.NET Digest | January 2024

Rachel Appel

Welcome to JetBrains .NET Digest! Yes, this newsletter used to be called JetBrains .NET Annotated, but we’ve Rename Refactored and refreshed the newsletter. 🎉

🌟 Featured Content

Happy new year, everyone! 🎉For 2024 and beyond we’ll continue to highlight educational, interesting, and fun content from the .NET and software development communities. We’ll also occasionally showcase content from our JetBrains Community Contributors here in the Featured Content section.

As a developer, AI is that one thing you can’t ignore, and not just because AI tools are enjoying the biggest and fastest adoption of any type of technology, ever. Some claim that AI can and will do everything from taking our jobs to becoming our dreaded overlords in a dystopian future. Others claim AI will bring peace and prosperity on Earth, while programmers become ultra-productive. But how much of these claims are true? Was “Battlestar Galactica” really a documentary?  Let’s take a look…

Let’s start with what can be immediatly impacted: jobs. In Is AI coming for your Developer Job?, Derek Comartin points out a likely scenario – AI will take some jobs. However, those jobs are largely going to be the ones that are considered “coding only”. So the advice is to focus on providing solutions and business value using AI to get ahead of the AI curve and secure your career. This is pretty good advice, even before AI. So don’t just stay a coder. Software developers and engineers do much more than just code, and developing those other skill sets will take your career to the next level.

Louis Lazaris summed it up nicely in the article Don’t Let ChatGPT Write Your Code: “It’s productive to use AI-based tools to complete our work” but at the same time “It makes us dumber to use AI-based tools to complete our work”. As developers, our work is thinking. It’s not using tools, although we use tools to implement our thoughts as software. So the next time you reach for an AI tool, keep in mind you should be asking AI to help implement your thoughts, but not to think for you. 

In Shedding light on AI bias with real world examples, the IBM Data & AI team points out the immediate problem with AI right now is bias. This problem won’t just go away either, and will become worse if it’s not dealt with promptly. Resumes are now run past an AI every time someone uploads a resume to any sufficiently large company, many of which have carried over prior hiring bias. AI models for policing and medicine are largely trained on cishet white people and often ignore people of color. Everywhere there’s AI, there’s bias that’s adversely affecting people right now. 

Humans Absorb Bias from AI—And Keep It after They Stop Using the Algorithm – Remember those boxes we had in offices called a “photocopier”? As a gag, folks would take a paper and copy it, then copy the copy, and then copy that, and so on and so forth. Then at some point an incomprehensible garbled mess would be the inevitable result, because each time something was copied it was skewed a bit. This feels a lot like that. Except AI is faster so this has the potential to wreak havoc as biases are amplified and fed into each other.

Meanwhile, AI shows no signs of becoming sentient 🧠 despite terrifying future scenarios put forth by some prominent folks in tech or science. Humans: 1, Robot Overlords: 0. 🏆 For now. 🤖 

🔗 Links

Enjoy these articles, videos, and podcasts from the programming community.

• Creating a Christmas UI in .NET MAUI – Leomaris Reyes 
• How to Get an Access Token from HttpContext in ASP.NET Core – Dona Pejnovic 
• How to Start Over After Making a Testing Mistake – Amy Reichert
• Don’t Use the Wrong LINQ Methods – Nick Chapsas
• Redacting sensitive data in logs with `Microsoft​.Extensions​.Compliance​.Redaction` – Andrew Lock 
• Is WPF Dead? – Mike James
• Customize the HttpClient logging – dotnet core – Josef Ottosson
• Serializing restaurant tables in F# –  by Mark Seemann 
• Functional Programming with C#  (Scan and FindIndex) – Simon Painter
• What Is String Interpolation In C# – What You Need To Know – Nick Cosentino
• A Guide to Code Coverage Tools for C# in 2023 – NDepend team
• .NET ecosystem in Gentoo in year 2023 – Maciej Barć
• Demystifying OpenID Connect’s State and Nonce Parameters in ASP.NET Core – Tore Nestenius
• Testing Typesense search with Testcontainers and .NET – Khalid Abuhakmeh
• Deserialize a Serialized Nested Type Within a JSON Object – Bryan Hogan
• PostgreSQL range types and Entity Framework Core – Giorgi Dalakishvili
• Single File Applications – Tom Prior 

🔦 From our .NET Guide

Each month we feature tutorials or tips from our .NET Guide.

Contribute to the JetBrains .NET Guide! 🧑‍💻

☕ Coffee Break

Take a break and enjoy some fun social networking posts.

🗞️ JetBrains News

What’s happening at JetBrains? Catch up on the latest.

• Webinar – Chris Woodruff – Mastering OData: An In-Depth Developer’s Guide
• ReSharper and Rider 2023.3.2 – Bug Fixes Have Landed!
• The First Set of Bug-fixes for ReSharper and Rider 2023.3 Are Here!

✉️ Comments? Questions? Send us an email. 

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