Automating Santa's Workshop with NServiceBus

Hello, 👋

This is the last newsletter in 2024 as I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. And I’ll need them. There’s a few exciting things planned for the next year already.

Early in the year, I’m going to move the newsletter back to my home brewed email service provider. This will give me more control over the deliverability, the looks and it should improve my curation and publishing processes. In the end, the newsletter should be nicer and should reach your inbox reliably (it sounds simple, but it’s not easy).

Secondly, I’d like to focus on the content itself. Find new and interesting sources and cover the topics that you care about. .NET ecosystem is large so hit me up with the areas that you’d like to dive deeper into.

And lastly, I’d like to reach as many C# developers as possible. If you like the newsletter please share it with your (programmer) friends and colleagues. It’ll help a lot.

Automating Santa's Workshop with NServiceBus
9 minutes by Kyle McMaster

Kyle explores how Santa can automate his workshop using Event-Driven Architecture and NServiceBus. He demonstrates a complete pipeline that includes processing children's letters to Santa, checking the naughty-or-nice list, manufacturing presents by elves, loading Santa's sleigh, and delivering presents on Christmas Eve.

How and why to write mutation tests in C#
8 minutes by Daniel Ward

The article explains mutation testing in C#, focusing on the Stryker testing library. It demonstrates how mutation testing works by introducing small changes ("mutants") to code and checking if tests can detect these changes.

EF Core 9 vs. Dapper: Performance Face-Off
10 minutes by Vladan Petrovic

A detailed comparison of Dapper and Entity Framework Core 9's performance in common tasks like retrieving, inserting, and updating records. The tests reveal that EF Core has significantly improved, nearly matching Dapper's speed in many scenarios, though it generally uses more memory.

Understanding the Ambient Context Pattern in .NET
6 minutes by Cyril Canovas

This article provides a comprehensive guide on implementing the Ambient Context pattern in .NET Core. Cyril demonstrates its advanced implementations for distributed tracing, multi-tenant applications, and background job processing, along with best practices and integration patterns.

Implementing semantic search in .NET
8 minutes by Bruno Capuano

Bruno explains how to implement semantic search in .NET applications using Microsoft.Extensions.VectorData, demonstrating implementations with both Qdrant and Azure AI Search. He includes detailed setup instructions, code samples, and explanations for both local development with Qdrant and enterprise-scale deployment with Azure AI Search.

Thank you for your support in 2024. Have a lovely Christmas break and I’ll see you again on January 6.

Jakub