This week, ReadingNotes shares some insightful blog posts that caught my attention. From embracing a positive mindset and integrating local AI models with .NET Aspire, to leveraging Docker for cloud-native development and exploring AI-powered Blazor Kanban, there's plenty to dive into. Happy reading!
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.
For this week reading notes, I have some exciting blog posts and podcast episodes. Covering topics including .NET scaffolding, Visual Studio updates, the Builder Pattern in C#, and OpenAPI in .NET 9. Plus, tips on validating identity with GitHub, improving Azure Identity, and podcast highlights on GitHub Universe and presentation skills.
The Builder Pattern in C# [2024] - This is a very nice post that explains clearly with code different scenarios where that pattern would make sense.
OpenAPI document generation in .NET 9 (Mike Kistler) - This is a great new feature in NET9 when building APIs. The post shares how to update existing APIs to get it. I'm looking forward to migrating my stuff.
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.
This week, I stumbled upon some fascinating reads. From the announcement of .NET 9 and its incredible versatility to an intriguing new type of failover for Azure Storage, there's plenty to explore. Discover how to get .NET 9 running on your Raspberry Pi, check out the latest Blazorise update, and delve into the power of GitHub Models in .NET with Semantic Kernel. Plus, don't miss out on the introduction of GitHub Copilot for Azure and a new season of AI-related sessions in Visual Studio. And for my fellow open-source enthusiasts, the .NET Aspire Community Toolkit is a game-changer.
Dive in and let's geek out together! 🌟
Suggestion of the week
Announcing .NET 9 - .NET Blog (.NET Team) - You can build anything with C# (aka .NET) and I love it! With runs everywhere, it's open source, it's fast and free!
Introducing GitHub Copilot for Azure (Chris Harris) - After trying it, I can tell that it is pretty amazing! It's like have someone else besides you with the Azure portal answering all you're questions.
Integrating .NET Aspire With Azure Storage (Fiodar Sazanavets) - Nice wait to have an emulator for local work. I will have to check this as I'm using Azure table storage in many of my projects.
Open Source
Introducing the .NET Aspire Community Toolkit - .NET Blog (Aaron Powell) - Very happy (and proud) about this OSS project. .NET Aspire makes things so much easier for developers. And now we can simply add more types of integration thanks to the CF.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to this week’s reading notes! In this post, you’ll find a curated selection of insightful articles and tutorials covering various topics in technology and programming. Whether you’re looking to enhance your testing skills with .NET Aspire, improve your code comprehension with GitHub Copilot, or explore the world of Docker for DevOps, there’s something here for everyone. Dive in and enjoy these valuable resources!
If you have interesting content, share it!
Suggestion of the week
Getting started with testing and .NET Aspire (Aaron Powell) - This is a great tutorial, with a video version if you prefer, to get us started with test when .NET Aspire is part obor solution.
Hosting a (DevOpsDays) Tech Conference (Dewan Ahmed) - I went to this even and you could feel it was prepared with patio and care. It very interesting to learn about the behind the scene and all the work put both before and after.DevOpsDay Halifax you won my heart.
It's Reading Notes time and this week we learn how to improve our experience and security while using AI and containers
a zip line spider?
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.
Avoid These 5 Common AI Project Mistakes for Success (Narcosa Admin) - AI is a great tool and with it's new easy accessibility more are integrating it into there services, This post shares tips to give you more chance of success.
7 Best Practices for Using GitHub Copilot (Visual Studio Code team) - AI is a great tool, but to enjoy it as much as possible there are a few things we can do, This post shares those tips that could make the differences.
Less posts and articles this week, I was devouring books! I guess a special "book edition" of the Reading Notes should be coming soon...
If you are new on this blog, welcome! The reading notes post 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.
Debug Containers with Mintoolkit (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - Great episode about the intricacy of debugging containers and a tool mintoolkit,before knows as DockerSlim, that could really simplify things for us.
Fine tuning Products with Stanza System's Stacie Frederick (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Do we really need to have that automatic build and deployment x time by week, or day? Are far should we go? Are we trying to solve a real problem or just find a solution we think we need. Great episode that will help you answering those questions.
Better ways to have tricky conversations at work (Modern Mentor) - It's been many stories I heard from people who quit their job before even talking to their manager... This short episode will provides you a few tips to get more prepare and try different alternative.
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.
Easier to fix async exceptions (Mark Downie) - Debugging Asynchronous code as been always more complicated, looking forward to seeing (and using) that new capability in .NET 9.
How to make your web page faster before it even loads (Salma Alam-Naylor) - To make sure our users have he best experience possible it important to fine-tune some little details. This post goes deep and explains them very well.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Good Monday! This week Reading Notes are more listening notes 😅 and we go from .NET Aspire and containers, passing by communication with AI to camping!
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.
Introducing .NET Aspire with Damian Edwards (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Nice episode where .NET Aspire is really well explained, but yes it's kind of hard to say in a few words what it is.
CosmosDB and AI with Mark Brown (.NET Rocks!) - AI and data! AI and data! AI and data! It's not a typo, I wrote it 3 times... It's everywhere, evolving fast and you must look at it.
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
It's Finally Possible To Hibernate Azure VMs (Sam Cogan) - This new feature must be such a relief for all the VM users. Make sure to read this post to know the requirements of the VM tone able to hibernate it.
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.
Making C# Simple with Fluent Techniques (Niraj Ranasinghe) - Nice post. I didn't realise that Fluent path was used in so many places. It makes it so cleaner when we can use it.
AI
Visual Studio Code AI Toolkit: Run LLMs locally (Shreyan Fernandes) - It goes so fast! It used to be complicated to get AI and now we can get one locally directly from vs code... Quick post to get us started.
Episode 1900 with Scott Hanselman! (.NET Rocks!) - Three of my favorite people in the word in a single episode! It was such a pleasure to listen pleasure to listen talk about all those little stories. Long live to .NET Rocks (and HanselMinutes)
8 Learning Paths for Beginners on GitHub (Cynthia Zanoni) - Wow! so many very cool learning Path to get started with anything you can think about it. I may do one or two just to refresh my knowledge.
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.
Bringing the Aspire dashboard to ACA (Mark Downie) - One of the great tool that was released with Aspire is its dashboard as it shows traces across services. This post shares how to enable this amazing tool in Azure.
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).
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!
I used to hardcode my password in my demos and code samples. I know it's not a good practice, but it's just for demo purposes, it cannot be that dramatic, right? I know there are proper ways to manage sensitive information, but this is only temporary! And it must be complicated to remove all the passwords from a deployment... It turns out, IT IS NOT difficult at all, and that will prevent serious threats.
In this post, I will share how to remove all passwords from a docker-compose file using environment variables. It's quick to setup and easy to remember. For production deployment, it's better to use secrets, because environment variables will be visible in logs. That said, for demos and debugging and testing, it's nice to see those values. The code will be available on GitHub. This deployment was used for my talks during Azure Developers .NET Days: Auto-Generate and Host Data API Builder on Azure Static Web Apps and The most minimal API code of all... none
The Before Picture
For this deployment, I used a docker-compose file to deploy an SQL Server in a first container and Data API Builder (DAB) in a second one. When the database container starts, I run a script to create the database tables and populate them.
As we can see, the password is in clear text twice, in the configuration of the database container and in the parameter for sqlcmd when populating the database. Same thing for the DAB configuration file. Here the data-source node where the password is in clear text in the connection string.
The easiest password instance to remove was in the sqlcmd command. When defining the container, an environment variable was used... Why not use it! To refer to an environment variable in a docker-compose file, you use the syntax $$VAR_NAME. I used the name of the environment variable MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD to replace the hardcoded password.
/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P $$MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD -d master -i /startrek.sql
Second Pass: .env File
That's great but the value is still hardcoded when we assign the environment variable. Here comes the environment file. They are text files that holds the values in key-value paired style. The file is not committed to the repository, and it's used to store sensitive information. The file is read by the docker-compose and the values are injected. Here is the final docker-compose file:
Note the env_file directive in the services definition. The file .env is the name of the file used. The ${SA_PWD} tells docker compose to look for SA_PWD in the .env file. Here is what the file looks like:
SA_PWD=This!s@very$trongP@ssw0rd
Conclusion
Simple and quick. There are no reasons to still have the password in clear text in the docker compose files anymore. Even for a quick demo! Of course for a production deployment there are stronger ways to manage sensitive information, but for a demo it's perfect and it's secure.
During Microsoft Build Keynote on day 2, Julia Liuson and John Lambert talked about how trade actors are not only looking for the big fishes, but also looking at simple demos and old pieces of code, looking for passwords, keys and sensitive information.
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.
Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.
Docker Compose Profiles, one the most useful and underrated features (Oskar Dudycz) - Woah! For now on, I shall have a profile in all my docker compose file. We'll probably not all, but I'm definitely using them. This post is the perfect place to get started and understand what are profile and how to use it.
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.
An introduction to primary constructors in C#12 (Andrew Lock) - Wow! This post dig into what can and cannot do the new constructors in C#. Example by example trying more complex scenarios, fascinating!
DevOps
Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.
Miscellaneous
Introducing Plans on Microsoft Learn (Kaberi Bell) - Would it be to be a data engineer, AI specialist, app builder there's a plan for you and that's a very cool new feature on learn have a look this blog post explain all of it
How Do You Measure Developer Experience? (Jennifer Riggins) - An interesting article about what and how measure performance. I didn't know so many system and details concepts were that detailed.
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.
Think Faster, Talk Smarter with Matt Abrahams (Modern Mentor) - Interesting episode about how to become a better communicators in both formal and informal situations. Matt is the author a book on that topic.
DevOps Adoption for IT Managers (Chris Pietschmann) - Interesting post that shares the benefits of DevOps for your enterprise and how to approach it as a manager.
Cascadia Code 2404.23 (Christopher Nguyen) - I used to do ASCII art back on my C=64... Now that all those new fonts and symbols are added should I start again? Nice to have all the options available to be able to display everything we need|the console.
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.
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.
Having interesting content? Share it!
Suggestion of the week
Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - Looking forward to this event. I have the pleasure to present a session with Jerry Nixon about Data API Builder. Join us!
Cloud
Demystifying Azure CLI pagnination (Jeremy Li) - That's great! It's so sad when all the information is "throw" on us without any control and it's on us to find our "needle" we are looking for in those screens full of line. This will definitely helps.
