I’ll be away for a week, and the Dew Drop will return on April 23rd or 24th.
Top Links
- Why MAUI Blazor Hybrid (Rocky Lhotka)
- Introducing the New Angular SpeechToText Component (Kirupa karan Raj Kumar)
- .NET Aspire and Databases with Jerry Nixon – Azure & DevOps Podcast Episode #345 (Jeffrey Palermo)
- Introducing GPT-4.1 in the API (OpenAI Team)
- Announcing the GPT-4.1 model series for Azure AI Foundry developers (Steve Sweetman)
- GitHub Actions now supports Windows on Arm runners for all public repos (Marcus Perryman)
Web & Cloud Development
- Next Level CSS Styling for Cursors (Declan Chidlow)
- Building a Chat Interface with KendoReact and AI—Part 2 (Hassan Djirdeh)
- Azure CLI Breaking Change Pre-Announcement (ychenu)
- OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect: The Professional Guide (Andrea Chiarelli)
- Data mapping to FHIR: What you need to know before starting (Mat Osmanski)
- Migrating from EKS to AKS: What Actually Matters (Robby Millsap)
Visual Studio & .NET
- Who can cancel Carmen Sandiego? (Oren Eini)
- LLBLGen Pro New features in v5.12 (LLBLGen Team)
- Merging Multiple Records with First-Page Headers and Footers (Bjoern Meyer)
AI
- Trending Model Context Protocol for AI Agents Gets C# SDK (David Ramel)
- Mistral OCR – Get markdown from PDF with C# (Marco Minerva)
- Calling MCP Servers in C# with Microsoft.Extensions.AI (Mark Heath)
- Expanding the Llama 4 Herd: New Models Now Available on Azure AI Foundry (Naomi Moneypenny)
- Build an AI Assistant with LangGraph, Vercel, and Next.js: Use Gmail as a Tool Securely (Deepu K. Sasidharan)
- Enable Local MCP Servers To Access Entra ID Accounts (Den Delimarsky)
- How AI will change software engineering (Holly Cummins)
- MCP vs. A2A: Friends or Foes? (Aurimas Griciūnas)
- Microsoft AI CEO: ‘It’s Smarter to Be 6 Months Behind’ — Here’s Why (Aminu Abdullahi)
- MCP, Easy as 1-2-3? (Austin Parker)
- GitHub Copilot Agent Tool calling -Safe by default (Bart Wullems)
- A Structured Approach to Selecting AI Models for Business-Critical Applications (Eleanor Berger)
- How ML.NET is used in real life (Fiodar Sazanavets)
- PayPal Releases Agentic Toolkit to Accelerate Commerce (PayPal Tech Blog Team)
- An Open Source Pioneer Wants to Unleash Open Source AI Robots (Will Knight)
- Like self-driving cars, fully AI-automated sysadmins don’t exist (Scott McCarty)
- AI Agents: Planning and Orchestration with the Planning Design Pattern – Part 7 (Shivam Goyal)
- Week 2 . Microsoft Agents Hack Online Events and Readiness Resources (Lee Stott)
Design, Methodology & Testing
- Signing NuGet Packages Using Azure DevOps and Workload Identity Federation (Aaron Stannard)
- 3 Reasons .NET Developers Still Struggle with Unit Testing (And How to Fix It) (Eli Lopian)
- Step-by-Step Guide to Digitally Signing WiX Installer Packages (Renato Ivanescu)
- Handle cancellation in tests with xUnit.net v3 (Anthony Simmon)
- Test Features, Not APIs (Gil Zilberfeld)
- Effective Application Design for Reliable Software Solutions (Akash Kilaru)
- GitHub for Beginners: Security best practices with GitHub Copilot (Kedasha Kerr)
- How to Handle a Talented, Yet Quirky, IT Team Member (John Edwards)
Mobile, IoT & Game Development
- Raspberry Pi CM5 IoT In C – Setting Up the CM5 (Harry Fairhead)
- The Subjective Charms of Objective-C (Gabriel Nicholas)
- How to Recreate A Minecraft Movie in Your Minecraft Game (Joe Skrebels)
Screencasts & Videos
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Power User Tips (Microsoft Mechanics)
- 🔴 Visual Studio 2022 v17.14 – Preview 3 Release Party 🎉 (Visual Studio Team)
- Extending Visual Studio – Adding a Command | Visual Studio Toolbox (Leslie Richardson & Etienne Baudoux)
- .NET 10 Preview 3 – CLI Upgrades: Local SDK Installs, Shell Completion, Interactive Mode, & More (.NET Team)
Podcasts
- Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast – Skipping the Vision, How Not to Introduce Kanban To An Agile Organization | Richard (Vasco Duarte)
- Talk Python to Me #501 – Marimo – Reactive Notebooks for Python (Michael Kennedy)
- SQL Server Radio Episode #174 – Is SQL Server quality in decline? Or is it just friction? (Guy Glantser & Eitan Blumin)
- The PowerShell Podcast – The PowerShell Podcast Summit 2025 – Missy, Leslie, & Hailey (James Petty)
- The Changelog News Podcast #140 – Google’s new protocol has AI agents talkin’ (Jerod Santo)
- Azure Cloud Talk 25/04/14 – Certifications Keep Changing (Alec Harrison & Brian Gorman)
- Google Cloud Security Podcast Episode #219 – Beyond the Buzzwords: Decoding Cyber Risk and Threat Actors in Asia Pacific (Anton A. Chuvakin)
- Building 50 Apps in 50 Days: The Power of Boring Stacks with Kelvin – JavaScript Jabber Episode #673 (Charles Max Wood)
- Grammar Girl Podcast – Better paragraph breaks. The story behind ‘mad money’ and ‘pin money.’ Bruce bad. (Edwin L. Battistella, Mignon Fogarty & Karen Lunde)
- The Stack Overflow Podcast – How AI can prevent clinician burnout (Eira May)
- Python Bytes Podcast #428 – How old is your Python? (Michael Kennedy & Brian Okken)
- The Breakpoint Show Episode #038 – Jibber Jabber! (Khalid Abuhakmeh, Maarten Balliauw & Chris Woodruff)
- Betatalks, the Podcast #106 – Where AI and Software Engineering Meet: Breaking the Black Box – Megan Bloemsma (Rick & Oscar)
- Defense Unicorns Podcast – Why DIU Ruined Wayne Starr in the Best Way (Robert Slaughter, Michaela Flatau, Rebecca Lively & Luke Shabro)
- Syntax Podcast #893 – Everyone Is Talking About MCP (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski)
- Practical AI Podcast Episode #309 – Orchestrating agents, APIs, and MCP servers (Pavel Veller & Daniel Whitenack)
Community & Events
- Journey through Git’s 20-year history (Patrick Steinhardt)
Database
- SSIS Download, Install and Configure (Daniel Calbimonte)
- Introducing Region Selection in Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer for NoSQL Accounts (Meredith Moore & Craig)
SharePoint, M365 & MS Teams
- Copilot Agents with SharePoint Agents (Jaspreet Dhamija)
- Leading the Way with Copilot: April 2025 (Julie Morris)
- Introducing Preview mode in SharePoint Pages and News (Katelyn Helms)
- Only 6 months until Office 2016/2019 end of support – are you ready? (Tania Shepard)
- Feature deep dive: Using PDFs in OneDrive and our journey thus far (Belle Podeanu)
- Get the most out of OneNote with these little-known features (Gokul Subramaniam)
PowerShell
Miscellaneous
- Releasing Windows 10 Build 19045.5794 to the Release Preview Channel and Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22635.5235 (Beta Channel) (Amanda Langowski & Brandon LeBlanc)
- Variables in Rust: Let Me Be Immutable (Chris Woodruff)
- The 800-pound gorilla (Johnny Rodgers)
- Dubious security vulnerability: Once I have tricked the user into running a malicious shortcut, I can install malware (Raymond Chen)
- Correct perspective then measure! (Joe Finney)
More Link Collections
- Interesting links of the week 2025-16 (Michael Eaton)
- Sands of MAUI: Issue #183 (Sam Basu)
- Things That Caught My Attention Last Week – April 14 (Peter Ritchie)
- AWS Weekly Review: Amazon S3 Express One Zone price cuts, Pixtral Large on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Nova Sonic, and more (April 14, 2025) (Elizabeth Fuentes)
- Daily Reading List – April 14, 2025 (#532) (Richard Seroter)
The Geek Shelf
Parallel Programming and Concurrency with C# and .NET (Alvin Ashcraft)