Reading Notes #82

Suggestion of the week

• Chasing an active Social Engineering Fraud at Amazon Kindle (Scott Hanselman) - Scary story... If you own a Kindle, you must read this post.
• Choosing between SQL Server in Windows Azure VM & Windows Azure SQL Database (Madhan Arumugam Ramakrishnan) - Great post to make your mind of the differences between the various scenarios and the pros and cons of each of them.

Cloud

• Three New AWS Reference Architectures for E-Commerce - Quick access to three good architectures using different AWS components.
• Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Common Questions (Narahari Dogiparthi) - Significant source of information important to know before planning to use IaaS.

This blog post summarizes the best practices to be used to protect Windows Azure Virtual Machines.

• All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels) - Good references on AWS Elastic Transcoder in video, perfect to make you a better idea of the beast.
• Windows Azure Powershell 0.6.10 is out and check out $DebugPreference feature to get Request and Response on PS console (Avkash Chauhan) - Great news! It's fantastic to see how active the Azure / PowerShell teams are.
• Windows Azure Guest OS Updates (Abhishek Anand) - Reference to stay updated on guest OS.
• Episode 100 - Introduction to the Windows Azure Service Bus Notification Hubs (Channel 9) - A lot of fun in this 100th show. Of course, it's not only about jokes since they are also doing a demo of Azure Service Bus Notification Hubs.

Integration

• How to Create your First SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Package - Part 1 (Md. Marufuzzaman) - For people who don't know SSIS, this is the perfect get started tutorial.
• BizTalk360 Windows 8 application is available in the app store (Saravana Kumar) - This great post announces not only the release of version 2 of BizTalk360 and it presence in Windows Store, but also describes most of its features.

Programming

• Unfortunate Things with JSON, jQuery UI Datepicker, and Dates - Because we all one day or another play with date and DatePicker, it's good to read what other have done.
• TFS, Automated Testing and Continuous Integration (Hamada Shather) - Interesting tutorial that explains how to use TFS as a test framework.
• PowerShell Remoting – The Double Hop Problem And A Solution - This post explains a solution to a problem when running remote PowerShell script using Credds.
• Elegant Code » It’s Markdown, no, PowerShell. Wait its Markdown formatted PowerShell. (Jason Jarrett) - Nice mix of Markdown and PowerShell.
• Update to VS Git tooling - Stay updated on Visual Studio add-ons.
• Responsive web design – Convertir rapidement un site web en une version mobile (lorys pognon) - Simple tutorial that shows how to use "less" (the language) to produce a Responsive We Design.
• Gérer les dépendances de vos librairies JavaScript avec Bower (Thierry LAU) - Great node.js tool that can simplify the JavaScript library management.
• jQuery Object Quacks like an Array Duck (Elijah Manor) - Interesting sharing about jQuery "inner code."
• Working with SqlBulkCopy - Nice async functionality in C# 5 and other great features of SqlBulkCopy class.
• Behind the scenes of PowerShell and SQL (Rob Farley) - Very interesting post that shows how PowerShell use SQL.
• Is Big Data the New Black Gold? (Arvind Singh) - Interesting thoughts about the value of Big Data and its future.

Miscellaneous

• Copy as path instead of a send to program - Cool tips. I didn't know that one.
• Markdown - I'm playing around for 2-3 weeks now with Markdown, and I thought of sharing this for those who like me, didn't know about it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #41

Cloud

• Single-Tenant Vs Multi-Tenant SaaS Invoicing Models (David) - Describe both single and multi-tenant architecture and explain the real power of the multi-tenant in the cloud.
• Quantifying and Avoiding Risk on the Windows Azure platform (Richard S. Parker) - Great post that identifies different types of risk and help to understand each of them. It’s also explained how you should manage the risk by not being dependant of Microsoft SLA.
• HTML5, CSS and Browser Compatibility (David Pallmann) - Second of a series, this post describes the HTML structure of the main page.
• Microsoft Research and Windows Azure Partner to Influence Discovery and Sharing (Himanshu Singh) - Nice post that introduces three projects of Partners have done in Windows Azure.
• Microsoft offers free cloud backup beta for Windows Server "8" (Sean Gallagher) - Great idea. I hope this service could be used by the other windows version.
• Transactional Messaging in the Windows Azure Service Bus - Really nice post that explains how could works a resequencer, why one could be needed and how to test it.
• Windows Azure Dev Fabric (Rodrigo De Castro) - Good tips using a ip:port mapper tool to access remotely to a compute emulator.
• Protecting Your Data in SQL Azure: New Best Practices Documentation Now Available (Gregory Leake) - Well best practices are always welcome, a must.
• Cloud Tip #5-Secure your settings in Web.config with Encryption (mbenkov) - Nice quick tip! Add a little more security to your config file.
• Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Update (GregoryLeake) - This is a great news! not being able to update sync group was REALLY painful... Otherwise Azure Data Sync is a great application.
• How We're Using Amazon Web Services - Moustach.io is sharing their experience of the cloud by showing how they use the AWS. Nice true story.
• Exploring Cloud Architecture - A really nice recap of different architectures in the cloud. Putting them in context with cost efficiency.

[…]cost efficiency doesn’t equate to cheap or even free. You can determine the cost to be efficient when the equation can’t be changed to reduce cost without also reducing the services or functionality—meaning[…]

• 4 Cloud Computing Pain Points That Still Hurt - Interesting post. Contain other post references and important cloud facts.
• Why (or Why Not) to Migrate to the Cloud - Great post that hi-light the pros and cons of the cloud migration.
• Migrating an on-premise database from SQL Server to SQL Azure using SSIS (zafarx) - Really well done tutorial using SSIS instead of the other tools to migrate a database to SQL Azure. By doing it that way you have the possibility do more with your schemas before moving them.
• Getting Acquainted with NoSQL on Windows Azure (Bruce Kyle) - A real good post. It compares different noSQL databases and explains how they work. A lot of other good posts and tutorials are also referred. Definitely perfect to get started.
• Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Update (Gregory Leake) - This is a great news. Not being able to edit the sync group in my previous projects was really painful. I can’t wait to try the new version...
• Announcing New Datacenter Options for Windows Azure (Cameron Rogers) - Always good to have more and more options. Maybe, some day one will be in Canada. We have a good temperature and plenty of water...
• An Up-Close Examination of the Microsoft RDP Vulnerability (Guest Author) - Important RDP vulnerability was fixed in the March patch. Since in Azure the remote is disables by default and that some firewall rules protect some connections, if you use Azure you are now safe and probably you were never really in danger. But if you are using an image on AWS you probably should apply you Windows Updates...

Programming

• Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0 - Garbage collector is not the more glamour feature, but it's nice to go under the hood and see that some innovation are going on. Very well explain.

Miscellaneous

• I'm Sure It Will Only Take You A Few Days To Code - Interesting, I didn't think our usual or natural sensor to estimate the complexity of something cannot be use when it comes to estimate software... but it makes senses!
• What geeks need to tell our parents about shopping online safely and securely (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post. read this post than go talk to your parent, uncle, brothers and sisters all those people that call you when they did nothing but the PC doesn't works anymore... ;)

[…]HTTPS (SSL) doesn't mean "I can trust this site," it means "this conversation is private." You still might be having a private conversation with Satan. - Scott Hanselman Trust[…]