Github’s COO exits a month after their CEO left, Github gives a ‘status update’ to their downtime over the past month, and a battle over Microsoft’s corporate culture is being waged internally.
π’Anti-Patterns when Building Container Images There are a lot of little paper-cuts when using container images (docker images, the Xerox of Containers), especially if you want to host your database in a container image. So, read this and file it away for when you invariably run into a problem.
βπUno aka “MAUI that’s available right now” 4.0 has been released If you want cross-platform .NET UIs, you want to use Uno. They’re not a sponsor, but their business is cross-platform UIs, and Microsoft is still stuck in the 90s image of Microsoft being Windows only, more on that in a minute.
π°2οΈβ£Cake 2.0.0 has been released Last week they released Cake 2.0.0rc0002, and the number of leading zeros on the RC had me a bit worried, but not to fear, they’ve just said f*ck it and released Cake 2.0. There are a ton of breaking changes (not what you want to hear) and feature improvements, particularly around supporting .NET 6. No one really wants to upgrade their build tooling, but they do want their build tooling to support their framework up-to-date.
π’Ξ²Rider 2021.3 goes Beta The Debug UI gets a new ‘fit (that’s what the kids say, right?), and it supports more C# 10 features, like file-scoped namespaces (Which felt like it should have been in C# 1.0), and global usings (which I maintain shouldn’t exist) and string handling changes as well as lambda changes for C# 10.
πGithub Availability Report: November 2021 You know Github has fully integrated into Microsoft when their blog post titles about bad news are a milquetoast as possible. In this case, Github was down on November 27th, for almost 3 hours. I can hear you saying this now, “That’s unfair, George”, but if we go back to Scott Sander’s release in 2016 from a similar issue (Github was down for 2 hours and 6 minutes that time), Scott starts out by saying:
Last week GitHub was unavailable for two hours and six minutes. We understand how much you rely on GitHub and consider the availability of our service one of the core features we offer. Over the last eight years we have made considerable progress towards ensuring that you can depend on GitHub to be there for you and for developers worldwide, but a week ago we failed to maintain the level of uptime you rightfully expect. We are deeply sorry for this, and would like to share with you the events that took place and the steps weβre taking to ensure youβre able to access GitHub.
Contrast this with the first paragraph of the November 27th 2021 outage:
In November, we experienced one incident resulting in significant impact and degraded state of availability for core GitHub services, including GitHub Actions, API Requests, Codespaces, Git Operations, Issues, GitHub Packages, GitHub Pages, Pull Requests, and Webhooks.
No apology, no personal touch. Not even active voice — did Scott change his entire writing style in 4 years? It’s possible, but the active to passive voice switch and the lack of all humanity leads me to believe the blog post was wordsmithed by Microsoft Legal or Marketing… Or both.
πͺIntroducing the new Razor editor in Visual Studio 2022 This is a welcome addition. Editing Razor files in Visual Studio has always felt like a high school senior submitting their final a night before it’s due with a ‘f*ck it I’m graduating anyway’ attiude. I’m hoping this continues. Razor is nice enough that it shouldn’t have any rough edges.
πΈMicrosoft has open sourced their “FHIR” implementation with FHIR Server for Azure. FHIR stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, and this is a wonderful thing to open source. The fact that this code is designed for Azure and is not portable between cloud vendors (yes, Between) means it’s the equivalent of getting an in-store credit; but I’ll take it. I wouldn’t be surprised if an AWS implementation pops up forked from this code.
In what has become the Song of my People, Mark Rendle says “Don’t upgrade to Windows 11. Wait for SP2”. I don’t have to hear any more. This has been the case since Windows 3; with a minor exception of Windows 7. Always wait for the first major ‘fix’.
π£Github Copilot has an experimental feature that explains code to you And this is wild, and the usecase is for those of us that write write-only code. You know, people that use Perl. I bet it doesn’t support Perl, though.
π¦‘Microsoft Edge’s marketing team is its own worst enemy This is a common thing that happens at Microsoft, so much so that I’m convinced their org chart isn’t accurate. It doesn’t show the giant gun a business unit points at itself. Edge is not a half-bad browser. It’s probably the best browser to ever come out of Microsoft. The problem is they want you to use it, and so they resort to dirty tricks to get you to use it. Someone’s bonus is tied to the usage rate for Edge ticking upward, and it shows.
“This is from months ago, George, how the heck are you bringing this up now?” Well the latest trick is for the Chromium-based Edge browser to call Chrome “so 2008”.
π€Microsoft backtracks on windows 11’s controversial default browser changes. They are back-pedaling from the “Let’s make it hard to change the default browser” strategy towards getting their yearly bonuses, however.
π§ͺAlba 6.0 is friendly with .NET 6, Minimal API, and WebApplicationFactory fun fact, I spent a few months reproducing Alba because I didn’t know it existed. If you want an easy way to test your HTTP APIs, use Alba.
βΏAzure Friday: The year in retrospect These are Rob’s favorite videos from this year in Azure Friday, and since it’s getting close to the holidays and you want something to listen to while you’re pretending to work, this is as good as anything you’ll see in the Azure space.
π ββοΈπ§ββοΈStop Telling me Trust Fund Kids are Finanical Wizards BillG makes an appearance, but it’s an Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk hit piece (There are no self-made billionaires).
πMicrosoft announces an employee only survey on… Twitter Not Yammer, Teams, Sharepoint, Github or Skype for Business, but… Twitter. Even Microsoft doesn’t want to use their own products to collaborate.
πCreate a chaos experiment that uses a Chaos Mesh fault to kill AKS pods with the Azure portal Chaos engineering, already built into Azure, is now available on purpose.
πErica Brescia steps down as COO of Github about a month after Nat Friedman left as CEO. This is not great, as planned departures are typically planned months in advance and multiple C-level executives are planned to depart a lot further apart than one month. This typically points to some sort of internal political struggle. Since Github is now underneath the same President that instigated the Hot Reload debacle, is is probable that the old Microsoft is battling the new Microsoft, and the old Microsoft is winning. Github reflected a culture shift; and as they become more integrated into Microsoft, it’s natural for the old guard to want to sink their synergy-laden teeth into the developer network on Github.
With this, Hot Reload, the Core Debugger License issue, and the Edge back and forth, I have no doubt there is an internal struggle being waged inside of Microsoft between the old guard, where everything had to synergistically work on Windows and for Microsoft’s commercial advantage, and the new guard, that understands the best way to get people to buy your products are not through synergy, but through making good products and caring about *their* desires as customers, and not trying to juice the numbers for your own products. The world has changed around Microsoft, and not everyone inside has gotten that memo.
πBuild Web applications with Blazor a free, gamified experience from Microsoft for learning Blazor.
π¨How to take better screenshots of Visual STudio on Windows 11 using Paint.NET This is good content for those of you that put screenshots of code into your presentation (which is probably better than the alternative).
π‘βJetbrains Fleet is in preview and some people have gotten to try it out. It’s the Jetbrains equivalent to Visual Studio Code, and there’s a video about it. Microsoft folks got a little snippy about the fact that it’s closed source, which is not punching down at all. At all. Totally appropriate for employees of a company that made $143 Billion last year to throw shade at employees of a $398 million company. Totally appropriate.
And that’s it for what happened last week in .NET. I am out next week on vacation, and so next week you’ll be getting the greatest hits — yes, the links you were interested in the most in 2021. Thank you, and see you next week.