Hi, and welcome to the January edition of this newsletter! I hope you had a good first month of the year! 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
LINQPad 9 released - Includes full macOS support, an advanced new AI coding agent, support for C# 14 (including file-based apps and .NET 10 source generators), and much more!
Claude Code .NET Skills - A tweet about it by the author Aaron Stannard can be found here.
AI news
Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw - This has gone viral very quickly! It’s basically an open-source AI agent/assistant that runs on your own device. It started off being named “Clawdbot”, but that immediately got jumped on by Anthropic for obvious reasons. It then changed to Moltbot, which didn’t sound good IMO - and it turns out I wasn’t the only one because they’ve now renamed it again to OpenClaw, which I think is way better! This does look amazing; however, obviously, do be mindful of the security risks associated with using it!! (see this tweet).
GitHub Copilot SDK - This uses the existing GitHub Copilot CLI’s runtime, and allows you to write agentic code using that runtime. There’s also been a hackathon on Reddit using it.
Claude Cowork - Sadly, this is only available for macOS users at the moment, so I can’t play with it. But they basically found that devs were using Claude Code for other stuff - not just coding. So they created Claude Cowork for non-developers to be able to do those things. To be honest though, maybe as developers, we don’t need it. I personally use Claude Code for both code and non-code stuff.
Agent Skills in VsCode - Agent Skills are now a standard and supported by multiple different coding agents. They’re so useful too - if you haven’t look into them, definitely look into them. VS Code has now added support for this, and in this video, James Montemagno goes through it.
ACP Registry - ACP stands for Agent Client Protocol, and there’s a blog post about this here and here. Also, now supported in the GHCP CLI (tweet).
Claude Code “Tasks” - They’ve changed the concept of “todos” and made a new primitive called “tasks”, which allows CC to track its progress better, managing dependencies between tasks, and run for much longer with less risk of context rot. Leveraging sub-agents for different tasks.
Claude Code VS Code extension - I should probably give this a try - but to be honest, I’m enjoying CC in the terminal too much! :)
Tweet from Principal Engineer at Google - “We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year…” “…I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.” 🤯
Others
Playwright CLI - A new CLI tool which the README recommends using over the Playwright MCP Server when working with coding agents. Typical - because as I type this, I coincidentally happen to have Claude Code writing a bunch of Playwright tests for me in a project using the PW MCP! Oops 😂
Aspire for JavaScript developers - Notice how this news item is about Aspire but isn’t in the .NET section above?! They renamed it last year from “.NET Aspire” to just “Aspire” because they want to target more than just .NET developers. In this post, David Pine covers what Aspire development is like for JS/TS devs.
Dev Comic pick of the month
Let’s go for two this time…
The above one comes from a post that could be a news item too, I guess:
Claude Code 2.1.0 arrives with smoother workflows and smarter agents
(source)
Dev Pick
The dev pick this time is a cheeky little mention of a mini project I’ve literally just started (mostly today!). I’ve wanted to knock up a Pomodoro timer Windows desktop app for quite a while, but haven’t really had the time. Now, thanks to Claude Code, I’ve just vibe-coded one instead! I’ll add more features over time (or more to the point - Claude will!). If you’re interested, it can be found 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 🎙
Sorry, no new podcast episodes this month, I’m afraid. But I am recording the next one later this week, which will be with Irina Dominte and Jonathan "J" Tower - chatting about their new role on the .NET Foundation board.
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
The next event has now been announced, which will be on the 24th March. The call for speakers is now open. If you’re local to Oxford (UK) and fancy doing a lightning talk (5, 10, or 15 minutes), then get in touch :)
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! 👋
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Or just go to danclarke.com for links to all my stuff 😊
