It’s Martin Luther King Day today, and as such I’ll share Letters from a Birmingham Jail, and it’s well worth your time to read. Today’s a holiday, and not much happened release-wise last week. That does not mean it was a quiet week, however.
CSharpFritz (Jeff Fritz) sits down and programs a Discord Chatbot with C# 6. I notionally know what Discord is, and I notionally know what a chatbot does, but this feels a bit “Hello fellow kids” for me. Maybe I’m getting old? 🧓🛹
.NET Developer? You’re an IoT developer too! according to a company that makes a living selling IoT devices that run .NET. Sardony aside; .NET in the IoT space is one of those things I find refreshing. I’ve done firmware work in C, and I would have given my kingdom for a SoC that could support .NET. (.NET wasn’t there yet in 2015). One of the few reasons why I’d go back to full time employment is IoT with .NET. If you’re hiring in that realm, shoot me an email at george+iotrocks (at) georgestocker.com. 🕸
Write cloud free code? What? Is this like Dapr (not the ORM) with infrastruture layer plugins? 🔌
VisualStudioMagazine.com writes “With many options, .NET Dev Asks for Tech CHoice Help: ‘I Am Lost'”. Ok, let’s unpack this. Converge360, which operates Visual Studio Magazine, is wholly owned by 1105 Media, and is a B2B magazine service (if you want a magazine for your business, you contract with them and they do it).
So, Microsoft said (either explicitly or implcitly), “We need more eyeballs on our .NET Tech Community Forums”, and this is the best that they could come up with, the trial and tribulations of one NickJ911.
It would be embarassing if it weren’t so on brand for Microsoft. The .NET Tech Community forums have fewer posts than a knitting forum, and as a free bit of advice, let me explain why that is: astroturfing doesn’t work. I’ve said it before: Stack Overflow was the perfect property for Microsoft to purchase. it started with two stalwarts in the .NET World (Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood), its initial audience was .NET, and even 14 years later, .NET is most popular. Microsoft keeps trying to make its own .NET watering hole, with Microsoft Q&A and now this, but they’re not getting the traffic they should be getting, because Microsoft’s reasons for doing it don’t match what the community wants or needs. Microsoft is the second largest company by market capitalization, and they should start acting like it. Instead of continually building something that isn’t in their DNA, they need to buy it and let it thrive by keeping their hands off. 😳
npm (which Microsoft owns, ironically enough), just announced a number of security-focused improvements to npm, including the ability to name access tokens (that wasn’t there before?!?!), enforcing 2FA, improved auditing for 2FA adoption, and adding new organization members to teams. ✌
CVE-2021-42278 and CV#-2021-42287 allow a regular schmoe to become a domain admin in under 60 seconds, and I wish they hadn’t become narcs. We could all use this, especially those of us in more restrictive work places. Joking aside it is an interesting in-depth look at how these vulnerabilities operate. 🦸♂️
Microsoft pulls new Windows Server updates due to critical bugs Symptoms include: Domain controllers rebooting, Hyper-V stops working, ReFS volume systems become unavailable, and password security requirements are neutralized. One of those is not true.
These bugs are quite frankly unbeleivable. How did this get through the QA process? Maybe their reorg is to blame? Or maybe they’re still feeling the effects of their QA layoffs? 🐛
State of the Windows Form Designer for .NET Applications Dear god these are terrbile headlines. Though I shouldn’t complain, these terrible headlines are how I have a job. Anyway, They’re putting the “Visual” back into Visual Studio by showing some love for the Winforms Designer. If you work at Microsoft, let me know by blinking (once for yes, two for no) whether or not there’s a legal/team that checks out blog posts before they’re posted to ensure they’re sufficiently bland before being posted. It’s not Klaus’s fault. Part of my work here is reading these things every week to share with you what’s going on, and they’re getting blander by the week. 🏢
Microsoft has 81 open roles for their #msintelplat team, did someone who wrote c for a living finally discover what a hashtag is? I’m going to assume this means ‘Microsoft Intel Platform’ team… which is probably not what it’s for. Microsoft Intelligence Platform?
Sadly I can’t even click on the hashtag to find out what it means. I guess that’s part of the job process: knowing what their hashtags mean is integral to getting the job. They even shortend “Azure Data” to #azdat, which is most certainly a C-ism.
I’m not against Microsoft has a company (in fact if you’re going to work for a “big tech” company, Microsoft may be the best of them from a human perspective), but
Their culture page is dropping big red flags with one of their values:
One Microsoft: We are a family of individuals united by a single, shared mission. It’s our ability to work together that makes our dreams believable and, ultimately, achievable. We will build on the ideas of others and collaborate across boundaries to bring the best of Microsoft to our customers as one. We are proud to be part of team Microsoft.
A family of individuals? You mean you’re not gonna fire people? Families can’t fire family members. 🚩
C# 11 now caches method group conversions which apparently has performance implications. Get your Resharper ready. 🖊
And finally, old for the internet but new to me, I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something… is a brain dump from the person who wrote Task Manager, and it has a lot of helpful and interesting tidbits. Worth your time.