Issue: 2026 - May/June

Channeling Douglas Adams' "DON'T PANIC," Mike argues for a rational, grounded approach to AI adoption—cutting through clickbait hysteria to focus on practical applications. AI is transforming work but remains limited and imperfect; human contributions aren't obsolete, and progress is best met with cautious optimism.

Sahil demonstrates how AI tools like Gemini CLI are transforming software development workflows—dramatically boosting productivity across scaffolding, debugging, UI design, and documentation. Using a JWT decoder app as a hands-on example, he shows how AI delivers professional-grade results in a fraction of the time, and why he believes AI will redefine rather than eliminate software engineering roles.

Wei-Meng builds MCP servers and clients from scratch using Python—covering Anthropic's ready-made Filesystem and Memory servers, two custom servers for live weather and public holiday lookups, and a fully functional MCP client that uses a local Ollama model to intelligently route natural language queries to the right tool.

Sonu Kapoor demonstrates how Angular's signal-based architecture simplifies form design by shifting focus from event orchestration to state modeling. Signals streamline validation, cross-field dependencies, and async logic—offering a cleaner, more maintainable approach to forms in modern Angular apps.

Joydip Kanjilal walks through building and deploying a cloud-native distributed application using .NET Aspire—covering orchestration, service discovery, observability, and Azure deployment. Using a shopping cart microservice as a practical example, Joydip demonstrates how .NET Aspire's code-first approach simplifies microservices development with Visual Studio, EF Core, and the Azure Developer CLI.

Alex examines the urgent threat quantum computing poses to RSA, elliptic curve, and symmetric encryption—and why the clock is already ticking. Using Shor's and Grover's algorithms as a framework, the article makes the case for transitioning to quantum-resistant cryptography before Q-Day renders both current and historical encrypted data vulnerable.

Mike Yeager traces the evolution of .NET AI development—from early generative AI experiments through Semantic Kernel to the new Agent Framework (Microsoft.Agents.AI). With hands-on code examples, the article demonstrates how Microsoft.Extensions.AI and Agent Framework simplify agent integration, tool use, and workflows, making them the go-to stack for building flexible, future-proof AI applications in .NET.