Over the last year or so of using Dotnet Aspire I’ve had a lot of successes, including getting other teams to also adopt Aspire within their solutions. When you stick to the well trodden path a lot of things just work, e.g.: Creating local instances of things like SQL Server and RabbitMQ Service discovery between projects (a bit of magic involved 🧙‍♂️) OpenTelemetry traces However, things start to get a bit more complicated when you want to veer off this well trodden path and start pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Programmable Voice as a Service (e.g. offered by the likes of Twilio and various competitors) has been around for a long time, it allow you as a developer to make/receive phone calls and then control them programmatically via an API. Azure Communication Services (ACS) is slightly newer to the picture compared to the likes of Twilio and others. As part of a project I’m working on at the moment, we need to make phone calls to a large cohort of people, ask them a series of questions and then process their responses.

Hello to C# Advent 2023 readers This post is part of C# Advent 2023 series, there’s loads of great content that’s worth checking out from a wide range of authors Azure Durable Entities have been around for a while, initially there was some good fan fare but it’s probably fair to say that there hasn’t been wide spread adoption of the technology. This could be because the virtual actor concept is unfamiliar to the traditional C# / Dotnet approach to solving software problems, or it could be that we don’t often find problem spaces that are best solved in this particular way.

My first edition of What I’m reading I don’t intend to become another aggregator of content but rather just want to use this a space to sporadically share the articles / blogs / podcasts I’ve found interesting lately. [article] Generating Mermaid Syntax Diagrams with AI-powered Amazon Bedrock. This was an interesting read that opened up yet another good use of generative AI (ChatGPT et all) in software development activities. [podcast] Key findings from the 2023 State of DevOps Report (Engineering Enablement Podcast).

Diagrams 🙄 are important pieces of documentation, but (some) are incredibly boring to put together. This is especially true as nowadays diagrams-as-code is the best practice - and I don’t disagree but it does mean having to go through the learn ➡ remember ➡ re-learn (repeat 🔁) loop of your syntax of choice. Take the sequence diagram, a classic that for some software projects is still a must have on the path to Production - particularly if you work with the NHS and need to complete a SCAL.

Last night on the The Changelog news postcast they mentioned PageFind a nifty library for adding search to static websites. The search provided out of the box from the theme I use for my blog was a bit average so I thought I’d have ago at integrating PageFind - there were a couple of gotchas that I needed to figure out. Adding the search page into the Hugo site This was the first gotcha I had to figure out, not being particularly well versed in the structure of Hugo, I spent a bit of time trying to figure out whether I needed to add a new layout to the theme I was using, this led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.