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.NET Annotated Monthly | September 2019

Ahhh, September. It’s such a great month that it’s been memorialized in a popular song by Earth, Wind, and Fire. In many places, school starts again and autumn will soon be upon us (for the north half of the world). As the weather becomes milder, it’s nice to sit outside and catch up on some technical reading. Besides, once the kids go back to school you can actually get some reading done.

.NET Annotated Monthly

.NET news

There’s been lots of news in the .NET space recently. Things are moving quickly.

Announcing .NET Core 3.0 Preview 8! – We’re getting closer. Clooooooser! Soon .NET Core 3.0 will be release. Now’s the time to get ready!

Announcing Entity Framework Core 3.0 Preview 8 and Entity Framework 6.3 Preview 8 – The EF team blogs the rundown of all the things to come in EF.

New for developers: Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK v3 now available – CosmosDB has become quite popular and Deborah Chen shows us what’s new in V3 of the SDK for .NET devs.

Update on .NET standard – .NET Standard gets an update!

.NET Core and systemd – Announcing the preview version of this nice little package.

New and improved NuGet search! – It’s new. And it’s improved. Somehow, it’s both! Either way, there’s a better NuGet search out there. Now go find that package you’ve been looking for.

.NET tutorials and tips

Having a Different ConnectionString in ASP.NET Core for each Operating System – Chris Woodruff blogs about the various ways to do connections in ASP.NET Core. Handy!

What’s the big deal with IAsyncEnumerable in .NET Core 3.0? – Yeah, tell us Anthony Chu! What is the big deal with this?

Unexpected Garbage Collection Results Courtesy of Your Compiler – Dennis Dietrich clarifies some common misconceptions about .NET garbage collection.

Migrating a Sample WPF App to .NET Core 3 (Part 1) – Are you looking to upgrade that older .NET code? Great! Mike Rousos shows you how.

Avoiding ASP.Net Core Configuration Pitfalls With Array Values – Khalid Abuhakmeh demonstrates some pitfalls he’s found with configuration while migrating to .NET Core. Read this post so you can avoid the pitfalls.

Porting desktop apps to .NET Core – If you’re porting to .NET core, check out this post by .NET PM Olia Gavrysh

New in ASP.NET Core 3.0 – Taking a quick look into the Startup.cs – Take this quick look at the the goodies in the ASP.NET Core Startup by Jürgen Gutsch.

screencastR – Simple screen sharing app using SignalR streaming I love SignalR! It’s simple yet powerful. Check out this post by Jeeva Subburaj on how to create a screen sharing app with SignalR. Finally, something that’s not a chat app as an example.

Web.config location element demystified – A nice post by Thomas Ardal detailing the location element of Web.config.

Content-Security-Policy – Cecilia Wirén shows us how to properly use the Content-Security-Policy response header in web apps.

All about types of Action Results in the Web API – Knowing what action results in ASP.NET do is quite important for web devs. So Dhananjay Kumar created this excellent write-up letting you in on the secrets.

ASP.Net Core Blazor Hosting Models Short rundown on the hosting models for Blazor – A nice, short rundown of the hosting models in Blazor by Madhu Sudhanan

Deploying Dockerized .NET Apps Without Being a DevOps Guru – Whale, whale, whale! What have we here? It’s Julie Lerman blogging for Docker on how to deploy containerized apps in .NET.

Learning how to develop GraphQL solutions with .NET – A nice intro to GraphQL on .NET by Glenn Block.

Let’s Learn Blazor: Getting Started – Brian Lagunas is a Trail Blazor with this getting started video.

Fixing Random (Part 1 of 40) – Eric Lippert has posted a 40 part blog post (Yes, that’s 40 posts) on everything you could possibly want to know (and some you don’t) about Random. It started back in January, and now the series is finally finished!

Prefer ValueTask to Task, always; and don’t await twice – Marc Gravell prefers ValueTask to Task. Do you? Read and see why.

.NET Debugging: 6 techniques you need in your arsenal – Daniel Hilgarth demonstrates some excellent techniques for debugging, including using Resharper!

Books! Books! Who doesn’t love books? And they’re FREE!

ASP .NET Core A-Z eBook – I’ve been waiting for this book by Shahed Chowdhuri who thoughtfully explores 26 topics, one for each letter of the alphabet, ranging from Authentication to Zero Downtime Web Apps.

.NET Microservices: Architecture for Containerized .NET Applications – Microservices! Containerized! Architecture! This excellent book covers all the cool stuff! Authored by Cesar de la Torre, Bill Wagner (my former team-mate) and Mike Rousos.

Resharper Succinctly by Peter Shaw. Get to know Resharper better with this free eBook.

Events, community and culture

.NET Conf – In Sept, you can attend .NET Conf, an entirely virtual and entirely free event.

SkillsMatter Prognet in London – Community, and culture! I’ll be there! If you are too, drop by and say “hi”!

How to stop fearing criticism – Jonathan Alpert points out a few tidbits on dealing with criticism.

Arcs of seniority – Did you ever wonder what actually makes a Sr Developer a senior? Stevan Popovic walks us through various arcs of developer attributes and where on that arc you should be, from junior to senior.

Diverse Teams Make Stronger Solutions – Marie Wiese’s podcast “Women Talk Tech” has published an episode with guest Joyce Durst, who discusses why diverse teams produce better solutions.

Random interesting and cool stuff

Abolish performance reviews – Phil Haack outlines some excellent reasons why companies should ditch the performance review and move to another model.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 — Draft Proposal – WCAG published their wish list. I’ll just quote them here, because I couldn’t have said it better myself: “For the love of God and all that is Holy, get over yourself, stop dragging your heels and make the shit you create accessible. And seriously: actually frickin’ care about it as well.” I happen to have a talk and many resources around building accessible software, and can show your organization how to make your apps accessible while using Rider or R#. Email me for details!

Typesetter.css – This is a handy little custom stylesheet that presents semantic HTML in “the most readable way possible”. Check it out.

Advice for Technical Writing – Do you have to do technical writing? Then you don’t want to miss this one. There’s some really great tips in this post by Chris Coyier.

And finally…

Here’s a chance to catch up on JetBrains news that you might have missed:

Rider 2019.2 and ReSharper 2019.2 were released! Woohoo!! Go and download it if you haven’t yet. No need to worry about having multiple versions installed – JetBrains IDEs all run smoothly side by side.

Webinar – TDD and the Terminator – An introduction to Test Driven Development – Catch this excellent webinar on TDD by Layla Porter of Twilio. That title is very Sci-fi!

From F# to JavaScript with Fable – The recording of our August 20 webinar with Florian Verdonck, is now available.

Indexing and searching NuGet.org with Azure Functions and Search – Grab a coffee (or two, it really is a long one) and read about how Maarten solved this index and search problem.

Using 3rd Party Windows forms controls in Rider Maarten Balliauw gives a tour of some 3rd party controls and how you can use them for Windows desktop development.

Check out this fantastic offer! CODE Magazine is offering a free subscription to JetBrains customers!

If you have any interesting or useful .NET or general programming news to share via .NET Annotated Monthly, leave a comment here, email me at rachel.appel@jetbrains.com, or drop me a message via Twitter.

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