In what I can only describe as a “lead magnet”, here’s a copy of my weekly .NET newsletter, creatively titled “Last Week in .NET”. I’m posting it here in the vain hopes that you’ll sign up for the newsletter or subscribe to the podcast. ♥
📢🐛Visual Studio 16.8 has been released; and it might have uninstalled the .NET Core 3.1 SDKs on your behalf.
🎲Random Street View shows you a place in the world randomly. Hopefully this gives you something fun to do during this holiday week while waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.
📢 Do you like the idea of using C# for scripting? dotnet-script provides that. Personally I’m of a mind that they should have modified C# for Scripting a long time ago and not invented Powershell, but we don’t all get what we want.
🛑 Github reverses course and re-enables the youtube-dl repository. The RIAA had issued a takedown notice, since the youtube-dl repository allows for command line accesss to Youtube. Initially Github caved (because they thought they had to?) and removed the repository; but after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) stepped in with a supporting letter as to why the RIAA was mistaken in their claim, Github re-enabled access to the repository and created safeguards so this “doesn’t happen again”.
💔 If you have a class with a private default constructor in .NET 5; SignalR can’t deserialize it. The author of this blog post suffered so we wouldn’t have to.
📝 AppVeyor has a helpful (short) blog post on Version pinning for .NET 5 and the .NET Core SDK. There’s something valuable here but I fear I’m missing the context to know what it is.
📢 .NET Framework November 2020 Security and Quality Rollup Updates have been released. This is a release of the “Preview” I mentioned a few weeks ago; although the word ‘security’ is in the title, there aren’t any security updates in this release.
🤦 Jimmy Bogard released a galaxy brain meme on how to see if a string is null in C# It’s funny and sad. It’s funny because it’s sad.
📝 You can see all the differences between the .NET Standard 2.1 and .NET Core 3.1 APIs vs .NET 5 here. It’s pretty cool to see all the API differences in one place.
📝 Roadmap for WinUI 3 should be out in the first half of 2021. I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again: I have no idea what WinUI is or how it’s different from all the other UI strategies Microsoft has had; but maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll finally unify everything.
📢 Along the same vein, WinUI 3 Preview 3 has been released.
📝 Julie Lerman shows you how to deploy containerized .NET 5 applications using AWS’s fargate. Also maybe one day AWS will unify its containerization strategy.
🎥 There’s a new Git Experience in Visual Studio 2019 16.8. If you use the UI; let me know how much better it’s gotten.
💡 Exception Filters allow you to pare down what you’re catching, and as the old adage goes, if you can’t handle it, don’t catch it.
💡 Microsoft edge allows you to add ‘notes’ to a PDF document Keep this up, Edge and I may install you on my PC.
📝 Top 5 features of EF Core 5.0 from 4 Entity Framework Experts. While we’re running the numbers, it turns out there were 240 enhancements, 380 bug fixes, and around 200 updates to documentation, and to give you an idea, EF Core 3.1 was released On 3 December 2019; so all those changes were made in the span of 11 months.
📝 The Roslyn team wrote a blog post detailing what’s new in the .NET Productivity Realm If you use Visual Studio 2019, it’s worth your time to check this out since you’re likely to find something to help you out.
📝 Joseph Guadagno shows you how to add .NET 5 support to the Azure App Service I’m not sure why this is a thing we as developers have to do; but here we are.
📢 Microsoft Research released a fuzzing tool for HTTP and REST APIs. A fuzzer is a real life incarnation of the saying “Throwing spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks”.
📢 TypeScript 4.1 has been released. Here’s my periodic reminder to you that TypeScript does not respect SemVer and therefore not pinning to the exact version of TypeScript you’re using (major.minor.patch) is a good way to cause random build breakages whenever typescript releases a new version.
💡 Don’t use the TFM without the SDK, says .NET team. Basically if your TFM is readable, you’re not using the right thing. Include both the TFM and the SDK number so you’re pinned to the exact right thing.
📢 Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 2.1 has been released with lots of bug fixes and performance improvements — and they mean it this time.
📢 Microsoft’s WebView 2 now uses Chromium Edge for when you need an integrated web browser in your .NET application The joke here is that we’re stuck with Desktop UI toolchains but we’d all rather be using web toolchains.
And lastly,
📝 Explaining Chains, Funcs and Actions in C#. Honestly this all sounds a bit like a kink; but I assure you, it’s all SFW.
Did you like what you read? This is a weekly newsletter you can sign up for at https://www.lastweekin.net. If you’d prefer it in audio form (hi, we should be friends), you can subscribe to the podcast version at https://podcast.lastweekin.net.
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