Last Week in .NET

Two years of simmering discord came to a head last week as the .NET OSS maintainers openly revolted against the .NET Foundation for years of non-communication, the Executive Director resigned, and newly elected board members are left to pick up the pieces.It was a wild week.First, there was some discord due to the .NET Foundation saying a board member left ‘for personal reasons' when in reality they left due to the nature of the .NET Foundation itself.Second, during this brouhaha and when finding out the Executive Director merged a PR without communicating, the .NET community learned that their projects were moved to the Foundation's Github Enterprise account without their consent, that the DNFAdmin service account was basically a trojan horse (an actual Trojan Horse, not the virus variety), and that even if they signed the ‘contributor model' contracts, they may not own their own projects.As I said, it was a wild week.So, the Executive Director apologized, not for the lack of communication, or moving the projects to the .NET Foundation's Github Enterprise account, or misstating why Rodney Littles II left the board, or for the fact that the foundation has not been up front with what it means to have a project join the .NET Foundation, but for… forcing through a PR on a project that the foundation ostensibly owned.Naturally members of the community asked for the Executive Director's resignation, and they got it. And we sit, a few days later, watching more communication from a single member of the board than we had from entire previous Boards of Directors, particularly around most of the painpoints the community mentioned previously. One of the board members spoke up during the incident but said nothing of consequence, except to say, “Likewise, I think that the community and projects may have not understood what they were agreeing to when they were brought under the .NET Foundation umbrella.”. That's what we in the biz like to call an understatement. I'm also not the only person to call this entire thing a brouhaha.And since I'm writing this newsletter, I get to have my say.I don't think Claire Novotny should have resigned as the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. I believe her to be a scapegoat for the structural issues the .NET Foundation has, as I've written about and spoken about previously. We've had entire Boards of Directors come and go from the .NET foundation with nary a peep from them in public about their work, no after-action review or postmortem, nothing outside of their initial interview to become a member of the Board of Directors.I believe if anyone should resign, it should be the Boards of Directors. They ultimately are responsible for what the Executive Director and what the .NET Foundation does, and while half the board is fresher than a prince from Bel-air, the other half aren't, and in some form of irony, it's only the new people who are speaking out. I think they're Good People, but they either have no idea what they're doing or they haven't seen and felt the issue simmering for the last few years, in which case they most assuredly shouldn't be representing the community in the .NET Foundation.It really all comes back to a single question: What does the .NET Foundation do? or, taken further: Why does the .NET Foundation exist?. We haven't really gotten an answer to that question yet; especially the vague “commercially friendly” mission statement.I'm willing to bet the Board of Directors haven't been taking minutes for their daily meetings over the past week, even though the bylaws require them to, and so I've taken to asking that the bylaws be amended to require that the minutes are shared for review by the membership of the foundation.If the .NET foundation is going to exist, then it's going to have a vision and a purpose. If you care about .NET and the future of .NET, you should be right there, holding their feet to the fire. Otherwise we're going to get what we've always got, a mono-culture that seeks to fulfill Microsoft's whims about .NET; not what the actual OSS community wants or needs of .NET.With that bit of news in the can, let's see what else happened Last Week in .NET:

VC that sells attention for NFTs wants you to buy NFTs. The .NET foundation decides to force its operations on member projects, and the Microsoft Store really really wants you to use the Microsoft Store. Please. Thank you.

Patch Tuesday gets delayed for more fixes, the word 'themes' now means 'new color schemes', and Microsoft releases a video called that's two minutes long filled with 8 new products... Or two minutes of 8. Not a really bright idea, that.

Arcade == .NET Foundation build tooling; .NET 6 RC 1 is out; and you can now specify what repositories to pull your nuget packages from -- individually.

The 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks is commemorated, Minimal APIs bet maximum attention, and technologies as old as it gets should be Good Enough For Everyone, says Linux Torvalds.

Windows 11 is coming October 5th; .NET Gets a plan for Deep Learning; and Techbash 2021 has been postponed.

The biggest news this week (and will likely trump any sort of news for the next couple of weeks in the Microsoft space) is that Azure has a vulnerability dubbed “ChaosDB” that exposed its customers keys to the world, leaving every single CosmosDB customer's database data exposed for the taking. There's a technical deep-dive into this vulnerability as well. I hope the Azure team is wearing their brown pants.This is as bad as it gets. Good news though! They gave out a bounty of $40,000 to the finder of this vulnerability. Which values this vulnerability as akin to a Tesla Model 3 — and not even a fully decked out one.Apply rounded corners in desktop apps for Windows 11. In some cases, rounded corners will be applied to your applications automatically, in others, here's what you can do to make them rounded. As Apple intended.Razer Bug lets you become a Windows 10 admin by plugging in a mouse. This is a pretty easy exploit to… well.. exploit, so if you're using Razer mouses in a corporate context, you may want to rethink that decision.The real names of features in Visual Studio. It's a bit inside baseball, but still a wonderful walkthrough.David Fowler writes to tell us that New .NET 6 APIS [are] driven by the developer community. In this blog post, David details new APIs available in .NET 6, and highlights the fact that well, they were authored by members of the community. I'm a fan of Parallel.ForEachAsync, as that seems rather useful for my needs.This is your warning: Get out of the Dev Channel for Windows 11 unless you want to experience some turbelance. If you want stability, use the beta channel or get out of the insider program entirely. If you want to see new builds of Windows 11 that may have the stability of Windows Vista, stay in the Dev channel.Nicole Miller-Abuhakmeh is the new Community Manager for the .NET Foundation. This is a wonderful choice for CM, congrats Nicole and the .NET foundation.Looks like there's another tactic available to exploit Proxyshell vulnerabilities. A few weeks ago, a researcher showed off an exploit of Microsoft Exchange Server dubbed ‘ProxyShell' and it seems like the gift that keeps on giving to attackers. Bottom line: keep your Exchange servers up to date.In .NET 6, FirstOrDefault(), LastOrDefault() and SingleOrDefault() now let's you specify a default value. Sadly it has to be a compile-time constant so you can't have something like new Random().Next() available.Microsoft Ignite is November 2-4, 2021 and is virtual again this year because people can't bother to vaccinate.Github's Copilot can get you in trouble 40% of the time and if you're the type to use AI to write code, maybe you deserve to have problems.Using SignalR in your Blazor applications This is an nice pairing of technologies. Like Chardonnay and Brie, or Hotdog and Chili. Ketchup is forbidden, Mustard is recommended, however.And I say this with a twing of irony, but that's it for what happened Last Week in .NET.

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 .. 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. 

Releases

Microsoft sunsets OneNote, only to expand OneNote, and the .NET Compiler has a bit of chaos inside of it. Let's get to it.⛔✅ David Fowler, member of the .NET team, writes that “null checking in C# has gotten out of hand”. David's right, of course, and a follow up tweet in that thread narrows it down to merely three methods to checking for null. Another day, another chance to tap the sign: Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's felt like that ever since C# was de-coupled from the .NET Framework, the language has exploded with new syntax; and yes, while newly divorced people sometimes do go through a sowing phase, you reap what you sow.

Several Zero-Days, and some more pontificating on the future of Programming as it relates to CoPilot. It's been a busy week, so let's see what happened Last week in .NET:

I swore up and down I would not release a newsletter this week owing to the July 4th holiday (Treason day for the Brits out there), and then Microsoft's Github announced and released Github Copilot, and my promise fell apart.CoPilot is an ML trained code snippet generator. What is it trained on, you ask? All the public code on Github, GPL'd or otherwise. This has angered the internet lawyers and is generally considered to be a Dick Move™ by everyone else (except those that have read the parable of the Scorpion and the Frog). And since there really isn't any magic in ML, that's led to some interesting bugs... like reproducing the inverse-sine function from Quake to include the PG-13 rated comments. Or giving internet randos the API keys that Sendgrid users put in their source code on accident, or even reproducing the GPL in its entirety in a source code header file and none of this includes the mundane but possibly Office Space plot inducing every day bugs present in CoPilot.It's almost trite to call these 'bugs', these aren't bugs. These aren't misunderstandings of product requirements, or bad coding. No, these are Ian Malcoms:Your scientists engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. (original source)AI and ML have given us a new class of software defect: the Ian Malcom, and we can thank Github for playing the role of movie villian here.With that out of the way, here's what else happened last week in .NET.

The Windows 11 livestream happened last week, and the big news there is just about every computer older than 2017 will require you to upgrade your hardware to use Windows 11. This is bad news and I am unhappy☠ Barry "I love tormenting people with pictures of beans" Dorrans reminds all of us that .NET Core 2.1 is End of Life at the end of August. I'm impressed support for .NET Core 2.1 lasted this long.

Windows 10 supports ends On October 14, 2025 according to a Microsoft support document. We're expecting Microsoft to unveil Windows 11 this week, but I gotta say: It's not going to be hard to get me off Windows 10 if Windows 11 promises less ads and less ‘synergy'. Appropos of nothing I bet this article on how to Disable OneDrive will be as useful to you as it is to me.1⃣ Uno Platform 3.8 – New WinUI Calendar, Grid controls, 2x performance, new Linux scenario and more is the tale of a headline that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. Regardless, if you use Uno, a new version is out.Visual Studio teaches you how to use the updated C# language features and this is pretty neat to watch. I maintain, of course, that if the Egyptians had access to gifs they would have used them to communicate instead of emojis.New data access benchmarks for .NET 5 and .NET Framework 4.8 This benchmark covers all major ORMs (and Microsoft data access strategies like ADO.NET) and has been updated for .NET 5 and .NET Framework 4.8. Enjoy.Migration of Bing's Workflow Engine to .NET 5, by Ben Watson The only fault I have with this blog post is that they never tell you what XAP stands for. If you know, could you do me a solid and let me know, please?Richard Lander talks with folks from the .NET team about “diagnostics” in another “Conversation” series The format is neat, even if the title is a little boring. Microsoft continues its tradition of parroting Mac by parroting Mac OS X for Windows 11. I'm not even mad. That does look better. Here's another article on Windows 11 updated look, if you're interested in that sort of thing.So good I'll share it twice. You wanted a .NET Repl, right? Well now you've got one.Thanks to Khalid Abuakmeh I've learned that Entity Framework Core Exceptions are pretty nice. It tells you the problem and how to fix it. We're in 2021 folks, so this shouldn't be revolutionary, but it is.Microsoft had an outage related to its Ubuntu repositories because of… Diskspace issues. Ok, first off, #hugops to the team that had to deal with this outage. Second: You're the #2 cloud provider in the world. You don't get to have diskspace issues, especially when you have invaded my desktop with “OneDrive”. Those are the rules.Visual Studio 16.11 Preview 2 has been released and this release includes lots of little fixes plus improvements for Git in Visual Studio.You can now try out Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1 (64-bit edition) for free.July 29th you can hear F# developers drone on about how much better F# is because it's .NET Conf “Focus on F#” Day. I can't wait.July 21st Microsoft wants its employees to learn more about racial justice and inequality.And finally, Juneteenth (June 19th) was passed into US Law as a national holiday last week. You learn that not all of the confederacy surrendered on April 9, 1865, and that some (like Texas) decided to keep on until Union soldiers arrived on their doorstep. June 19th, 1865 is the day that union soldiers arrived and told Black slaves they were finally free. Long overdue and a small step towards righting the wrongs of our history.And that's it for what happened Last Week in .NET. If you're pursuing microservices, take my five day course before making the move.

We've come down from build and gotten back to the grind. Two releases this week followed by a ton of interesting stuff that's happening in the .NET Space..NET 5.0.7 has been released and it's a small release that fixes CVE-2021-31957. In the same vein, .NET Core 3.1.16 has been released and it fixes the aforementioned CVE.Microsoft's Kate Crawford says “AI is neither artificial nor intelligent and I've never agreed with a headline more.End to End encryption coming to Microsoft Teams which will send corporate legal compliance teams into tizzies. So I'll assume that it's “End to End” but your employer will probably have keys to decrypt and record it, because that's who's paying the tab.There's a design proposal to make Directory.Build.targets just work and as someone who is still very scared of MSBuild, I hope this is means fewer nightmares.MSTIC helped the FBI confiscate the hacker's wallet from the Colonial Pipeline ransomware hack and they're being mum on what ‘help' means. Some commenters note that Windows 10 has a built in keylogger; and I'm seriously reconsidering linux.Visual Studio now supports deep links for git pull requests and the 1990s called and asked for royalties on this tech.First known Malware targetting windows containers but everyone is safe because no one uses windows containers. Also if you are forced to use Windows Containers I have to assume that's about the 20th worst part of your job.Jet Brains Rider ‘Must Use' Plugins. Selling Microsoft based developers on a better IDE is like selling shoes to the cobbler's kids. I respect Jetbrains here but it's always going to be an uphill battle. JetBrains has another blog post just released titled “Import settings from Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to JetBrains Rider” In case you wanted more evidence of that uphill battle.The .NET Community Standup asks “What's new with Blazor” in this video. What's new, Blazor?Do you need to inject text into an ASP.NET Core Response? Rick Strahl has you covered this is over a year old but still the best resource if you need to rewrite the response in ASP.NET Core.Immo Landwerth wants to make Exception.ToString() useful and if accomplished I'd like to have Immo's babies. Only one of these statements is a joke and I'll leave that to you to decide which one.Azure App Service supports .NET 6 Preview on Linux and Windows Early Access according to Byron Tardif (@bktv99 on twitter).Visual Studio Code 1.57 has been released and there will come a tipping point where new features gives it a similar bloat profile to Visual Studio. It's like the Wilford Brimley line for software.Rediscovering Implicit Casts or as I like to think about it “More than you ever wanted to know about implicit casting in C#.Christina Warren shows us that comic sans makes a pretty good mono-spaced font and I hate myself for how much I like this.And that's it for what happened Last week in .NET.

It's a light week this week; everyone is coming down from Build. If you missed that, check out last last week's newsletter. Now on to what happened Last week in .NET.Jared Parsons, member of the Roslyn core team, talks about string vs. String. That is, for those of you listening to this instead of reading it, the keyword string vs. the class String. As it turns out, they're not the same thing. There is also a special circle of hell for people who override String. @ me on Twitter @gortok if you think I'm wrong about this. Not about .NET but relevant to our interests, Michele Hansen's preorder for “Deploy Empathy” is open. Michele is the founder of https://geocod.io, which is, as the name says, a geocoding API. She does a lot of customer interviews for Geocodio, and previously she was a product manager for The Motley Fool, where she — you guessed it — did a lot of customer interviews. Anyway, she's written a book (and she has a newsletter!) about customer interviews that will give you the feedback that you need for your product or service. I don't do sponsored content here, and if you work on a product or are a consultant trying to sell a service, you need to read this book. Periodt. Benefits of the preorder is you get rough drafts of the book. Seriously, buy it.This is one of the best produced virtual keynotes I've seen ever Scott Hanselman “and friends” bring you a Build keynote unlike any other. I mentioned this last week, but it's worth noting again. Watch it. It's that good.Raymond Chen talks about Arm32 If this is your introduction to Raymond Chen, you're one of today's lucky 10,000. Feel free to peruse his back catalog and be amazed and entertained for thousands of hours. Today he talks about Windows and Arm32.Microsoft is partnering with Morgan Stanley to provide reference cloud architectures for highly regulated industries (like the financial industry). This is akin to Las Vegas partnering with Satan, but I get it. This is corporate synergy.C# 9's blazor ‘colorization' and appropriate C# 9 syntax highlight and documentation is live If this sentence is confusing to you I'd like to point out I present the links; I do not vet them for sanity.Paint.NET Is smackdab in the middle of its migration to .NET Core and some parts are already live. If you aren't aware of Paint.NET. It's… Paint. In .NET. That's it, that's the hook. All joking aside, it's a rather wonderful paint program and it just happens to be written in .NET — now .NET Core. Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream 2.1.0 is released Could someone explain to me how a .NET 4.6.2 targeted application can now use Span? email me at george+whatthefuckisthisshit@georgestocker.com.Microsoft wants to be twitter's main character for a day by censoring the “Tienanmen Square Tank Man” image on the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre. rubs head with hands… Do you see how this is bad, Microsoft? Do you? I can't rub a company's nose in their own mess, but I'd sure like to.And that's it for what happened last week in .NET. Tip your service staff, and tune in next week.

So Build happened last week. This email newsletter is shockingly late for reasons that you probably don't care about but have messed up my entire week. Mea culpa.

This week's newsletter is late because my wife and I were gone all weekend for our 10th anniversary. I am chagrined and refreshed all at the same time. With that said, let's get into what happened Last Week.

☠ .NET Framework 4.5.2, 4.6, 4.6.1 will reach End of Support on April 26, 2022 At least, that's the word right now. Governments around the world are still using Windows XP, so it's not like this is a firm 'end of support'.

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.

It's a light week. Not much going on except for me being stung by the "30 is old in tech" rebuke. What happened in the world of .NET (which turned 20 this year)? Let's get to it:

☠Azure AD fell down last week, causing outages with Microsoft's Cloud properties Outlook 365, Office 365, the Azure Portal, and Teams were all affected.​The root cause was a bug during key rotation, and I'll let the Azure Post Mortem team take it from here:Azure AD utilizes keys to support the use of OpenID and other Identity standard protocols for cryptographic signing operations. As part of standard security hygiene, an automated system, on a time-based schedule, removes keys that are no longer in use. Over the last few weeks, a particular key was marked as “retain” for longer than normal to support a complex cross-cloud migration. This exposed a bug where the automation incorrectly ignored that “retain” state, leading it to remove that particular key.Metadata about the signing keys is published by Azure AD to a global location in line with Internet Identity standard protocols. Once the public metadata was changed at 19:00 UTC on 15 March 2021, applications using these protocols with Azure AD began to pick up the new metadata and stopped trusting tokens/assertions signed with the key that was removed. At that point, end users were no longer able to access those applications.Service telemetry identified the problem, and the engineering team was automatically engaged. At 19:35 UTC on 15 March 2021, we reverted deployment of the last backend infrastructure change that was in progress. Once the key removal operation was identified as the root cause, the key metadata was rolled back to its prior state at 21:05 UTC.This is the second time in six months that Azure AD has gone down. This happened 6 months ago. These are growing pains for Microsoft's cloud endeavors, and the ops teams involved need #hugops. Microsoft being the "safe bet" for enterprises means in part being stable, and two enterprise outages in 6 months is a lot.

Last Week in .NET - 3/13/2021

Last Week in .NET - Microsoft Ignites Exchange - Week Ending 6 March 2021Microsoft Ignite happened last week. Its releases were all about Azure, azure, azure, and at least for the moment tangential to the work we do here. There's a playlist if that's your thing, but the first video on the list, and I am not shitting you here, is a video is titled "Faster Management Performance – Inventory and Financial Management learnings in Azure". ...and I'm already asleep.

Releases

Last Week in .NET - February 20th, 2021.NET Releases

Last Week in .NET - February 6th, 2021No 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

Last Week in .NET - January 30th, 2021We're getting our first snow here in the DC area for the first time in what feels like forever; and the .NET team is pondering the true meaning of the words "Backlog management". Let's get to it.

Last Week in .NET - January 23rd, 2021Is it over yet? Maybe? Not sure. 2021 has certainly come in like a lion, here's hoping is goes out like a lamb. A new president here in the states, a renewed focus on science, and a bunch of things happened last week in .NET. Let's get to it.Releases

This is Last Week in .NET for the week that ended... well.. last week (January 16th, 2020). It was a rocky week last week; and more of the same expected this week for the Washington DC area, and with an inauguration and Martin Luther King day as our backdrop, let's dive into what happened last week in the world of .NET.Releases

Here in the States, we recorded the first invasion of the Capitol since the war of 1812 (in 1814), the first time a sitting president has incited an insurrection, and the last time any of us will hold out hope that it being a new year will mean things get better.With that as our backdrop, let's get down to what happened last week in the world of .NET:

Between the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft releasing a working document detailing the problems with the .NET ecosystem, and a bouncy castle crypto vulnerability, it's been a busy week. Let's dive in and see what happened, shall we?

Skip to content  Pull requests Issues  Marketplace Explore gortok/ lwidn-newsletterPrivate 1  0  0 CodeIssuesPull requestsActionsProjectsSecurityInsightsSettingslwidn-newsletter/LwidnGenerator/input/20201212.mdgortok Update 20201212.mdThis is Last Week in .NET for the week ending 12 December, 2020.

Normally I'd start this out with some of the funnier things that happened; but before I dive into what happened last week, I want to talk about this week. Warning: death and violence follow. Yesterday was the 31st anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre. If you're not familiar with this atrocity, let me quote Deb Chachra's chilling telling of the event:  On December 6, 1989, in late afternoon a man had walked into the École Polytechnique, the engineering school of the University of Montreal, carrying a hunting rifle, ammunition, and a knife. He entered a mechanical engineering class of about sixty students, separated out the nine women, and told them, "I am fighting feminism." One of the women, Nathalie Provost, responded, "Look, we are just women studying engineering, not necessarily feminists ready to march on the streets to shout we are against men, just students intent on leading a normal life." She reports that his response was, "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists."He then opened fire on the women, killing six of them. Then he went from floor to floor in the building, targeting and shooting women.Fourteen women were killed that day, twelve of them engineering students, one a nursing student, and one a university employee.Here are their names: Anne St-Arneault, Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Crotea, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Klueznick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, and Annie Turcotte. (Me: You can hear more about these women here.)An additional thirteen people were injured. Nathalie Provost was shot four times, but survived. In the weeks, months, and years that followed, among other responses, Canada implemented stricter gun-control regulations, and began to observe December 6th as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. The event remains the worst mass murder in Canadian history.Our industry has problems with sexism, whether latent or outright. While we hope never to have another atrocity like this one; we should strive for equality and justice in our industry. As a white dude in tech, I'll do everything I can; and I ask you to do the same. If you've never had to fear for your life just because you wanted to be an engineer, then you too need to stand up and help stop the sexism in our industry. Now, on to what happened last week in the world of .NET. 

Welcome to Last week in .NET; and last week was a holiday week so things will be lighter than usual.

Hey again, what a week. We had a blue moon, Halloween, and Daylight savings time end all one one night.In case you're the voting type here in these United States, that's happening tomorrow, where the choices are between two old white guys. You would think we would have learned our lesson by now, but we have not.But this is not last week in politics, this is last week in .NET, so let's get to it.

Mostly community goodies this week. No releases, but that's not surprising given the impending release on November 10th. Here's what I found last week in .NET:

This is Last Week in .NET for the week that ended 17 October 2020. Lots of releases and CVE fixes last week, so let's get to it.

This is Last Week in .NET for the week ending 10 October 2020.No releases this week, but lots of goodies showing off .NET 5.Starting out with some inside baseball, I'm working to improve the layout of the newsletter, and if there's someone's design you think I should shamelessly copy, let me know on twitter