studio status report: 2025-06

month 06 of 2025 was about releasing the b-roll player API

Month 06 of 2025 was about releasing the b-roll player API in Microsoft Azure, solidifying the architectural practice of this Studio as this release features:

• the premiere use of Microsoft’s HttpTriggerAttribute.Route [🔗 GitHub ] attribute for endpoints which allows me to match routes already set up on the legacy Player API
• the premiere use of Microsoft’s keyed DI which is new to dotnet|.NET 8.0
• the keyed injection of Activities into Functions classes which formally define the ‘tree’ of inputs and outputs of the domain
• the premiere use of the new ‘boundary-crossing’ abstractions of this Studio (e.g. IApiEndpoint [🔗 GitHub ]) which still find quite revolutionary-but-not-at-all-glamorous at the moment (more detail is in last month’s report)
• the premiere use of IConfiguration as a form of input, causing the new Studio convention of *ShellActivity Activities which are concerned with reading command-line input

This API release allows me to make the claim I made over two months ago true: this Studio is in a ready state to focus on building for the front end. Two months ago my notes referenced this Pen: https://codepen.io/rasx/pen/raNbNwx This Pen represents the push toward replacing the old-ass Angular JS (and, yes, I mean Angular JS) home splash for kintespace.com with a splash based on eleventy. Ideally, more to come…

According to the Obsidian Graph View, only five days were spent on the b-roll player API:

This is down from the ‘epic’ 16 days used up last month which is understandable as the front end concerns emerge. Speaking of which, here are the NuGet packages released by this Studio for month 06:

• Songhay.Publications 8.0.3 [🔗 NuGet ]
• SonghayCore 8.0.2 [🔗 NuGet ]

These releases were needed to support the dependencies of the Player API.

The following selected notes should show a month of front-end awareness and maybe a little day-job concern:

.NET: “Announcing dotnet run app.cs – A simpler way to start with C# and .NET 10”

[!question] Is this is a replacement for C♯ scripting?

Until now, executing C# code using the dotnet CLI required a project structure that included a .csproj file. With this new capability, which we call file-based apps, you can run a standalone .cs file directly, much like you would with scripting languages such as Python or JavaScript.

This lowers the entry barrier to trying out C# and makes the language a much more attractive choice for learning, prototyping, or automation scenarios.

—“Announcing dotnet run app.cs – A simpler way to start with C# and .NET 10”

Microsoft introduces Drasi

Mark Russinovich introduces Drasi under “Project RADIUS” [📹 watch ]:

Inside Azure innovations with Mark Russinovich | BRK195

Drasi is a new data processing system that simplifies detecting critical events within complex infrastructures and taking immediate action tuned to business objectives. Developers and software architects can leverage its capabilities across event-driven scenarios, whether working on Internet of Things (IoT) integrations, enhancing security protocols, or managing sophisticated applications. The Microsoft Azure Incubations team is excited to announce that Drasi is now available as an open-source project. To learn more and get started with Drasi, visit drasi.io and the project’s GitHub repositories.

—“Drasi: Microsoft’s newest open-source project simplifies change detection and reaction in complex systems”

Drasi, the open-source Data Change Processing platform, is an exciting new option for building change-driven solutions easily. This article explores how Drasi’s unique capabilities—centered around clearly defined change semantics, the continuous query pattern, and the reaction pattern—provide a more efficient and effective alternative to traditional event-driven implementations. By codifying consistent patterns and reducing complexity, Drasi empowers solution architects and developers to build responsive systems faster with greater precision and less complexity, which makes them less brittle and easier to update as solution requirements change.

—“Optimizing Change-Driven Architectures with Drasi”

.NET: json-everything extension method #to-do

The IsEquivalentTo method [🔗 link ] is interesting and leads to questions like:

• does it use ToList for performance reasons or just out of habit?
• will it work with ToArray?
• can it be modified to record/store the location/values of the diff?

Publications: “Self-hosting your own media considered harmful”

So along that theme, I've re-uploaded the video to Internet Archive, free for anyone to download and view at their leisure.

…

Some in the fediverse ask why I'm not on Peertube. Here's the problem (and it's not insurmountable): right now, there's no easy path towards sustainable content production when the audience for the content is 100x smaller, and the number of patrons/sponsors remains proportionally the same.

—“Self-hosting your own media considered harmful”

Microsoft finally has an answer to Amazon Workspaces 😐

Microsoft Dev Box gives developers self-service access to ready-to-code cloud workstations called dev boxes. You can configure dev boxes with tools, source code, and prebuilt binaries that are specific to a project, so developers can immediately start work. You can create cloud development environments for your developer teams by using a customized image, or a preconfigured image from Azure Marketplace, complete with Visual Studio already installed.

If you're a developer, you can use multiple dev boxes in your day-to-day workflows. Access and manage your dev boxes through the developer portal.

Microsoft Dev Box bridges the gap between development teams and IT, by bringing control of project resources closer to the development team.

—“What is Microsoft Dev Box?”

Microsoft SQL Server: HierarchyId has been around since 2008 #day-job

The hierarchyid type was introduced with SQL Server 2008. This type is used to represent and manipulate hierarchical data. Hierarchical data contain the notion of parent/child but also the notion of order between elements having the same parent. Values ​​of this type are stored in a binary form, for example, 0x5AC0 or 0x58, but in practice, we use character strings of the type '/' for the root or '/1/' for a child of the root node…

—“SQL Server - Discovering the HierarchyId data type”

Assuming this HierarchyId thing takes off, I’ll need to move into Entity Framework: “EF Core SQL Server HierarchyID - Use HierarchyId”

Additional reading: “Using SQL Server HierarchyId with Entity Framework Core” 📖

Finance: tech layoffs from a change in tax law?

Section 174 of the Internal Revenue Code governs the tax treatment of research and development (R&D) expenditures. For roughly 70 years, American companies could deduct 100% of “qualified research and development spending” in the year they incurred the costs, and this was generally interpreted pretty liberally. Salaries, software, contractor payments… if it contributed to creating or improving a product, it could be deducted “off the top” of a firm’s taxable income. The deduction was originally codified by Section 174 of the IRS Code of 1954, and under the provision, R&D flourished in the U.S. It gave us the dominance of Bell Labs, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook - pretty much all the US technology booms you’ve lived through unless you’re quire venerable.

—“The Tech Job Meltdown”

Songhay Player (C♯): the thinnest ‘controllers’ ever 😐

The following seems so obvious now that it all comes together:

Here are some initial observations:

• my Activity concept makes a thin ‘controller’ (just two lines of code per endpoint)—and these Activities can also be used in other contexts like the command line (by calling these Activities shown above from a dedicated *ShellActivity class which knows how to read IConfiguration stuff)—or even something as old-fashioned as a Windows Service
• the ‘art form’ around building an Activity class is to not hide long-running operations in massive for loops which would make lowest-cost Azure Functions fall over under the hidden weight
• keyed services via DI is new to .NET 8.0, making this one of many things we had to wait for from Microsoft
• the fundamental use case for Azure Functions (not particularly celebrated by Microsoft these days) is as a direct (serverless) replacement for ASP.NET Web API
• I am sure David Fowler’s .NET Aspire would have made building this better(?)/faster(?) but, at the moment, I remain ignorant of the benefits (when I somehow have several “micro-services” to deal with instead of one Functions App, I will look forward to .NET Aspire)

Publications: “CSS Color Functions”

sRGB has been a standard color space for the web since 1996. However, it’s closer to how old computers represented color, rather than how humans understand it, so it had some problems like not being able to capture the full gamut of modern screens. Still, many modern applications and websites use sRGB, so even though it is the “old way” of doing things, it is still widely accepted and used today.

…

Björn Ottosson created this color space as an “OK” and even better version of the lab color space. It was created to solve the limitations of CIELAB and CIELAB color space like image processing in lab(), such as making an image grayscale, and perceptual uniformity. The two color functions in CSS that correspond to this color space are oklab() and oklch(). #to-do

—“CSS Color Functions”

Publications: my first sign of F♯ people daring to question React 😐⏰

Fastoch is a virtual DOM for Elmish with minimal dependencies.

…

Elmish is a great model to develop robust web applications in F#.

However, having a dependency on React has three main drawbacks:

• React does more than what is needed by Elmish, and is a bit heavy for the job.
• React must be added using npm as is it not a Fable component.
• React is developed by Facebook which is an awful company lead by a masculinist billionaire CEO.

—https://codeberg.org/thinkbeforecoding/Fastoch

Publications: “AI Photo Upscaling is Getting Worse! Gigapixel vs On1 PhotoRAW vs Luminar Neo”

One interesting point made in this video is that older machine-learning based up-scaling (e.g. in Photoshop) is better than the novel generative products:

AI Photo Upscaling is Getting Worse! Gigapixel vs On1 PhotoRAW vs Luminar Neo

Publications: my extensive work on thumbs is dead on Chromium 😐🧐 #to-do