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James Newton-King ♔

@james.newtonking.com
1.2K followers 34 following 155 posts

Principal Software Engineer ASP.NET. Author of Newtonsoft.Json.

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Reposted by James Newton-King ♔
OpenTelemetry @opentelemetry.io · 14/05/2026
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...
opentelemetry.io
Inside the LLM Call: GenAI Observability with OpenTelemetry
Your AI agent just took 45 seconds to answer a simple question. Was it the model? A slow tool call? A retry loop? Every time an application calls an LLM, a chain of model calls, tool invocations, and…
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 29/01/2026
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
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 16/01/2026
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)
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 03/01/2026
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.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 24/12/2025
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...
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/12/2025
Aspire 13.1 new dashboard features, day 8: The Aspire dashboard MCP is wrapped by the CLI MCP: aspire.dev/get-started/... ✨ This fixes dashboard MCP limitations: - NodeJS hates self-signed certs - Endpoint and API key aren't constant - Unavailable unless the dashboard is running
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/12/2025
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 ⛵️
Screenshot of the structured logs page with the Gen AI button displayed.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/12/2025
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...
Screenshot of the GenAI visualizer with video content.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 16/12/2025
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.
Screenshot of the open resource details menu.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 14/12/2025
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)
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 13/12/2025
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 🙃
Screenshot of the dashboard showing the last time a health check ran.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 12/12/2025
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 🧹
Screenshot of the resources page with the parameters tab selected.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 11/12/2025
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.
Screenshot of the Gen AI visualizer with tool definitons displayed.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 12/11/2025
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
Screenshot of Aspire MCP dialog
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 11/11/2025
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 🚀
Screenshot of the Azure provisioning dialog.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 10/11/2025
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.
Resource graph with language specific resource icons.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 09/11/2025
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!
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 08/11/2025
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 🤓
Color preview web page
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 07/11/2025
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. 💬✨
Screenshot of tooltip displaying multiple lines.
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Reposted by James Newton-King ♔
Aspire 💫 @aspire.dev · 27/10/2025
.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 🎃
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 27/09/2025
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)
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 25/09/2025
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 🔗
Trace detail page showing destination resource in details.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 24/09/2025
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.
Traces page with an error trace.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 23/09/2025
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.
Screenshot of the console logs page with (All) selected.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 22/09/2025
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...
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 22/09/2025
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.
Traces page with a type selected.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 21/09/2025
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.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 20/09/2025
Aspire 9.5 new dashboard features, day 4: The trace detail page adds new "Expand all" and "Collapse all" buttons.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/09/2025
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
Color preview web page
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/09/2025
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.
Screenshot of resource details icons.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 18/09/2025
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 🚨
Screenshot of old text alignment in details view
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/09/2025
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...
github.com
Release 13.0.4 · JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json
New feature - Annotated for trim/AOT (in)compatibility New feature - Added support for using Index with JArray Change - Avoid LINQ expression trees in .NET 6+ reflection Fix - Fixed handling of emp...
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 17/09/2025
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
Screenshot of trace detail page showing new resource column and log entries UI.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 21/08/2025
Many new metrics are coming in #aspnetcore .NET 10.
List of new metrics
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 19/08/2025
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
Console logs page with (All) selected.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 29/07/2025
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 lets you clone and run again.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 28/07/2025
Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 8: The Aspire dashboard now supports .NET 10. The dashboard runs on whatever .NET version is installed on your machine, so it must stay backward (and forward) compatible with all Aspire targets: .NET 8, .NET 9, and now .NET 10 previews 🔥
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 27/07/2025
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 📝
Screenshot of resources page showing an argument with spaces.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 27/07/2025
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.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 25/07/2025
Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 5: The console logs page now lets you toggle log line wrapping on or off 🪵
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 25/07/2025
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
Screenshot of trace detail showing improvements.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 23/07/2025
Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 3: We've fixed many race conditions and thread safety bugs ⏱️💥 These issues were rare (1 in 1000 chance of modifying data or clicking a button at just the wrong time, etc), but the dashboard has a lot of users. They add up at scale.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 23/07/2025
Aspire 9.4 new dashboard features, day 2: The dashboard now shows an update notification when a newer version of Aspire is available 📢
Dashboard screenshot displaying an update notification.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 22/07/2025
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/...
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 16/07/2025
GitHub Copilot understood the screenshot in my comment, interpreted the emoji and made a good fix. Color me impressed.
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 15/07/2025
Dependency injection is the worst way of architecting a large-scale code base, except for all the others. www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/com...
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 10/07/2025
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...
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Reposted by James Newton-King ♔
.NET @dot.net · 01/07/2025
#ASPNET Community Standup happens TODAY at 4PM PT. Join us for a behind-the-scenes look with James Newton-King on how the .NET Aspire team builds the .NET Aspire Developer Dashboard with .NET, AI, and Blazor. Drop in LIVE here ➡️ msft.it/63329SI1o3 #dotNETAspire
spot art.
Photo of presenter(s).
text reads: ASP.NET Community Standup - Behind the Scenes: Building the .NET Aspire Dashboard
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 26/06/2025
When you live in Singapore and you see HMS Prince of Wales is visiting: 😬 www.youtube.com/shorts/tvM9D...
youtube.com
UK aircraft carrier docks at Marina Bay Cruise Centre
YouTube video by The Straits Times
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James Newton-King ♔ @james.newtonking.com · 20/06/2025
Hold on to your butts, Aspire vNext has some 🔥 new features.
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