.NET Tools

.NET Annotated Monthly | April 2022

Did you know? ReSharper once existed as a standalone IDE built with WinForms, in addition to being a plugin to Visual Studio. If you’re interested in ReSharper’s and Rider’s inner workings, Maarten Balliauw has a great talk on the subject

.NET news

Updates for spring in the Northern Hemisphere/fall in the Southern Hemisphere: 

Featured content 

We’d like to thank Nick Chapsas for curating this month’s featured content, as well as the introductory trivia. Nick is a Senior Engineering Manager at Checkout.com, a YouTube Content Creator for .NET, a Microsoft MVP and a course author. You can also find him on Twitter where he doesn’t talk about himself in the third person.

The development of .NET 7 continues and this month .NET 7 Preview 2 was released. The biggest feature of this preview is the introduction of the Regex Source Generator (it’s pronounced Regex btw) which allows developers to automatically generate source code based on the Regex pattern specified. This means that applications can get a significant boost to their startup time and also a minor boost to their Regex match time. If you’d like to know more about how this works check out my video on the topic.

Minimal APIs were introduced in .NET 6 and very quickly people started getting their hands dirty and seeing what they can build with these newly granted low-level powers. One of the projects that has stood out to me is FastEndpoints. It is an open-source project that allows people to build elegant and fast APIs in .NET using Minimal API technology at its core. The approach almost looks too good to be true, but if you’re looking for a simple and clean way to build APIs in .NET you should check the project out.

Event Sourcing seems to be one of the most popular patterns for software development and for good reason. The idea that every change to the state of an application is captured in an event object, and that these event objects are themselves stored in the sequence they were applied to for the same lifetime as the application state itself, is brilliant. It does, however, sound very complex. Anton Wieslander at his YouTube channel “Raw Coding” has taken it upon himself to break this concept down to its fundamentals and show us how we can implement it in C# in his unique teaching way.

Still can’t make sense out of the new application bootstrapping approach in .NET 6? Wondering what happened to Startup.cs? Tim Corey has you covered. In one of his latest videos, Tim is going through the .NET 6 changes step by step and explains how the Startup.cs was changed to be integrated directly into the Program.cs.

Are videos not your thing? Do you prefer to listen to podcasts when working or on long drives? Then I got you covered. Dan Clarke and his Unhandled Exception Podcast has quickly become one of my favorite podcasts to listen to. And, what a coincidence! I happen to be the guest of the latest episode where me and Dan geek out on several topics around software development and .NET.

To wrap this up, I’d like to give a shoutout to a new GitHub repository by Matthias Jost called dotnet-content-creators. If you’re looking for people to follow and learn from in the .NET space, this repository contains a lot of the people that should be on your radar. If you know someone who’s creating content and isn’t in that list, feel free to create a pull request.

And as always, keep coding.

.NET & programing tutorials and tips 

Below are some recent articles on .NET and related topics.

.NET tutorials and tips

Daniel tweets some excellent pointers on the popular AutoMapper library. 

https://twitter.com/danylaws/status/1506280583361609729

Related programming tutorials and tips:

Interesting and cool stuff

Check out these recent off-topic links.

This is really interesting to think about. In many places, folks don’t use cover letters anymore. Instead, they send an email and the email text serves as the cover letter. Or they upload a resume through a corporation’s website and there is no option to upload a cover. Should we revive this old practice? Do you think it makes a difference? 

And finally, the latest from JetBrains

Here’s a chance to catch up on JetBrains news that you might have missed:

As always, our .NET Guide is available as a learning tool with tons of videos, tips, tricks, and info on a variety of .NET related topics.

Feel free to share content that you find useful with other readers. Don’t keep it to yourself! Send us an email with your suggestions for publication in future newsletters. Thank you for reading.

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