Tag: morning dew

Announcing Dew Submitter – Now Accepting Link and Feed Suggestions

I’m excited to announce Dew Submitter, a new web application that makes it easy for my readers to suggest links and RSS feeds for inclusion on The Morning Dew. Whether you’ve found a great article, discovered a new blog, or spotted a podcast episode worth sharing, you can now submit it directly through the web at submit.alvinashcraft.com.

For almost nineteen years, The Morning Dew has been curated entirely by me, which means I’ve had to personally find every link and manage every RSS feed. While I enjoy the work, I know there’s a ton of fantastic content out there that I might miss. Dew Submitter lets the community help. If you come across a blog post, tutorial, release announcement, or screencasts about .NET, Azure, AI, web development, or other tech topics that would be a good fit for my daily roundup, you can now suggest them instantly. Similarly, if you know of a great RSS feed covering software development topics, you can submit feed suggestions to help me discover new sources.

Dew Submitter is built as a Blazor WebAssembly app hosted on Azure Static Web Apps, with an Azure Functions API backend and Table Storage for data persistence. The submission form includes built-in spam protection, auto-detection of page titles and authors, and an admin panel where I can approve, reject, or process your submissions. Sorry, not every suggested link gets included – I still get the final say. I’ve also integrated NewsBlur support so approved RSS feeds can be added directly to my NewBlur list with a single click.

Thanks for continuing to support and read The Morning Dew. Now, head over to submit.alvinashcraft.com and help me discover more great content!

The Dew Submitter icon - featuring a dew drop, a chain link, and a document on a background similar to the classic Windows XP Bliss wallpaper.

Morning Dew Break Coming Up Next Week

The daily Dew Drop posts will be taking a break for about a week and a half. I’m taking some personal time off and unplugging after Friday. So, there will be no daily links from Monday, October 21st through Wednesday, October 30th.

I should be back on the 31st, but I won’t be including most of the blog posts that folks share in that time in-between. If there are any major announcements from Microsoft and other “companies of interest”, I’ll flag those to be included upon my return.

I’m also experimenting with migrating from WordPress to a static site, and I’d like to bring my 4800+ blog posts along with me. If you have any recommendations for static site generators that can build sites of that size without memory heap issues in JavaScript, give me a heads-up. My brief experimentation with Astro didn’t go well. See this GitHub issue for others running into a similar problem. I ran into the issue on Netlify, GitHub Actions, and when building the prod site locally (even with NODE_OPTIONS=–max_old_space_size=8192 set).

Thanks for continuing to follow the daily links on the Morning Dew. We’re coming up to 17 years of sharing links in early November. Cheers!

Farewell Microsoft MVP Program (and Thank You) – #mvpbuzz

I have been honored to be awarded as a Microsoft MVP eight times since 2009. The next award cycle begins on July 1st, and I have learned that I will not be among those re-awarded.

While it is disappointing to hear, as I have not changed my own level of engagement with the community, it is not completely unexpected. The Microsoft developer community is thriving today. There are more developers stepping up as community leaders than ever before. As they push the bar higher, the rest of us need to push ourselves as well.

My readers will not notice any changes to the Morning Dew based on this news, other than the MVP logo disappearing from my blog’s sidebar. I will continue to do what I do every day. You will see an increase in activity on my other blogs, WPF Tips and the newly launched UWP Tips. Be sure to check them out.

Also be sure to connect with me at TechBash 2017, the conference that several current and former MVPs (including me) started last year with TechBash 2016. We’re going to have a blast again at the Kalahari Resort in Pocono Manor, PA this fall. This non-profit developer conference has been our baby since mid-2015, taking many hours of our time every month to plan and host. It easily doubled my time working for the community over the last two years. Ping us (info@techbash.com) if you’re interested in helping out as well.

I would like to thank the MVP Award program for many great years of engagement. I am looking forward to joining MVP Reconnect and perhaps rejoining the ranks of the MVPs again someday. Thank you to Esther for being a great advocate for a number of years in the program. Thank you to Joe for reaching out personally to break the news and for doing it with class. And a huge thank you to everyone who already reached out on Twitter and Facebook when I announced the news this week.

EDIT: Adding a huge thanks to my family for supporting me over the years. My commitment to the Microsoft community has taken countless hours of my time. They have been hugely supportive of the time spent and travel required.

Congratulations to all of the soon to be announced new and returning MVPs! Keep doing great things and keep pushing the bar higher.

Alvin

 

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