Microsoft says the quiet part out loud

Microsoft spills why they make Political Action Committee Contributions to members of congress that supported the insurrection on January 6th; Visual Studio now supports preprocessor symbols for intellisense; and two conferences are coming up.

Show Notes

Last Week in .NET - January 23rd, 2021

Is it over yet? Maybe? Not sure. 2021 has certainly come in like a lion, here's hoping is goes out like a lamb. A new president here in the states, a renewed focus on science, and a bunch of things happened last week in .NET. Let's get to it.

Releases

📢Visual Studio 16.9 Preview 3 has been released We now have intellisense for PREPROCESSOR symbols (yea, that was a written pun). This is about 20 years overdue and I'm excited to see it. Not excited enough to actually inflict PREPROCESSOR symbols on anyone, mind you, but excited nonetheless.

📢Project Tye 0.6 is out If you "Microservices" solely written in .NET, you should give Tye some attention. It's 0.6, so give it the attention that versioning deserves.

📢Microsoft has automated intellisense tooling to help you write P/Invoke... invocations. If you deal with Win32 APIs, see if the Cs/Win32 nuget package helps you out. Special thanks to Claire Novotny for the link.

📢Refit v6.0-preview.84 has been released, which is a type-safe rest API library for .NET.

📢KDL Parser for .NET 1.0 has been released I didn't know about KDL Before now. Apparently it's like XML or JSON, it's a configuration language. If you use it, shoot me a note. I'm interested to know more.

.NET News and Sundries

🎥Jetbrains is hosting a webinar on the OSS project FluentValidation on January 27th Fluentvalidation is a library that provides... Fluent Validation. Ok. There's a webinar on this on Wednesday. Feels a bit like a webinar on how to use a hammer but I'm willing to be surprised.

📝Julie Lerman details the content she's released on Entity Framework Core 5 Julie is one of my favorite content creators; and I'm always happy to share her work.

🎥Konrad Kokosa has an 8-part video series coming out on the... .NET GC. In Part 1, Konrad introduces you to the internals. There's no way to really talk about the GC without wanting to fall asleep; and I applaud Konrad's effort to make it interesting. If you find yourself running into allocation/performance issues, then learning about the GC is a Good Idea, and Video is probably the least terrible way to learn about it.

📝Anthony Giretti introduces us to a ridiciously named and yet surprisingly helpful tool called "gRPCui" a visual way to see what is being sent and received through gRPC. It's like Postman but for gRPC services.

🎥Kevin Griffin is interviewed about what sort of Real world projects you can use SignalR for (including one that saves lives). Kevin also offers consulting on the world of SignalR, if that's interesting to you.

📆.NET Frontend Day is January 28th and there's still time to sign up to learn more about using .NET for the 'front end' of your application.

📝The EF Core 6.0 plan is out, and it seems like there will be no rest for the Entity Framework Team. They put together a pretty aggressive plan for features and performance improvement.

🎥David Fowler does a Part 2 to the ASP.NET Core Architecture Video These sorts of videos are fascinating to me just with the sheer number of tidbits you learn.

📝F# has a Stats library I have a fondness for F#, much like I do holiday chocolate; but I'm not going to spend all year eating chocolate.

🎥Akka.NET hosts its community standup Use Akka.NET? This is for you.

📝Dean Ward of Stack Overflow details how they (ab)use IConfiguration If you find yourself with environment and tenet configuration settings; check this post out.

🔊Jon Skeet talks about C# and Time on Adventures in .NET and yes, dealing with dates and time is an adventure in .NET.

📝Steve "Ardalis" Smith talks about how you should use the APIEndpoints project instead of MVC controllers because "MVC Controllers are Dinosaurs" What The F*ck is this Sh*t. Seriously. I've got opinions about this. The "Clean Architecture" crowd isn't going to get my sympathy by saying this sort of bullshit. "Your architure isn't clean if you don't use this rube goldberg contraption of best practices we've put together". Thank you, next.

📝Microsoft released a deep dive into the stage 2 activation malware dubbed "SOLARIWARE" in the Solar winds Hack It's undeninably bad when your malware attack gets new codenames for each attack vector.

📆.NET Conf "Focus on Windows" is February 25th, 2021 and will focus (ahem) on Windows .NET Desktop applications. No word yet on Speakers or schedules; but I'll keep an eye out and when I know you'll know.

Other Tech News

📝Jennifer Riggins talks about why Tech is still toxic for women Our best days are ahead, but we're not going to get there if we're making it impossible for half the population to be a part of tech. Read this article. Internalize it.

☑Github's Security team wants to talk to you about securing your Open Source Project Open Source (and hosted) secrets management is definitely a 'need', and if you run an Open Source project, you should reach out to Github's team. Special thanks to Dee Dee Walsh (@ddskier on Twitter) for the link.

📝Jared White writes about why Tailwind CSS isn't for him Technologies go through the Gartner Hype Cycle, and Tailwind isn't any different. What is different is that techies get pretty religious about the libraries we use. Special thanks to @SaraSoueidan on twitter for the link.

🔊Scott Hanselman sits down to talk about event modeling with Adam Dymitruk Event Modeling is one of those phrases from Distributed Systems architecture and if you find yourself saying the words "Microservices" or "Kubernetes" in any serious conversation, you should proabably listen to this podcast.

🐦Microsoft says the quiet part of PAC contributions out loud. Microsoft has been chastised for not stopping its political contributions to members of congress that encouraged the insurrection on January 6th, and Microsoft says they need to continue to give money to politicians so they can "pick up the phone" and "get help".

Jobs

💰Microsoft is hiring in Boulder Colorado for their Commercial Software Engineering team, which is effectively a project team that writes software for their customers. A consultancy.

And that's it for what happened last week in .NET. I'm George Stocker, and I help teams double their productivity through Test Driven Development. If that sort of thing interests you, check out www.doubleyourproductivity.io. Thanks, and I'll see you next week.

What is Last Week in .NET?

A podcast that details the happenings around the .NET ecosystem, generally a week at a time. I can neither confirm nor deny that there will be attempts at humor involved.

For any confusion caused to fishermen thinking they've gotten a new podcast devoted to the tools of fishing, I am sorry. This is about the technology stack. Naming is hard.