Reading Notes #626

Kick off your week with this curated list of must-read tech articles. From .NET modernisation patterns and new C# 13 LINQ methods to open-source contributions and thought-provoking reads, there's plenty to explore. 

Enjoy!

Programming

• Microsoft Introduces Modern Web App Pattern for .NET: Accelerating App Modernization to the Cloud (Almir Vuk) - This is a nice post that overviews pattern that Microsoft suggest to use.

• New LINQ methods in C# 13: Index, CountBy, AggregateBy (Tim Deschryver) - Simple and efficient post that shows new command coming up in C#13.

• The Legacy Coder's Guide to .NET Conf 2024 (DeeDee Walsh) - .Net Conf is coming up and how doesn't like some suggestions about wish sessions? This will be a great event for new and experienced developers.

• .NET Upgrade Assistant Now Supports Upgrading to Centralized Package Mangement (McKenna Barlow) - Cool tool that become even better I just wish you had an option to run it from let's say Linux

Open-Source

• .NET MAUI Welcomes Syncfusion Open-source Contributions (David Ortinau) - This is a really exciting news! Very happy to see a great company like Syncfusion investing in Open source like this.

Miscellaneous

• Why Don’t You Fucking Retire Already? (James Whittaker) - Food for thoughts no doubt. It's still a delight to read you sir Whittaker.

• Microsoft Tech Community: Upgrade complete (Allie Thompson) - It was time. I didn't dig too much and looking forward to experience the new features as a writer but also as a reader.

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.

If you have interesting content, share it!

~ Frank

Reading Notes #591

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

• Make demo typing easy with DemoType in ZoomIt v8.0 (John Stephens) - This is such a game changer! Of course live demo are the best but losing precious secondes because of a typo is a real nightmare.

Cloud

• Planning for Resiliency with Azure OpenAI (Matthew Anderson) - Like everything else in the cloud we need to think about resiliency. This nice post get us started and explains 2 different architectures for our system.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - February 2024 Release (Grace Kulin) - Cool feature now supported in this new release with helm support for kubernetes and many other features.

Programming

• The Difference Between RESTful APIs and Web APIs Using ASP.NET Core (Januarius Njoku) - A very complete post about APIs their definition and differences.

• Scaling Docker Compose Up (Milas Bowman) - Interesting post that do a deep dive into docker compose file.

• Our Vision for .NET 9 - .NET Blog (.NET Team) - Inspiring plan for the future release of .Net.

• My Top 10 NEW Visual Studio Features of 2023 for .NET Developers - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - I don't code everyday and when I do it's on all kind of device and OS so I end up more often using VS Code. But, when I can use Visual Studio it's always a treat. In this post, James shares his favorite new features part of that great IDE. Those are only the recent ones, there are so much more!

• Scaling Docker Compose Up (Milas Bowman) - Interesting post that do a deep dive into docker compose file.

• 8 ways to set the URLs for an ASP.NET Core app (Andrew Lock) - What!? So many different ways to assign the url.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #570

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!

 

Programming

• .NET MAUI Summer Coding Adventure (Bruno Capuano) - Nice a series to be quickly but surely started with MAUI.

• Beyond the Basics: .NET MAUI Extension in Visual Studio Code (Leomaris Reyes) - That pretty interesting! Looking forward to test that on my Linux machine. Instead of booting my VM I could use this for a quit fix or test/demo.

Open Source

• Windows Terminal on Open at Microsoft (Christopher Nguyen) - Like many a love the new windows terminal, and learning more about the making of and the challenges they encounter was really interesting. Learn more about all that series of video in this post.

• slash7 with Amy Hoy » Blog Archive » Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide (Amy Hoy) - Beware of those vampires! Interning read on a unfortunately real and serious topic. Useful post.

Low Code

• Power Automate Standards: Flow Architecture & Design Tips ( Matthew Devaney) - Very useful post that lost so many best practices to make sure our flow are secure, performant and easy to read.

• Announcing the integration of Power Automate telemetry data with Azure Application Insights (Rakesh Krishnan) - This is so useful! And once more the timing was excellent! Collecting information to a central place and from there take action.Brilliant!

• Get Started with Copilot on Microsoft Power Apps (Rachel Irabor) - Here are the steps to get Copilot in your environment. Very cool.

Miscellaneous

• Unleash Your Entrepreneurial Spirit at Hack Together: Power Platform AI Global Hack! (Lee Stott) - Learn more about this cool opportunity.

• OpenAI tokens and limits - Surface Duo Blog (Craig Dunn) - Great post that uses a real application to explains how we can get the best without going over the limits.

~Enjoy!

Reading Notes #564

Monday! It is time to share my reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

 

Cloud

• How To: Remote Debug a Deployed Azure Function using Visual Studio 2022 (Jamie Maguire) - Because sometimes the only solution is to debug live from the cloud. It's great that it's possible.

• Enabling Azure Application Insights for an App Service (David Giard) - It's one of those tools it's right there and you didn't know you couldn't live without until you try it and you get all that information.

DevOps

• Modifying Docker images during Kubernetes deployments (Matthew Casperson) - This is a very detailed tutorial that helps and explains clearly each step of that deployment pipeline.

Programming

• Tech Notes: Quick hacks on GitHub Pages (Evan Martin) - Nice git tricks.

• Debugging distributed systems is hard! (Dennis Frühauff) - This is a very nice post that explains clearly a situation. How many of us have been in this situation before where you try to debug a system and it's just so hard?

• Healthcare and Life Sciences Blog (Kyle Raymond) - This is a cool tutorial/ example that explains what is and how to use semantic Kernel.

Data

• Speeding up Queries with Materialized Views (Derek Comartin) - Great post that will inspire us on how to get the best performance for our databases.

~Frank

Reading Notes #563

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!

Cloud

• Using WSL and Let's Encrypt to create Azure App Service SSL Wildcard Certificates (Scott Hanselman ) - A nice step-by-step tutorial. And after this, you will have a very useful script.

• Deploy your Blazor app to Azure now for free! (Dennis Frühauff) - This is a simple easy-to-follow tutorial to deploy your Static web app in the cloud.

Programming

• API Architectural Styles: REST vs. SOAP vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC | Postman Blog (Bruno Pedro) - Selecting the best architecture for our needs that a scary decision. This post explains the different architecture and shares a real-life story and tools to help decide.

• Creating a VS Code editor extension (Tim Heuer) - The journey of a dev building an extension for Visual Studio Code.A very interesting post.

Open Source

• Build an Open Source Project: Behind the Scenes (Alexey Yuzhakov) - This post shares a story of a real-life open source project. It's about putting in the effort and doing the extra work to make our project more useful and accessible.

Low Code

• Power Apps Dynamic Forms - Generate Forms From A Questions List (Matthew Devaney) - A tutorial that shows how to build a very useful form using code. But once you build it you can reuse it at many places.

• Power Apps Code Review Tool (Mehdi Slaoui Andaloussi) - That's a really cool tool! I need to test it now!

Podcast

• Podman In Action: Desktop, Machine, and more (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - The perfect episode to get started with Podman. Very interesting.

• Building Apps using OpenAI with Mark Miller (.NET Rocks!) - So much energy in this episode and great topics.

~Frank

Reading Notes #562

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!

Cloud

• Getting Started with API Management: A Beginner's Guide for Developers (Neha Hafeez) - This a very interesting post that explains why and how those tools are useful for us.

Programming

• Top 14 Game-Changing Websites Every Developer Should Know About 🚀🔥 (Arjun Vijay Prakash) - An interesting list indeed of website-tool.

• Comparing MVVM and MVUX for building a Multi-Platform Application using .NET, C# and XAML with the Uno Platform (Nick) - A detailed comparison of those two models with Uno platform.

Open Source

• How to write a perfect README for your GitHub project (Marc Seitz) - This is a nice and simple guide to make sure your readme help visitor to land well on your project.

• 5 Ways OpenTelemetry Can Reduce Costs (Morgan McLean) - Great tools from the open-source community to help save money.

• Open at Microsoft – OmniBOR (Aeva Black) - Did you know there is a tool that can help you see the security flaws or your dependencies? Learn more about this project in this post and video.

• Dapr (AugustaUd) - Learn more about Dapr with this series of 3 videos that each contains short demos. With a very active community, there is no dough that OSS project is healthy.

Low Code

• How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot (Zachary Cavanell) - Learn more about the best practices and how to prepare your enterprise.

Miscellaneous

• Building Your DevRel Resume with Open Source (BekahHW) - A different journey for each of us for the best devRel teams.

• Accountability for Effective Teams (Jessica Joy Kerr) - Interesting thoughts. Measuring and staying trustful is so hard.

~Frank

Reading Notes #485

It's Monday,

time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Announcing the Azure Identity 2.0 client library and plugin packages for JavaScript (Will) - Very nice update for the SDK that will be used with popular tools.

• General Availability of Azure Functions OpenAPI Extension (Justin Yoo) - What!? one year already and GA is on top of it. Wonderful.

• Is it time to start creating C# Azure Functions in isolated mode? (Mark Heath) - Nice post about the different options today and in the future.

• What is Cloud-Native? Is It Hype or The Future of Software Development? (Thorben Janssen) - My 2 cents, it's so much more than a heap. Excellent post that cover all the angles.

Programming

• Implicit Usings in .NET 6 (Scott Hanselman) - Ok yes, it's a cool feature to get started... BUT it's the first best practice you learn in VB (yes I remember Scott) do not use implicit... So fun, but that's it.

• 5 Reasons Why You Should use a DevTool (Michelle Pruit) - Yes, indeed and it is worth spending money on them to not be limited or blocked because you are using the free version or something.

• 7 unique software collaboration features in GitHub Discussions (Evi Liu) - I started using GitHub discussion while streaming and loved it. I was curious to learn different scenarios where there is also a benefit.

• Announcing ASP.NET Core in .NET 6 (Daniel Roth) - I've not been coding for a little while now, first thing on my to-do is to upgrade to.NET 6 my projects.

• [Cake v2.0.0 RC 1 released](Pascal Berger) (https://cakebuild.net/blog/2021/11/cake-v2.0.0-rc0001-released) - A great new version, and important notification of retirement. I should do a tour of my flows/ pipeline to avoid bad surprises.

• I made Squid Game with JavaScript (Shuvo) - I love it! Great post that shows us all the code used in this cool demo. There is also a short video to see the final game.

• Publishing Events from CRUD or Commands? (Derek Comartin) - Nice post/video about event-driven architecture.

• Should Controllers Reference Repositories or Services (Steve) - Very interesting dive into the layers of an application. There are reasons for different architectures.

• Shrink your WSL2 Virtual Disks and Docker Images and Reclaim Disk Space (Scott Hanselman) - Wonderful tips from Scott. To get back that pure performance of a clean dev environment.

Miscellaneous

• After Microsoft Ignite, keep the learning momentum going (Jeff Sandquist) - Very happy to see this news being public.

• How to get Windows 11 (John Cable) - It's out now and honestly, it is great! If you didn't get the automatic upgrade maybe it's because you don't meet the requirement. Following the steps, it could be a simple checkbox to check-in your current version.

• Introduction to GitHub Actions for .Net Developers (Dave Murray) - I'm not sure why but I always felt called by automation. Maybe because it's the ultimate proactivity of any task.GitHub Action is one of those extremely powerful tools that are worth your attention.

~frank

Reading Notes #419

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. Enjoy!

Suggestion of the week

• Approval Workflows With GitHub Actions (Aaron Powell) - Wow! That's a very clever and impressive way to have step flow in GitHub. All the details are in the post if you would like to create your own.

Cloud

• How to use Azure App Service managed certificates (Michael Crump) - It's that simple. A few clicks and you will; have https.

Programming

• Using GitHub Actions to deploy a .Net Web App (Gregor Suttie) - A nice tutorial to learn how to deploy a Hugo website.
• Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 3 release now available (Daniel Ruth) - OMG! Super excited about all those new features as they will all help me in a current project I'm working on...
• Creating an event-driven architecture out of existing, non-event-driven systems (Richard Seroter) - An interesting post that explains the different options to go event-driven.
• GitHub with Azure DevOps | Premier Developer (GitHub with Azure DevOps) - Very interesting post that explains al the benefits of using this mixt, and why an enterprise would be interested to do that.

Podcasts

• The Joy of making with LEGO Master and Cosplaying Engineer Amie DD (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A delicious episode and BTW I watch Lego master because of that.
• #31: Julie Lerman - Software Coach, Writer & Speaker (The Solo Coder Podcast) - I was really looking forward to listen to this interview. Julie is an extraordinary person and an amazing communicator.
• 193: UI Is Messy (Merge Conflict) - I, once more, had a nice moment listening to that discussion/ argumentation about different patterns pros and cons.

Miscellaneous

• Bond At A Distance With The Remote Team Cooking Challenge (Alexia) - We are so creative when we want. Super.

Reading Notes #356

Suggestion of the week

• Security Headers (Tanya Janca) - Interesting post that shows the code/configuration we need to add, in order to get a more secure website.

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure portal December 2018 update (Peri Rocha) - Nice new update.. The last one of the year.
• Serverless Google App Engine Flex Custom Docker Runtime & Cloud SQL Backend with Swift & Vapor Web API (Alfian Losari) - Great tutorial that explains how to build a web backend.
• Créez vos Logic Apps via des templates ARM (Wilfried Woivré) - An excellent post in French that explains step by step how to build our ARM template to deploy an Azure Logic Apps.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 2.2 Parameter Transformers for clean URL generation and slugs in Razor Pages or MVC (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains a new feature of the new core release.
• How to become a Git expert (Aditya Sridhar) - A very nice post that explains how to fix common mistake users does and also explains how to keep our history clean.
• Web Architecture 101 (Jonathan Fulton) - This is a very complete article that does a tour of every piece of a web solution.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Books That Will Help You Become a Better Writer (Glenn Leibowitz) - A nice little list of books for the holiday...
• Becoming a better supporter of women in tech (Tom) - Great post. Share it.
• Leadership Mode Activate (Allen Pike) - Don't be affray to move forward and smash!
• Write more compact SQL Server code using new features (Sergey Gigoyan) - This is a nice way to learn how to be more efficent with SQL.

Books

Fast Focus: A Quick-Start Guide To Mastering Your Attention, Ignoring Distractions, And Getting More Done In Less Time! (Damon Zahariades) - Great book well organized. Simple strike to the point. It is divided into three parts: understanding focus, creating an environment for focus, and employing tactics to focus. It lists the top 10 obstacles to staying focused and gives you a great idea on how to get start your journey.











~

Reading Notes #348

Cloud

• Announcing the public preview of Azure Digital Twins (Daniel Escapa) - Learn more about this new product for our IoT projects.
• Move Managed Disks to another Subscription (Eric Leonard) - Cool post that explains the new easy way to do it.
• Tackling Costs in Azure (K. Scott Allen) - This post explains why the answer to: "How much will that cost?" Is always ...well it depends.
• Top 10 Azure Cognitive Services (Cristopher Burge) - Don't reinvent the wheel see all the incredible tool at your disposal.

Programming

• Where Should I Put My Logic? (Adam Storr) - Interesting post that provides a few answers.
• Performance tuning an Azure DevOps build configuration (Jeffrey Palermo) - Really interesting post packed with great tips to improve our builds performance.
• Using ASP.NET Core with MongoDB in containers for local dev, CosmosDB for production (Shayne Boyer) - This is an excellent tutorial to get started with asp.net core container and mongo or cosmoDB.
• What to focus on when learning ASP.NET Core? (Jon Hilton) - This is an excellent post to get inspired, remove the fear of a false start and help us to get started.
• elementary OS 5 Juno is Here – elementary – Medium (Cassidy James Blaede) - ELementary was already one of my favorite Linux distribution. With this new version named Juno it's just... Hmmmm so smooth and beautiful. Try it you will see.

Data

• Spinning Up a PostgreSQL Database on Azure Using Bash (Rob Conery) - None only this post is a great tutorial, but it's also a nice story.

Miscellaneous

• Azure PowerShell – Cross-platform “Az” module replacing “AzureRM” (Mark Cowlishaw) - Nice update of the Azure PowerShell, a shorter name is always a good idea. However, how could we make the difference with Azure CLI now?
• Creating the perfect MVP Summit (Charles Sterling) - The MVP summit is a very special event. However, these suggestions are also applicable to other technical event.
• Why you aren’t drowning in recruiters, too - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - Interesting post that brings a more realistic perspective to those moments.

~enjoy!

Reading Notes #338

Suggestion of the week

• Why Code Reviews Hurt Your Code Quality and Team Productivity - Simple Programmer (Lou Bichard) - A very interesting story that told us a huge change that a team implemented.

Cloud

• AWS Step Function Serverless Applications (Gerald Bauer) - What a great tutorial! Very interesting all the plumbing and toolings is explained in this Hello word AWS Lambda.

Programming

• 5 Essential Tips for Service Worker Development (Kezz Bracey) - Nice top 5.
  
• Containers - What Are They Good For? Running Our CI Builds (Jimmy Bogard) - Cool post that helps to avoid a lot of errors.
  
• Fritz and Friends present The Virtual Software Architecture Workshop (JeffFritz) - Wow, a very impressive achievement done by the man with a million hats Jeff. I'm still not done watching all that content. However, I can assure you that every bit is delicious.
  
• PowerApps Newbie – getting started (Jen Kuntz) - Nice first post of a promising series ;) To all the #powerusers of planet earth... you want to use PowerApps... so this is your chance to get started!

Miscellaneous

• The Ability Hacks: The story of two hackathon teams embracing the transformative power of technology (Jenny Lay-Flurrie) - An inspiring post that I'm sure is just a glimpse of what we will find in this book. This book definitely found his place at the top of my to-read stack.
  
• Chocolatey Package Manager and How I Use It (David Giard) - Chocolatey is a must tool to have to any developers or power user on Windows.
  
• Markdown View — Markdown Viewer for the Web, Windows 10, Android and everything (Alan Mendelevich) - It looks pretty cool and simple. I'll install it for sure.

Reading Notes #291

Cloud

• App Service Environment v2 release announcement (Christina Compy) - That a really good news let's go full PaaS.
• Fast and Easy Containers: Azure Container Instances (Corey Sanders) - A very promising new service in Azure.
• Import Power BI Desktop files into Azure Analysis Services (Josh Caplan) - A quick post that shows how convenient is the new AAS.

Programming

• .NET Application Architecture Guidance (Cesar de la Torre) - This post is like an amazing trailer about all the great things that will be created in this blog... Stay tuned for more.
• Docker Basics, Part Zero: Why Should I Care about Containers (and Microservices) Anyway? (Michelle Gienow) - Great post with the best description of what are containers I have ever read.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Ghost 1.0 (John O'Nolan) - Wow! So happy and proud to be part of the early adopter of this platform. It never stopped to get better, and it stayed free. Now I just need to upgrade.
• Follow-up: The Windows Insider Program has lost its way (studio384) - Interesting thoughts about different Microsoft programs.
• Passwords Evolved: Authentication Guidance for the Modern Era (Troy Hunt) - Amazing post again from Troy, things are evolving we must also change.

Reading Notes #223

Cloud

• Background tasks for your web site using Azure WebJobs (Jon Hilton) - Interesting post that introduces storage queues and webjob to manage background process.
  
• Azure Logic Apps Connectors (Jeff Hollan) - This post is a nice introduction to trigger. These ca be use in Azure Logic Apps but also in Power Apps.
  
• Download Azure Resource Manager Tools for VS Code - Another nice extension for Visual Studio Code (vscode).
  
• Get Last Sync Time for Read-Access Geo-Redundant Azure Storage - This post contains a lot of detail and information about disaster recovery and how to create a nice PowerShell module as a tool to help us.
  
• Accessing v1 APIs and BizTalk APIs from Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - Nice post that shares interesting tips about Azure API Apps.
  
• Getting to Know #Azure Mobile App - Nice tutorial that leverage the recently GA Azure Mobile App to build AskAlex: an universal application that looks promising...;)
  
• Exception Handling with Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - Great tutorial that shows how to solve a extremely frequent problem... the exception handling.
  
• Using Logic Apps Webhook Triggers (Jeff Hollan) - Fantastic tutorial that shows how to create an HTTP trigger in today's interface/ designer.
  
• Deploying in the Logic Apps Preview Refresh (Jeff Hollan) - Very interesting post for the initiated that explains few pro tips when deploying our Azure Logic App.
  
• Using the Azure Resource Manager: Part 1 Virtual Machines (Rachel Hagerman) - First post in a very promising series. This on sets the table and shows how to use VS to deploy a VM.
  
• Using the Azure Resource Manager: Part 2 Networking Templates (Rachel Hagerman) - This second post in this series gives more details about a very common piece in our deployments the network.

Databases

• Making Entity Framework 7 and Azure Data Sync work together (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice tweak to solve a problem in small database context.

Programming

• Automated Testing with Visual Studio (Lachezar Arabadzhiev) - An episode to watch... Everyone should do tests.

Miscellaneous

• Microservices as an Evolutionary Architecture - Interesting post about an architecture pattern that becomes more popular.

Reading Notes #166

Suggestion of the week

• Unit Testing Asynchronous Code - This post is a wonderful source of information about how to test ascyn code following the best practices.

Cloud

• Security and Identity Management with Azure Mobile Services - Great article from MSDN Mag that provides important information.

• Comparing Clouds : IaaS Scalability Options (Richard Seroter) - Very interesting article that compares one the key feature: scalability between the biggest cloud providers.

• Scaling a Multi-Tenant Application with Azure DocumentDB (John Macintyre) - Very good post that reviews and explains different scaling strategies in the NoSql context.

• Applied Azure: Infographic of how “Have I been pwned?” orchestrates Microsoft’s cloud services - One year after the launch of Have I been pwned, see what this service has become, and what was learned during this journey.

Programming

• 5 Incredible Features in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview - (Michael Crump) - Still didn't try visual studio 2015? This post will describe so of his greatest new features.

• ASP.NET 5: Using POCO controllers - Very interesting tutorial that explains some functionalities of Asp. Net MVC 5.

• 3 Useful Tools for Local Development & Testing - (Brian Rinaldi) - It's always nice to find new toys.

• Getting ready for the future with the Microsoft .NET Portability Analyzer (Scott Hanselman) - So many great tools that can help us are available easily and for free.

Miscellaneous

• How to Use Google in the Most Unusual Way to Make Your Self-Editing Faster, and Better (Guest Blogger) - Nice and very clever tips.

• 5 Quick Questions with Robert Scoble: What Makes a Great Tech Blog? (Stacey Roberts) - Everything about how to have a good tech blog.

• This is your bank, please verify your details – No, you verify YOUR details! - This situation arrived to frequently. I got in the same situation and mostly at the equivalent conclusion... how about you?

• The Small Personal Risks That Actually Change Behavior - Interesting post where the author shares his life, experience, inspiring.

• Is Blogging Dead? How Blogs are changing and How You Can Stay on Top (Stacey Roberts) - Very interesting post about the evolution of the blogging platform as medium and suggestion n how bloggers should be adapted to today's reality.

• Top Blogging Tools For the Blogger’s Soul (Matt Banner) - A nice list of online tools.

• The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that removes the voile on a great "mystery".

~Frank B.

Reading Notes #151

Suggestion of the week

• How I’ve started loving PowerShell (Fabien Dibot) - This nice post is a real pep-talk. And gives references for more information about PowerShell.
  
• MSDN magazine brings you a wealth of practical info about Azure Websites (Erez Benari) - Here why we soundn't miss the July's MSDN Magazine if we are interested to cloud computing...
  
• Automating Integration Testing with Microsoft Azure - This post gives a lot of detail on how a test environment could e build in Azure, iteration by iteration. Really interesting.

Cloud

• Introducing Azure Web Sites Services - This post describes an overview of the current Microft Azure Website situation.
  
• Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure - This book fantastic, and fill with important pattern and best practices. Even more because it's a free book!
  
• Desktop in the cloud: synchronize user logon and log off with Microsoft Azure - Interesting trick to get one step further in automating the Azure VM start stop process. Simple but cleaver.
  
• Azure Mobile Services .NET Updates (Henrik Frystyk Nielsen) - Great new update in the azure services, learn more here.
  
• Architect for the Cloud Using Azure Web Sites - That the article we need to read before doing our website on Azure. From A to Z, everything is explained to plan exactly what we need.
  
• Hybrid Connectivity: Connecting Azure Web Sites to LOB Apps Using PortBridge - Excellent deep-dive post / tutorial about a connection on a premise to the cloud.
  
• Azure Storage Explorer Preview 3 Now Available: Queue Support, Blob and Table Enhancements (David Pallmann) - Very happy about these new features.

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: MarkdownLog makes log files much prettier - I like markdown I found it very easy to read or edit on any platforms or devices. This package could be very useful.
  
• ASP.NET MVC 6: New HttpContext - Interesting post that talks about what is coming next in the MVC framework.
  
• Kendo UI Grid Custom Columns: How to Show a List of Links (Rachel Hagerman) - Nice tutorial for my co-worker that are on a project where Kendo grid is really present...;)
  
• Tips for Best Practices in WordPress Development - Tuts+ Code Article (Damian Logghe) - This post explains the best practices to follow when "playing" with WordPress. It's true that some info are available on the WordPress website, but here is a little "je ne sais quoi" that make it very clear.
  
• Migrating from Subversion to Git with svn2git on Windows (the tricky bits explained) (Troy Hunt) - Useful walkthrough.

UX

• Hey Developers - is it UI, UX, UI/UX or Something - Very interesting post that explains things clearly.

Miscellaneous

• The Experience Paradox -How to Get a Job Without Experience (simpleprogrammer.com) - Great post that can help junior developers to get started, or even the not so young to continue...
  
• How to create a file with a . dot prefix in Windows Explorer - Nice tip!
  
• Surface Pro 3 - Initial Impressions - Really good review of the Surface 3 from a user / tech guy point of view.

~Frank

Reading Notes #146

Suggestion of the week

• Day 2: Examining the Solution Structure (James Chambers) - Mandatory post to any new (or less new) web developers, learn what's in an MVC project.

Cloud

• Trying Redis Caching as a Service on Windows Azure (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains how easy it is to use Redis cache everywhere.
  
• ASP.NET Scalability: the Good, the Bad and the Hype (Dino Esposito) - Excellent post that explains everything we should know about the famous buzz word scaling.

Programming

• Day 0: Bootstrapping Mvc for the Next 30 Days (James Chambers) - Very promising series. Day 1, Day 3 , Day 4 , Day 5, Day 6
  
• Adventures in Custom Testing Infrastructure - This is an interesting post about building a unit test tool.
  
• Glimpse 1.8.6 released (Anthony van der Hoorn) - Nice update for glimpse.
  
• How to Automate IIS 7 Configuration with .NET -- Visual Studio Magazine (Patrick Steele) - This post is a incredibly well done tutorial that explains how to create a tool to automate configurations, exploiting the capabilities of the library Microsoft.Web.Administration.

Architecture

• The Onion & The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ (The Open Group Blog) - This post expains the analogy between an onion and a business process and is limits.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Tough Questions You Should Ask Your Team Today BY Paul B. Brown  @FromPaulBBrown (Paul B. Brown) - Really interesting thoughs about how to make your company evolve.
  
• Sometimes Clothes Make the Presentation BY Steve Cody  @RepManCody (Steve Cody) - Interesting point of view about cloths...

~Frank

Reading Notes #145

Suggestion of the week

• Thinking About Strings, Quotes, Tokens, And Tildes In Less CSS - Less CSS seams really interesting. Next web projects, I seriously think use it.

Cloud

• Lessons Learned – On #Azure, Log Everything!s (Alexandre Briseboi) - Great post about how we should use the Event Trace Windows (ETW) to do our logs.
• Using Time-based Partition Keys in #Azure Table Storage (Alexandre Briseboi) - Nice tips about how saving our logs in Azure.
• How to get notifications from a Windows Azure website - Wow, this is truly amazing and really easy to do.

Programming

• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.
• PowerShell Tools - v0.8.0 - Now with REPL! - Time to get or update this great add-ons in our Visual Studio.
• Thinktecture.IdentityManager as a replacement for the ASP.NET WebSite Administration tool (Scott Hanselman) - This post introduces a great project to manage our memberships in our Asp.Net projects through a nice interface.

Mobile

• Windows First: A New Strategy for Mobile Development and Beyond - Programming multi platform application is becoming much easier. This post explains some of your options.

Architecture

• The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ Starts to Take Shape (The Open Group Blog) - This post talks about an interesting white paper. What’s good in it and why we should read it. This new 3.0 platform look very promising.

Miscellaneous

• How to use an Xbox One controller on your Windows PC (Scott Hanselman) - Really.?! That simple? That’s great!
• Windows Live Writer going Open Source? - This post explains why our help is needed in order to give a future to Windows Live Writer.

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.

Reading Notes #126

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing Reduced Pricing on Storage - How can we be not happy to pay less for a nice service?!
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #2 – How do I create a new Organizational Account on Windows Azure Active Directory without any existing accounts or EA? (Bill Wilder) - Very useful post that could have saved me a lot of time few years back...

Books

• Cloud Architecture Patterns (Bill Wilder) - Very instructive books that explains many different patterns with clear and practical examples. All the patterns presented are also implemented in an application Page of Photos (or PoP for short). A great book that I strongly recommend.

 

Cloud

• Indexes are Crucial on Windows Azure SQL Database! - This post explains very clearly how we can (and should) plan our Azure database to get better performance.
  
• Enough PaaS vs. IaaS: The cloud is really about Services as a Platform (James Urquhart) - Interesting post that expresses opinions on the different cloud s0ervic0es and providers.
  
• Goodbye SkyDrive, Hello OneDrive (David Musgrave) - Time to re-brand for Microsoft... and I think I prefer that new name...
  
• New Poster: Windows Server 2012 R2 Private Cloud Storage and Virtualization (Benjamin Armstrong) - Another of those huge posters.
  
• Google Cloud Platform: Storing Data in Google Cloud Datastore (Ted Neward) - This 6th post of the series describing the Google is focusing on datastore everything is really well explained. All parts were very nice.
  
• New Financial Services Category in the AWS Marketplace - Interesting new product as a service, I know a few people that would be truly interested ;).

Programming

• Code Kata - I love it. I didn't know those kind of websides exists! I will make my visit.

Miscellaneous

• How to speak tech to non-tech people - Interesting tips to improve our talks.
  
• Internet of Things or Thing on the Internet? - Interesting thoughts about today's and tomorrow's the Internet.

~Frank

Reading Notes #123

Suggestion of the week

• Scott Hanselman's 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows (Scott Hanselman) - A post to read, and bookmark. I always find awesome tool that I didn't know.
  
• Introducing Visual Studio Online - This post is a lot more than only an introduction. It explains all the options we will encounter to start our first project, but it also describes how to use it, build with a CI, test, monitor, etc.

Cloud

• A new year's present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure (Maarten Balliauw) - Really interesting tools that provide a lot of useful information. I need to try this.
  
• Quick ways to edit your files hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), other than re-deploying - Nice quick tips that can save you a lot of time... and troubles.
  
• Do you serve your Azure Web Site hot or cold? - Useful use for the scheduler to improve website performance.
  
• New Windows Azure Network Security Whitepaper (Ashwin Palekar) - This is the post to improve your knowledge about network security, since it references the windows Azure white paper on the topic.
  
• Cloud Cover Show - Episode 125: Getting started with Application Insights for Visual Studio Online - Really great video. If you don't have time to read the MSDN Mag article or to get a better of the Online experience, this is the video.

Programming

• Composite Pattern: Handling child node collections - Interesting code solution. To read a second time.
  
• Temporary is The New Permanent - Interesting point of view about caring about our code.
  
• The Quality of Code (Paul W. Homer) - One of the best posts I read about this topic since a long time. It explains very well how easy it is to lose the focus.
  
• TypeScript: A New Language for .NET and JavaScript Developers - Nice introduction and quick overview of TypeScript.
  
• Prefixing ID columns with the table name in Entity Framework - See a time saving tips in this post to rename all ID property of your datamodel.

You can find out more about these conventions in the blog post Custom Code First Conventions (EF6 onwards)

Architecture

• How to Become a Software Architect - Interesting list.

Miscellaneous

• Finding a low-memory browser (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting information, and a simple but useful PowerShell script to get the info.
  
• What blogging was - Interesting thoughts about what blog became.