Good news sources for .NET developers
Scott McKelvey
By
January 27, 2023
At WebCE, being “Responsive” is part of our DNA, and it’s one of our Core Values that we discuss often. We define it as “Reacting timely to needs and trends,” and before you can respond to those needs and trends, you first need to know what they are! To do that, we try to read broadly and listen carefully to trusted voices in our industry, and we regularly discuss industry headlines in our team meetings.
We learn a lot from others, and in this “Good News” series, we’ll highlight feeds, blogs, newsletters, and other sources that have helped us stay aware of important needs and trends in technology. Quick disclaimer: We don’t have control over these third-party sources, and we probably don’t agree with everything that they post. That said, for the first post in this series, let’s talk about Microsoft tech!
Here are some of the sources that we watch:
Many of our apps are built on the .NET platform, and the official .NET Blog and Visual Studio Blog are good places to learn about upcoming features as well as tips and tricks that can help us today. The DevBlogs site is an aggregator for those and other Microsoft blogs, which is a great one to skim to gain situational awareness of technologies that we might use in the future.
Outside of the official blogs, Visual Studio Magazine is the online incarnation of the older MSDN Magazine, and it features articles with a (little) bit more objective distance than the official blogs. CODE Magazine is similar and has longer-form content that covers a slightly wider space. Bonus: if you're a Visual Studio subscriber, you may be able to receive their print magazine for free for offline reading!
We have learned a lot from the experts at JetBrains, and their .NET Tools Blog has a monthly .NET Annotated series that collects details from across the ecosystem (here’s an example from January 2023).
InfoQ is a hub for “Software Development News, Trends & Best Practices”, and the .NET feed that they publish is another aggregator of interesting content.
We’ve been a hybrid team for years, and we use Microsoft Teams to communicate, collaborate, and stay connected. The official Microsoft Teams Blog helps us learn about new features so that we can work together more efficiently and effectively.
There's a world of quality resources available today, and these are just a few of the ones that have been helpful to us!