25 July 2024

General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development

I keep hearing how great .NET Aspire is, so I went back to the GA announcement to read what it is. Basically it’s about improving the developer experience when working with cloud native apps. Cloud native apps depend on other resources such as databases, caches, other services, etc. Aspire make it easy to ensure that all those dependencies are running locally when you’re running your app locally. It also adds in an OpenTelemetry dashboard. I expect to be hearing and doing more of this soon.

Why and How to Execute GraphQL Queries in .NET

I’m used to using GraphQL queries to query resources in the Azure graph, but not so much querying graph database (because NIPO) doesn’t use them. But anyway, this looks like a nice way of generating clients that use GraphQL queries efficiently using the Strawberry Shake package.

How To Fix .NET Nullability Warnings For Guarded Members

I’m not a fan of the recent(-ish) nullablity checks in C#, I guess because there’s too many warnings that are not really errors because of the logic in the code. This post is about a feature to disable those warnings, something along the lines of if Initialized is true then don't warn about Name being null. So maybe it’s time to enable those warnings and fix the code

Exploring Azure Cloud Shell’s new UI and ephemeral sessions

There’s not been anything interesting on Azure Friday for a long time, but I just noticed this one about the recent updates to Azure Cloud Shell. As it happens, I used a cloud shell earlier this week and was rather disappointed and confused that they’re removed the editor (the VSCode-like editor). You have to switch back to the old experience to get that. They conveniently skipped over that part in this podcast. So I can’t yet see the benefit of the new experience. They’ve introduced ephemeral sessions, but I can’t see the use of that because I like to come back and find the stuff I’ve clone still in my home folder.

Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today

Some nice detail about the timeline of Microsoft’s Linux adoption, and the effort they make to keep it running.

• 2001: Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer complained that “Linux is a cancer”
• 2008: Microsoft launched Azure to offer a .Net platform-as-a-service
• 2014: with the blessing of CEO Satya Nadella, the first VMs running Linux were offered on Azure
• 2019: Microsoft released WSL to support Linux on Windows
• 2023: Microsoft released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux

A Git story: Not so fun this time

And while I’m doing timelines, here’s one for Git.

• 1998: Linus Torvalds heard about BitKeeper and said he’d use it if it works
• 2002: Linus started using BitKeeper for Linux development
• 2005: Linux stopped using BitKeeper because of disagreements of the way it was run. The next day Linus wrote the first version of Git, which was very similar to BitKeeper
• 2008: GitHub launched as “Social Code Hosting”
• 2022: Git had a market share of 94% in the StackOverflow survey