[Object]ing... for now.
Microsoft defers 2022 Election Cycle contributions to congressional representatives that supported the objections to certification of electors on January 6th. Microsoft Ignite is coming and it's free.
Last Week in .NET - February 6th, 2021
No releases of note this week; but several updates in the .NET area that are useful, especially around Windows UI. Let's get to it.
Microsoft News
👐 Microsoft Open sourced the storage engine that powers Exchange Server, Office 365, and parts of Windows. They open sourced the Extensible Storage Engine, or ESE for short, and it's been a foundational part of windows since Windows NT 3.51. This is cool and I'm still holding out hope for IIS to be open sourced so I can finally figure out this 10 year old IIS bug.
🛣 The Windows UI Library Roadmap has been updated. WinUI 3 looks like the model that unifies all the different ways of creating UIs on Windows, and I'm excited to see where it goes. Currently, it reminds me of the dnx project back in the earliest days of .NET Core. As this stuff solidifies, the picture will hopefully become clearer. As for the updates, UWP support is slated for post-may and Multi-window support has been delayed. Special thanks to @dotMorten for the info.
🔮 Brent Ozar talks about the future of SQL Server with Forrest Brazeal. According to Brent, DBAs are safe for at least the next 10 years at least.
📅 Microsoft Ignite is free and it's happening from March 2-4 2021. Did I mention it's free?
🏛 Microsoft's PAC is announcing it's suspending contributions for 2022 election cycle to all members of Congress who voted to object to the certification of electors. It's important to note that they aren't ending support, only delaying it, presumably until the furor over January 6th blows over.
.NET News
📚 Updated Documentation is out about gRPC pn .NET. gRPC is an alternative to plaintest JSON based APIs and is a staticly typed wire format. It could be for you if you write APIs and you want an effecient format.
📝 Rehan Saeed covers configuring OpenTelemetry. Open Telemetry helps with tracing and logging for your .NET Core Web applications.
📢 Azure Quantum is now in Public Preview at least it is... until someone observes it. All joking aside, Quantum Computing will either be the biggest snake-oil sale of our lifetime or will literally remake the world of technology as we know it. At this point though, you get a whole 11-qubits to play with. Not bytes, bits. 11 quantum bits. Don't spend it all in one place.
📝 Mark Seemann shares his lessons learned about trying to put ASP.NET Web API Controllers under test. Unit testing controllers is a bad idea, and Mark goes through how to use an HTTP Client to test them. It's a step up from unit tests; even if it is heavier weight.
🤫 The ASP.NET Core team is disabling the Github Discussions feature. It makes sense that if the team can't handle the size of the backlog, there's no way they can handle that plus the Discussions.
❓ There's a video out on the .NET Show about building 'real' applications with Orleans in .NET. Orleans is a framework for building distributed applications in .NET, and this video hopefully clears up why Orleans exists.
Jobs
🦆 DuckDuckGo is hiring .NET Windows Desktop Developers. If you know WPF and have a hankering for a remote job, this job is for you.
💰 Microsoft is hiring a Principal Software Engineer in their WDX (Windows, Developers, and Experiences) team. Apparently it's not a .NET role, rather it's a C++ / Java role.