Reading Notes #706

This week's collection highlights several practical upgrades for your workflow, ranging from cleaner C# patterns to more secure ways to manage AI agents. I’ve also included a few podcast episodes and articles that offer some much-needed perspective on productivity and community life.

AI

• Why AI Agents Need Isolation with Docker SBX (Karan Verma) - Power comes with responsibilities. It's well known (at least for Spider-Man fans), but more seriously, AI users have a simple way to stay safe. And now, with "the kits", it looks like it's even easier.

• Using AI to Build a Blazor App 1: Start With the Problem (Jon Hilton ) - It's so true that AI doesn't always do or act the way we expect. In this case, I wonder if a different model would have been better. In my experience, GPT is better at doing things compared to brainstorming.

Databases

• Fundamentals of Azure DevOps with SQL projects - Azure SQL Dev Corner (Drew Skwiers-Koballa) - This post provides all the details and pieces of config/ code required to get an Azure DevOps pipeline to work, no magic.

Programming

• Azure WAF - Never used yet Yarp, but nice to see a great example exists for when I will. Great solution.

• How to match names in C# without exact string comparisons (Nick Harrison) - Excellent post that shares many patterns and strategies (with code snippets) to optimize our research.

DevOps

• New: Versioned CLI and SDK Docs (Cam Soper) - That's a nice feature that more should implement! You pick your API version, and the documentation follows.

Podcasts

• Create a Happier Version of Yourself: Redirect Your Energy for Positive Thinking (The Mel Robbins Podcast) - I think this episode should be listened to by so many! It's a simple discussion between a son and mom, but so helpful for anyone.

• The space between the Commits with Zed and DeltaDB's Nathan Sobo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I was happy to listen to this episode with Nathan and learn more about his projects: Zed and DeltaDB.

• Azure Container Apps with Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis (.NET Rocks!) - Hmm, a very interesting usage of Azure Container Apps! I'll have to try that.

Miscellaneous

• 3 Tricks to Help You Stop Procrastinating (Suzanne Scacca ) - Need tips to improve your time management? This post is for you.

• Goodbye, forever, probably. (Salma) - Sad news for the communities, but at the same time, it's because of those same communities. This post shares a very sad portrait of the online world that affects many people.
  

~frank

Reading Notes #705

This week’s collection features a mix of critical .NET lifecycle updates and practical strategies for optimizing your database interactions. These selected articles offer helpful insights into everything from edge computing deployments to the evolving landscape of AI in modern workflows.

AI

• AI Raised the Bar (And Now We're All Tired) (Golnaz) - It's so true! So much can be done quickly today. An interesting question is: how do we avoid burning out resources and tokens? How, as human we stay smart? After all, life is a marathon, not a sprint!

Cloud

• How to Deploy Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) – Bringing Azure to the Edge (Thomas Maurer) - This post shares many information about what is possible to deploy on edge devices. It's not a how-to, however.

Databases

• EF Core LINQ Querying: Filtering, Projections, and Performance (Nick Cosentino) - This is a great post to quickly learn key principles and immediately improve the performance of our interactions with the database when using EF Core.

• EF Core vs Dapper in .NET: When to Use Each (Nick Cosentino) - Great post for developers or architects planning a future project. Both tools are great, so the decision factor depends on the context.

• Optimizing PostgreSQL on Azure directly in Visual Studio Code (Jesse Sullivan) - Interesting new tools in VS Code and Azure for PostgreSQL users. Curious to learn more about that Azure HorizonDB.

DevOps

• WSL container is now available for public preview (Craig Loewen) - This is great news; this will help improve deployment as now people can have an environmental test in WSL.

Programming

• Creating Dual Use Windows GUI and Console Applications (Rick Strahl) - I never thought about that complexity, and you would think that in 2026 it would be much simpler. Good to know!

• SkiaSharp 4.0 is here: announcing the first stable release - .NET Blog (Matthew Leibowitz) - Learn more about SkiaSharp that run under things like .NET MAUI and UNO platform. This new release should improve performance a lot.

• .NET 8 and .NET 9 will reach End of Support on November 10, 2026 - .NET Blog (Rahul Bhandari) - Time flies; it's good to have a reminder. This post includes a helpful timetable and references to help you migrate.

Miscellaneous

• Evaluating performance and efficiency of the GitHub Copilot agentic harness across models and tasks (Shibani Basava & Carlos Castro) - This is a nice post to learn a little about benchmarks.

~frank

Reading Notes #704

This week’s collection highlights practical ways to improve developer workflows, from faster test runs and more manageable pull requests to intuitive new AI integrations. I have gathered a few standout articles on Blazor components, Azure Functions updates, and the nuances of training coding agents for your specific stack.

Suggestion of the week

• Stop overloading your skills - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - The post ends with: "In many cases, models don’t need a textbook. They needed a cheat sheet." It's so true! And this post explains why and how to validate it.

Programming

• I built a little Claude that dances when it needs me (Jim Bennett) - I've been thinking about one of those notifications, and I really like what Jim did here. Have a look, it's way more useful than you think

• How to Filter a Blazor Table Control using .NET | ComponentOne (Ashwin Saxena) - Another Blazor component: ComponentOne. It's nice to have options.

Open Source

• How pull request limits are cutting down the noise (Camilla Moraes & Ashley Wolf) - This will help control the flow for many OSS projects. Hopefully, it will be seen positively by the communities.

DevOps

• Distributed Test Runs in the Aspire Community Toolkit | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - I didn't know all that was possible. This is a great post that shares the optimization iterations to make unit test runs take less time.

AI

• Azure Functions MCP Extension: What's New at Build 2026 (Lily Ma) - An easy win. Simple to write, fast and straightforward to deploy, and serverless.

• Intelligent Terminal 0.1.1 is here: bash support, new slash commands, and more customization (Hamza Usmani) - Finally! I know someone who has wanted this terminal for a very long time. It looks nice, I saw the demo at Build.

• When the model has never seen your code - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - A very interesting post, part of a series about how to make AI coding agents work correctly with your technology.

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

 ~frank