Welcome 🎉!

This is the first edition of this newsletter, titled “Hooked on .NET”, where every month we’ll have a guest from the community share their current thoughts and views, and anything they’ve recently found interesting in the .NET ecosystem and supporting technologies. We’ll cast our net wide to gain the thoughts and ideas of those in the community, including the excellent engineers working behind the scenes at VMware.

My name’s Layla, but most peeps know me as LaylaCodesIt on the interweb, and I’ll be your editor on this endeavour. I’m a developer advocate at VMware Tanzu focused on the .NET community.

For my crimes, I’m a 5 times Microsoft MVP, GitHub Star, Progress Ninja, and the founder of the #WomenOfDotNet Initiative.

This newsletter will tend to enterprise software development, but we’ll cover all aspects of software development as we can learn something from everything.

What’s new and exciting?

• Migrate .NET to chiselled Ubuntu containers - Martez Killens, a solution engineer at VMware, is excited by this as it brings Distroless concepts to the .NET ecosystem. Allowing for container images with a small memory footprint, faster load times and smaller security surface area.

• Improved F# hints in Visual Studio - F# enthusiast, Mårten Rånge believes type-hints are perhaps extra useful in a language like F# where, thanks to type inference, explicit types can be and often are omitted.

• Announcing C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code - Community member Shawn Vause thinks this will help attract a broader audience to the .NET ecosystem.

• Improvements to the Caching Abstraction in ASP.NET Core - Caching is hugely important for performance in applications, these improvements make it much more easy to set up and with far less ceremony. I’m a fan!

What to read 📖

Series: Exploring the .NET 8 preview - The .NET 8 release is fast approaching with preview builds already out. Prolific blogger, Andrew Lock, is breaking down the changes and features in this new blog series, complete with thorough explanations and examples. Check it out as new articles will be added as Andrew writes them.

.NET 8 Preview 5 Combines Upcoming Blazor Changes in Handy New Project Template - continuing with what’s new and exciting in .NET 8, Jon Hilton tells us about the new Blazor template included in preview 5 that removes the need to configure your Blazor apps manually to make use of the awesome new features available.

How to Use Factory Pattern With Dependency Injection in .NET - I’m a big fan of Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection. In this blog, Ahsan Ullah covers several ways in which to combine the factory pattern with dependency injection for greater abstraction and control over dependencies.

Getting Started with API Management: A Beginner’s Guide for Developers - If you’re managing a lot of APIs and want to gain better control and insight into them, then an API management service may be a great, if expensive, option for you. In this article, Neha Hafeez explains what an API management service is, what features it brings, and compares the big three - GCP, AWS and Azure.

The hardest part of building software is not coding, it’s requirements - Jared Toporek shares his thoughts on why replacing software engineers with AI is far from easy.

What to listen to 🗣

Coding After Work: Playing the YouTube game with Nick Chapsas - In this episode, Jimmy and Jessica chat with Nick Chapsas about YouTube and his new education platform, Dometrain.

Building Apps using OpenAI with Mark Miller - In this episode of .NET Rocks!, Richard and Carl are joined by Mark Miller to chat about using OpenAI to help build apps. Just remember to thank our future AI overlords for their help 😉.

The Unhandled Exception Podcast: Cleaning your Big Ball of Mud using CQS - with Matt Hunt - In this episode, Dan is joined by Matt Hunt to explain the CQS (Command Query Separation) pattern and how to apply it to your application architecture to gain clearer separation of concerns.

What to watch 📺

Burke learns Blazor by porting a Vue.js app to Blazor - If you have a spare couple of hours, you can watch my personal tech hero, Jon Galloway teaching Burke Holland Blazor in this live stream. This is the first episode of the series that will run over the coming weeks.

Why I prefer xUnit over NUnit - As a diehard NUnit fan, I’m not sure YouTuber Nick Chapsas has done enough to convert me to xUnit. Still, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on NUnit versus xUnit and whether you’re willing to change camp after watching Nick’s video.

Before you go 👋

We do hope you’ve enjoyed the articles, videos, and podcasts we’ve shared with you. If you have an article you’d like us to include in the newsletter, then please complete this form.

If you have any comments or suggestions or just want to reach out then feel free to complete this contact form to reach me, Layla.

Lastly, don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter and share it with your friends!

Thanks for reading!