Monsters Weekly 241 - Reimagining Lemonade Stand

Here we’re going to dive in to the classic ‘Lemonade Stand’ game and reimagine it as a whole new adventure in our cloud-based (and VR-based) world. Have ideas to share? What could be done to this app to make it waaaaaaaay over the top?

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/MisterJames/LemonadeStand

Monsters Weekly 242 - Performance of .NET JSON Serialization

With the built in System.Text.Json serializer, serializing objects to and from JSON in .NET is FAST! However, the actual performance you get depends a bit on how you use it. Using DotNetBenchmark, we take a look at some different patterns that can be used for serializing an object to and from a file on disk.

Benchmarking in .NET: https://benchmarkdotnet.org/articles/overview.html
JSON Serialization: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/serialization/system-text-json-how-to?pivots=dotnet-6-0

Monsters Weekly 239 - Changing Storage Providers in Azure Durable Functions

When it comes to durable functions, there’s no magic as to where your progress is tracked! In fact, you can even configure it as you see fit. In this episode we’ll look at how and where the data is stored to back your orchestrations and talk about a few preview packages that allow you to configure the persistence yourself.

Monsters Weekly 238 - Improving Page Load Performance with Responsive Images

In this episode, we take our quest to improve page load performance to the next level by introducing responsive WebP images. Using responsive images, we can minimize the number of bytes downloaded to render images by specifying different images that are more appropriately sized for different sizes of screens. Let’s take our mobile lighthouse score from 66 to 100!

Previous Episode:
Optimizing Web Images with WebP - https://youtu.be/nx4UHooI-is

Useful Links:
https://12daysofweb.dev/2021/image-display-elements/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/picture
https://caniuse.com/?search=picture
https://caniuse.com/?search=webp

Monsters Weekly 237 - Optimizing Images with WebP

Images make up a substantial part of the bytes downloaded on the average web page. The WebP image format can make a huge difference in payload size. Let’s see how easy it is to improve page speed performance by introducing WebP images while still maintaining compatibility with older browsers with the picture element.

Useful Links:
https://12daysofweb.dev/2021/image-display-elements/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/picture
https://caniuse.com/?search=picture
https://caniuse.com/?search=webp

Monsters Weekly 236 - Interacting with Orchestrations in Azure Durable Functions

Once a Durable Function has started there are often times when you’ll need to access external resources, or intervene manually when the workflow hits a certain point.

In this episode we’ll talk about the first of several detours an orchestration can take, waiting on custom external events before progressing along to completion.

Monsters Weekly 235 - Programming Workflows with Azure Durable Functions

Here’s a quick primer on creating your first Durable Function in Azure Functions. We’ll have a quick look at the payload that is automatically returned in the sample project code, and start to dive into how to make it our own.

We’ll also do a quick peek to see how you might wire that up with a front end.

Monsters Weekly 233 - Getting started with .NET and Kafka

In the last video we looked at streams in Kafka. In this episode we jump into actually getting started using .NET to talk to Kafka.

Monsters Weekly 232 - PeriodicTimer in .NET 6

Why does .NET have 5 version of a Timer class? Because reasons… but don’t worry because .NET 6 adds a 6th version called PeriodTimer. Let’s take a look at the new PeriodTimer API and how it compares to the traditional System.Threading.Timer API.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.threading.periodictimer?view=net-6.0