Reading Notes #624

Dive into this week's fascinating mix of tech insights, troubleshooting tales, and productivity tips. From the latest in Azure Dev tools to real-world debugging adventures and cutting-edge .NET innovations, there's something for everyone.

Happy reading!

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) – October 2024 (Grace Kulin) - Quick post to share about the most recent features like customizing our API version when deploying our containers.

Programming

• Webcam randomly pausing in OBS, Discord, and websites - LSVCam and TikTok Studio (Scott Hanselman) - Weird technical issues are so unpleasant and it's worse when I imply an external devices.Is it a driver, the cable, some software.. In this post Scott shares about how he investigated and found a workaround.

• 3 more productivity tips for .NET developers (mtmattei) - Interesting tips to be and stay productive by different people.

• How we build GitHub Copilot into Visual Studio (Anson Horton) - It is so interesting to read how things happens and the different interactions. If you use vs code or Visual Studio, you should read this article.

• Introducing the New .NET MAUI Kanban Board (Saravanan Madheswaran) - I'm always impressed when I see components build be third parties. The quality, the customization, the look... It's a lot of work make one in your app with half the features; wow.

Podcast

• Microsoft Playwright Testing with Debbie O'Brien (.NET Rocks!) - Great tool to help making tests on our websites. It's open source and now support .NET.

• Inspektor Gadget (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - THe first time I heard about Inspektor Gadget was in an episode of Open at Microsoft. I don't use much Kubernetes, but that will be part of my toolbox when I do. Great security, troubleshooting, and observability utility.

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 #615

It's reading notes time! 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.

Back from a two weeks time off it was nice to get back into tech read.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) – August 2024 (Grace Kulin) - Wow so many new features (many security related) and tons of new templates.

Programming

• Adding .NET Aspire to your existing .NET apps (Jon Galloway) - This great post explains step by step how to add .NET Aspire to your existing app, saying what you gain and how it's helping you to be faster at buildinba better application.

• Bring your AI Copilots to the edge with Phi-3 and Semantic Kernel (Arafat Tehsin) - First post of a very interesting and promising series to build our own local only AI app.

• Combining multiple docker images into a multi-arch image (Andrew Lock) - Another great article from Andrew that explains very clearly a Docker feature: generate multiple image under the same ta to target different OS and infrastructure (ex: x64,arm32)

• Logging in Banana Cake Pop (Pascal Senn) - What a amazing new feature! This will greatly improve development and debugging productivity!

• An Absolute Beginner's Guide to LangGraph.js (Anchit) - A great tutorial that requires not API key and provides detailed steps to learn using Node how to use AI.

• The ultimate guide to developer happiness (Jeimy Ruiz) - Many great tools and solution within GitHub "circle". This post provides best practices to improve developers productivity and announces when the next GitHub Universe is coming up.

• Different Containerising Options for .NET Developers (Justin Yoo) - So many options! The classic one with all the Docker command or the some more embedded... Your choice!

~frank

Reading Notes #606

It's reading notes time! 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.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Azure Developer CLI (azd) – Build 2024 Recap (Grace Kulin) - All developers should look at how it can really speedup and simplify your Azure deployment and ease the creation of your infrastructure as code file (bicep and terraform).

Programming

Catch Up on Microsoft Build 2024: Essential Sessions for .NET Developers (James Montemagno) - Perfect for . NET developers who would like to know what's new and what's coming

Avoiding interactivity with Blazor? (Jon Hilton) - Nice post that examines how some fancy checkbox or button interactivity works in Blazor.

Must-have resources for new .NET Aspire developers (Anthony Simmon) - This post contains a list of other posts and videos about aspired really interesting if you want to get started.

Microsoft Dev Box introduces new ready-to-code and enterprise management capabilities - Wonderful powerful device where and when you need it. This post shares the most recent new features.

Developing cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio (Mark Downie) - Nice post that celebrates the general availability of .NET Aspire and shares many advantages of using it with Visual Studio.

It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files (Frank Boucher) - We all did it. Hardcoding password in code, because it's "just" a quick thing, or it's just for us, and we think it's okay... but is it? This post shares my learning while removing passwords from docker-compose file.

AI

Announcing the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (John Lam) - Nice! The favorite editor of so many now have an AI extension! I missed the Microsoft Build sessions with the demos. Lucky me they are available on demand!

~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 #572

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.

A-30 bridge 

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

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - September 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Wow! I'm trying that today!

Programming

• Delay, Sleep, Pause & Wait in JavaScript — SitePoint (James Hibbard) - As an occasional JavaScript developer that post was pretty interesting.

• Async Lazy In C# – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility (Nick Cosentino) - Great post from our friendly neiboor.But seriously very well explained.

• Exploring Blazor Changes in .NET 8 - Auto Render Mode (Jon Hilton) - Pretty cool changes coming up with .NET.

Open Source

• Unleashing the Entrepreneurial Spirit: Microsoft's Open-Source Solutions on Display (Japhlet Nwamu) - Open source it there, everywhere. Learn more about how it could help you transforming your ideas in real project!

Low Code

• Migration automatique grâce à l'IA… Oui et non (Frank Boucher) - We all have one of those Excel sheets that start just as a quick thing and became way too big. This video shows how to leverage AI to transform it into a PowerApp.

Books

Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect 

Author: Will Guidara

- This book really resonate with me. It's a mix of auto-biography and business, and some may argue that hospitality motivated by profit is actually hospitality? But it's about working smarter, and respecting the human while doing business. Trying harder to find a solution that respect the human, the environment while achieving our goals.

~Frank

Reading Notes #556

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

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - May 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - The Azure Developers CLI just is evolving so fast! New Java early functionalities, improvement with Container Apps... Looking forward to watching Build sessions and seeing all of it!

Programming

• Announcing the new Azure Container Registry libraries (Mario Guerra) - Nice update! And there are more languages supported, which is fantastic.

• How I used GitHub Copilot to build a browser extension (Rizel Scarlett) - Another great story about how Copilot helps the productivity of a developer. And at the same time, great tutorial to build and Chrome extension.

• Choose Your Own Adventure in Open Source: Paths to Success (Bekah) - This is a nice post that provides many excellent reasons why you should start contributing to open source and how it is good for you

• Quick Progress in Software Development (Mike Krop) - Interesting... A Development Sim game?!

LowCode

• Exploring the Power Platform GPT Prompts: Unleashing the Potential of AI in the Power Platform (Lee Stott) - When new tools are coming up with such potential its great to have ideas of how to work with it. This post helps users get started or find new ways, and advance users an opportunity to share.

• Fueling Creativity: Introducing our Power Platform Prompt Samples Repository! | Power Platform Developer Blog (April Dunnam) - A great initiative to get us started when the spark is missing.

Podcasts

• Molly's Game with Molly Bloom (A Bit of Optimism) - What a story! An inspiring journey with so many challenges.
• 357: The Zune UI was the Best UI (Merge Conflict) - Ahhh! Now I understand why so many people are talking about the Zune! Great episode that go over some souvenirs and memories.

Miscellaneous

• Discover Ways to Make Open Source Contributions to Microsoft (Kiran Panjwani) - Great post shows how you, students, can make a huge difference.

• Why Put PostgreSQL in Azure - Grant Fritchey (Grant Fritchey) - Great post that explains why Azure is a great hosting platform. In this case, it's about the database and it is so true. But it's also true with many other services...

~Frank