Musings while learning 14 Aug 2021

This post is just a bunch of things I encountered while catching up on tech for [Not] The Damn Manager. There won’t be much of a through-line or story, as I’m just jotting things down as I encounter them. This post may update a couple of times if I come across other things that fit in here better than their own post.

This post is part of a series I’m using to track my progress on [Not] The Damn Manager. To see the other posts in this series, check out the first post.

Dependabot

So after publishing my ‘coming back’ post last week, GitHub created a few automated PRs for me (example). This was a bit of a surprise so I read through the documentation included. What I can tell from a really quick read is it’s an automated service that watches repositiories and security updates, and creates PRs if it sees a trivial patch to fix vulnerabilities. I of course merged the recommendations, and noticed another nice feature when it auto-rebased a later PR for me. This is a pretty awesome service, thanks GitHub!

Using Preview Visual Studio

When updating all my tooling I noticed the 2022 preview for Visual Studio was available, so rather than updating to VS2019 I figured why not go to the preview? For the most part this has worked well so far, but I did hit one issue: While going through on of the Azure courses I needed to clone and run a specific repository, but when I tried to do so the project failed to run. Turns out it required a version of .NET Core 3 that wasn’t installed with the preview. I’m guessing 2019 would have installed it, but just manually downloading + installing latest .NET Core version got me up and running so I’m sticking with 2022

Azure Sandbox

Encountered this while going through some Azure lessons. It’s a neat system that provisions Azure functionality to you for use while learning for free, so you don’t need to spend money on hosting just to learn about it! Seems it lasts for 4 hours, and I can activate up to 10 today (every day?). Don’t really know much more, just wanted to call out that this was a nice touch in the learning process.

Azure Static Webapp

This is a pretty neat integration between Azure and GitHub that lets you automatically build and deploy updates using GitHub Actions. Azure sets everything up for you nicely so you just give it a little info and permissions and you get all the actions for free. It even builds ‘staging’ versions from PRs so you can view live before merging to main.

C#

I figured after several years off I’d be really far behind on C#. I last coded seriously on 7.x and now there’s a preview out for 10! Seems my timing was lucky and nothing massive has changed (though default non-null looks awesome). Even so, it was fun to quickly read through the What’s New Articles for 7-10.