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Here are the things that caught my eye recently in .NET. I’d love to hear what you found most interesting this week. Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
Introducing Orleans 3.0
We are excited to announce the Orleans 3.0 release. A great number of improvements and fixes went in, as well as several new features, since Orleans 2.0. These changes were driven by the experience of many people running Orleans-based applications in production in a wide range of scenarios and environments, and by the ingenuity and passion of the global Orleans community that always strives to make the codebase better, faster, and more flexible. A BIG Thank You to all who contributed to this release in various ways!
I was happy to see the generic host for co-hosting with something like ASP.NET Core. I’ve blogged Co-Hosting Orleans and ASP.NET Core which this about this feature.
Link: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/orleans-3-0/
Snitch
A tool that helps you find transitive package references that can be removed.
> snitch Foo.csproj --tfm net462
Building Foo (net462)...
Building Bar (netstandard2.0)...
Building Baz (netstandard2.0)...
The following packages can be removed:
Autofac (ref by Baz)
Newtonsoft.Json (ref by Bar)
The following packages might be removed:
Castle.Core (ref by Baz) 4.4.0 <- 4.3.1 (Baz)
Link: https://github.com/spectresystems/snitch
What’s Your Problem? – Asbjørn Ulsberg
A talk given by Asbjørn Ulsberg from PayEx at the 2019 Platform Summit in Stockholm.
An API isn’t stronger than its weakest link and what’s often ignored in the ongoing maintenance and development of an API is the constant effort required to provide great self-servicable error messages. What this means is that without great, user-friendly error messages, your API is not going to be great.
Just think about your first interaction with an API. How many failing requests have you sent before you have dug yourself through swathes of error messages and documentation to get to that one penultimate successful request making your heart sing and fists shaking in the air?
Great error messages make them not feel like errors, but like friendly guidance towards a working request. They should be detailed enough to let the developer fix whatever problem there is themselves, like a dialogue between a customer and a support technician.
This talk will give you ideas of how to handle errors and exceptions that occur in your application, be it with the incoming request, database failures or errors received from a 3rd party and how to serialize them into user friendly and actionable problem messages.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWIUn5BHDBc
The next 5 years of ASP.NET Core – Ryan Nowak
Join Ryan Nowak on a tour of ASP.NET Core’s evolution from “Project K” to present day and look forward to a few possible futures. We’ll discuss technical design details of how the ASP.NET Core stack is changing from bottom (hosting and startup), through the server, middleware pipeline, and up to high-level frameworks like MVC and Blazor.
This is a technical deep-dive talk, and will explore possible design directions of .NET 5 and future releases.