Starting out this week a little differently, Sarah Dresner, @sarah_edo on twitter comments on the Batman movies, and it’s shockingly relevant to software we create:

When they make Batman movies, they say “ah yes, this has all the ingredients of a good movie” The trouble is, you don’t eat ingredients, you eat a meal. (Source)

She has an entire thread just on the problem with (primarily) DC movies, but it’s definitely relevant to our work, and it reminds me of our approach to business applications (and a bit broader; large companies that rhyme with smike-ro-croft approach to building software). We build software with features, (ingredients) but we generally forget the soul of software; that part of it that makes it relatable to the user. Features are not a soul, though a feature can be implemented with a soul. Software that we love and software we merely tolerate (at best) are separated by whether or not it has a soul.

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John Papa takes us through the early history of JavaScript and why jQuery saved JavaScript. We look at these technologies with derision today, “Oh, you’re still coding in jQuery? How can you?” but everything that is old and busted was once new and wonderful.

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Aaron Stannard asks, “Why does it seem like Microsoft deprecates all of their Azure SDK NuGet packages and replaces them with an entirely new one every 18 months?”. That’s a great question, and the comments on the tweet offer possible explanations, but no one is speaking up in an official capacity.

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The people inside Microsoft using Windows Containers are talking about the cool stuff they can do. If you’re one of the five outside of Microsoft using Windows Containers voluntarily, you’ll enjoy this as well. Also, if you’re not a part of Microsoft and you’re using Windows Containers because you want to please drop me an email. It’s george at georgestocker dot com.

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dotMorten shows you have to add OAuth to your WinUI application with one line of code using WinUiEx (Windows UI Extensions).

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Windows App SDK 1.1 Preview 3 is out and it includes Mica and Background Acrylic; which are two UI styles in Windows 10.

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Apparently Windows 11 Cumulative Preview KB5012643 breaks .NET 3.5 (in Windows Server 2022 as well) so watch out.

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Microsoft 3D MovieMaker was released into opensource and the amazing part is that the software was built last. The entire manual and documentation was created first. That’s astonishing.

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.NET 5.0 is out of support, so if you haven’t updated to .NET 6, now is the time. Literally.

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This old tweet by Scott Hanselman came up again on what should be included in a Windows Developer Checklist and I maintain that GNU Utils is a requirement. I also want a native Perl Runtime, but you can’t have it all.

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Jimmy Bogard writes You Probably Don’t Need to Worry about MediatR which itself is a response to this post that says, You probably don’t need MediatR as someone who has never used MediatR, they’re both right.

But what I want to bring up here is this mentality in software where we find these castles we believe in, live in those castles, and then eschew all the other castles we see. We build moats around ours, and see others as inferior. We tie the software we use and create to our identity. We defend it.

I also want to point out that Jimmy does a great job of not doing that in his post. He gives a reasoned rebuttal without it crossing any lines into attacks.

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Not an Internet Of Sh*t joke but “This toilet installation is connected to Microsoft Azure IoT Central”. I just can’t with this.

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Power Platform Conference in September in Orlando, FL is looking for speakers. Submissions are due by May 16th.

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Jeffrey Snover talks about the time he was demoted and made a corporate pariah for five years for inventing Powershell. There’s an accompanying talk on it. Sometimes I get asked, “why do you hit Microsoft so hard when they do <something I think is wrong>”, and stuff like this is the reason. There’s an inertia present in all businesses towards the present. Not towards innovation or getting better, but for extracting as much from the cash cow as possible. Microsoft is not only not immune to this, but there are many recent examples of this happening (Hot Reload, to name just one). The ‘new Microsoft’ has not gotten away from this inertia, and if we just stay silent, there won’t be any external forces helping them to see they are just relying on inertia. As much as I dump on Powershell, it was revolutionary for Windows administrators, and it deserves more accolades. In the replies another Microsoftie talks about the fact that BitLocker was also one of these anti-inertia projects.

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And that’s it for what happened Last Week in .NET.