[Last Week in .NET #75] – Jetbrains, are you out Azure mind?

Happy New Year!

Everyone’s back from vacation and we’re ready to start 2022. Omicron started the party early, and at this point it’s not a matter of ‘if’ you’ll catch COVID, but when.

Stay safe out there, and this is what happened.. over the last few weeks in .NET:

🌧Azure had a bit of an outage on December 16th, due to an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) problem. This isn’t the first outage Microsoft has had with Azure AD last year, but it was the last. However, it being 2022, I guess we can look forward to more outages? I don’t want to be glib about this, but Microsoft sucks at writing post-mortems. They still haven’t told us what the hell was going that caused the ChaosDB incident, and so I’m not holding out hope for an explanation into this outage either. If they want to endear trust, it’s not enough to fix issues, you have to explain why they happened and what you’re doing to keep them from happening again. Microsoft does not do this well right now, whether it’s a leadership problem or a regulatory optics problem.

🐑The .NET 6 Lambda Container Image for AWS has been released. If you’re into Azure Functions, yea, they have that too.

🥌Resharper and Ride 2021.2.3 have landed with a giant thud. The new harebrained scheme from Jetbrains is to require you to sign up for a JetBrains account to use the trials for Rider and ReSharper, with the following “reasoning”:

  • We want to protect our products from misuse. We understand that using credentials is not a silver bullet, but it still should help.
  • We’d love to help newcomers get started with our products, and we’re optionally offering relevant learning materials, tips and tricks, etc. We won’t send you any emails without your explicit consent.

Or, in other words: SALES FUNNEL.

They need to make sales, I get that. People downloading trials and then just continually downloading trials every 30 days sucks for them. They’d also like to get you to convert to a paying customer, and having your email address is a nice way to do that.

This is a no-win scenario for them. If sales are your biggest problem, then make the trial a credit-card trial. That will kill piracy and ensure your trials convert all at the same time.. Yes, you’ll have fewer trials, but that would be the trials that wouldn’t have converted anyway. I’ll note that they do not have a ‘community’ (free) edition of Rider, so they’re already banking on you paying for it.

🔕 Cancelling IAsyncEnumerable in C# Jeremy Sedro-Woolley takes you through how to… well.. Cancel IAsyncEnumerable. Sometimes Cancel culture is good, I guess.

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