James Newton-King ♔

Your AI agent just took 45 seconds to answer a simple question. Was it the model? A slow tool call? A retry loop? #OpenTelemetry is making it easier to find the answers with semantic conventions for generative AI. Learn more in today's post! opentelemetry.io/blog/2026/ge...

1999 install shiny new NVIDIA TNT2 windows 98 boots first try (miracle) launch Quake III Arena demo hardware acceleration ON fps go brrrr install Winamp it really whips the llama's ass queue up Prodigy.mp3 alt-tab between frags and vibes future has arrived

Upgrading a 10-year-old website with AI 🤖 🚀 .NET Framework → .NET 10 🌐 ASP.NET MVC → ASP.NET Core 🗄️ Entity Framework 6 → EF Core 10 🎨 Bootstrap 3 → Bootstrap 5 ⚡ Sync → Async 💎 KnockoutJS → KnockoutJS (perfection doesn't change)

Vibe-migrated my blog as a holiday project: james.newtonking.com/archive/2026... 🎄 I made a console app to scrape HTML and output Markdown. It's 1500 lines of AI slop, one file, full of indecipherable regex. Basically a programming war crime ☠️ But it did its job and now I'll throw it away.

Some OTEL #aspnetcore improvements before Christmas 🎄 📊 Set OTEL HTTP semantic convention attributes in #aspnetcore hosting github.com/dotnet/aspne... 🛣️ Transform static route parameters. For example, {controller}/{action}/{id?} → Products/Get/{id?} github.com/dotnet/aspne...

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 7: Small QoL improvement: when logs are associated with a Gen AI span, a button to open the visualizer is shown ✨ No need to jump to the traces page, making the Gen AI visualizer easier to discover ⛵️

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 6: The Gen AI visualizer now supports audio and video previews. Listen to or view media being analyzed by AI, as well as AI-generated content 📽️ This feature is powered by HTML's <audio> and <video> elements: developer.mozilla.org/docs/Learn_w...

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 5: Resource details buttons have moved into a menu. This makes them consistent with other detail controls and lets us include a text description for each action.

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 4: Bug fixes! 🐞 🌐 Status code middleware no longer interfers with API calls 💫 Interaction service can open a dialog when the dashboard is first loaded 🤡 Trace detail page doesn't error when a span duration is 24+ days (2^32 ms)

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 3: Resource health checks now show when they last ran ❤️‍🩹 This change removes uncertainty when viewing the dashboard: Yes, your resource is still broken, and no, Aspire hasn't stopped checking it 🙃

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 2: We've added a dedicated Parameters tab to the Resources page to keep things tidy for apps with lots of parameters 🧹

Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 1: Aspire's Gen AI Visualizer adds a UI for tool definitions. You can now view detailed information about tools included in an AI request.

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 6: Introducing the Aspire MCP server. Integrate Aspire into your dev AI eco-system. 🚀 Observe resources (health status, endpoints, etc) 🪄 Debug with real-time console logs 📊 Investigate dev-time telemetry ⚙️ Execute resource commands

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 5: The interaction service just got a major upgrade ⚡ 💫 Dropdowns can now accept text — in other words, ComboBox inputs. 🔄 Supports dynamic data loading for cascading dropdowns. See it in action in the Azure provisioning dialog 🚀

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 4: Aspire is going polyglot with strong support for JavaScript ☕ and Python 🐍 apps. The dashboard features new programming language resource icons.

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 3: Big perf gains when displaying traces with thousands of spans: 📂 Don’t refetch trace if it hasn’t changed 🔍 Use dictionary lookups to turn O(n) → O(1) 🧠 Cache calculations Large traces (10k+ spans) now update in sub-second time!

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 2: New dashboard accent colors. 🎨 They're now more FluentUI-ish (saturation++) with custom tweaks for light and dark themes. Dark blue is no longer almost invisible on a dark background 🤓

Aspire 13 new dashboard features, day 1: The log entry tooltip now adjusts its size dynamically! It stays compact for short messages and expands to show multiple lines when the message is longer. 💬✨

.NET Aspire ❌ Aspire ✅🤌🏼 we're officially rebranding - starting with our shiny new website, aspire.dev 💫 join us for a special edition #AspiriFriday to wrap up the week and celebrate with the team! see you there 🎃

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 10: Introducing the Gen AI Visualizer ✨ Collate and summarize AI telemetry: 🗃️ Explore input and output messages 🚀 JSON/XML payloads highlighted and indented 🖼️ Preview Markdown and multimodal content (e.g. images)

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 9: Span details now show the destination of a span 📍 For database calls, HTTP requests, or RPC calls, Aspire matches the target address to a resource and displays it as a clickable link 🔗

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 8: Traces with errors are now highlighted 🚨 This brings the traces page in line with how error logs are displayed.

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 7: The console logs page now has an (All) option. As you’d expect, it lets you view logs from all resources at once.

Lots of people using Aspire ❤️ I also learned: 🐧 App host doesn't run on Linux (it does) 🔒 Aspire creates lock in (confidently stated after saying they haven't tried Aspire) 🐴 Not only has Aspire not left preview, it will never leave preview www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/com...

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 6: Traces pages now have a type filter 🔎 - a quick way to find traces and spans for the selected operation type. For example, choose Messaging 📬 to see only traces from your app that interact with RabbitMQ.

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 5: The dashboard selects the best duration unit based on its length: Long → seconds (s) Short → milliseconds (ms) Very short → microseconds (μs) In 9.5 you'll see seconds more often, with microseconds shown only to avoid 0.00ms.

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 4: The trace detail page adds new "Expand all" and "Collapse all" buttons.

Fun AI use: Updating the accent colors in the Aspire dashboard to be more Fluent design-ish. AI tasks: 🎨 Tweak the existing color scheme to follow Fluent 🌃 Output light are dark optimized colors 🌐 Generate HTML page to preview

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 3: Details controls for resources, logs, and spans got a facelift. Now with icons 🎨 and links 🔗 where they're useful.

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 2: Consistent text alignment comes to resource, log and span details 🤓 Screenshow below is what it looks like today... 🚨 OCD trigger warning 🚨

I released a new version of Newtonsoft.Json (13.0.4). It's mostly bug fixes and minor improvements. Notably trim/AOT incompatible APIs are annotated. You'll get a clear warning that serialize/deserialize isn't supported in trimmed/AOT published apps. github.com/JamesNK/Newt...

Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 1: The trace detail page gets some quality-of-life improvements: 🏷️ Span names are clearer, with resources split into their own column 🪵 Logs are now shown in the waterfall chart. Hover for a tooltip, or click for full details

Many new metrics are coming in #aspnetcore .NET 10.

The Aspire team is cooking up a new (All) option for the console logs page. Want everything at once? (All) gives you all resource logs in one view 🚀 #dotnet #aspire

Aspire 9.4 is out. 🛠️ Aspire CLI is generally available 🖥️ Interaction service 📢 Parameter prompting 🔔 Automatic upgrade check notifications 🌐 External service modeling ✨ YARP routing API 🐳 Improved persistent containers And much much more: learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspir...

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 7: A common bug with command-line arguments is passing a single argument with spaces when multiple are expected 💥 The dashboard now adds quotation marks around arguments containing spaces for clarity 📝

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 6: Resources with a connection string (databases 🗄️, caches 🧠, message brokers 📬, etc.) now display the connection string in the dashboard.

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 5: The console logs page now lets you toggle log line wrapping on or off 🪵

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 4: The trace detail page gets some quality-of-life improvements: 📊 The name column is wider to show more detail ℹ️ Header trace details now collapse to prevent wrapping

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 2: The dashboard now shows an update notification when a newer version of Aspire is available 📢

Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 1: The reconnect dialog got an upgrade: 🎨 Improved look in light and dark themes 🔄 More reliable, thanks to Blazor improvements More details here: learn.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/...

GitHub Copilot understood the screenshot in my comment, interpreted the emoji and made a good fix. Color me impressed.

Dependency injection is the worst way of architecting a large-scale code base, except for all the others. www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/com...

Merged new #aspnetcore features today 🎈🎉🎂 📊 Identity metrics: track counts of logins, new users, password changes, etc. github.com/dotnet/aspne... ⚠️ Configuration to suppress exception handler diagnostics (e.g. logging) when the exception is handled. github.com/dotnet/aspne...