Dew Drop – February 5, 2025 (#4355)

Top Links

• Microsoft’s Build developer conference starts on May 19th (Tom Warren)
• Technology & Friends Episode #839 – Alvin Ashcraft on Microsoft Learn (David Giard)
• What Is DeepSeek? Dive in Using DeepSeek, .NET Aspire and Blazor (Dave Brock)
• How to Protect Word Documents in C#: Step-by-Step Guide (Mohanaselvam Jothi)
• Introducing Azure OpenAI Realtime API Support in JavaScript (Deyaaeldeen Almahallawi)
• Your fonts are now preserved when changing theme in Visual Studio (Mark Downie)

Web & Cloud Development

• Which render mode is my component using? (Jon Hilton)
• ASP.NET Core on .NET Framework servicing release advisory: ASP.NET Core 2.3 (Daniel Roth)
• Tutorial: publishing ESM-based npm packages with TypeScript (Axel Rauschmayer)
• D2: like Mermaid, but better. Syntax, installation, and practical usage tips (Davide Bellone)
• Maintenance release: Blazorise 1.7.4 (Mladen Macanović)
• What’s new in Svelte: February 2025 (Dani Sandoval)
• Generating Barcodes with KendoReact (Hassan Djirdeh)
• Visualizing 2024 US Stock Market Growth and Challenges with React Bar Chart (Swetha Babu)
• How to Make The Fluffiest Grass With Three.js (The Ebenezer)
• Request for feedback: Incoming call notifications API for web apps (Patrick Brosset)
• January 2025: A look at the latest Microsoft Entra key feature releases, announcements, and updates (James Casey)

WinUI, .NET MAUI & XAML

• Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways (David Ramel)

Visual Studio & .NET

• Visual Studio 2022 v17.13 Preview 5 release notes (Microsoft Learn)
• Vogen and Value Objects with C# and .NET (Khalid Abuhakmeh)
• Supporting multiple .NET SDK versions in a source generator: Creating a source generator – Part 14 (Andrew Lock)

AI

• Using Azure OpenAI Chat Completion with data source and Function Calling (Dmytro Struk)
• A Developer’s Guide to Azure AI Agents (Janakiram MSV)
• Fine Tune Mistral Models on Azure AI Foundry (Rashaud Savage)
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) (Martin Fowler)
• Postman Launches AI Agent Builder (Kay Ewbank)
• Prompt Engineering for OpenAI’s O1 and O3-mini Reasoning Models (Agustin Mantaras)
• Explore and test local modals using Ollama and OpenWebUI (Bart Wullems)
• AI privacy controls (John Moehrke)
• Hugging Face researchers aim to build an ‘open’ version of OpenAI’s deep research tool (Kyle Wiggers)
• Google Lifts a Ban on Using Its AI for Weapons and Surveillance (Paresh Dave & Caroline Haskins)
• OpenAI rebrands itself (Emma Roth)

Design, Methodology & Testing

• How to harmonize Agile sprints with product roadmaps (Amanda Rueda)
• Full web support for conditional access policies across Azure DevOps and partner web properties (Angel Wong)
• Gain control over commit messages generated by GitHub Copilot (Tim Deschryver)
• 5 Levels of Listening According to Stephen Covey and Empathic Listening is the Highest Form of Listening (JD Meier)
• The End of Programming as We Know It (Tim O’Reilly)
• From pain to productivity: How I learned to code with my voice (Salma Alam-Naylor)
• Resisting Coercion and Conformity Demands a Conscious Design: Here’s How to Get Started (Kim Scott)

Mobile, IoT & Game Development

• Flutter DataGrid: How to Group Data Easily (Farjana Parveen)
• Setting Up for Pi Pico Development (2025) (j2inet)

Screencasts & Videos

• Leveraging Copilot Studio to Create Powerful Web Focused Bots for Designated Roles (Microsoft Healthcare and Life Team)
• Creating Postman Flows with AI (Postman Team)
• Mr. Maeda’s Cozy AI Kitchen – AI & Exploration, with Corey Jaskolski (John Maeda)

Podcasts

• Duke’s Corner Podcast – Venkat Subramaniam: Be Agile about Being Agile! (Jim Grisanzio)
• RunAs Radio Episode #970 – Microsoft Entra ID Protection with Corissa Koopmans (Richard Campbell)
• Software Engineering Radio #654 – Chris Patterson on MassTransit and Event-Driven Systems (Jeff Doolittle)

Community & Events

• CfP List Updated 2025-02-04 (Dave Aronson)
• Threads now lets you share your custom feeds (Emma Roth)
• Interview: Bill Gates on his early years, key influences, and outlook on the world today (Todd Bishop)
• Dinner and a Show: Where to Eat Near Philly Theaters (Visit Philly)

Database

• The 6 Best Things Microsoft Ever Did to SQL Server (Brent Ozar)
• Reduce NULL Storage in SQL Server with Sparse Columns (Dashrath Hapani)
• Indexing SQL Server Queries For Performance: Indexed Views And Non-SARGable Predicates (Erik Darling)
• How to Learn SQL Without Quitting Your Day Job (Tracy McKibben)
• Databricks Workspace Health SQL Toolkit (Noa Shavit)
• Add New Columns Versus New Table in SQL Server (Jared Westover)
• T-SQL Tuesday #183 Invite: Tracking Permissions (Steve Jones)
• SQL Coalesce Function Examples and Use Cases (Rajendra Gupta)

SharePoint, M365 & MS Teams

• The new calendar in Microsoft Teams now generally available (Meera Ajam)
• Keeping Up with Microsoft Loop (Margaret Farmer)
• Get Started with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel (Michael Gannotti)

Current Events

• Here’s a PDF Version of the CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism and ‘Things Are Going to Get Intense:’ How a Musk Ally Plans to Push AI on the Government (Jason Koebler)
• [Opinion] In a trade war with a madman, hold fast, hit hard and imitate the hedgehog (Andrew Coyne)
• Elon Deletes Free Tax Program And His Fans Are Baffled – What did they think would happen? (God)
• USPS Halts All Packages From China, Sending the Ecommerce Industry Into Chaos (Zeyi Yang)

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Apple Invites, a new app that brings people together (Apple)
• Pinball Restoration Revival (Erin Winick Anthony)
• The original name for Flexible Single Master Operations in Active Directory (Raymond Chen)

More Link Collections

• Daily Reading List – February 4, 2025 (#486) (Richard Seroter)

The Geek Shelf

 Parallel Programming and Concurrency with C# 10 and .NET 6: A modern approach to building faster, more responsive, and asynchronous .NET applications using C# (Alvin Ashcraft)