My list of projects and technologies to get into the lab for learning and experimentation is never-ending. However, this holiday gave me just enough time to take another look at Microsoft Orleans, a technological kindred spirit with wasmCloud.
Engineering @ Cosmonic
.NET: Are we WebAssembly Yet?
With the recent release of the .NET Framework 7, I thought it might be a good excuse to check back in on the .NET WebAssembly ecosystem and see where things stand and what improvements have been made.

Compatible With, but Not Dependent Upon - WebAssembly and Kubernetes
From the beginning of our days developing wasmCloud, we took a stance to be compatible with today's technology without being dependent on it. So, wasmCloud needed to be able to:
- Run inside or outside of a container
- Run inside of Kubernetes or another orchestrator and run without it
- Run on Linux, but also support Mac and Windows (and not just WSL)
- Etc

Why WebAssembly Belongs Outside the Browser
Here at Cosmonic, we believe that WebAssembly is the future. In talking to developers we found that many people still have questions about why WebAssembly would be useful for them. We partnered with our friends at Suborbital and Fermyon to write a blog post answering why we think WebAssembly is so compelling. Check out the blog post on Wasm Builders!
Write the Right Code
There is a special kind of pride that comes from the exhaustion at the end of a hard day's work. Whether we spend our days laying bricks, pouring concrete, mowing lawns, cooking hamburgers, or smashing rocks; our exhaustion is proof that we've done work. The well-earned rest after all that work feels good.
What if our goal wasn't just to smash rocks, but instead to find some tiny nugget of value inside just a small fraction of the rocks? With that goal in mind, does it still make sense to spend our days smashing every rock we see with a hammer, or is there a better, more focused approach?

Running your UI on wasmCloud
One of the things we've run into as we've worked with customers and developed our own examples at
Cosmonic is the need to serve UIs that are consuming services you are running inside of wasmCloud.
Our own examples required you to either run the UI using npm
or to run a docker image. This felt
less than ideal and didn't fit with our vision of WebAssembly being the future of distributed
computing.
We just released a new version of the petclinic example that demonstrates how you can bundle up a UI for your application into a single actor. Now when you start the full petclinic example, the API and UI are served from the same place

We Love Web Assembly (outside the browser)
Hybrid meetup hosted by Stuart Harris, co-founder, Red Badger on Wed., March 2, part of a series called “Wheel of Tech”
Guest presenters from Cosmonic included Brooks Townsend, lead software engineer, and Taylor Thomas, engineering director. Also presenting was Kostya Babanakov, enterprise solutions engineer, SingleStore UK and EMEA.
This event focused on why the use of WebAssembly server-side represents a major revolution in platform design as we move beyond the cloud as a destination. Coupled with products like wasmCloud and NATS, WebAssembly is creating a whole new paradigm for cloud native and eliminating entire classes of problems in the process.

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