Reading Notes #330

Cloud

• Integrating ACI with other Azure services (Mark Heath) - Great post and source of tons of also good references.
• Securing an Azure App Service Website under SSL in minutes with Let's Encrypt (Scott Hanselman) - Really cool tutorial AND info about Free certification that you can automatically install... on Azure. Well it possible elsewhere, it's just not explained in this post.;)

Programming

• .NET Core 2.1 and AWS | Amazon Web Services (Norm Johanson) - AWS, containers, .Net Core all together to make your code sits where ever you like. Pretty useful.
• Effective bundling with ASP.NET MVC (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice post about the bundling process in our asp.net MVC application.
• New Updates for Azure Development in Visual Studio (Visual Studio Team) - Great update to the tooling that makes our life easier... Or at least that reduce (a lot) the pain when starting and deploying a project.
• Some tricks I learned recording & publishing an educational video every day for 30 days - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - I really liked that series and I learned tons of stuff while watching it about React of course but also about how to present technical tutorial and make them interesting to watch. Great work buddy!

Data

• Apply a Filter to a Slicer (Mike Carlo) - Sooooo useful. If you don't know how to do it (yet), just watch the video, you'll thanks me later.

Miscellaneous

• How to Become a Successful Technical Speaker (Daniela Petruzalek) - Interesting and motivating post about how to get prepared and how to learn.
• Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Blocking the Worst Passwords (Troy Hunt) - Incredibly Useful tool that helps us all to stay secure and also check if we are compromised.

Reading Notes #321

Suggestion of the week

• Creating an ASP.NET Core Markdown TagHelper and Parser (Rick Strahl) - Amazing post that shares a cool taghelper for our projects, and explains all steps to build it.

Cloud

• Beyond The Obvious With API Vision On Cognitive Services (Víctor Moreno ) - This post is a nice and details overview of the cognitive services.
• Deployment Pipelines For Versioned Azure Resource Manager Template Deployments ( Peter Groenewegen) - Great post that explains all the best practices to manage healthy ARM template.
• Differences between Azure Functions v1 and v2 in C# (Damien Guard) - Nice overview showing the differences in the code.
• Secure your backups, not just your data! (Aruna Somendra) - I do most of that already...but yeah not all of it. What's YOUR backup plan?

Programming

• Azure vs GCP part 15: Microservices (Kenichiro Nakamura) - Interesting post that compares two microservice platforms... A must.
• Converting a Ghost blog to a Progressive Web App (Dean Hume) - Very interesting post that explains every step in its conversion journey.
• How to deploy Angular application to GitHub (Dhananjay Kumar) - Nice post to get started with Angular and Angular CLI.
• Demystifying Serverless with Cecil Phillip (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting discussion about serverless or less server programming...

Databases

• The world of Automatic Tuning – SQL Server 2017 | All About SQL on WordPress.com (blobeater) - I was also surprised, but yes it's true the auto tunning really works.

Miscellaneous

• From Windows to the Cloud (Tim Sneath) - Wow! Well... Speechless, just read it.

Books

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (Daniel H. Pink)

A really amazing book packed of very interesting advice. Things that you kind of already knew, or at least had a feeling you maybe knew are clearly explained to you.

After reading (or listening) this book, you will know why, and you can decide to fight it or change the when... improve your performance and use your time and energy on something else.

ISBN: 0525589333

Reading Notes #285

Cloud

• 10 tips for enterprise integration with Logic Apps (Toon Vanhoutte) - Nice list of integration / LogicApps best practices.
• Azure Automation Graphical Editor from a Coder’s Perspective (Brian Christopher Harrison) - Pretty cool post that explains how someone with PowerShell base could use the designer interface in automation.
• Azure CLI Samples for Azure Cosmos DB - Just a quick reference to see what's available today.
• Azure Logic Apps - Retry Policy (Sriram Hariharan) - This post explains how to customize a key feature to build successful integration solution in cloud programming.
• Microsoft Cognitive Custom Vision Service .Net Core Angular 4 Application (Part One) - With all those code snippets and screen captures, this tutorial is extremely well detailed.
• How to Serve Serverless with Examples in Azure (Jeremy Likness) - Nice post that decorticates the serverless using Azure Functions as an example.
• Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit version 2.0 - Super, new version of the toolkit.
• Top 5 mistakes when people talk about Azure (Saverio Guardato) - Yep, same here.All true.

Programming

• How to reference a .NET Core library in WinForms - Or, .NET Standard Explained (Scott Hanselman) - Nice explanation, very clear.

Suggestion of the week

• Solve Node.js issues faster with Application Insights for Node.js (Josh Gavant) - Awesome post that shares a lots of very useful tips and guidance.

Miscellaneous

• 10 strategies for beating “programmer’s block” (Madison Moore) - Interesting top ten.

Reading Notes #244

Cloud

• Azure DevTest Labs: Set expiration date for a virtual machine - How could we have lived without that all that time... awesome
  
• Creating “Codeless” Swagger Connectors for Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan [MSFT]) - This post is a great tutorial about how to create an API App ready to be used by Azure Logic App (or anything else of course).
  
• Deploying an Angular 2 App to Azure with Github - Nice tutorial that leverage many frequently used tools, a popular framework and my favorite cloud platform.
  
• Logic Apps Reaches General Availability - This post is a great summary of the changes introduced by the last release aka GA.
  
• Microservices Cookbook: Design Principles and Solution Recipes for Microservices (Neil McEvoy) - Because something is done using a specific new tech that doen't automatically makes that thing better... Learn more about best practice and useful pattern.

Programming

• A .NET IDE for the iPad? - Exploring Continuous with Frank Krueger - Wow! That look just fantastic. I cannot try it since I'm not a "jThing" owner, but I really like the idea of such a powerful and useful tool on a tablet. Looking forward to see how that will go.

Miscellaneous

• GitKraken Pro git client teaming up with NightScout to support Open Source Diabetes software - Have you tried this awesome tool? I've been using it since the first private preview, and I love it. I really think it' s a must as git user interface
  
• Windows Insider Program.next() (Dona Sarkar) - The Windows 10 anniversary edition is out since August 2nd. This post is about the community who made that possible, and explains how you could join.

Reading Notes #174

Suggestion of the week

• How I Use Git On Windows – Setup and Tooling (Jesse) - Great post that gives a lot of little tips for Windows developers. A post to read.

Cloud

• Saving #Azure Resource Manager Templates to JSON files on disk (Alexandre Brisebois) - Useful post, learn how to manage your Azure resources.
  
• Configuring Internal Endpoints on #Azure Cloud Services (Alexandre Brisebois) - Quick post that explains how we can configure and deploy internal endpoint in our solution.
  
• Stories from the trenches: Sizing and penny pinching with Azure websites - Once again, a very interesting post on scaling and how the reality could differ for our expectation.
  
• Opening Windows Firewall Ports on #Azure Cloud Services - Great post that talks about how execute startup tasks in an Azure WebRole. At some point we will all need to do that, and this is the correct way.

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: A different take on ASP.NET MVC Forms with ChameleonForms (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting package that looks like a view engine, but that is, in fact, a kind of Razor forms booster.
  
• Using Bower with Visual Studio - Excellent tutorial to migrate projects package manager from nuget to bower. If you don't know bower, do a quick search on it first.
  
• Adding WinJS to your website (davidvoyles) - Nice tutorial to add different Javascript "tools" in our projects.
  
• Kanban split columns, inline adding and editing – Feb 18 - Great list of updates on VSOnline, good job!
  
• Why You Should Use Markdown for Your API Documentation - Nice post that talks about some useful tools when it comes to document our API.
  
• Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck (Scott Hanselman) - Another great post that will help to ask our self some better question when it's time to investigate so performance issue.

~Frank Boucher

Reading Notes #127

Suggestion of the week

• Source Control considered harmful - Excellent post! Don't stop at the first paragraphs, everything will be clear as you read through.

Cloud

• Stupid Azure Trick #3 – Create a Dev Virtual Machine in Windows Azure (Bill Wilder) - Very simple and efficient.
  
• Can I use Multiple Monitors with Remote Desktop (RDP)? Yes. Here’s how. (Bill Wilder) - How could I have missed that?!
  
• Gartner's 2014 MQ for PaaS: Organizing the Chaos - This post is sharing interesting though about the new PaaS Gardner's Quatran.
  
• Deploying TWO websites to Windows Azure from one Git Repository - This post explains a ninja trick with Azure Website and Git.
  
• Where’s Azure? Mapping Windows Azure 4 years after full General Availability. (Bill Wilder) - Interesting quick post that maps Azure today.
  
• WordPress 3.8 on Windows Azure Websites (Mark_BrownMS) - It's time to upgrade our blog on Azure website.
  
• Le Global Windows Azure Bootcamp à Montréal (Samedi 29 mars, 2014) - Time to reserved your place!
  
• Amazon is Still the Leader When it Comes to Cloud Pricing (Saroj Kar) - Good news for cloud user, the prices are going down...
  
• Brownfield Windows Azure Solutions & Hidden Treasures - Nice example of how a simple website could be optimized / become scalable in multi iteration so it doesn't affect negatively the user experience.
  
• Amazon Launches New Reporting Tools For EC2 (Frederic Lardinois) - Great new tools that help seeing stats of all kinds about resources and billing.

Programming

• For your convenience, please disable security warnings - This post explains why we soudln't turn-off security warning. It looks obvious, but ...
  
• Here’s how Bell was hacked – SQL injection blow-by-blow - About sql injection.
  
• Pro NuGet second edition is out - A book to add in your bookshelf (virtual or not)
  
• 10 Reasons Web Developers Should Learn Angular - Whatever it is because you need munitions to get Angular to be adopted at your work or because you what to know more about it, this excellent post is for you.
  
• Web Essentials 2013: Where is the TypeScript support? (Google+) - Important explanation for TypeScript user.

Databases

• Hadoop 2.0 – A Big Step For Big Data (Saroj Kar) - Nice post that introduces MapReduce v2 (MRv2) one the best new feature of Hadoop last release.

Integration

• Streaming Xml Transformations (Christos Karras) - Great tutorial that explains very clearly what are our solutions when we are in front of a complex XML transformation.

Miscellaneous

• Internet of Things or Thing on the Internet? - Interesting thoughts about today's and tomorrow's Internet.
  
• Fixed: The Synology NAS with Plex Server and mismatched version numbers - Nice catch. If you don't know Plex here to read about it.
  
• The Heart of Innovation: How to Prepare for Brainstorming - Nice post to help us to improve our meetingproductivity.