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.NET Annotated Monthly | October 2020
A little bit of October’s computing history: In 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP! Thank goodness for the chance to get away from Windows 98 & ME. Meanwhile, Apple was busy working on consumer products and had released the iPod.
.NET news
- .NET Foundation All Hands – The .NET Foundation is holding its first ever public All Hands meeting. Guess who’s hosting it? That’s right, yours truly! Join in on October 13, ask questions and see what’s going on in the world of .NET!
- Repo experience survey results
- NET Core Releases and Support Highlights
- The future of .NET Standard
- Announcing .NET 5.0 RC 1
- Announcing Entity Framework Core (EFCore) 5.0 RC1
- .NET CLI Templates in Visual Studio
- Azure Static Web Apps with .NET and Blazor
.NET tutorials and tips
The Curious Developer’s Guide to Portable Azure Functions – Want to take your .NET code to the cloud? Wondering what serverless applications are? Azure Functions is an excellent way to do so. So check out this tutorial by Linda Nichols, go serverless, and get started with Azure Functions.
.NET Memory Performance Analysis – Maoni Stephens is at it again with another excellent and comprehensive document going into the depths of .NET memory management and performance.
Assembly Versioning and DLL Hell in C# .NET Framework: Problems and Solutions – DLL hell didn’t end when .NET started? For some, it’s still a nightmare, but one you can escape. Let Michael Shpilt show you how.
Anchor navigation in a Blazor application – Blazor is Microsoft’s hot new technology on the ASP.NET stack. Gérald Barré has been blogging about it, and this month, brings us some great tips on anchor navigation in Blazor apps.
C# 9.0: Target-typed New Expressions – Make Your Initialization Code Less Verbose -Thomas Claudius Huber
ArrayPool vs MemoryPool—minimizing allocations in AIS.NET – Ian Griffiths has published an in-depth post how his team has "discovered, diagnosed, and then fixed a memory allocation related performance issue in a .NET component designed for high-volume, high-efficiency processing of location data". This is very useful!
The 68 things the CLR does before executing a single line of your code – Every single line of code that’s executed in a high level language (any .NET language) goes through a lengthy process before it can actually run. Matt Warren gives a rundown of this process.
Don’t Let Your .NET Applications Fail: Resiliency with Polly – Resiliency, and reacting to and fixing problems as they occur is an often overlooked aspect of software development. So make sure to check out this post by Dmitrij Kovaliov detailing how you can create more resilient apps with Polly.
How to deploy Blazor WASM & Azure Functions to Azure Static Web Apps – Shipping is a feature! So let Niels Swimberghe show you how it’s done. Finally get that Blazor WASM & AF app deployed to Azure as a static web app.
Running SQL Server Integration Tests in .NET Core Projects via Docker – In this article, Georg Dangl demonstrates how to run SQL integration tests in .NET Core, with Docker. It’s something many enterprise developers need.
Validating an input on keypress instead of on change in Blazor – Gérald Barré shows us how to correctly validate on keypress in Blazor in this quick but useful post.
Fast Builds: Make a Url Shortener with .NET – Read Casey McQuillan’s post to learn how to make an often needed web utility: a URL shortener.
Allow Your Users to Login to your ASP.NET Core App Through Facebook – Do you want to integrate social networking into your app for extra coolness? Great! Then let David Grace show you how.
Why use MediatR? 3 reasons why and 1 reason not – What is Mediatr you ask? It’s a library that implements the mediator pattern, which defines an object that encapsulates how a set of objects interact. Derek Comartin has published a piece on why you should check it out (and one reason why you shouldn’t).
A Step by Step Guide for ASP.NET Core Configuration – Every app must be configured. It’s something we all have to do as ASP.NET developers. So read Waqas Anwar’s step by step guide showing us how.
Events, community and culture
Hacktoberfest is here! – Each year during the month of October, DigitalOcean hosts the Hackoberfest event. This means that to participate, submit a minimum of four pull requests (that’s roughly one per week) during October, and win a great t-shirt. We’re not sending you out into the land of OSS without tools, though! So if you’re participating in Hacktoberfest, we’re offering a free All Pack subscription of our tools for one month!
Interesting and cool stuff
Reading Code is a Skill – It’s harder to read code than to write it. That’s why Trisha Gee has written about reading code. Check it out!
{La Vie en Code} – Send this site to new developers on your team. Nicole Archambault has some excellent resources for new developers. Courses, blog posts, a podcast, and more!
Okay, my phone is ridiculously aesthetic now pic.twitter.com/za1oNn5STZ
— 〈/body〉 (@bodyEndTag) September 21, 2020
Have you ever wanted to make your iPhone look like a Windows 95 desktop? Now you can. Throwbacks to retro technology like this one are super fun!
How To Structure And Motivate Your Team To Be More Collaborative – This is a much needed article, as everyone is working from home due to the COVID pandemic. Janet Mesh discusses everything needed for an excellently-functioning team from building trust, to goals, support, and more.
It’s a brand-new NODE Mini Server! – Check out the wonderfully geeky Node mini-server. It’s tiny! It’s adorable! It’s a Node server! Get the details from Ashley Whittaker.
Advice I was taught early in my career:
1. The first time you need a piece of code, assume it’s the only time you’ll need it
2. The second time you need it, it’s a fluke—copy it
3. The third time you need it, refactor https://t.co/EUfb9w7MdY
— Jeff Handley (@JeffHandley) September 23, 2020
Here is some great advice from Jeff Handley. Think about how software will be reused before you design for reusability.
The Importance Of Branding Projects – Developers would like to think that branding and marketing isn’t important, and that projects and products can simply speak for themsevles via the quality of their code. But that’s not how it works. Without branding, people are less likely to even recognize your project or know it exists. Our own Khalid Abuhakmeh demonstrates the importance of branding in software.
Computers Are Hard: app performance with Jeff Fritz – Performance. It’s a perpetual problem for programmers. Balancing speed with features, quality code, and shipping software is difficult at best. In this interview, Wojtek Borowicz talks to Jeff Fritz about performance and programming, and everything that goes with it.
Typescript is more trouble than it’s worth.
*hides* https://t.co/BRn4blXWQU
— Laurie (@laurieontech) September 28, 2020
In this unpopular opinion, Laurie thinks that TypeScript is more trouble than it’s worth. As they say in American Western movies, "Them’s is fightin’ words". Is she right? What do you think?
And finally…
Here’s a chance to catch up on JetBrains news that you might have missed:
Rider & R# Roadmaps are here!
Download an EAP version
Webinars
- Webinar – Service Creation via .NET Core Templates
- Xamarin, MAUI and the reactive MVVM between them – Webinar Recording
- Webinar – Blazor – C# in the Browser
Blog posts
- Building a Xamarin.Forms Moon Phase App
- Create well-formed XML and schema efficiently
- Unit Testing in TypeScript Code
- Dataflow Analysis of Integral Values
- How to Debug Hangs Using the dotTrace Performance Profiler
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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