No releases this week; but lots of interesting tidbits nonetheless. If you read just one article this week, check out “The Myth of the Treasure Fox”. Link below, of course.

Get the Drop on Sorting. Kevlin Henney does a deep dive on the drop-sort, a sorting algorithm that sorts by dropping elements in the collection. This is not as useless as it immediately appears, and Kevlin explains why. It’s engaging and informative.

In a screenshot that is strangely alluring Maarten shows off what VB looks like in the brave new world of .NET 6, with a pattern based XML Literal. If I were to rate VB on this screenshot alone, I’d give it a 12/10. Having worked in VB, I give it a 4/10. It’s slightly ahead of the readability of JavaScript 5, and slightly behind Python. These ratings are final.

Chat Wars! How microsoft tried (and failed) to keep MSN compatibility with AIM. If AIM and MSN were still alive, they’d have graduated college by now and be grumbling about the state of the job market. I mean, they unemployed, strictly speaking, with AIM having been retired in 2017, and MSN Messenger having been retired in 2014.

.NET 5 Support of Azure Functions OpenAPI Extension Yes, now Azure Functions support .NET 5 for OpenAPI Extensions. If you, like me, have no idea what that is, then this blog post isn’t for you! (It’s becoming increasingly clear that these blog-posts with keyword laden titles are there to help hit some sort of internal Microsoft KPI related to pushing Azure). “George, you’re being unfair!”, I can hear you say. If I’m being unfair, then why aren’t these blog post titles telling you the outcomes they can help you acheive, instead of keywords of processes related to their own products?

No, NVidia Didn’t Fool Everyone with a Computer-Generated CEO In case you missed this, NVidia used a Computer Generated capture of its CEO for a short scene in its presentation, but their initial blog post on the subject made it seem like they used the CG’d CEO throughout. It’s still impressive, bu tnot nearly as impressive as initially made out to be.

Microsoft revamps Visual Studio JavaScript projects in forthcoming version. Visual Studio will now rely on whatever the ‘system’ has installed for JavaScript frameworks when creating a new JavaScript-ish project in Visual Studio 2022. I assume it will work seamlessly with things like nodeenv and other virtual environments, and if it doesn’t that would be a bit embarassing, wouldn’t it?

.NET Optional SDK Workloads This came about because I saw the word ‘workload’ in reference to .NET, and had no idea what it meant. It means a way to extend the SDK to do other things than it’s meant to. I can’t figure out if this is a public thing (you too can write extensions for the SDK) or if this is a Microsoft Only addition, or who this is even for.

A Decade Later, .NET Developers Still Fear being ‘Silverlighted’ by Microsoft. Killing Silverlight was the closest thing .NET Developers had to experiencing the Red Wedding. An entire developer stack killed overnight. I don’t claim there’s any sort of ‘guest right’ when it comes to Technology Stacks, but there’s a certain amount of creative destruction taking place that Microsoft was not known for previously. They have several hundred projects to kill to even get close to Google’s bloodthirstiness. There are, of course, differing views, as is the norm on Twitter.

Async code has signficantly less overhead using .NET 5 compared to .NET Core 3.1. Screenshots of the benchmarks in the link if you like that sort of thing.

The myth of the treasure fox in Skyrim. This is why I love twitter. You learn things you’d otherwise never hear about. I won’t spoil the story for you, but it’s worth your time to read.

Introducing DevOps-Friendly EF Core Migration Bundles. DevOps here means “Deploying your code easily” and has nothing to do with Azure DevOps (either Azure DevOps On-Prem, or Azure DevOps on Azure — and no, I’m never letting Microsoft live that atrocious naming down). Anyway, The EF Core team has made it easier to run database migrations in a CI environment.

Highlights from Git 2.33. The news here is that git now has a new rewritten and faster merge strategy called merge-ort. To try it out (it’s not the default yet), you can use the command git merge -s ort when merging two branches in git. The -s ort is some sort of a cruel joke, I think. Or at least proof that no one talks their way through commands any more. Can you imagine telling someone with your mouth-words how to do it? “Type g i t space dash s space o r t”.

Performance Improvements in .NET 6. If you like performance blog posts and you tolerate IL, this blog post is for you. As deep a dive as you’ll get on just what performance improvements have been made in .NET 6, and what it looks like under the covers.

Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3 offers a new breakpoint context menu to set advanced breakpoints more easily. If you don’t use advanced breakpoints, they’re quite magical to improving productivity when debugging — like setting a breakpoint after a specific number of times, or setting conditional breakpoints.

In the “We can’t help being evil” department, It’s harder to switch default browsers in Windows 11. Besides the tweet, there’s an in-depth article about it on the verge, and what that means for us. Since 90s clothing is come back in style, I suppose 90s monopoly practices should too?

You can now have global using static <class>.. This is a great idea. I mean, globals are already a time-honored programmer tradition, and of course seeing methods being called that you have to have an IDE to trace is a wonderful idea.

And that’s it for what happened last week in .NET. It was a light week; but as we get closer to November (and .NET 6), we should see more releases.