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Today, my last self-assigned duty before the Christmas break was to migrate our in-house rate-limiting implementation (based on the AspNetCoreRateLimiting third-party package) to the new, shiny rate-limiting middleware introduced by ASP.NET Core 7. While the process was relatively straightforward, I stumbled upon a few quirks I want to annotate here. Our use case is simple. We use what the ASP.NET Core 7 documentation defines as a “fixed window limiter.” It uses a specified time window to limit requests. When the time window expires, a new time window starts, and the request limit is reset. Consider the following code (for convenience, I’m using an extension method): ...

And we must remind ourselves that growth occurs in intervals: there are times of growth, and there are times of non-growth. The latter isn’t a failure so much as a necessary period of rest. Dormancy isn’t stagnant; it’s potentiating. It’s patient. If you’ve grown a lot in the past however many months or years and now feel that growth coming to a close, don’t fret right away. Wait. Reflect on what you’ve learned. Look for signs of spring. Move to where there’s water, if you need to. But don’t rush. There will be time again for running and jumping, when you’re ready. ...

This short novel was a genuine surprise. I certainly didn’t expect Voltaire to be this accessible, witty, sarcastic, and also outrageous for the era (1759). Below the surface of a seemingly entertaining and often absurd sequence of improbable events is a constant philosophical struggle. Quoting from the back cover: Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in “the best of all possible worlds.” On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan. ...

It’s mind-blowing that today scientists can “extract genetic material from the letters written [in 1475] by Vlad Dracula […] and, from that, build up a picture of not only the physical makeup of the Wallachian warlord who became known as Vlad the Impaler but also the environmental conditions in which he lived.” Also, I’m not surprised that similar investigations revealed that Mikhail Bulgakov was under morphine when he wrote his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (one of my all-time favorite books). ...

Today I upgraded to JetBrains’ Rider 2022.3. Startup speed has been enhanced, and full .NET 7 and C# 11 support is included. So far, my favorite feature is the conversion of regular and verbatim strings into their raw counterparts (it’s often the small, simple things.) My second best is the fulls upport for WSL2 remote development. This one took a good while to come out of the trenches, but better late than never, I’d say. ...

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut, is a strange narrative object. It mixes fact and fiction in imaginative ways, sometimes making it hard for the reader to distinguish between them, which is probably a testimonial to the experiment’s success. As I was reading, Wu Ming’s unidentified narrative objects (UNO) came to mind. If it doesn’t qualify as UNO, it comes close enough. It certainly fits the ‘faction’ (fact+fiction) genre, if such a thing exists. ...

I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others. ...

While it has been a very challenging and difficult time for the company, it cannot even remotely be compared with the horrendous situation that the people of Ukraine are facing on a daily basis, caused by the war. Once again, we condemn this aggression, and have and will continue to stand by the people of Ukraine, including our colleagues and their families. More here. I’m using JetBrains products when I’m not in (neo)vim. For C#, Rider is fantastic, and so is PyCharm for Python. The company is incredible, too, as today’s bold move demonstrates. They moved 800 employees, got visas, new locations and apartments, everything. Huge respect. ...

Despite its name suggesting otherwise, Dune II was a first – a real-time strategy game that sprang out of the box with almost every gameplay attribute and control system seen in every RTS since. In direct lineage, it was the father of the globally successful Command & Conquer franchise, in that its code was used as a basis of the first game of the series. Yet in terms of wider influence, the battles first fought out on the vibrant sands of Arrakis continue to echo through modern videogaming. ...

The other day we did a .NET 7 Spotlight event at this month’s DevRomagna meetup. The speakers were Ugo Lattanzi and me. In my session, I chose to talk about my top 7 new features in .NET 7 (pun intended.) What follows is a mix of my preparation notes and what I ended up really saying1. 1. Performance Since the initial release of “new dotnet” (.NET Core), performance has always been a critical goal for the .NET team. Starting with .NET 5, performance gains have been skyrocketing. .NET 6 was a lot faster than 5, and now, well, I’m surprised by the remarkable performance improvements in .NET 7. Stephen Toub posted a remarkably long (255 printed pages!) in-depth analysis of the performance improvements in .NET 7. one That was followed by articles dedicated to ASP.NET Core 7 and MAUI 7 performance gains. At .NETConf 2022, a particular slide caught everyone’s attention. ...