Welcome to the fifth edition of The Catch Block!
In this edition: Free April, CQRS, clouds, Regex, good enough vs perfect, .NET 5, and feelings.
Pluralsight is Free for April!
I totally missed this last week and am kicking myself for it. Pluralsight is completely, totally free for the month of April! This is a seriously good deal, one you shouldn't pass up. You don't even need a credit card. Check it out!
While you are there, you can see my talk from CodeMash 2020, "Hold Up, Wait a Minute, Let Me Put Some Async In It." Also check out a cool course from Julie Lerman and Steve Smith about domain-driven design fundamentals, and many more!
You can also check out Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard's blog post with this announcement.
Cool Reads
- Getting Started with CQRS (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) (Diogo Souza) - CQRS (Command/Query Responsibility Segregation) is a highly useful design pattern that comes down to a simple idea: the reads in a system should be separate from the writes. Diogo's longform series explores exactly how to do this, using MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and ASP.NET Core.
- Feeling Remote (Eric Brechner) - I know these sorts of posts are getting trite, but on the other hand, we're all in an unprecedented situation here. Eric's post on working from home hits hard right off the bat with an uncomfortable truth: working from home isn't very comfortable unless you can make it so. Take a look at Eric's suggestions, and see if they work for you and your family.
- Up to the clouds! (John Reilly) - John documents the story of his team moving to ASP.NET Core and migrating their app to the cloud. I know of many teams using a similar setup to his (including Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Kerberos, Hangfire and more) and his story might be of use to many of my readers.
- Export Data to Excel with ASP.NET Core (Thomas Ardal) - Part of me really cannot believe we're still having to do this in 2020, and part of me is relieved that we are. Maybe things don't change too much after all.
Previews and Announcements
The second preview of .NET 5 is out, and with it comes a bunch of announcments.
- Announcing .NET 5 Preview 2 (Richard Lander)
- ASP.NET Core Updates in .NET 5 Preview 2 (Sourabh Shirhatti)
- Announcing Entity Framework Core 5.0 Preview 2 (Jeremy Likness)
- Regex Performance Improvements in .NET 5 (Stephen Toub)
Other Neat Reads
- Perfect vs Good Enough When Coding (Joe Eames)
- Writing .NET Database Integration Tests (Khalid Abuhakmeh)
- Repeatable Execution in C# (Mark Seemann) - This article made my head spin.
- Array and Object Destructuring in JavaScript (Sarah Chima Atuonwu)
- Content Injection with Response Rewriting in ASP.NET Core (Rick Strahl)
- Automatically Collapse Code Comments When Opening A Document (Matt Lacey) - Requires an extension to Visual Studio but looks pretty darn useful.
- How Are .NET APIs Designed? (Steve J Gordon) - This is way more interesting than it sounds.
- Life From Home: What happens to your work-life balance if you never leave your home? (Todor Mitev)
- 5 ways to set the URLs for an ASP.NET Core app (Andrew Lock)
- Using Azure Key Vault for Secrets in Azure DevOps Pipeline (Damien Bowden)
- Checking DataTypes In JavaScript (Alcides Queiroz)
- HTML multiple selections with datalist (Gérald Barré)
Catch Up with the Previous Issue!
Matthew Jones
Thanks for reading!
Note: A previous version of this newsletter incorrectly attributed the article "Checking DataTypes in JavaScript" to Mosh Hamedani, when in fact it was written by Alcides Queiroz. The attribution has since been fixed.
