Happy New Year to all here in 2023. It’s going to be a great year. It’s a great time to be a programmer. A great time to be building with .NET; you are going to do great things this year. You have what it takes. You are smart, you have great tools, and you have a great team. You are a great leader. This episode is going to be all about remembering what happened this past year at the podcast.
Topics of Discussion:
[1:15] Jeffrey talks about the architect forums he’s hosting and facilitating in 2023. You can register here.
[1:46] Huge announcement in Microsoft Developer news including:
- Android apps on Windows 11
- ARM processors getting big investments
- Microsoft Dev Box — in preview — dev workstation in the cloud
- Power Pages websites
- Large SKU app service; up to 256GB RAM available for those who need it
- Azure Arc, the new name of Hybrid Azure. And a single-node Azure Stack for remote locations but the programming model of Azure — looking forward to testing it at the right time.
- Azure Container Apps tooling got better, and it became ready for prime time. Every team should be looking at this.
- .NET 7 released.
[4:11] What might the default application stacks and environments look like on the platform in 2023?
- Windows 11
- Visual Studio 2022 w/ ReSharper
- .NET 7
- Onion Architecture
- Blazor for interactive applications
- .NET service workers for back-end jobs and queue listeners
- Entity Framework with Azure SQL — add on other storage services as per application.
- Azure App Service for hosting while prototyping Azure Container Apps.
- Application Insights with the Open Telemetry NuGet packages.
- Azure Pipelines paired with Octopus Deploy (keep an eye on GitHub Actions as they fill out support for scenarios you need).
- NordVPN for developer workstation work-from-home or remote Wi-Fi.
[9:11] When it comes to developer workstations, desktop computers are still giving the most bang for the buck with power, and only a few laptops do the job really well. I have not reviewed all computers, and there are a lot out there. I can vouch for Alienware R series desktops. Liquid-cooled, so they are really quiet, even under full load. Dell Precision laptops are amazing for software engineers. I really wanted to love the Lenovo P1, but the fan was just too loud when it was under load. And we all know that cooling is so important in laptops. When a laptop gets too hot, your BIOS will slow down the processor to keep it from burning up. Then you no longer have a fast processor. And video calls use a good deal of processor, surprisingly — or not. For super mobile laptops that you can use for programming, I really do like the Microsoft Surface Laptop. I wanted to like the Surface Studio laptop, but they inverted the cooling and the battery placement, so it’s very uncomfortable on my lap and my wrists unfortunately under load. The wrist wrest gets really hot. Normally the battery is under the wrist rest, but Microsoft swapped it on this one, so it’s not fun using it as a laptop on your lap or even on a desk while hot and under load.
[13:11] Highlighting some past episodes that will be interesting:
- Highlighting some past episodes over the year that might be interesting.
- With Microsoft Orleans providing a new implementation of the Actor design pattern, we have a two-part series interview with Aaron Stannard, the creator of Akka.NET, episodes 172 and 173.
- On the IoT front, Wilderness Labs has been trucking along creating system-on-a-chip options that run .NET natively and easily. I interviewed founder and CEO Bryan Costanich.
- For those educating themselves for a career in software engineering, my interview with Henry Quillin might be useful. He talks about a programming internship and his education journey, his work earning his Eagle Scout, and how he became a working programmer even as he is just starting university.
- More on embedded. Kevin Kirkus was with us in episode 186. He runs a testing team at Intel doing automated testing for their Xeon processor line. The design necessary for testing in this specialized environment gives us all plenty to think about.
- For team leaders out there, I interviewed Mark Seemann. He wrote a recent book, Code That Fits In Your Head. He talks about the principles that are in the book. I subsequently bought and read the book, and I wish I had this book earlier in my career. Would have saved me a great deal of time.
- On distributed systems, Udi Dahan is always a fascinating gentleman to listen to. Check out episode 192. As the founder and CEO of Particular Software, and the creator of NServiceBus, he is one of the world’s leading experts on distributed systems, microservices, and messaging architectures.
- Time-tested ideas are continually useful. I had the pleasure of interviewing Philippe Kruchten. He worked at Rational Software back when they were at the forefront of the software process in the 1990s. He published a paper outlining a framework for emergent, agile architecture. He didn’t call it that. He called it the 4+1 Architecture, but only because it predated the agile manifesto. If you are an architect, and you aren’t aware of this approach to architecture, give episode 195 a listen.
- For the Blazor developers, I had Steve Sanderson on in episode 202. Steve is the original designer of Blazor, which has become the new default web application on .NET. He shared about the future of Blazor and WebAssembly.
- Because there is so much going on in this space, Daniel Roth also joined me to discuss more Blazor Futures.
- GitHub Actions is being talked about quite a bit. While loads of people are using it for builds, people are scratching their heads about where it fits in regarding deployments. Damian Brady, on the GitHub team and a former employee of Octopus Deploy, sheds light on this in episode 206.
- Scott Hunter joined me in episode 211. He announced his new role at Microsoft running more of Azure development and .NET. He shared quite a bit behind the scenes regarding Microsoft’s strategy there.
- For the UX people. Mark Miller is the Chief Architect of DevExpress, the big UI components company. He has a brilliant user experience mind, and I was able to get him talking in episode 212.
- Telemetry. We all need it to keep our software stable in production. The Serilog and AutoFac maintainer, Nicholas Blumhardt, joined me to discuss the fundamentals of modern logging and telemetry. Check out episode 217 for that.
- More on the testing front, Eduardo Maltez, a software engineer doing some really interesting full system test work shares his thoughts on what makes tests reliable, stable, and fast — and how to fight brittle tests. Episode 224.
- We closed out the year on the security front. With LastPass getting hacked and now Rackspace having a hacking-induced major outage, we all need to take action. Troy Vinson, a multi-certified security professional and certified ethical hacker, gave his perspective on the Rackspace breach and what every .NET team should learn from it.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Architect Tips — New video podcast!
Azure DevOps
Clear Measure (Sponsor)
.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer’s Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!
Jeffrey Palermo’s YouTube
Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!
Programming with Palermo
programming@palermo.network
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