Useful Links

Quote of the Day

“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.”
-- Abraham Maslow

Testing

Message Bus Dye Test

Software Development

Why software only moves forward

If You’re Not Refactoring Every Day, You’re Making a Mistake

AI

Top 5 Tips for Fine-Tuning LLMs

Business

Leadership/Management

Dumb Leadership Mistakes I’ve Made

Why Great Leaders Push Authority Down, Not Information Up

Personal Development

til / radiate intent — Lee Byron

Web and Cloud Development

Introducing the modern web app pattern for .NET

The Different (and Modern) Ways to Toggle Content

Add Authentication to Apps in Minutes

11 Best Practices for Software Development Security

Simple approach to modern Access Control in Entra ID

DotNet

JSON Structured Logging for .NET Lambda Functions

How to Set Semantic Versioning for .NET Core Apps and Libraries

Working With DTO Auto Translators — Mapperly

An awaitable Blazor Modal Dialog

Implementing Idempotent REST APIs in ASP.NET Core

Database

Network Round Trips are Evil, So Batch Your Queries When You Can

Quote of the Day

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
-- Peter F. Drucker

Testing

API Mocking for Unit Tests: Best Practices for Developers

Playwright Tutorial: Mastering Element Locators

Software Development

Platform Engineering: Why You’re Doing It Wrong

Developer Tools / Libraries

.NET Upgrade Assistant Now Supports Upgrading to Centralized Package Mangement

Bringing developer choice to Copilot with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o1-preview

AI

eShop infused with AI – a comprehensive intelligent app sample with Semantic Kernel

Business

How do the most successful VCs pick which companies to bet on and which to avoid?

Professional Development

On Good Software Engineers

Personal Development

On Avoiding Foolish Opinions

DotNet

Implementing Idempotent REST APIs in ASP.NET Core

Is the result pattern worth it?

eShopSupport Series: Customer Web UI Project

Quote of the Day

“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
-- Winston Churchill

AI

OpenAI Structured Outputs: How-To Guide for Developers

Announcing the Availability of Phi-3.5-MoE in Azure AI Studio and GitHub

Leadership/Management

A Culture of Good Decision-Making (Part 2)

DotNet

Sending Messages to the Original Sender with Wolverine

Adding more extensions to Result

Comparing the performance between the Minimal API and classic Controllers

Quote of the Day

“If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.”
-- Zig Ziglar

Software Development

An Engineer’s Checklist of Logging Best Practices

API Error Messages for a GOOD Developer Experience

Testing

My book “Practical Debugging for .NET Developers” is now Free!

Condition xunit tests to presence of user secrets

Trace sampling in SerilogTracing

Developer Tools / Libraries

Git Tricks: Get the last checked out branch

How we build GitHub Copilot into Visual Studio

Designing for Trust in AI-Powered Developer Tooling

AI

New Function Calling Available in .NET for Semantic Kernel

Microsoft Eases Integration with Semantic Kernel AI SDK

Observability in Semantic Kernel

See Prompts Microsoft Engineers Use for Bleeding-Edge Multimodal RAG AI Research

Advanced RAG Techniques

Building RAG on Phi-3 locally using embeddings on VS Code AI Toolkit

eShopSupport Series: Evaluator Project

New Hugging Face Models on Azure AI: Phi-3 Variants from the Community

The Architect’s Guide to Interoperability in the AI Data Stack

Autogen RAG

Business

Key Qualities of Great Companies : Friday Forward (#453)

Leadership/Management

How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You?

Navigating the BS Maze: A Tech Leader’s Guide to Brandolini’s Law

Set Sail for Success: Why Your Team Needs to Try the Sailboat Retrospective

6 Essential Leadership Skills — and How to Develop Them

Professional Development

Personal Development

Web and Cloud Development

How Accessify Was Built: An Adobe Express Add-On That Ensures Your Content Is Accessible

Mobile Development

DotNet

Multi-Tenancy in Wolverine Messaging

Building an AI Dev Space With a Little Assistance from Aspire

Working with the result pattern

Wolverine 3.0 is Live!

Typed chat completions with OpenAI and .NET 9

CommunityToolkit/Aspire

Quote of the Day

“Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.”
-- Thomas A. Edison

Software Development

An Engineer’s Checklist of Logging Best Practices

Introducing Stripe’s new API release process

Developer Tools / Libraries

sq

Git Tricks: Get the last checked out branch

Testing

Condition xunit tests to presence of user secrets

Trace sampling in SerilogTracing

AI

Building RAG on Phi-3 locally using embeddings on VS Code AI Toolkit

Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is now production ready

How to Choose the Architecture for Your GenAI Application

Autogen RAG

See Prompts Microsoft Engineers Use for Bleeding-Edge Multimodal RAG AI Research

Microsoft Eases Integration with Semantic Kernel AI SDK

eShopSupport Series: Evaluator Project

New Function Calling Available in .NET for Semantic Kernel

Observability in Semantic Kernel

Business

How to Measure Product-Market Fit

Key Qualities of Great Companies : Friday Forward (#453)

Leadership/Management

Perception ISN’T Reality, But…

How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You?

Navigating the BS Maze: A Tech Leader’s Guide to Brandolini’s Law

Professional Development

Appetites instead of estimates

DotNet

Domain Events with .NET

eShopSupport Series: Aspire Projects (AppHost and ServiceDefaults)

Centralize your packages in .NET with NuGet

Typed chat completions with OpenAI and .NET 9

Building an AI Dev Space With a Little Assistance from Aspire

Working with the result pattern

Multi-Tenancy in Wolverine Messaging

Quote of the Day

“The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me.”
-- Ayn Rand

Testing

How to test HttpClient inside API Tests

Developer Tools / Libraries

Git Project Management: Advanced Git Strategies for Developers and Project Managers

My recommendations to configure Visual Studio Code for Angular Development

AI

Evaluating Language Models with Azure AI Studio: A Step-by-Step Guide

Business

5 lessons I learned after conducting 100 customer interviews

Leadership/Management

How To Gauge Your Feedback

Web and Cloud Development

Astro 4.15

Build Web Apps Absurdly Fast with Vite

Umami.Net and Bot Detection (English)

The Top 50 Tips for Better Angular Development

DotNet

Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens Has Finally Fixed IsNullOrEmpty Foobar

Performance Improvements in .NET 9

What’s new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.10

Database

LINQ Joins on multiple columns in Entity Framework

Quote of the Day

“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
-- William James

I dont know where this goes but it is good

Drasi: Microsoft’s newest open-source project simplifies change detection and reaction in complex systems

Software Development

Introducing Stripe’s new API release process

CQRS Command Handlers with Marten

Developer Tools / Libraries

Using Cursor AI as Part of Your Development Workflow

AI

The Rise of Intelligent Agents: Exploring the Levels of Agentic Platforms

Elvis S.’s Post

Why RAG Is Essential for Next-Gen AI Development

An AI companion for everyone

Introducing Lumigator

Nvidia stunned the world with a ChatGPT rival that’s as good as GPT-4o

Announcing the stable release of the official OpenAI library for .NET

How to Choose the Architecture for Your GenAI Application

Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is now production ready

Business

Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction — And How to Spot Them

How to Measure Product-Market Fit

Leadership/Management

Perception ISN’T Reality, But…

How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire

Conducting a Time Audit

Professional Development

Appetites instead of estimates

Personal Development

How To Defeat Anger: 4 Secrets From The Ancients

DotNet

Refit in .NET: Building Robust API Clients in C#

Boost Your .NET Projects: Unleashing the Power of Spargine’s Array Extensions

Avoiding Identity Obsession in .NET with Entity Framework Core

Domain Events with .NET

Performance Improvements in .NET 9

Introducing the New React AI AssistView Component

eShopSupport Series: Aspire Projects (AppHost and ServiceDefaults)

🚀 Unlock the Power of .NET Aspire! 🚀

Centralize your packages in .NET with NuGet

Quote of the Day

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Software Development

CQRS Command Handlers with Marten

Event Sourcing 101: Terminology

Feature Flags are more than just Toggles

Keeping cross-cutting concerns out of application code by Mark Seemann

Developer Tools / Libraries

AI

Embeddings: How to select the right one?

3 ways to use AI to grade homework assignments

Semantic Kernel - Multi agent systems

Kaggle Model Upload Made Easy

Semantic Kernel–Agent Framework

Business

For years, tech firms were fighting a war for talent. Now they are waging war on talent.

Leadership/Management

Founder Mode

Coaching Feedback

Coaching Founder Mode

Professional Development

Why Generalists Own the Future

Personal Development

For what it’ll make of you

DotNet

Rate Limiting in ASP.NET Core

Database

Why and How Marten is a Great Document Database

Quote of the Day

"It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong."
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Software Development

Strangler Fig

4 ways to pay down tech debt by ruthlessly removing stuff from your architecture

Developer Tools / Libraries

Windows Terminal Preview 1.22 Release

C# Dev Kit update brings enhanced Razor IntelliSense, Project Status, and New Config Options

New IDE features in Visual Studio v17.11

AI

Boost your AI with Azure’s new Phi model, streamlined RAG, and custom generative AI models

Business

Software Licensing Changes and Their Impact on Financial Outcomes

Leadership/Management

Manager Antipatterns

Professional Development

You Should Blog

Web and Cloud Development

Using Azure Storage Queue messages with Azure Functions and [QueueTrigger]

.NET Observability with OpenTelemetry – Part 3: Distributed Tracing using AWS X-Ray

DotNet

.NET Community Toolkit 8.3 is here! NativeAOT, .NET 8 enhancements, and more!

Quote of the Day

“You are very powerful, provided you know how powerful you are.”
-- Yogi Bhajan

Software Development

A List Zipper in C# by Mark Seemann

Zippers

Serverless Sucks?

Design

Fire, Ready, Aim

AI

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Powerful AI Monitoring Dashboard with Semantic Kernel and Azure Monitor

PyTorch is dead. Long live JAX.

Exploring Generative AI

This startup wants to be the iTunes of AI content licensing

Web and Cloud Development

Blazor and Tailwind - Quick Setup Without npm

DotNet

PerfView: ASP.NET Core Stats View

eShopSupport Series

Database

To Soft Delete or Not to Soft Delete

How to Implement Audit Trail in ASP.NET Core with EF Core