Visual Countdown Days Until [a date]

During the holidays, I embarked on a fun project to create a visual countdown for important dates. Inspired by howmanysleeps and hometime from veebch, I wanted to build a countdown that didn't rely on Google Calendar. Instead, I used a Raspberry Pi Pico and some custom code to achieve this.

💾 You can find the full code on GitHub

What It Is

This project consists of two main parts:

• Python code for the Raspberry Pi Pico
• A .NET website to update the configuration, allowing you to set:
  • The important date
  • Two custom colors or random ones
  • The RGB values for the custom colors

What You Need

• Raspberry Pi Pico
• Azure subscription
• BTF-LIGHTING XGB1338(WS2812B) LED Strip DC5V with Individual Addressable LED
• Azure Developer CLI (azd)

How to Deploy the Configuration Website

After cloning the repo, navigate to the src/NextEvent/ folder and use the Azure Developer CLI to initialize the project:

azd init

Enter a meaningful name for your resource group in Azure. To deploy, use the deployment command:

azd up

Specify the Azure subscription and location when prompted. After a few minutes, everything should be deployed. You can access the URL from the output in the terminal or retrieve it from the Azure Portal.

How to Set Up the Raspberry Pi Pico

Edit the config.py file to add your Wi-Fi information and update the number of lights on your light strip.

You can use Thonny to copy the Python code to the device. Copy both main.py and config.py to the Raspberry Pi Pico.

How It Works

• The website creates a JSON file and saves it in a publicly accessible Azure storage.
• When the Pi is powered on, it will:
  • Turn green one by one all the lights of the strip
  • Change the color of the entire light strip a few times, then turn it off
  • Try to connect to the Wi-Fi
  • Retrieve the timezone, current date, and settings from the JSON file
  • If the important date is within 24 days, the countdown will be displayed using random colors or the specified colors.
  • If the date has passed, the light strip will display a breathing effect with a random color of the day.

The Code on the Raspberry Pi Pico

The main code for the Raspberry Pi Pico is written in Python. Here's a brief overview of what it does:

1. Connect to Wi-Fi: The connect_to_wifi function connects the Raspberry Pi Pico to the specified Wi-Fi network.
2. Get Timezone and Local Time: The get_timezone and get_local_time functions fetch the current timezone and local time using online APIs.
3. Fetch Light Settings: The get_light_settings function retrieves the important date and RGB colors from the JSON file stored in Azure.
4. Calculate Sleeps Until Special Day: The sleeps_until_special_day function calculates the number of days until the important date.
5. Control the LED Strip: The progress function controls the LED strip, displaying the countdown or a breathing effect based on the current date and settings.

The Configuration Website

The configuration website is built in C#. It's a Blazor server webapp, and I used .NET Aspire to make it easy to run it locally. The UI uses FluentUI-Blazor so it looks pretty, without effort. 

The website allows you to update the settings for the Raspberry Pi Pico. You can set the important date, choose custom colors, and save these settings to a JSON file in Azure storage.

Little Extra

The website is deployed in Azure Container App with a minimum scaling to zero to save on costs. This may cause a slight delay when loading the site for the first time, but it will work just fine and return to "dormant" mode after a while.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my holiday project! It was a fun and educational experience, and I look forward to working on more projects like this in the future.

What's Next?

Currently the project does a 24 days countdown (inspired from the advent calendar). I would like to add a feature to allow the user to set the number of days for the countdown. I would also like to add the possibility to set the color for the breathing effect (or keep it random) when the important date has passed. And lastly, I would like to add the time of the day when the light strip should turn on and off, because we all have different schedule 😉 .

Last thoughts

I really enjoyed doing this project. It was a fun way to learn more about the Raspberry Pi Pico, micro-Python (I didn't even know it was a thing), and FluentUI Blazor. I hope you enjoyed reading about it and that it inspired you to create your own fun projects. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out, I'm fboucheros on most socials.

~Frank

Reading Notes #627

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!

Cloud

• WTH is Planned Failover for Azure Storage? (Sam Cogan) - Interesting new type of fail over that could help to practice without losing any data.

Programming

• Install and use Microsoft Dot NET 9 with the Raspberry Pi (Pete Codes) - C# everywhere! I love it! I do have some code that run on a Pi as a mini server, bubi need to have a look for a IoT library that could be used.

• Blazorise v1.7 (Mladen Macanović) - New version of a nice looking CSS Framework for our Blazor website with more features and better performance.

AI

• Unlocking the Power of GitHub Models in .NET with Semantic Kernel - .NET Blog (Bruno Capuano) - Super cool, very quick to setup, secure, and perfect why we are "just" developing.

• 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.

• Learn how to create a Client-Server Application in under 45 Minutes in the new Season of AI - Visual Studio Blog (Pablo Lopez) - A lot of AI related session are coming up, it's time to register.

Data

• 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.

If you have interesting content, share it!

~ Frank

Reading Notes #618

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!

Programming

• Announcing .NET Aspire 8.2 – Goodbye Components, Hello Integrations! (Maddy Montaquila) - New release, new name, new functionalities, and one documented breaking change. All in this post.

• C# Dev Kit update brings enhanced Razor IntelliSense, Project Status, and New Config Options (Wendy Breiding) - Wow so many great improvements! I can't wait to enable the experimental ones and open my vsCode again.

• Working with tar files in .NET 8 (Andrew Lock) - A nice post that explored and show what we can to do with tarbal from .NEt and explains some of the limitations.

• Blazor Basics: Testing Blazor Components with BUnit (Claudio Bernasconi) - We all agree that tests are important (or we should). bUnit is specially build for Blazor Applications. If you are using this web frontend you should definitely have a look!This post helps you getting started.

Miscellaneous

• If you’re going to block your time, do this, too (Michael Eaton) - Simple and efficient time blocking is a great way to be productive.

~frank

Reading Notes #614

In this edition of Reading Notes, we delve into a diverse range of programming topics, from stream manipulation in C# to the latest updates in Docker Desktop. Whether you’re interested in adding AI to your .NET apps or understanding the implications of .NET 6 reaching end-of-support, we’ve got you covered. 

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.

Programming

• How to Convert a Stream to a File in C# (Bozo Spoljaric) - Learn more about stream and file manipulation in this useful post.

• Add AI to Your .NET Apps Easily with Prompty (Bruno Capuano) - This is a nice tutorial to build an API using Semantic Kernel to communicate to Prompty and add AI to your project.

• .NET 6 will reach End of Support on November 12, 2024 (Rahul Bhandari) - NET 6 will be reaching end of support, okay but what does that means for you?This post covers it all.

• Disambiguating types with the same name with extern alias (Andrew Lock) - It's always a pleasure to read Andrew's post that goes deeper explains more complex scenarios.

• Docker Desktop 4.32: Beta Releases of Compose File Viewer, Terminal Shell Integration, and Volume Backups to Cloud Providers (Deanna Sparks) - Some great new features and improvement for this new update of Docker Desktop.

• How use a Blazor QuickGrid with GraphQL (Frank Boucher) - QuickGrid is an excellent component that came recently in Blazor. Optimized and compatible with tons of modern patterns to display,sort,filter our data.This post share a few o those things filling the grid with a GraphQL endpoint.

Miscellaneous

• What CrowdStrike teaches us about risks & resilience (Om Malik) - Nice post to learn more about that event,and understand the real risk.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #611

Welcome to this week’s edition of Reading Notes! In this roundup, we explore a variety of topics across cloud, programming, databases, and AI. From understanding Docker’s USER instruction to styling Blazor components with CSS, I’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in!

Suggestion of the week

• Understanding the Docker USER Instruction (Jay Schmidt) - A great post to that explains really clearly the basic usage of user when building our container. After reading this post you should feel confident to follow this best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Static Web Apps–SWA CLI behind the scenes (Bart Wullems) - Cool post to that quickly explains how the CLIworks and a few different tools.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: Styling Blazor Components with CSS (Claudio Bernasconi) - That will solve an issue I was having... Blazor for the win!

• Is Your ASP.NET Core Application Running In A Container? (Adam Storr) - Very neat tip to know when the App is or not in a container.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

Databases

• Automating SQL Deployments using GitHub Actions - Part 2 (Eduardo Pivaral) - That's pretty neat. Of course, there is a SQL option but I never thought about it. Excellent idea to keep everything in one place with versions.

AI

• Updated Documentation for Semantic Kernel (Sophia Lagerkrans-Pandey) - Nice update in the documentation, new content new look.

~frank

Reading Notes #609

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.

• Enhancing Performance in Azure Container Apps (Cary Chai) - This post gives us an history of the different algorithm used in ACA but also explains briefly how does one works.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2022 - 17.10 Performance Enhancements - Visual Studio Blog (Ashok Kamath) - Impressive improvement going up to 50% in specific cases! Congratulations to the team,event the smaller speed improvement will be feel.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.8 (Vincent Baaij) - awesome update just before summer! (well, in the north hemisphere).

AI

• Using Phi-3 & C# with ONNX for text and vision samples - .NET Blog (Bruno Capuano) - Nice post that shows that when using great tools it can be really simple todo amazing things.

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity - ChatGPT and other tools have an impact and it disturb the flow. Some embraces the change other don't like the change. Interesting post where the author shares his concerns.

~frank

Reading Notes #607

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 PostgreSQL, Entra ID Authentication and .NET | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great post! Of course using some identity provider is more complicated then a strait password, but it's way simpler that we may though.

• 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.

• Microsoft Entra ID Tenant Starters Guide: Understanding Identity Management and Licensing (Gregor Wohlfarter) - Nice post to have an overview of this important piece of security.

Programming

• Refactor your code using alias any type - .NET Blog (David Pine) - Excellent series to learn more about recently to feature of C#.

• Blazor Basics: Child Routes & Optional Route Parameters (Claudio Bernasconi) - You know your route 101 and would like to learn more, this post is for you.

Databases

• A beginner's guide to mapping arrays in EF Core 8 - .NET Blog (Arthur Vickers) - An interesting post to that depending if your database supported features explains how EF Core could works and use arrays.

Podcasts

• The Definition of Success with author Neil Strauss (A Bit of Optimism) - For a conversation to be constructive and to learn from it not all participant needs to agree. Nice episode about success.

• 81. From APIs to natural language: The democratization of AI - with Henk Boelman (Betatalks the podcast) - Nice to listen to a colleague. Henk definitely knows the very well the topic and how to explains it clearly.

• Motivated by play (Friends) (The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source) - What a journey! Interesting episode, inspiring.

• Brady Gaster: .NET Cloud Native - Episode 295 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Aspire, aspire, aspire, you will learn all about Aspire in this episode.

~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 #604

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 Communication Services May 2024 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Wow many great new features in this update.

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 – SANDRO PEREIRA BIZTALK BLOG (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problems.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: 9 Best Practices for Building Blazor Web Apps (Claudio Bernasconi) - This post shares best practices. They are simple to follow but very impactful.

• Performant, Secure, and Versatile Containers (Savannah Ostrowski,Sohan Maheshwar) - Cool! It's time to try it, only one switch to flip..

• 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.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.21 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of new features again and I love| seeing all those community contributions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #602

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!

Cloud

• Azure SDK Release (April 2024) (Hector Norzagaray) - Lots of SDKs updates for many different languages and services.

Programming

• .NET Aspire preview 6 - .NET Aspire - The more a play with Aspire the more I like it. .NET developers you must give it a try.

• How to upload a file with Blazor SSR in .NET 8? - (Jon Hilton) A nice quick tutorial with all the code snippets we need.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.7 - (Vincent Baaij) A lots o new features and improvements in this release.

• Why don’t we talk about minifying CSS anymore? - (Salma Alam-Naylor) An interesting post. I didn't think about it but it's true, we used to talk way more about minification...

• Minimal APIs Nuget Packages - (Shawn Wildermuth) Same great tools but new names to make it easier to remember and more of the same family.

AI

• #SemanticKernel: Local LLMs Unleashed on #RaspberryPi 5 - (Bruno Capuano) This is the perfect tutorial to get started with local AI. No powerful computer required.

~Frank

Reading Notes #601

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.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: Localization Using Resource Files (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice and complete tutorial.

• What's new for .NET in Ubuntu 24.04 - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - This is a good news! Definitely going in the right direction.

• Minimal APIs Nuget Packages (Shawn Wildermuth) - Same great tools but new names to make it easier to remember and more of the same family.

• Useful features in Entity Framework Core 8 for your application (Dennis Frühauff) - A great post with detailed explanation and code samples that covers the major new feature and enhancements of EF8.

• Better Minimal APIs Endpoint Organization With Carter in ASP.NET Core (Ivan Gechev) - Carter looks like a very useful library definitely something to explore a bit more.

• Warp’s Team plan for developer productivity is available today (Melanie Crissey) - I started using this terminal a few weeks ago on a personal device. It's interesting to see all the different options an the possibilities for teams.

Open Source

• Open sourcing MS-DOS 4.0 - Microsoft Open Source Blog (Scott Hanselman, Jeff Wilcox) - That a cool news! I'm curious what people will do with it, what kind of experiments they will try.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #600

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! 

by: Microsoft Designer

Suggestion of the week

• Streamline your container build and publish with .NET 8 - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - As containers takes more and more space in our development life, it's great to see the tools evolving too. This post is a must for all .Net developers.

Cloud

• Announcing a new login experience with Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI (Damien Caro) - This is a great news. Have a look before you update.

Programming

• Build & test resilient apps in .NET with Dev Proxy - .NET Blog (Waldek Mastykarz) - Every web developers needs that tool. Dev Proxy is just pure gold.

• C#: What is the difference between 'string' and System.String? (Chris Pietschmann) - Memory check passed .... Did you knew?

• Blazor Basics: Handling Images Dynamically (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice simple tutorial playing with images within Blazor.

Miscellaneous

• What is an RDP Browser? (And How To Get One) (Peter) - A great alternative when you want to test on different browser or version of a browser, for gaming, And also for cyber security when investigating.

~Frank

Reading Notes #598

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, 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

• What is cloud native and how can it generate business value? (George Fitzmaurice) - Interesting thoughts about cloud native, how to see it, how to se it's value.

• Using Kudu in Azure to Debug an Azure Function (Paul Michaels) - Kudu is a fantastic tools that not enough people know about.

Programming

• Is Your Container Image Really Distroless? (Laurent Goderre) - Nice post that explains a new way to improve security and more while building our container by going distroless.

• Blazor Basics: Improved Performance with Component Virtualization (Claudio Bernasconi) - When applicable the lazy loading makes a huge difference. This simple tutorial explains how things works and has all the code to back it up.

• Azure PowerShell Tips and Tricks (Paul Harrison) - PowerShell is a very interesting and useful script language.All those tips are pure wisdom!

DevOps

• Beautiful .NET Test Reports Using GitHub Actions (Sean Killeen) - It's true that the unit test result in Azure DevOps looks amazing. Pretty nice adaptation in GitHub Action, could/ should it be native?

Open Source

• Linus Torvalds announces Linux 6.8 (Brian Fagioli) - Nice post.I feel we see more often distro new release making "the e news".

• Debian’s Dedication to Security: A Robust Foundation for Docker Developers (David Dooling) - Happy to see such a fundamental distribution take seriously security as core idea.

AI

• Building a Video Analysis and Transcription Chatbot with the GenAI Stack (David Cardozo) - This post explains a very cool project with generative AI and docker in different technology, very inspiring!

~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 #596

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

• Introducing .NET Smart Components - AI-powered UI controls - .NET Blog (Daniel Roth) - Wait whaaat! This it so cool and useful and it's available now. You must see this the smart-past button needs to be on all forms...

Cloud

• Smart To-Do Creator: Combining the ease of Azure Logic Apps and the power of Generative AI (Gaurav Mantri) - A cool little project explained in this post. It uses logic apps and AI.

Programming

• .Net Aspire - A Brief Introduction (Paul Michaels) - I also started playing with aspire this weekend I must say I love it, give it a try.

• Difference Between await and Task.Wait in C# (Georgios Panagopoulos) - This nice post goes in the details to explains the difference of the two methods.

AI

• Microsoft and NVIDIA announce major integrations to accelerate generative AI for enterprises everywhere (Microsoft) - If you use AI or are planning to do it, this post will be interesting.

• Demystifying LLMS From Zero to Raccoon-Hero, with Azure and DotNet, Episode 1: Creating a CLI (Maho Pacheco) - This is a nice step by step tutorial that show us how to build a console application that use AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (Manish Shivanandhan) - An interesting aLternative to GPT when text is involved.

Miscellaneous

• Homo sapiens 1.0 (Mark Downie) - Interesting reflection about how to determine what ready important when adding features in a product or services.

~Frank

Reading Notes #595

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 Aspire preview 4 - .NET Aspire - So much in this new release! So many possibilities.

• Generate Local .NET Secrets from Azure Deployments (Frank Boucher) - Nice new simple to get started.

• Unity extension for Visual Studio Code - Now Generally Available (Jb Evain) - That's an interesting idea! I'm not a Unity developer, but I'm curious to see the response from the community.

• Blazor Basics: Advanced Blazor Form Validation (Claudio Bernasconi) - Having control on the validation and how we guide our users is a must. This post does a great job at explaining how to to it within Blazor with clear and simple code sample.

• An introduction to the heap data structure and .NET's priority queue (Andrew Lock) - Great post that the explains how to understand the heap. This source of information could be so useful when investigating something that doesn't work as expected in our code.

• Lightweight In-Memory Message Bus Using .NET Channels (Milan Jovanović) - Messages queues are such a powerful tool when our solution work asynchronously. This nice tutorial shows us how to do it and stay local.

AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/an-introduction-to-mistral-ai/) - An interesting alternative to GPT when text is involved.

• Get started with .NET 8 and AI using new quickstart tutorials (Jordan Matthiesen) - Five extremely simple example application to explain different AI scenarios in .NET and an opportunity to give your feedback.

Databases

• RavenDB and Two Factor Authentication (Oren Eini) - Good news! Always use the two factor authentication when available.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Easiest Way To Make Your Life More Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric Barker) - Love it! Don't be stuff buy time.... Nice post

~Frank

Reading Notes #593

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 Functions Extensibility - Runtime Scaling (Tomasz Pęczek) - A well written post that goes in the details.Perfect to really understand how things works.

Programming

• 5 Powerful HTML Attributes That Don't Require JavaScript (Ashish Patel) - Wow! I didn't even known that most of those attributes existed..

• Docker Init for ASP.NET Core Compared to VS or VS Code Extensions (Julie Lerman) - awesome comparison! I've been thinking about doing it for a little while. Another great post from Julie.

• Blazor and .NET 8: How I Built a Fast and Flexible Website (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - optimisation is often a step that people forgets, but it's one that is extremely rewarding.This series seams very interesting, we will s| more of those in the notes...

• Warp, the modern terminal, is now available for Linux (Aloke Desai, David Stern) - I didn't heard of that terminal before. It looks interesting! Looking forward to try it.

• Using Visual Studio Code for .NET MAUI Development (Vijay Anand) - it's incredible the progress that was done in such little time I'm looking forward to try it.

• The FAST and the Fluent: A Blazor story - .NET Blog (Vincent Baaij) - Nice post that teach us a bit of history. I'm fan of Fluent UI and Blazor...and more recently of the Fluent UI Blazor library. I think it's a must for all Blazor developers.

• GraphQL vs. REST—Which is Better for API Design? (Hassan Djirdeh) - Pretty cool comparison of different type/design of APIs.

Miscellaneous

• Windows AI Studio : Getting Started ( Shreyan Fernandes) - Nice tools the works locally. I'm installing it, will you?

~Frank

Reading Notes #592

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, that catch my interest during the week. This week it's definitely more code focus.

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

Cloud

• Open at Microsoft - FluentUI.Blazor (Denis Voituron) - This post summarized the new series of videos about FluentUI Blazor done on Open at Microsoft, including the videos.

Programming

• An Introduction to the World of Containers with .NET 8 (James Montemagno) - A lots of information to get started with containers in this post.And the best of it is its most likely easier that you think!

• Developing Optimized GitHub Actions with .NET and Native AOT (David Pine) - There is so many good and great ideas in this post! Now I just need time to implement them.

• Using named pipes with ASP.NET Core and HttpClient (Andrew Lock) - I didn't known about these pipes, did you? Interesting tool that could simplify the communication between services.

• Introducing ASP.NET Core metrics and Grafana dashboards in .NET 8 (James Newton-King) - tons of metric and not a lot of work to get them just like we like it.

• Using dependency injection with Azure .NET SDK (Alexandre Nédélec) - Great post to learn how the Microsoft.Extensions.Azure package can really help us with our code.

• How To Use AI Assistant to Generate Test Data For .NET Applications (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - I like that! I can see myself using AI to scaffold the big part of my test and then finish them. It's like the classic 80-20. Nice post to get inspired.

~Frank

Reading Notes #590

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

• Observability on Azure Container Apps (Abdullah Abu-Hassan) - Great post to get started. We can download all the code required to try it ourself.

• WTH is Azure Copilot? (Sam Cogan) - I believe this copilot will be extremely useful for so many people... including me.

Programming

• Solved! Visual Studio .http File Not Sending Authorization Header (Steve Smith) - The devil is in the details as they say. Great post that shares the investigation of an issues. A time saver.

• Should I put my Blazor components in the server project, or the client project? (Jon Hilton) - Short and clear explanation of the blazor structure, very helpful post.

• How to Make Your Web Sites Accessible (Beau Carnes) - Accessibility is a must and now there a course available on camp to help us making our website accessible.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor components 4.4 (Vincent Baaij) - Nice new components. Its going fast!

• Dev Tunnels: A Game Changer for Mobile Developers - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - Dev Tunnel is definitely a incredible tool.I used it for debugging connector in Power Platform and there is no doubts it will help with mobile app...No more guesses debug with the real thing.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Sudo for Windows! (Jordi Adoumie) - Wow! This is a really good new feature. How many time a forgot to start my terminal as admin and needed to starry over again...Looking forward to try it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #587

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

• Backing up files to Azure blob storage with azcopy (Andrew Lock) - A very interesting solution to a situation we are all facing. Nice to see the OSS project (I didn't know that one) and smart way to use Azure.

Low Code

• Building your own copilot – yes, but how? (Part 1 of 2) (Carlotta Castelluccio) - This is a cool tutorial to build a Copilot codeless style.If you prefer code style watch for part two coming soon.

Programming

• Structuring a Clean Architecture Folder (Adrián Bailador Panero) - Nice quick overview of the folder structure.

• Git Lesson: How to Use .gitignore and .gitkeep? (Rita Lyczywek) - Two important files indeed when using Git.

• Cookies vs Session Storage vs Local Storage (Royal Jain) - Clear post that explains the purpose and differences between 3 useful tools.

• 14 Things To Check Before Deploying a Website 👨‍💻🔥 (Arjun Vijay Prakash) - Quick sanity check before publishing.... It is always a good idea.

• Difference between CultureInfo.Get and new CultureInfo - Gérald Barré (Gérald Barré) - Short post how performance tip with cultureInfo.

• Simpler auth for Blazor Web Apps with Auth0? (Jon Hilton) - A wonderful tutorial very well detailed that explains how to use Auth0 with Blazor server app and search some gotchas so our experience goes smoother.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Communication Services January 2024 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Improved management and a new data channel, great updates to start the year with a bang!

~Frank