Not many releases last week, but lots of shenanigans. I spelled that word on the first try which matters not a whit to anyone else but I'm proud of myself. The shenanigans themselves are an age old story: Big Corporation finds feeble consumers, and exploits them.

🤑 Microsoft pushes MVP Influencers to Spruik Azure in Lead up to AWS: Reinvent. That's the headline, here's the story: Microsoft wants the community MVPs to shill for SQL Server on Azure and claim it's cheaper and better, when the fact that SQL Server is more expensive on AWS is due to Microsoft's own shenanigans. When an MVP called this out as the bad behavior it is, Microsoft removed them from the MVP Program.

Microsoft seems to want MVPs to shill for Microsoft, forgetting that any of the trust these MVPs have is because they don't shill for Microsoft.

🚚Meet the .NET Upgrade Assistant, Your .NET 5 Moving Company In this blog post, Dave Brock from Telerik

🌊'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries In other news, water is wet, and Government agency buys into marketing hype and complains when they were hoodwinked.

🕹There's a series on building Testris in Blazor A fun way to learn blazor, no doubt.

📢Visual Studio 2022 is announced and it includes making Visual Studio 64-bit. A lot can change in 10 years, especially when the world changes around you.

⬆Update existing projects to the latest release of Project Reunion The latest stable release of Project Reunion is 0.5.5, and as it says on the tin this blog post shows you how to upgrade.

💰Octopus Deploy raises 172.5 Million in venture capital The 500K on the end seems like an odd number, doesn't it?

🏬Microsoft is building a new app store for Windows 10 in major revitalization effort. Microsoft is, at its heart, an enterprise software company. It's the only way to explain why so many of their consumer efforts have failed. To have a successful app store, you have to give developers a compelling reason to write for it and for consumers to adopt it. As of yet, neither has happened with desktop App stores.

💸NetEscapades.AspNetCore.SecurityHeaders 0.14.0 has been released and it supports opting out of FLoC. FloC is a Google's replacement for Third party cookies. You know Google, right? The Ad giant and owner of the web browser with 90% market share? Neither of those facts say that Google "has the best interests of its users at heart".

🐧Windows now supports Linux GUI Apps Somewhere the founder of Lindows is crying.

🔚David Fowler shows off how small ASP.NET Endpoints will be in the future A svelte 7 lines to get an endpoint. Of course, there's no Authentication, Authorization, or any of the database connection code, but still. 7. lines.

☁You can run and debug AWS Lambda from Jetbrain's Rider. I have nothing snarky to say here. This is just cool.

🐣Intro to Uno Platform, Intelligent Virtual Agents and Cloudflare These three topics are brought to you by scattergories and the Cape Town MS Developer User Group.

💨EF Core is now at 93.5% speed of Dapper. Well known enough for Microsoft to compare to, but not backed by enough money for Microsoft Legal to care enough to change the name of "Dapr" to something that doesn't conflict.