You don't need to install MySQL to use it. With Docker Desktop, one small compose.yaml file runs the official MySQL 9.7 image with its data stored safely in a volume, and one command starts it. This guide builds that file line by line, starts MySQL for the first time, and shows exactly what to look for in the output.

A password typed into compose.yaml ends up in Git, and then in every copy of the repository. Docker Compose can read passwords from a separate .env file instead, and with one small piece of syntax it refuses to start when they're missing. This guide sets that up for a MySQL container, with the real output of every check.

The passwords people make up are easy to guess. The ones a computer picks at random aren't. One command in your terminal generates a long, cryptographically random password made only of letters and digits, which is safe to paste into connection strings, .env files and YAML. This guide shows it for macOS, Linux and Windows.

A .NET C# project fills up with files that should never be committed: build output in bin and obj, editor settings, and secrets such as .env. The .NET SDK ships a ready-made .gitignore that covers all of them, and one command adds it to your project. This guide adds it, shows what it ignores, and proves a file is really ignored.

Git keeps a history of every change you make to a project, so you can see what changed, when, and go back if something breaks. Three commands turn any folder into a Git repository with its first saved snapshot: git init, git add and git commit. This guide runs them on a real project and shows every line of output.

I changed four lines of a .NET project file, and Git reported 32. The ASP.NET Core Web API template creates its files with Windows line endings (CRLF), even on a Mac, while the dotnet commands that later edit a file save it with LF. To Git, every line of such a file looked different. One .gitattributes file, as Git's own documentation describes, stores every text file with LF and ends the noise.

The first build of a brand-new .NET 10 Web API failed with error CA1852 on the template's own WeatherForecast record. The solution turns on Microsoft's recommended code-quality rules and treats warnings as errors, and one of those rules asks for types like this one to be sealed. Adding that one word fixes it.

dotnet restore said Restore succeeded, with one warning: Unable to find a project to restore!. Nothing had been restored. I had run it in a folder whose solution file didn't list any projects yet, so that's what it restored: nothing. Pointing it at the project, or adding the project to the solution first, fixes it.

I created an ASP.NET Core Web API project inside a .NET 10 solution that manages package versions centrally, and the template's own restore failed with error NU1008. The template writes a package version into the project file, which central package management doesn't allow. Moving that one version to Directory.Packages.props fixes it.

I ran SHOW PROCESSLIST in MySQL 9.7 to see who was connected, and the result ended with 1 warning. SHOW WARNINGS named it: Warning 1287, the old implementation behind SHOW PROCESSLIST is deprecated. Querying the Performance Schema's processlist table directly gives the same list, without the warning.