Reading Notes #575

Happy Thanksgiving to all Canadian🍁! 

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• New experiences designed to make every developer more productive on Windows 11 (Mike Harsh) - Damn! I'm very tented to go right away and reinstall Windows on my dev PC, it looks so great.

Programming

• Get Started with the Microcks Docker Extension for API Mocking and Testing (Ajeet Singh Raina, Yacine Kheddache, Hugo Guerrero) - This looks like an amazing and simple to use tool to test all our API.How doesn't need it.

• Windows Subsystem for Linux September 2023 update (Craig Loewen) - Wow! So many new improvement. Its time for an update which one will it be for you WSL -update or -pre-release update ?

• New Azure DevOps scopes now available for Microsoft Identity OAuth delegated flow apps - Azure DevOps Blog (Angel Wong) - Security is the job of everyone , right? Nice update for Azure DevOps.

• Hugo + VSCode + Docker = ❤️ (Aaryn Smith) - After an upgrade of Hugo or the theme, one of my site wasn't being generated anymore. Happy to to find a that devContainer, I will be able to investigate quickly.

Open Source

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.19 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Cool updates! I love that right-click web search! You know... when there is an error it will be so much efficient! An that was a community contribution! Fantastic!

• Unlocking DevOps Magic: Dive into the Azure Kubernetes Service Wonderland in Visual Studio Code! (Japhlet Nwamu, Tatsat Mishra) - Great tools that really simplify the life of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). It was the topic of an episode of open at Microsoft.

Podcasts

• Introducing TypeChat with Anders Hejlsberg (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - It's the second time I hear about TypeChat, remember Reading Notes #565, it seams extremely interesting.
• How to rally support for your big idea (Modern Mentor) - Listening to winning strategies to make sure our biggest ideas have good start... It's always a good idea.
• Community and Empowerment with Sharmadean Reid (A Bit of Optimism) - See ideas and challenges as a way to learn more, to learn maybe something different, to climb higher as Simon says, love it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #400

Cloud

• 10 user experience updates to the Azure portal | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Leon Welicki) - I'm very pleased with this portal update. Seriously I spent the last two weeks doing tons of demo and all those improvements... Wonderful!

• Improving observability of your Kubernetes deployments with Azure Monitor for containers | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Keiko Harada) - Great post about monitoring within Kubernetes.

Programming

• Cool WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) tips and tricks you (or I) didn't know were possible (Scott Hanselman) - Tons of awesome tips with WSL.

• ASP.NET Core updates in .NET Core 3.1 Preview 3 (Sourabh) - Preview 3... The final version is coming pretty soon!

• Getting feedback from EntityFramework Core through diagnostics (Dominique St-Amand) - This is a great tutorial that explains how to use the Application Insight SDK with EF.

• Trying out Visual Studio Online - Using the cloud to manage and compile your code is amazing (Scott Hanselman) - VSOnline is so cool! I personally just briefly tried it (busy with Ignite and Ignite The Tour) but it was working great. Looking forward to testing the VSCode extension...

~

Reading Notes #371

Cloud

• How to query Azure resources using the Azure CLI (Neil Peterson) - Nice post that gives a few tips and tricks about how to query Azure resources with Az.
• Setting up Jenkins X on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (Chee Chan) - A very simple tutorial that explains how to install and get started with JenkinsX with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

Programming

• Using npm's ls command for Fun and Insight (Tierney Cyren) - A useful discovery about a node.js command and how to use it in our different environments.
• Intro to web programming in Rust for NodeJS developers (Bastian Gruber) - Jump aboard this new promising series to learn Rust...

Miscellaneous

• How do You Structure Your Code When Moving Your API from Express to Serverless Functions? (John Papa) - When structured the code is always better. A nice post that explains just that with serverless.

Reading Notes #367

Suggestion of the week

• Eight things your existing ASP.NET apps should get for “free” from a good platform (Richard Seroter) - If you have a solution that runs on-premises, this is why you should at lest consider doing a lift & shift... Seriously, this post is a must.

Cloud

• Accessing Azure Key Vault using Managed Service Identity Logic Apps (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - An awesome tutorial that hit two targets with one demo.
• Migrating Azure Functions from v1 (.NET) to v2 (Jeremy Likness) - A great story and an migration walkthrough. It's most likely that by following these steps we can only be successful with our migration.
• Announcing launch of Azure Pipelines app for Slack (Atin Bansal) - Great integration on a tool that so many of us used.
• Update to Azure DevOps Projects support for Azure Kubernetes Service | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Atul Malaviya) - It's now easier to use these two great tools together.

Programming

• Everything You Need for Coding with Node and Cosmos DB in 60 Seconds-ish (John Papa) - Get started quickly. Excellent tips.
• Introducing the Cake.VsCode.Recipe Package (Gary Ewan Park) - Great set of tools to help us build awesome VSCode extension.
• Introducing draft pull requests (Luke) - That look like a very useful feature! Looking forward to try it.
• Keep Calm, and Keep Coding with Cosmos and Node.js (John Papa) - An excellent first-time tutorial.

Miscellaneous

• Exploring nopCommerce - open source e-commerce shopping cart platform in .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - This open source project looks very interesting.
• Applied AI in Software Development (Afsana Atar) - This post is an excellent overview of whats AI at ten thousand feet in the air. Perfect if you are not a data scientist and would like to learn more about that trend.
• My Twitch Live Coding Setup (Suz Hinton) - A great post from Suz (aka Noopkat) a long time technical streamer, who his both very smart and generous. Definitely, a post to read.
• Using the Basic Process Template in Azure DevOps to make support management easier (Matteo Emili) - I love it. Start simple to learn fast. Then if you need it, grow, but smartly.

Reading Notes #344

Suggestion of the week

• Understanding the Difference Between CI and CD (Kostis Kapelonis) - Fantastic post that explains very clearly the meaning of CI, CD and how could be doing that.

Cloud

• AKS with Kubenet vs Azure Networking plug-in (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - An interesting post that shares some subtilities of the AKS network features and introduces tools.
• How to get started with Azure and .NET (Andrew B Hall) - Nice post that lists the pieces of Azure with a short description.
• Introduction to Azure Durable Functions (Maxime Rouiller) - This is a great post that explains what are durable functions and shows a simple case to gives context.
• Moving an Azure SQL Database across Resource Groups (blobeater) - Why it should be more complex. This post shows a simple it is to move a database in Azure.
• Serverless to the Max: Doing Big Things for Small Dollars with Cloudflare Workers and Azure Functions (Troy Hunt) - True story and big saving... Awesome.

Programming

• Always Be Closing...Pull Requests (Scott Hanselman) - So true, and yet so common.
• Are Containers Replacing Virtual Machines? - Docker Blog (Jenny Fong) - It's definitely a legit question. What do you think?
• Container Catharsis with Laura Frank Tacho (Scott Hanselman, Laura Frank Tacho) - A very Inveresting episode that will put a smile in your face.
• Inside Linux on Windows with WSL and Tara Raj (Scott Hanselman, Tara Raj) - WSL is haft the time the terminal I open these days. It's nice to learn more about it.

Books

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (Patrick Lencioni) - I really enjoyed this book. The fact the first the material was passed as a story adds a lot of perspective and to our comprehension. In the last chapter the author return to the theories and gives more details. I completely devour that book; I'm looking forward to reading more.

Miscellaneous

• paddling.com (Wayne Horodowich) - I could not agree more.
• Image optimisation and galleries in Ghost (Kym Ellis) - This new version 2.0 is really packed with tons of great features.
• When you want that job, tell them your story - Microsoft Life (Toyinaminia 'Toy' Norwood) - Of course it's a story that works best... Learn a lite why in this post.
• 1575 Coding on Twitch with Jeff Fritz (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, Jeff Fritz) - Yep developers are also on twitch and they rock. We learn how it all started in this episode.

~Enjoy

Reading Notes #311

Suggestion of the week

• 4 Common Datetime Mistakes in C# — And How to Avoid Them (Carlos Schults) - This post is a must to all C# (and you know what?! All developers), because we all need to use dates at one point in our code and script...

Cloud

• Create Precompiled Azure Functions With Azure Event Grid Triggers (Jason Roberts) - A nice quick tutorial that shows how to plug the Azure Functions with the new Event Grid.
• Microsoft releases new time series data developer tools for Azure (Anirban Ghoshal) - It looks pretty neat and it is certainly easy to deploy. Looking forward to trying it.
• Setting up a managed container cluster with AKS and Kubernetes in the Azure Cloud running .NET Core in minutes (Scott Hanselman) - Not that long ago I would never guess that Building and deploying a cluster could be that easy... If you got 30mins it's a demo to try.
• The moment I came to play with .NET Standard 2.0… (Dominique St-Amand) - In this interesting post, the author shares with us all the gotchas and lessons learned developing his project.

Programming

• Styling Social Media Icon Lists in CSS (Mark Heath) - Yeah right, we can read CSS and probably hack some stuff... But it's excellent to learn how to do simple things the good way. And this post shows exactly that.

Data

• Microsoft Deep Drive Track at the Data and BI Summit April 22-26 (Charles Sterling) - Wow, it looks packed with so much great content!
• Power BI Desktop January Feature Summary (Amanda Cofsky) - It looks like some team did not take a lot of time-off during the Holidays... So many great new functionalities; it's a fantastic way to start the year.

Miscellaneous

• Long Distance Relationships, or How to Manage a Remote Team (Natallia Brych ) - Remote working is not for every situation nor everybody. This post will help you to get started on the topic.
• Why Consider a Website Redesign – Tips and Recommendations (Daniel Schwarz) - Good post, food for thought.