Two years of simmering discord came to a head last week as the .NET OSS maintainers openly revolted against the .NET Foundation for years of non-communication, the Executive Director resigned, and newly elected board members are left to pick up the pieces. It was a wild week. First, there was some discord due to the .NET Foundation saying a board member left ‘for personal reasons’ when in reality they left due to the nature of the .NET Foundation itself . Second, during this brouhaha and when fi...
Oct 11, 2021•11 min•Ep. 63
VC that sells attention for NFTs wants you to buy NFTs. The .NET foundation decides to force its operations on member projects, and the Microsoft Store really really wants you to use the Microsoft Store. Please. Thank you.
Oct 05, 2021•7 min•Ep. 62
Patch Tuesday gets delayed for more fixes, the word 'themes' now means 'new color schemes', and Microsoft releases a video called that's two minutes long filled with 8 new products... Or two minutes of 8. Not a really bright idea, that.
Sep 27, 2021•5 min•Ep. 61
Arcade == .NET Foundation build tooling; .NET 6 RC 1 is out; and you can now specify what repositories to pull your nuget packages from -- individually.
Sep 20, 2021•5 min•Ep. 60
The 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks is commemorated, Minimal APIs bet maximum attention, and technologies as old as it gets should be Good Enough For Everyone, says Linux Torvalds.
Sep 13, 2021•3 min•Ep. 59
Windows 11 is coming October 5th; .NET Gets a plan for Deep Learning; and Techbash 2021 has been postponed.
Sep 06, 2021•3 min•Ep. 58
The biggest news this week (and will likely trump any sort of news for the next couple of weeks in the Microsoft space) is that Azure has a vulnerability dubbed “ChaosDB” that exposed its customers keys to the world, leaving every single CosmosDB customer’s database data exposed for the taking . There’s a technical deep-dive into this vulnerability as well . I hope the Azure team is wearing their brown pants. This is as bad as it gets. Good news though! They gave out a bounty of $40,000 to the f...
Aug 30, 2021•5 min•Ep. 57
No releases this week; but lots of interesting tidbits nonetheless. If you read just one article this week, check out “The Myth of the Treasure Fox”. Link below, of course. Get the Drop on Sorting . Kevlin Henney does a deep dive on the drop-sort, a sorting algorithm that sorts by dropping elements in the collection. This is not as useless as it immediately appears, and Kevlin explains why. It’s engaging and informative. In a screenshot that is strangely alluring Maarten shows off what VB looks ...
Aug 23, 2021•8 min•Ep. 56
Releases 🔮 Magick.NET 8.2.0 has been released which is an image manipulation library for .NET. 📢 Windows App SDK 1.0.0-experimental has been released and Kevin Gallo attended the App Development Community STandup to underscore why it’s an important release. The release notes tout several experimental features, push notifications and windowing improvements. 📢 Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 now available! This preview release includes improvements to the Dark Theme, added new JavaScript and TypeS...
Aug 16, 2021•7 min•Ep. 55
Microsoft sunsets OneNote, only to expand OneNote, and the .NET Compiler has a bit of chaos inside of it. Let’s get to it. ⛔✅ David Fowler, member of the .NET team, writes that “null checking in C# has gotten out of hand” . David’s right, of course, and a follow up tweet in that thread narrows it down to merely three methods to checking for null . Another day, another chance to tap the sign: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should . It’s felt like that ever since C# was de-coupled from the ...
Aug 09, 2021•8 min•Ep. 54
🕵️♀️ Using Secrets in .NET Core Console Applications Console applications remain one of the least documented parts of the .NET Core experience (compared to ASP.NET), and I’m always happy to share content on that topic. Why are console applications important? If you’re in an event-driven microservices world in .NET, using a Console application to connect to your message queue and receive messages and put them into a database of some sort is an integral part of the work; as are services that res...
Aug 02, 2021•9 min•Ep. 53
Several Zero-Days, and some more pontificating on the future of Programming as it relates to CoPilot. It’s been a busy week, so let’s see what happened Last week in .NET: 🧱 Next-generation firewall capabilities with Azure Firewall Premium . Microsoft is literally charging a premium for better security. Not a great plan . 🔓 Let’s make Visual Studio even more accessible together This is a wonderful shift in focus, and I hope Visual Studio accessibility continues to improve. 👨🏼🤝👨🏼 Cecil Ph...
Jul 26, 2021•7 min•Ep. 52
📆 July 29th is .NET “Focus on F#” Day. You can sign up to watch a whole day of videos on F# at focus.dotnetconf.net . I haven’t ever seen a CFP for these “Focus” events so I’m unsure of how they pick their speakers; but it looks like a good lineup. 🏪 Microsoft publishes its own applications through the Microsoft Store , making it about 95% of the Microsoft Store. 📹 On July 8th, Kathleen Dollard, Rich Lander, and Immo Landwerth ‘sat down’ on youtube to talk about What’s new in .NET 6 Preview 6...
Jul 19, 2021•6 min•Ep. 51
🍄 Jetbrains' Simon Cropp is hosting an "OSS Power-ups: Verify" event and I have no fracking idea what any of these words put together means. Which, if you think about it is entirely on brand for OSS, where marketing is shunned. ⏳ Rick Strahl has a lengthy blog post about converting the Desktop application Markdown Monster to use C#'s Async/Await . This is as an indepth dive into real-world async that you'll ever see and worth your time. 🖨🌙🐎 Microsoft released a patch against the PrintNightma...
Jul 12, 2021•6 min•Ep. 50
I swore up and down I would not release a newsletter this week owing to the July 4th holiday (Treason day for the Brits out there), and then Microsoft's Github announced and released Github Copilot , and my promise fell apart. CoPilot is an ML trained code snippet generator. What is it trained on, you ask? All the public code on Github, GPL'd or otherwise. This has angered the internet lawyers and is generally considered to be a Dick Move™ by everyone else (except those that have read the parabl...
Jul 05, 2021•9 min•Ep. 49
The Windows 11 livestream happened last week, and the big news there is just about every computer older than 2017 will require you to upgrade your hardware to use Windows 11. This is bad news and I am unhappy ☠ Barry "I love tormenting people with pictures of beans" Dorrans reminds all of us that .NET Core 2.1 is End of Life at the end of August . I'm impressed support for .NET Core 2.1 lasted this long. 🚜 R# and JetBrains Rider will support "Create from usage" for C# Records , which is pretty ...
Jun 28, 2021•6 min•Ep. 48
Windows 10 supports ends On October 14, 2025 according to a Microsoft support document. We’re expecting Microsoft to unveil Windows 11 this week, but I gotta say: It’s not going to be hard to get me off Windows 10 if Windows 11 promises less ads and less ‘synergy’. Appropos of nothing I bet this article on how to Disable OneDrive will be as useful to you as it is to me . 1⃣ Uno Platform 3.8 – New WinUI Calendar, Grid controls, 2x performance, new Linux scenario and more is the tale of a headline...
Jun 21, 2021•5 min•Ep. 47
We’ve come down from build and gotten back to the grind. Two releases this week followed by a ton of interesting stuff that’s happening in the .NET Space. .NET 5.0.7 has been released and it’s a small release that fixes CVE-2021-31957. In the same vein, .NET Core 3.1.16 has been released and it fixes the aforementioned CVE. Microsoft’s Kate Crawford says “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent and I’ve never agreed with a headline more. End to End encryption coming to Microsoft Teams which wil...
Jun 14, 2021•5 min•Ep. 46
It’s a light week this week; everyone is coming down from Build. If you missed that, check out last last week’s newsletter. Now on to what happened Last week in .NET. Jared Parsons, member of the Roslyn core team, talks about string vs. String . That is, for those of you listening to this instead of reading it, the keyword string vs. the class String. As it turns out, they’re not the same thing. There is also a special circle of hell for people who override String. @ me on Twitter @gortok if you...
Jun 07, 2021•4 min•Ep. 45
So Build happened last week. This email newsletter is shockingly late for reasons that you probably don't care about but have messed up my entire week. Mea culpa. 📢 .NET 6 Preview 4 is out and contains a metric ton of bug fixes and new docker images for your testing pleasure. Seriously, far too many to list here. Thankfully though Microsoft has a blog post out detailing what's in it . I'll talk about some of these updates independently. In .NET 6 Preview 4, there's now a "Date Only" and "Time O...
May 31, 2021•6 min•Ep. 44
This week's newsletter is late because my wife and I were gone all weekend for our 10th anniversary. I am chagrined and refreshed all at the same time. With that said, let's get into what happened Last Week . 🙅♂️ Microsoft Teams is now available for personal use . I want to have the confidence of the executive that this would be a hit. Also in a facepalm moment, you must have both a Microsoft Account and a Phone number to use Teams for personal use . Stop making Live.com a thing. It's never go...
May 24, 2021•3 min•Ep. 43
🔧 Dave a Brock writes on how to use Configuration with C# 9 Top Level Programs One of the nicer features of C# 9 was pulling out the ceremony of the Main method. Dave uses this blog post to show how you can use configuration in this new world of no Main method. Now if only there weren't years of documentation showing varying ways to use configuration for varying versions of .NET Core. 📔 There's an Adobe Reader 0day vulnerability that's been exploited in the wild this is part of CVE-2021-28550,...
May 17, 2021•6 min•Ep. 42
👽 Do you live in the UFO Hotspot? Boing Boing Asks, and my answer is: "What answer gets the aliens to come and take us away from this madness we call 2021?" 🥤📦 CVE-2020-15257 has been dubbed "Abstract Shimmer" . I hear "shimmer" and I think "thirst trap". So yea. A CVE has officially been called a thirst trap. Free Association is one of the many reasons why you subscribe to this newsletter. And what is a thirst trap if not getting someone to click a link to look at what you want them to? 🕸 P...
May 10, 2021•7 min•Ep. 41
☠ .NET Framework 4.5.2, 4.6, 4.6.1 will reach End of Support on April 26, 2022 At least, that's the word right now. Governments around the world are still using Windows XP, so it's not like this is a firm 'end of support'. 🤡 Basecamp lost a third of its employees after a controversional series of blog posts last week A CEO couldn't destroy their company's reputation any faster if they tried. This is truly impressive in the depth and breadth of DHH and Jason Fried's stupidity here. 🎁 The Develo...
May 03, 2021•4 min•Ep. 40
Not many releases last week, but lots of shenanigans. I spelled that word on the first try which matters not a whit to anyone else but I'm proud of myself. The shenanigans themselves are an age old story: Big Corporation finds feeble consumers, and exploits them. 🤑 Microsoft pushes MVP Influencers to Spruik Azure in Lead up to AWS: Reinvent . That's the headline, here's the story: Microsoft wants the community MVPs to shill for SQL Server on Azure and claim it's cheaper and better, when the fac...
Apr 26, 2021•6 min•Ep. 39
🚨🚨🚨🚨 Microsoft Exchange has four new vulnerabilities with patches . CVE-2021-28480, CVE-2021-28481, CVE-2021-28482 and CVE-2021-28483. For some things the cloud does not make sense, but for the "I really don't want to deal with patching my own stuff", the cloud makes sense. Maybe it's time to migrate to O365, if you haven't already? By the way, this is so bad that the NSA is actually telling everyone about these flaws immediately . 😆 Schadenfruede is watching someone else try to set up Micr...
Apr 19, 2021•10 min•Ep. 38
🎁 .NET 5.0.5 has been released . This release fixes an issue where dotnet restore wouldn't work on Linux. 💸 Jimmy Bogard takes you through local development on Azure Service Bus . Developers won't pay $99 a year for a tool that saves them hundreds of hours, but will happily pay to develop software in the cloud. 🕴 Leverage enterprise-scale reference implementations for your cloud adoption . I think Microsoft marketing is skimping on their KPIs: The title doesn't have the word "Azure" in it. 🙋...
Apr 12, 2021•3 min•Ep. 37
💣 Jesse Liberty started off the week with violence by introducing his team's updated coding standards for C# . For the most part I agree with these standards, but there are a few I have problems with... which I suppose was the goal all along. ✒ Do you author Markdown files in VS Code? If so Paige Bailey ( @DynamicWebPaige on twitter) has an amazing extension you should try. This extension made for markdown authors includes linting, spellchecking, image compression + resizing, templates, and so ...
Apr 05, 2021•5 min•Ep. 36
It's a light week. Not much going on except for me being stung by the "30 is old in tech" rebuke . What happened in the world of .NET (which turned 20 this year)? Let's get to it: 🤞 Edit and Continue support for Linux? Not happening any time soon . The Jetbrains folks received complaints that Edit and Continue support for Linux wasn't available in Rider, and this particular rabbithole leads right to Microsoft's door step. It's indicative of a bigger problem, that the promise of cross-platform ....
Mar 29, 2021•3 min•Ep. 35
☠ Azure AD fell down last week, causing outages with Microsoft's Cloud properties Outlook 365, Office 365, the Azure Portal, and Teams were all affected. The root cause was a bug during key rotation , and I'll let the Azure Post Mortem team take it from here : Azure AD utilizes keys to support the use of OpenID and other Identity standard protocols for cryptographic signing operations. As part of standard security hygiene, an automated system, on a time-based schedule, removes keys that are no...
Mar 22, 2021•5 min•Ep. 34
