Reading Notes #625

Welcome to another edition of Reading Notes! This week, dive into the latest updates on Azure DevOps, Docker best practices, System.Text.Json enhancements in .NET 9, AI innovations from GitHub Universe, and more. 

Enjoy your reading!

Cloud

• Using Entra profile information in Azure DevOps (Andrew Brenner) - This is nice, I will save us to re-enter information and should make more profile more complete at the same time.

Programming

• Docker Best Practices: Using ARG and ENV in Your Dockerfiles (Jay Schmidt) - A nice post that improve how we are using Arg by going through a few examples.

• What's new in System.Text.Json in .NET 9 (Eirik Tsarpalis) - This is a nice post that explains with code sample the new features.

AI

• GitHub Spark (Devon Rifkin, Terkel Gjervig Nielsen, Cole Bemis, Alice Li) - Fascinating news from GitHub Universe. A new spin on the lowcode app but with code. Looking forward to trying it and see what I can build with it.

• GitHub Copilot in Windows Terminal (Christopher Nguyen) - There it is, Copilot making his entrance into our beloved Terminal. It's only in version Canary for now, but I'm sure it will help many of us when no sure what command to use, or the equivalent bash/ PowerShell.

Miscellaneous

• Releasing WinAmp source goes badly for its owners, anyway (Liam Proven) - A true story that looks unreal. It's a bit sad that this OSS opportunity was missed.

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 #597

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

• Building Interactive Blazor Apps with WebAssembly (Ed Charbeneau) - Wow! A very well crafted tutorial that guides us, while explaining why we need to do what we're are doing at each steps.

Cloud

• Azure Spring Clean: Leveraging Azure Copilot To Better Manage Your Tenant (Sam Cogan) - It's always a good idea to do a tour of our resources in the cloud to see what's there. With that new AI assistant it will be easier to ask questions when we are not sure how to search.

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly Virtual File System Access (Michael Washington) - A nice tutorial the show us how to keep file (aka data) in the browser of the visitor. All the code is available.

• ASP.NET Core Basics: Organize Projects—Architectural Patterns (Assis Zang) - Architecture helps us to have clear and easy to maintain code. And this is what is ready important. Besides that the code need to do what we want, obviously.

• Automate Your GitHub Workflow with Bash Scripting (arjun) - Remember, everything is scriptable...

• Blazor Render Mode – How To Avoid Dependency Injection Woes (Nick Cosentino) - Failing is learning. In this post the author shares why is Blazor app wasn't behaving as he expect and what he did to fix it.

Open Source

• My new open-source repository to schedule all your content! (Nevo David) - This post shares what look like a fantastic scheduling tool, I'll have to try this project definitely useful

Miscellaneous

• Starting CockroachDB in Single User Mode with a Dockerfile (Bryan Hogan) - I really believe that database in a container is the best option for many developers. Here a simple example with cockroachDB.

~frank

Reading Notes #571

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

• Serverless Playwright the easy way with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - I didn't think about that scenario but wow! Thats very efficient ant much easier.

Programming

• 6 Best Practices for Documenting APIs (Nduka John) - Documentation is often what makes the difference. Bad docs may cause users to not use correctly the APIs.

• New .NET Upgrade Assistant version with feature updates and .NET MAUI improvements! - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - Wow that a pretty cool and powerful tool! I really like the mixed upgrade with project file and version.

• Generative AI and .NET - Part 2 SDK | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Nice series where we explore the SDK building a .NET poroject.

Open Source

• Walkthroughs in the Windows Terminal Repository (Mike Griese) - Contributing to big oss project is challenging.The Windows Terminal team had a cool idea to make it easier.There is a video version of this blog is you prefer.

• Microsoft PowerToys v0.73.0: A Comprehensive Overview (Kunal Chowdhury) - Cool post that shares new utilities in PowerToys and explains the optimization of the others.

Miscellaneous

• Navigating Developer Burnout: Causes, Impacts, and Strategies for a Ba (Christopher Johnson) - A truthful and realistic post. If you never been exposed to burnout, take 2 minutes to read this.

~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 #546

Cloud

• How to build, test and deploy your application using Azure and GitHub - Azure DevOps Blog (Liam Hampton) - A nice DevOps tutorial that requires no installation because it all happens in the browser.
• Introducing the Reliable Web App Pattern for .NET - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup, Nish Anil) - This post explains the best practices build on top of the well architect Azure framework.

Programming

• Run Appwrite on a Raspberry Pi (Jim Bennett ) - This post will make you save money and time while setup your dev environment.
• Can WebAssembly Solve Serverless's Problems? (Cameron Gain) - This is an interesting post that shares why WASM is an excellent idea and how it can help today's businesses.
• How to Read and Parse a JSON File in C# (Januarius NjokuUnknown) - Multiple ways to parse a file. How many did you know?
• How to automate your dev environment with dev containers and GitHub Codespaces (Kedasha Kerr) - Since I discover the devcontainer I use it all the time. Lucky for me my computers are powerful enough to manage my simple project. Codespace provides all that comfort but online...Have a look.
• Write a high-quality README for NuGet packages - The NuGet Blog (Lynn Dai) - Wonderful initiative! I believe that well-written documentation is the missing piece to many great hidden projects.

Podcasts

• 344: Exploring CoreData and CloudKit (Merge Conflict) - Honestly it felt good hearing about those two genius struggling with data. But more than that to see them continue to look for different alternatives, and try new tools and patterns. Great episode, as usual.
• 51. Minimal web API’s and API Management & learning by teaching - with Jonah Andersson (Betatalks the podcast) - Jonah is just amazing! I knew her before listening to the episode, I just love her even more! Brilliant mind mixed with a contagious passion!

Books

• 
  
  Learning Blazor (David Pine) - This book is just perfect! It explains a bit of everything. It is packed with real examples and code variation (because there are so many ways to write something). There was even a full chapter un test with playwright, I didn't expect that and it was great!

Reading Notes #543

Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

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

The Suggestion of the week

• What is .NET, and why should you choose it? (.NET Team) - This is not an ordinary blog post. It makes me think of those deep interesting MSDN articles. A great read for young or older developers that would like to know more about .NET or refresh their memory.

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Pipelines: If Expressions and Conditions (John Folberth) - This nice post in the series on Azure Pipeline focuses on conditions. Avery has efficient tools to customize our pipeline just like we want them.

• What is an Azure Load Balancer? (Cary Roys) - Do you know what an Azure Load Balancer is or you only thing you know? In this nice post not only you will learn what it really is but it the post shares some OSS tools to test your ALB and explains how to use them.

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming Patterns in .NET (Code Maze) - This is a great tutorial that explains 3 asynchronous patterns with code samples and explanation. Perfect to get started and understand legacy code or write new one.

• Coding 102: Writing code other people can read (Max Pekarsky) - This is an excellent post with so much wisdom in it. Writing readable code is extremely important. Whether it's just a few lines in excel, a script, a query for a database, or a full app.

• Use multiple identity providers from a Blazor WASM ASP.NET Core App secured using BFF (Damien Bowden) - An interesting post that explains how to implement authentification.

Podcasts

• Sustainable Open Source with Sarah Novotny (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode with the Microsoft Open Source Lead talking about why truly open source is important and how Microsft really believes in its future.
• Digging Up the Past with Sarah Parcak (A Bit of Optimism) - Using satellite images to do archeology... wait what?! Great episode really interesting from the early second until the last one.

Miscellaneous

• ChatGPT: One million people have joined the waitlist for Microsoft's AI-powered Bing (Liam Tung) - What a first day! This is a little post that shares a little info about the new Bing and its kickoff.

~Frank

Reading Notes #538

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - January 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Easier to install and more secure. A nice update.

• Develop Your Cloud App Locally with the LocalStack Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Harsh Mishra) - Interesting tools that can emulate your AWS environment locally, perfect to develop and not stress about the cloud cost busting your budget.

Programming

• 6 Command Line (PowerShell & CLI) Tips & Tricks for Microsoft Azure you should know about! (Thomas Maurer) - Great tips that really enable us to be more productive and efficient.

• Get Started with GitHub Actions (Mandy Hubbard) - This is a great post to get started with CICD. GitHub is free and accessible, give it a try and then automate some tests or a deployment.

• Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - New Pluralsight course announcement.

• The Problem With Dependency Injection Frameworks (James Shore) - A very interesting post that continues to explain why DI frameworks are bad even though they help us.

• Public Preview: Azure Automation Visual Studio Code Extension - Nice I like Azure automation. An extension to manage those cloud cron jobs, I say yes.

• Release notes for Microsoft Q&A - Love that new look!

• Why tuples in C# are not always a code smell (Dennis Frühauff) - I didn't use Turple yet but it's not hard to see the potential and how it could become ugly. This post shows and explains a few simple rules to stay clear.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Cosmos DB to Azure Data Explorer Synapse Link (public preview) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Two worlds touched. This new connection looks super cool.

• Lazy and once-only C# async initialization (Ian Griffiths) - An amazing post that explains so much and that has all the code snippets to be clear about it. I will have to copy-paste those into some test applications to really try them, but it is clear what I should expect.

~frank

Reading Notes #531

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Azure SDK Release (November 2022) - Azure SDK Blog (Azure SDK team) - New release with tons of updates.

Programming

• .NET 7 Web API CRUD Using Entity Framework Core (Naveen Bommidi) - This is a good tutorial to build our first simple API with EF...and it uses the brand new .NET 7.0

• 7 Reasons for Startups to Choose ASP.NET Over Node.js (Michael Shpilt) - I believe the most crucial point is to use a language that your team is comfortable with. If everyone already masters Node, then continue with that. If you are starting a new team or need specific performance or requirements that Node doesn't provide then, of course, .NET must be considered.

• 7 common mistakes new contributors make in Open Source Software - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 (Jessica Wilkins) - Good health check of our practices when collaborating on an open-source project.

• Minimal API validation with ASP.NET 7.0 Endpoint Filters - Ben Foster (Ben Foster) - That minimalist API can really make us save some keystrokes

• Multi-repository Support Released! - Visual Studio Blog (Jessie Houghton) - That's very good news and so many developers will be happy about it.

• .NET Interactive Notebooks is now Polyglot Notebooks! - .NET Blog (Claudia Regio) - A new name, the same great tool with a bright future.

~frank

Reading Notes #527

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

Programming

• Blazor WASM Custom 404 Page on GH Pages (Justin Yoo) - This is a lovely double tutorial. Learn first how to write a 404 not found page in Blazor then learn how to use custom 404 when using GitHub as a hosting platform.

• 9 Tips for Containerizing Your Node.js Application - Docker (Ajeet Singh Raina, Johan Giraldo) - A nice list of smart tips.

• Cake - Cake v2.3.0 released (Mattias Karlsson) - Nice to see more features available in Cake. You can do complex and advanced stuff now.

• Docker and WebAssembly together at Wasm Day NA 2022 (Chris Crone) - Wasm + Docker...That seems promising...

• I changed my mind about writing new JavaScript frameworks (Salma Alam-Naylor) - JavaScript is its own universe with so many options and variations. Looking forward to seeing the WTF tool and learning more about how she builds it.

• Introducing Spectre.Console (Steve Smith) - It's for sure a library that I will try. Console applications are a very useful tool so anything that can speed up the creation process is a must.

• Learn how to improve your ASP.NET Core controllers with these principles - dateo-software (Dennis Frühauff) - A very interesting post to learn more about how to improve our code.

• Make The First Letter of a String Upper Case in C# - Code Maze (Code Maze) - I didn't even know the aspan method...Do you? Nice performance / fine-tuning post.

Podcasts

• HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal (Screaming in the Cloud) - MySQL database as a service on Oracle cloud, this sounds interesting and looks like the price is too.

• Developing .NET on AWS with Isaac Levin (.NET Rocks!) - Yes!! Of course, .NET is everywhere but now we hear about it! A captivating episode where Isaac makes a quick tour of all the possibilities for .Net developers on ASW.

• 137. Anti-Time Management with Richie Norton (Part 1)-id2920271-id538368995) (The Greg McKeown Podcast) - I was not sure what to expect from "Anti-Time Management" and I like what I heard. looking forward to listening to part two.
• Rob Richardson: Web Services in .NET 6 - Episode 213 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - What a great episode covering so much! Expect to learn more about how things work like the authentification and authorization.

~Frank

Reading Notes #526

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

• Azure Functions – 2022 update (Eamon O'Reilly) - So great to have news from the Azure Function team. Of course, I'm pretty happy about v4 isolated and the .NET updates but there is so much more.

• Introducing the Azure Static Website Component (Sean Holung) - This is a nice tutorial that shows how to deploy a static web app using Pulumi.

Programming

• How to get ready for Hacktoberfest 2022 (Michelle Mannering ) - Oh boy, we are already mid-October and I just realized that... Did you jump on?

• ASP.NET Core - Why async await is useful (Steven Giesel) - Ah ha! Learn the real reason... A nice quick post that explains it all.

• DevContainers for Azure and .NET (Justin Yoo) - Dev Containers are so great. This post explains how they work, and lists many components to customize them. Here it's about .NET but all languages are supported.

• How to generate header images for blogs and ASP.NET Core (Thomas Ardal) - Nice tools to simply create custom images.

Podcast

• Securing Containers, First Steps in Docker and Kubernetes (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Because security is an important topic, this episode is worth your time.

• C64 OS - A new operating system for the Commodore 64 with Gregory Naçu (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A new OS for the old C64? Yes, and it's open source... How cool is that?!

Miscellaneous

• Should we hire junior developer advocates? (Rizèl Scarlett) - Great post, I was already on the yes team but it is worth reading in you are not sure.

~Frank

Reading Notes #523

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

Suggestion of the week

• Teaching ‘Digital Native’ College Students Who Understand TikTok — But Not Microsoft Excel (Lilah Burke) - This great post makes the distinction between social tech awareness and technophile.

Cloud

• .NET 7 comes to Azure Functions & Visual Studio 2022 (Melony Qin) - This is one of the reasons why isolated functions were so cool, now we can select our version as we please.

• .NET on Azure Functions Roadmap Update (Matthew Henderson) - The future looks very promising... :) And that also reminded me that I really need to upgrade one of my older functions.

• Journey to the Cloud With ACA (Anthony Chu) - A perfect little tutorial showing how to build a one container App from nothing and end with a complete CICD workflow to deploy it into Azure.

• Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Introduction (Jonathan George) - Great post about the reason behind a migration from Azure Function to Azure Container App. I really like reading all the questioning, going into the detail, planning the pricing, and the POC, this reflects the real life.

DevOps

• 9 DevOps Best Practices - What You Should Do and NOT Do (Ioannis Moustakis) - A nice high-level post that shares best practices, perfect to get inspired and start learning more.

Programming

• .NET now on Windows Package Manager (Ashita Nagar) - That's fantastic! I often have multiple versions of the framework installed because I try previews and so. With Winget I will be able to do some cleanup very easily.

• Micro Frontends in Action With ASP.NET Core - Communication Patterns for Blazor WebAssembly Based Web Components (Tomasz Pęczek) - A wonderful post that shares knowledge and code snippets to explain so much. I will need all of that. Love it!

Miscellaneous

• Test the Fall Insider Preview Build for HoloLens today! (Shona Bang) - Oh, nice! Please share as I'm sure so many would love to try that game asap and be part of that program.

~Frank

Reading Notes #517

Good Thursday, 

back from a nice time off, I'm all recharged and it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Controlling Blazor Environments on Static Web Apps | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - This is a very neet tip; short and simple.
• Host your website on Azure Static Web Apps for free (Julia Muiruri) - There you have it, two different sets of three-step to get your Azure static web app.
• How to deploy a Local Docker Container to Azure Container Apps (Vincent Nwonah) - An excellent tutorial to get started with Azure Container App.
• Ultimate Guide to Deploying Azure App Service WebJobs Using Azure DevOps (Wael Kdouh) - Wow! This post has so many little time-saver tips (aka gotchas). Great content.

Programming

• Git-Flow, GitHub-Flow, Gitlab-Flow and Trunk Based Development explained (Steven Giesel) - This is a nice post to see different alternatives for your Git pattern
• Keys to Effective Regression Test Development (Amy Reichert) - This post shares a lot of info about test planning and structure. A nice read to get inspired and learn more on the topic.

Podcasts

• Rust for Beginners with Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm studently craving to learn Rust thanks to Scott and Nell in this episode Rust for Beginners
• 315: A Proper Podcast (Merge Conflict) - Fun episode about Frank's and James' personal life.
• How to have a hard conversation (Modern Mentor) - Those moments are hard and I believe we can all benefice from a few tips to prepare ourselves.
• 0267 - Serge Tremblay - Microsoft Loop (Visual Studio Talk Show) - (In French) Microsoft Loop?! If you have the same reaction as me when reading this title, then this episode is for you. A nice episode where three friends talk about new technology.
• Steve Sanderson: The future of Blazor and WebAssembly - Episode 202 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - A really interesting episode about Blazor...

~frank

Reading Notes #499

Good Monday, 

Monday means it's reading notes times. 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!

Suggestion of the week

• How to Separate Production, Test and Development Resources in Azure (John Kilmister) - Great post. It is an extremely frequent question, and I am happy to have now documentation to support the best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Apps Autopilot (Justin Yoo) - A great DevOps post that great an automatic deployment process. Very inspiring, I think I may is some of it for my AzUrlShortener.

Programming

• Automate code metrics and class diagrams with GitHub Actions (David Pine) - Very cool post and GitHub action. Will it come next weekend's little project to give it a try? I'll let you know.

• Blazor&Dragons! How to consume gRPC-web from Blazor – part 1: the client (David Guida) - A pretty cool first part of the tutorial. Who said learning cannot be fun.

• Windows Package Manager 1.2 (Demitrius Nelon) - I just try it and it works so well. This is good news and there are already so many packages available.

Podcasts

• Adam Shoalts On The Importance Of Solo Adventures In Life (What's Essential) - As I was listening to this episode I was thinking what an interesting guest. Adam Shoalts, explains a few anecdotes of his numerous expeditions, and how the essential it most of the time in the middle of them. Then at the end, I connected the dots! Adam Shoalts author of the book Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic, I read that book :) and it's was part of the Reading Notes #460

• Headphones Vs. Earbuds Vs. AirPods: Which Is The Best Podcasting Audio Equipement? - (Feed Your Brand) - Really interesting episode about gears... And excellent timing, because yes I need some new ones.

• Entrepreneurship as a developer - (Software Engineering Unlocked) - WHat does it means to think at scale. I am not quite sure I would enjoy doing it his way, but it's definitely working.

~frank

Reading Notes #493

Good Monday, Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

Just for the of it, I did a little funny video to answer the question: Where really is cloud computing? 

Watch it on your favorite platform ;) YouTube - TikTok

Cloud

• Migrating from GitHub Pages to Azure Static Web Apps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is a good tutorial that leverages the GitHub deployment to Azure.

• Tip 352 - How to trigger an Azure Function from Azure Cosmos DB | Azure Tips and Tricks - This is a clear tutorial about how to use an Azure function trigger connected to Azure Cosmo DB. Simple but very powerful.

Programming

• Minimal APIs, Blazor Improvements, and Tools Updates in ASP.NET Core 6 (Antonio Liccardi) - So many goodies in the last few days.

• Azure Static Web Apps, Blazor, Authentication and Visual Studio 2022 (Scott Kuhl) - There is a little bit more work than I would like but there is also a lot to interact with and monitor locally. Thanks to this clear tutorial we have all the steps to reproduce.

• Comparison of Dependency Injection in .NET (Nickolas Fisher) - A very complete tutorial, with all the required code even the GitHub reference. The perfect example to get started.

• VS Code Gets New Side Panel in v1.64 Update (David Ramel) - Nice! I like this new menu functionality.

Podcasts

• 291: GitHub Actions All The Things (Merge Conflict) - Sometimes building a CI-CD feels too cumbersome, but it's probably worth it. In this episode Frank and James share and they found their balance.
• Greg on The Power Of The Graceful No (What's Essential) - It's so hard some time to say this simple word... But it is an important, nice episode.
• Shaun Walker on Blazor and Oqtane - Episode 179 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Nice discussion with the creator of DotNetNuke and more recently Oqtane, about .Net and Blazor for today's solution.
• 564: Make Your Reading More Meaningful, with Sönke Ahrens (Coaching for Leaders) - As far as I can remember, I always struggled with taking "good" notes. Interesting topic, a few good tips, and tricks.
• Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History with Evan Amos (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Really interesting interview about... yes, photography. Scott is chatting with the photographer of those amazing images of the game consoles.

~Frank

Reading Notes #484

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

• Separate the Metadata Noise from the Implementation in Azure Functions (Adam Storr) - This post shares an interesting technic to not get flood by all the metadata required but still managed to be OpenApi compatible.

• 
  Amanda Silver on What’s Coming for Developers - Episode 151  - This is the summary of a podcast episode. It looks like gold! Already download it and it's next on my playlist.

• How to Calculate Azure Blob Container Size (Mark Heath) - Nice little code snippet.

• Top 6 tips for configuring a new Microsoft Azure environment ( Sonia Cuff) - This is stupid simple as they say and it will make a big difference further down the road. They are no reason to not do it.

Programming

• Looking inside ConfigurationManager in .NET 6: Exploring .NET Core 6 - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - Such a nice integration, cleaner and more efficient.

• Dapr v1.4 is now available (Dapr project maintainers) - New updates on this loved library. This post also shares get-started resources.

• Schedule Your Tasks Like A Pro in Blazor Applications (Alan Sangeeth) - I love Syncfusion controls and each time is always hard. Nice post.

~Frank

Reading Notes #481

Cloud

• Chocolatey Software Blog | Announcing the Chocolatey for Business QDE Azure Environment (Chocolatey Team) - Really cool to see awesome tools like this one now available in the marketplace and with what looks like a very interesting offer for businesses.

• Play with Proxy in Azure Function App (Kevin Li) - A very interesting post about the proxies contained in Azure Functions... Such an interesting tool.

Programming

• How to Use GitHub Codespaces With Your docfx Project (Sean Killeen) - Excellent post that shows how to set up and configure our project so anybody can have a functional dev environment in one click.

• How to Handle Global Exception Handler with C# Web API (Charris Herrera) - Perfect post to get started with exception management in our projects. And there are even C# code snippets.

• The Three Pillars of WebAssembly (Connor Hicks) - A nice short post that describes the essentials of WASM.

Podcast

• DevSecOps or SecDevOps with Wabbi's Brittany Greenfield (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - DevSecOps vs. SecDevOps vs. DevOpsSec... A lovely episode, I read or hear those buzzwords often very happy to better understand what they mean.

• SPI 500: Session 500! A Mystery Host Flips the Script! (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - I have been listening to this podcast for a while and I really liked learning more about Pat and how all this started.

• Take Control of Your Life and Business with Christy Wright (The EntreLeadership Podcast) - Productivity equal working less. So we need to take the time to plan or structure our days. A nice episode about a hot topic.

• Productive, Happy, Focused—How Small Habits Bring Big Success (Modern Mentor) - This is gold. So many times I heard people that they fail at changing their habits because they do too much at once.

~Frank

Reading Notes #479

Cloud

• Putting some more FUN into Azure Functions, Managed Identity & Microsoft Graph (Luise Freese) - Very nice post that gets you started with powerful tools in a very secure way. This is the perfect place to start even more if you are an occasional (aka citizen) developer.

• Azure Active Directory B2C with Blazor WebAssembly Hosted Apps (Marinko Spasojevic) - A nice tutorial to see the requirement and code snippets with B2C.

• Optimize your cloud spend with Azure (Microsoft Azure) - This post lists many tools, more detailed posts, and videos to continue our journey feeling safe in the cloud.

Programming

• Developer Best Practices - Structuring Your Repository for Static Web Apps (April Edwards) - Great post easy to understand and to learn how to be more secure.

• What is an API? (Salma) - Wonderful post that explains so well API. I definetly think that could be the best post to get started about the topic.

• Why do we need Dapr? (Mark Heath) - A very clear example that illustrates simple but frequent situations where Dapr would help us. Reference to a book also in.

Podcasts

• #TracyPodTips: Why You Should Nod And Not Comment When Recording A Guest Interview (Feed Your Brand) - That's an excellent pro tips!

• Shannon Doherty on A Platform to Influence Happiness (What's Essential hosted by Greg McKeown) - A fun and interesting episode where a life-hack content cretor shares her reflection about how to find what will works and different hacks of course.

• 264: FOSS, Code Tours, & .NET MAUI Web with Ooui (Merge Conflict) - Tons of news in many different topics... Nice show, as usual, looking forward to learn more once both of them use more MAUI in their projects.

~Frank

Reading Notes #478

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

• Comparing Azure Static Web Apps vs Azure WebApps vs Azure Blob Storage Static Sites (April Edwards) - Excellent post that lists all the features of the latest flavor and compares it to the previous one. Tons of references to get started.

Programming

• 9 Vital Reasons to Use Docker With ASP.NET (Arjun S.) - Nice post that lists, at a high level, the reasons why Docker should be worth your time to learn.

• Blazor and Cancelling Asynchronous Calls With CancellationTokenSource (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - Nice post that clarifies some details. And the code is available.

• Install WSL with a single command now available in Windows 10 version 2004 and higher (Craig Loewen) - This is very interesting and will certainly ease the install process. I mean it's hard to beat a single command of only a few characters.

• Stringly Typed vs Strongly Typed (Scott Hanselman) - I love it! That's totally the questions I will ask myself next time I use magic strings.

Books

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & flow

Author: Dominica Degrandis, Tonianne DeMaria

This book helps define and explains how to really do and use tools like Kanban. It's not a story like in The Phoenix Project. There is a lot in this book and it is worth taking your time to read it.

A book to share.

~Frank

Reading Notes #475

Every "Monday", I 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!

The suggestion of the week

• What makes a good Git commit? (Al Tenhundfeld) - Great post. It's always good to read opinions from others about collaborating as it helps to better understand others, be in their shoes, and then become a better team player.

Cloud

• Azure Service Bus: Queues vs Topics (Davide Bellone) - Most people know about queues but topics is not as well known. This is a great post to understand why, how, and what you need.

• Azure Service Bus and C# - an introduction (Davide Bellone) - This is a nice and detailed post perfect to get started with the service Bus and queues.

• Building and auto-deploying an ASP.NET Core application - Part 7 - Improving your build and release processes ( Imar Spaanjaars) - This series is gold for anyone interested to learn more about best practices when deploying. It covers many different scenarios and got into the details.

• Creating Azure Functions, Custom Connectors and using them inside of Power apps (Charles Sterling) - Quick tutorial that connects two amazing tools.

• Leveling Up Static Web Apps With the CLI (Aaron Powell) - A pretty cool demo running locally. The explanation of the tasks fike is awesome.

Programming

• Best Practices for Microservices (dilshan ukwattage) - 7 best practices to help us building great microservices solutions.

• Conditional compilation for ignoring method calls with the ConditionalAttribute (Andrew Lock) - An interesting post about commands that we don't see that often, or at least that I don't see often.

• How to use GitHub actions and Contentful webhooks to show your latest blog posts on your GitHub profile README (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Wow, This is pretty cool! I didn't think we could do this kind of thing with our page...but I guess we can do all we want; love it.

• Extending HttpClient Testing With Templating (Adam Storr) - A nice quick post that shares unit test pattern

• Exploring .NET interactive notebooks with VS Code (Andrew Lock) - Nice practical utilization of that tech and I love the historic vibe into it.

• Git – What to do when things go wrong (pcmichaels) - Wonderful post...We all been there when we screwed up then not sure how to fix things. This post is packed with helpful commands and explanations on how to use them and the expected result

Miscellaneous

• Diagram as Code with Diagrams (Sam Cogan) - Interesting tool, I use drawio most of the time because it doesn't require any installation, but I am curious to see it.

• Speaking CTO (Gregor Hohpe) - Nive post with really good and simple best practices.

~Frank