you use the desktop version.”
AI news
GPT-5.2 released - After Google’s Gemini 3 dropped, OpenAI announced an internal “code red”, which soon prompted the release of GPT-5.2.
Gemini 3 Flash released - A new model by Google built for speed and cheaper costs.
VsCode now supports Agent Skills - the open standard created by Anthropic for extending AI agents with specialised capabilities. Create skills once, use them everywhere.
OpenAI opens ChatGPT to third-party apps after review process - They announced ChatGPT Apps a few months ago, but it was limited to some showcase companies, like Spotify, etc. This has now been opened up.
DeepSeek launches two new open-source AI models - DeepSeek-V3.2 matches ChatGPT-5’s abilities across multiple benchmarks and serves as what DeepSeek calls a “daily driver" for AI assistance. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale focuses on advanced mathematics and matches Google's Gemini-3 Pro.
Anthropic releases Claude Chrome extension - “Now Claude can navigate, click buttons, and fill forms in your browser. Works with Claude Code and Claude Desktop. Available in beta to all paid subscribers.”
GitHub Copilot Memory (early access for Pro and Pro+) - “Enables agents to learn from your codebase. Over time, Copilot builds a repository-specific memory by capturing key insights about your codebase and using them to improve how agents assist you. This shared context helps Copilot perform better across coding and code review workflows.”
Others
Critical Security Vulnerability in React Server Components - Plus two more discovered too! If you haven’t updated your React apps - treat this as urgent!
Oh My Posh Visual Configurator - A drag-and-drop theme builder tool created by James Montemagno for the Oh My Posh command line customisation tool. To find out more about Oh My Posh - check out podcast episode 80 with Jan De Dobbeleer.
Oh My Posh now integrates with Claude Code - More Oh My Posh goodness! :)
Dev Comic pick of the month
(source)
Dev Pick
I’m going to steal Debbie O’Brien’s dev pick from the latest podcast episode (see below). She mentioned a project called Goose. Quoting from their GitHub readme:
“Goose is your on-machine AI agent, capable of automating complex development tasks from start to finish.”
My initial thought was, “How does this differ from something like Claude Code?” And I found a GitHub discussion answering just that. It sounds like this adds a lot more flexibility with models and is also “local-first”.
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 🎙
Two episodes were published this month in the podcast…
The first one was with James World, where we chatted about AI and the Microsoft Agent Framework…
And the second one was with Debbie O’Brien, where we chatted about Playwright! We covered a ton of features, including the amazing Playwright MCP, with a lot of AI discussion thrown in too!…
Also, just a reminder that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)
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!
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 😊
