One Year Anniversary - 01
Welcome to the first edition of The .NET Core Podcast newsletter for August.
For new subscribers, the format of the newsletter is usually:
- This editorial/intro portion
- A note on ways that you can support the show
- A quick summary of the latest episode
- Information on the next episode
- A random episode from the vault
- A brief on any upcoming events that I’m attending
- Ways to subscribe to the show
- Some links to things that I’ve recently discovered in the community
- Ways to connect with me
As you can tell from the title of this newsletter, we’re almost a whole year into creating the podcast. For those who haven’t heard the earlier episodes, I’d recommend going back to the first one and catching up
here's a link to the show notes for the first episode - with an embedded player and a full transcript
As we’re one year in, I thought that I’d share the download stats as reported by the podcast’s host:
here's a direct link to the above image, in case it doesn't load in your email client
The values in the image are correct at the time of writing this edition of the newsletter
Friday August 2nd, 2019
I think you’ll agree that the upward trend is amazing - the drop at the right-hand side of the chart is because the total downloads in August (both days of it) currently stands at 393 - and that’s all down to all of the wonderful folks who listen to the show and share it with their developer friends and communities. So thank you all for that.
As a way of celebrating a whole year of episodes, I’ve decided to run a competition for the length of August. You can find out about the competition, how to enter, and what you might win, in this video:
here's a direct link to the above video, in case it doesn't load in your email client
tl;dw (too long; didn’t watch): I’ve got some things to give away, and would love to give them away to engaged listeners. To show that you’re engaged, you need to do at least one of the following:
- Follow the show on Twitter
- If you already follow the show, skip to step two
- Send out a tweet all about the show with the hashtag #dotnetcoreshow (and tag the show in it)
- Connect with me on LinkedIn
- Subscribe on YouTube
- Sign up for the mailing list
- which you already are, so send out a tweet about the mailing list, too
- Bonus points for if you’re a Patron, too
Any one of these during August is a single entry into the competition. Doing more than one of them will result in multiple entries.
And here’s to another year of episodes!
You’ll notice that this edition of the newsletter is sponsored by Rider from JetBrains. I just wanted to mention that I only look for sponsors who create tools that I actually use. As such, I want to point out that I’ve loved using Rider since it was in the initial EAP
which I wrote about, back in May of 2017
and have been using it in the majority of my coding streams
which you can watch over on YouTube here
so I can definitely recommend it to anyone who is serious about doing .NET development and would like to try out an IDE other than Visual Studio
plus you wont have to pay for a separate license for Resharper
A lot of things have happened in the community recently. We have .NET Core 3.0 Preview 7, we’ve got the new .NET Core samples site, and we’ve got .NET Conf coming up. Not to mention things like the A-Z of .NET Core, and Feature Flags. Be sure to scroll down to the community links area to learn about each of them.
Supporting The Show
Support for The .NET Core Podcast is provided, in part, by our Patreon supporters. To find out more about them, or to become a supporter of the show head over to our Supporters. Did you know that Patreon supporters get early access to full versions of each episode?
We also have a ko-fi page. This is for listeners who may not want to support us on a monthly basis, but more of an ad-hoc one.
And if that wasn’t enough ways to support the show, I’ve also created a “Buy Me a Coffee” page, which you can check out by clicking the following button:
But the best way that you can support the show would be to leave a rating or review in your podcatching service. Beit Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Podchaser, Stitcher - wherever, really. That will help more folks find the show, which will mean that there’ll be more episodes.
Mailing List Sponsor
This edition of the mailing list is supported in part by Rider from JetBrains
> Have you heard about Rider, a cross-platform .NET IDE developed by JetBrains and based on IntelliJ Platform and ReSharper? If not, it’s time to give it a try! Develop .NET, ASP.NET, .NET Core, Xamarin, or Unity applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Check out Rider today and try it free for 30 days!
I personally love using Rider and have written about why you should at least try it, over on my .NET Core blog here
Would you like to sponsor the show? Then check out our Sponsor page for details on what we have to offer your brand and products.
Latest Episode
Episode 30 - Reflections on .NET with Pablo Santos and Phil Haack
This episode was published to Patreon supporters a few days ahead of the “regular” RSS feed on July 24th, 2019 at 12:30 GMT.
In this episode of The .NET Core Podcast, we talked with Pablo Santos and Phil Haack about the .NET ecosystem, where it has come from, and where it might be going in the future
The episode was later released to the “regular” RSS feed on July 26th, 2019 at 12:30 GMT. The show notes, including a transacription, are available at: Episode 30 - Reflections on.NET with Pablo Santos and Phil Haack
The Next Episode
Episode 31 - The Liberal Arts and Levelling Up Your Career with Thomas Betts
This episode will be published to Patreon supporters a few days ahead of the “regular” RSS feed on August 7th, 2019.
This episode of The .NET Core podcast is a discussion with Thomas Betts on the ways that you can level up your career, and how studying the Liberal Arts can help with being able to connect with your customers and clients at a deeper level.
As of sending this email out, the interview with Thomas hasn’t been released yet, but will be available on August 7th, 2019.
Once it has been released, you’ll be able to check out the show notes at: Episode 31 - The Liberal Arts and Levelling Up Your Career with Thomas Betts.
Classic Episode From The Vault
Episode 20 - Xamarin with Jim Bennett
Jim Bennett is an absolutely wonderful person
I had the chance to meet him in person at MS Ignite, back in February this year
and he was willing to talk to me about Xamarin. We discussed the Mono tool chain, the fact that you can run .NET Core apps on Fridges - and his plans to do an on stage demo with a Fridge - and that you can use the Mono linker in your .NET Core build chain.
> In fact, someone was saying that the day that Mono lifted 120,000 unit test from .NET Core; could literally just lift them up, drop them in, run them, and they all just passed
Full show notes, including a full transcript of the episode and an embedded player are available here
Places You Can Meet/See Me
As mentioned in the July’s second edition of the newsletter
titled "Vacation Time!" and here it is in the archives
I’ll be attending NDC 2020. I won’t be speaking, but I will be there for the duration of the conference (both the workshops and the conference proper).
I’m also planning on attending EGX in London as part of another Podcast that I’m part of
and that podcast is called the Waffling Taylors
So if you’re going to be at either of these events and spot me, do come over and say hello. I’m planning on having some swag to give away to folks who do say hello to me, so you wont walk away empty handed.
Subscribing To The Show
You can subscribe to the show in a number of ways, here are links to a number of podcasting services which have the show listed:
Some Recent Discoveries in The Community
A wonderful article written by Thomas Betts (he’ll be on the next episode) about just how the Liberal Arts can help engineers to connect with fellow engineers, clients, and customers, and to understand the problem domain more deeply than other engineers.
Listener Nick Proud was moved to write an article about how we should all be taking cross platform .NET seriously. I would definitely recommend giving it a read for a wonderful view on why your fellow engineers should be looking into .NET.
Whilst this isn’t directly related to .NET Core, I do love to read about how other folks are doing automation. The author of this post is Dan Slimmon, who works over at Hashicorp
as in the folks who maintain Kubernetes
I’m a big fan of automating things, and have written .NET Core global tools and templates specifically to automate the boring things. In fact, at the beginning of each episode I say
> lets sit back, open up a terminal, type in dotnet new podcast and let the show begin
and that’s literally how I start work on each episode.
This blog post is a great introduction into writing a script for automating anything - the example used is setting up a new employee - by prompting the user to perform an action. Which is a great way to start when attempting to automate something:
- Start by prompting the user with the actions to take
- Start replacing the prompts with the actual actions
- Finalise by having the script perform the actions and provide the user with relevant output
There are a lot of new things coming in .NET Core 3.0 and C#8, and IAsyncEnumerable<t> is one of those APIs. I’ve mentioned that the Elvis operator is my favourite C# operator
I mentioned it in episode 30, by the way
but IAsyncEnumerable<t> might end up being my favourite new API. I’d recommend that you read the article, but the tl;dr is that you’ll soon be able to do something like the following:
public async IAsyncEnumerable<product> GetAllProducts() { Container container = cosmosClient.GetContainer(DatabaseId, ContainerId); var iterator = container.GetItemQueryIterator<product>("SELECT * FROM c"); while (iterator.HasMoreResults) { foreach (var product in await iterator.ReadNextAsync()) { yield return product; } } }
and you’ll be able to return IAsyncEnumerable<t> from controllers, too:
[HttpGet] public IAsyncEnumerable<product> Get() => productsRepository.GetAllProducts();
As per the title, this blog post shows you how to get started with Health Checks in ASP.NET Core. I would read this post alongside Gunnar’s follow up post Avoiding ping flood in ASP.NET Core health checks for a great way to expose an API endpoint in your application which allows you to check on the health of your API and the external endpoints that it relies on.
Which seems incredibly useful as we move towards microservices.
Let’s Connect
Here are some awesome Communities Where you can find me: