Useful Links

Quote of the Day

“The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going.”
-- James Allen

Everyones got one…

Agile is not a process.

Stop Team Topologies

Software Development

Zippers by Mark Seemann

Testing

Advanced Debugging in C#

Developer Tools / Libraries

2024 Mac Developer Toolbox: Essentials for Full-Stack Development

AI

How To Improve the Performance of a RAG Model

Leadership/Management

Administrivia: Reconsidering the Engineering and Management Tracks

Professional Development

The Curse of Knowledge

Personal Development

Why doesn’t advice work?

Accessibility

Things to Do Before Asking “Is This Accessible?”

Web and Cloud Development

Announcing a new learning module for evaluating and building with Microsoft Entra External ID

DotNet

Hosting a Keycloak Container in .NET Aspire

Database

Simplify development with Dev Container templates for Azure SQL Database – Preview

Quote of the Day

“Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.”
-- Jane Wagner

Developer Tools / Libraries

ReSharper 2024.2: Deepened C#12 and Initial C#13 Support, New AI Capabilities, Localization, and More

dotCover, dotMemory, dotPeek, and dotTrace 2024.2 Have Been Released!

How to level up your Git game with GitHub CLI

RDEL #55: Analyzing the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey: How Engineers use AI (Part 2)

Rider 2024.2: Full Line Code Completion, Reader Mode, Major Enhancements to Debugging, and More. 

AI

Practical tips for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

Professional Development

Protect your time!

Web and Cloud Development

Build better HTTP APIs

DotNet

.NET 9 Preview 7 is now available!

Quote of the Day

“Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion.”
-- Tina Fey

Developer Tools / Libraries

Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 – Your feedback in action

How developers want to use AI tools

The ultimate guide to developer happiness

AI

What are AI agents and why do they matter?

Introducing the Azure AI Inference SDK: Access More AI Models with the Azure AI Model Catalog

Support for Azure.AI.OpenAI and OpenAI v2 is here

Personal Development

Think Better

Security

Microservice Vulnerability Analysis: A Literature Review with Empirical Insights

DotNet

What Are the Proposed C# Type Unions and How Do They Relate to Discriminated Unions?

Microsoft’s Alternative to Redis: A Deep Dive into Garnet

Introduction to the Wolverine Library in .NET

Database

What’s New in Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer: A Better Way to Navigate Your Data

Gadgets

The best USB-C hub for 2024

Quote of the Day

“Just believe in yourself. Even if you don’t, pretend that you do and, at some point, you will.”
-- Venus Williams

Software Development

Are You Done Yet? Mastering Long-Running Processes in Modern Architectures

Testing

Initialize asynchronous data in XUnit Collections for sharing data between tests

Testing Modular Monoliths: System Integration Testing

Playwright adoption guide: Overview, examples, and alternatives

Developer Tools / Libraries

Cast Expressions, Primary Constructors, Collection Expressions, List Patterns – C# Language Support in 2024.2

AI

The future of Planners in Semantic Kernel

Using Semantic Kernel to perform RAG Queries

Visual Studio Uses RUBICON to Improve AI Conversations

Planning with Semantic Kernel using Automatic Function Calling

Exploring the Advanced RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) Service

Build Powerful RAG Apps Without Code Using LangFlow and Azure OpenAI

DotNet

How to use Testcontainers with .NET Unit Tests

Implementing the Specification Pattern in C# with Entity Framework Core

Quote of the Day

“It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.”
-- Tom Brokaw

Software Development

In Praise of Small Pull Requests

Testing

Enhancing Code Quality with Modern Cloud-Native Tools

Seeding in-memory Entity Framework with realistic data with Bogus

Developer Tools / Libraries

Raygun for .NET Aspire

Five misconceptions about AI-powered software development

AI

Semantic Kernel: Creating a Custom Webchat Agent Using Open AI GPT-4, and ASP.NET

Using Semantic Kernel to create multi-agent scenarios

My trip to the frontier of AI education

Professional Development

Lessons learned in 35 years of making software

DotNet

Build a message queue with email notification using .NET Azure storage queue function and Twilio SendGrid

Raygun For Teams

Adding Antivirus to .NET Aspire Systems

Azure Functions Best Practices for Performance, Reliability and Security

Software

A privacy-first, open-source knowledge base

Quote of the Day

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
-- Theodore Roosevelt

Software Development

Avoiding long-running HTTP API requests

API naming principle: If there is no direct object, then the direct object is the source object

Testing

TDD. You’re Doing it Wrong

Continuous Delivery on Google Cloud with Gitlab CI/CD and Cloud Deploy

Developer Tools / Libraries

8 reasons developers love Go—and 8 reasons they don’t

Power Prompt with Windows Terminal and Oh My Posh

AI

No More AI Costs: How to Run Meta Llama 3.1 Locally

How to build user authentication into your gen AI app-accessing database

Control LLM costs with context caching

Business

Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organizations: A continuously evolving list.*

Professional Development

Question: What is your greatest achievement at your client/job in the last 12 months?

Beyond Tech: What makes a great developer?

When Your Boss Suddenly Reduces Your Scope

Personal Development

Burning out isn’t worth it: how to avoid it and recover from it

DotNet

Adding .NET Aspire to your existing .NET apps

Simplify Your .NET Aspire Caching With Metalama

The Memento Design Pattern in C#, Practically With Examples [2024]

Software

Use sprints to be more Agile in Planner

Quote of the Day

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be"
- Abraham Lincoln

Software Development

Is Vertical Slice Architecture better than Clean Architecture or Ports and Adapters?

Developer Tools / Libraries

Microsoft Previews AI Prompt Playground for VS Code: Prompty

AI

Software Architecture in an AI World

Title:Retrieval Augmented Generation or Long-Context LLMs? A Comprehensive Study and Hybrid Approach

Business

The Guide to Going Multi-Product: 11 Tactics for Tackling Your Next Bet

(People on) Nice Teams Finish Last

Is AWS Lambda a Halo Product?

Leadership/Management

Is Your Team Playing It Too Safe?

When Asking Too Many Questions Undermines Your Leadership

DotNet

How to Cancel an HTTP Request on Leaving a Blazor Component

Design a Timer App using .NET MAUI Radial Gauge and Timer Picker

Quote of the Day

“The greatest gift anyone can give another person: believing in them.”
-- Jim Valvano

Everyones got one…

The rise and fall of Stack Overflow

Software Development

Three data architectures for the server by Mark Seemann

How to review code effectively: A GitHub staff engineer’s philosophy

Testing

Snapshot Testing in .NET with Verify

Developer Tools / Libraries

Try Full Line Code Completion in JetBrains Rider 2024.1.4

More enjoyable Code Reviews with Gemini

Open source AI coding assistance with the Granite models

AI

Introducing Agents in Semantic Kernel

Building A Generative AI Platform

Business

I Like Dumb Plans

Is It Time to Pivot Your Strategy?

Launching a landmark partnership to support AI startups with Y Combinator

Leadership/Management

Are You a Micromanager or Too Hands-Off?

Personal Development

How to Ask for Help Without Making Yourself Look Bad

DotNet

.NET 8 Data Annotations Validation

Caching HttpClient Requests

Adding Serilog to ASP.NET Core: a practical guide

.NET Aspire : Supercharge your .NET DX

The Singleton Pattern in C# Today Is Not Your Dad’s One!

Custom config sections using static virtual members in interfaces

What’s New in .NET Aspire 8.1: A Game-Changer for Cloud-Native Development

My Love Hate Relationship With Pattern Matching

Developer Tools / Libraries

Use Tailwind’s JIT mode with dotnet run and dotnet watch run

Integrating Tailwind into an ASP.NET Core Project

Business

The Parrotfish Principle: How to Craft Compelling Product Messaging

DotNet

Fix missing tokens when using downstream APIs and Microsoft Identity in ASP.NET Core

Quote of the Day

“Most everything that you want is just outside your comfort zone.”
-- Jack Canfield

I dont know where this goes but it is good

Bad Software, Written Badly

Software Development

donnemartin/system-design-primer

LegacySeam

Domain Modeling Gone Wrong – Part 1

7 Deadly Sins of Agile: Greed 

Observability in 2024: More OpenTelemetry, Less Confusion

Developer Tools / Libraries

Developer Productivity in 2024: New Metrics, More GenAI

Coding at Google

AI

4 Steps for Building Event-Driven GenAI Applications 

Semantic Kernel - The new planners introduced in 1.0

Business

Amazon’s Silent Sacking

This Is the Person Selling Your Product

Leadership/Management

How Would Your Manager Whiteboard You?

Building trust with an open-door policy

Professional Development

A Job at Microsoft: Getting and Passing the Interview

Personal Development

Giving back as a developer

Web and Cloud Development

Why LinkedIn chose gRPC+Protobuf over REST+JSON: Q&A with Karthik Ramgopal and Min Chen

DotNet

Implementing Distributed Transactions with the Saga Pattern on Azure

C# Advent: The Joy of Immutable Update Patterns

Broker Architectural Pattern in C#

HttpClientHandler in C# - Easy Guide

Database

Eager Aggregation in SQL queries