Hi, and welcome to the Feb edition of this newsletter!
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 11 Preview 1 is now available - I’ll just pick out a headline change in this release… Runtime Async! → moves async method handling from the compiler into the runtime itself, improving performance and diagnostics for async-heavy code paths. Nick Chapsas did a video about it here.
Aspire Conf - Sorry, I know Aspire is now more than just dotnet, but I’m keeping it in the dotnet section anyway! 🙂 The Aspire team are hosting a virtual Aspire conference on the 23rd March. I’ll be working on an update to my Aspire course in March too - so great timing!
RIP .NET Upgrade Assistant - “Microsoft's free migration tool has been deprecated in favour of an AI-powered approach.”
AI news
New models…
Claude Opus 4.6 released - 1M token context window (beta, and only available for API-based usage, not Pro/Max plan), adaptive thinking with 4 effort levels, 128K max output tokens, 80.8% on SWE-bench Verified, 68.8% on ARC-AGI-2 (nearly double Opus 4.5's score).
Claude Sonnet 4.6 released - A bit later in the month, Sonnet 4.6 was released. Apparently approaching Opus intelligence, but at a lower cost.
GitHub Copilot CLI is now GA - The more heavily I use AI for coding, the more I seem to be living in the terminal! The GHCP CLI is growing rapidly, with the team working really hard, adding features daily.
Claude Code features…
Claude Code Agent Teams - Splits larger tasks across multiple agents. This isn’t just like sub-agents, because each agent in the team is its own instance, and they can all talk to each other to solve more complex tasks.
Claude Code gets “remote control” support - There have been so many times when I’ve had Claude Code running in the background, then I’ve been away from my computer and wished I could see its progress. This still requires me to do
/remote-controlon my local session - but still very useful if I need to leave it running and go somewhere, but then check in from time to time to allow permissions for something, or prompt the next stage of whatever it’s doing.Claude Code gets built-in Git worktree support - 12 months ago, a lot of devs hadn’t even heard of Git worktrees. Now, thanks to AI being able to code in the background, they’ve really gained popularity. Enough so that CC has added built-in support for it.
OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, announced he would be joining OpenAI - Last month’s newsletter covered the new viral open-source AI agent/assistant, which went through various names (Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw). This seems to be talked about everywhere. I still haven’t played with this yet (mainly because I already have my own custom solution that does this for me anyway). There’s been a bunch of news around this, one being that Anthropic blocked using it via a Claude (Pro/Max) subscription, which angered a lot of people using it. Also, as the link above shows, the creator has joined OpenAI.
OpenClaw Windows Hub - A GitHub project created by Scott Hanselman… “A Windows companion suite for OpenClaw - the AI-powered personal assistant.”
Claude Code Security launched - Anthropic launched a reasoning-based vulnerability scanner as a limited research preview for Enterprise/Team customers.
Introducing the Codex app - OpenAI launched a standalone macOS app for Codex - a "command centre" for managing multiple AI coding agents in parallel, with built-in worktree support, automations, and skill management.
WebMCP is available for early preview - Google (with Microsoft) announced WebMCP - a proposed W3C web standard that lets websites expose structured tools directly to AI agents via native browser APIs, rather than agents having to screenshot and guess their way around a page. Available behind a flag in Chrome Canary.
Others
Azure Data Studio officially retired - Microsoft's Azure Data Studio reached its end-of-life on February 28, 2026. Instead, users can use the VsCode MSSQL extension or SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).
Dev Comic pick of the month
(source)
Dev Pick
My dev tip this month is to intentionally try not to write any code, and get AI to do it for you. As a learning experience - challenge yourself not to manually write the code. We’re now at a point where you don’t need to code, and AI can do it MUCH faster. There’s a massive difference in how devs are currently using AI - from those that aren’t using it at all, to those that get AI to do everything and have different AI agent instances running in the background in parallel. And IMO, where you are on that scale strongly correlates to the risk of you losing your job to AI. By intentionally trying not to manually write code and to leverage AI instead, this is a really good way of teaching yourself how to use it and forcing that mindset shift. Does it sound boring not writing code manually? Actually (and surprisingly), I’m loving it - I’m finding I’m building so much more, and am having a lot more creativity in what I’m building because I’m not wasting so much time typing, and I’m seeing the results MUCH faster. There’s stuff I’ve built recently that I couldn’t have begun to justify the time if I were doing it by hand.
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 🎙
This month, I released one episode, and have recorded another…
In this episode, I was joined by Irina Dominte and Jonathan Tower to chat about the .NET Foundation. They both recently ran for the .NET Foundation’s board of directors, and were elected! 👏 We chatted about their experiences running for the board, what the election process was like, and their initial experiences as board members.
I also recorded an episode with Chris Woody Woodruff, chatting about simplicity-first and keeping things simple in software development. This should go live at some point in March.
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 service 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 😊
