Reading Notes #541

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. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

Cloud

• Learn Azure DevOps from Zero to Hero (April Edwards) - Nice series of videos to learn Azure DevOps.

Programming

• Jan. Extensions: Deploy Kubernetes and Run Cloud Apps Locally (Amy Bass) - I like those extension of the month post. It makes you discover little gem that you have not be interested at first.

• 5 .NET MAUI Features for Building Great Desktop Apps (James Montemagno) - Nice top five that shows us one more time how .NET MAUI is a great idea when it's time to create an application UI.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1! Better, faster MVVM source generators, .NET 7 support, and more! (Sergio Pedri) - Great new toolkit with many honestly very cool features.

• Generating Sample Data with Bogus (Shawn Wildermuth) - We all need seed data, test data, temp data... Bogus seams sample and efficient. I'm definitely trying it, in my next project.

• How to Get an Enum Member as a String in C# (Code Maze ) - This post provides a nice overview, with code samples, of three different ways to get the text value of an enum.

• Generating argument expressions for minimal APIs (continued): Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 5 (Andrew Lock) - Another nice post in that series that explains how things works under the hood for Minimal API.

Books

Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance 

Author: Erica Dhawan 

It's been a while since I had so many "ah-ah" moment while reading a book. Digital body language is about communication using many different technologies by different culture, generations and individuals... 

It a must if you care about how your message are received.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day (Eric Barker) - A nice post that reminds us of simple things to regain or productivity.

• How I Use Stream Deck (Brian T. Jackett) - Its always interesting to see how others are using some tools. It provides inspiration for our own setup.

~frank

Reading Notes #470

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!

Cloud

• How to Display the Current Azure Subscription in your CLI (Sam Cogan) - This is a game-changer for me. Every time I work in the terminal I was checking what was my current subscription (you don't want to deploy things in the wrong one right?) But know it will always be visible. Wonderfull!

Programming

• Devlead.Statiq - Part 2 - Theme from external web resource (Mattias Karlsson) - That's cool and clever. And cleaner than the modules.

• @devlead - Mattias Karlsson's Blog - Devlead.Statiq - Part 1 - Tabs (Mattias Karlsson) - Cool feature from Statiq the static content generator.

• ASP.NET Core in Action, Second Edition is available now! (Andrew Lock) - Nice update, its a lot of work to keep up with .Net. Great work.

• Chocolatey GUI - The Path to 1 million downloads (Gary Ewan Park) - Congratulation! I love Chocolatey and this little historic review is super cool.

• Take your Windows Terminal and PowerShell to the next level with Terminal Icons (Scott Hanselman) - Nice quick tips, super simple, and yeah way prettier.

• Viewing overwritten configuration values in ASP.NET Core (Andrew Lock) - Nice post that goes deep in debugging and shows how to make things more visible.

• Devlead.Statiq - Part 3 - IncludeCode 🤺 (Mattias Karlsson) - An interesting feature that I didn't know about...

Miscellaneous

• Writing, Editing and Formatting a Technical Ebook in 2021 (Rob Conery) - Interesting post. I knew writing a book was a lot of work, of course, but never thought the formatting was such a challenge.

Reading Notes #382

Cloud

• Getting Started with the Cognitive Services Computer Vision API - The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard (David Giard ) - Nice little tutorial to get started quickly with the Vision API.
• Kubernetes: What it is and what it isn’t (Jason Haley) - Cool source of resources related to how to learn Kubernetes
• Sync Folder with Azure Blob Storage (Thomas Maurer) - Wow, this is so sick! Very happy about this feature.
• Using Entity Framework with Azure Functions (Jeff Hollan) - Pretty cool demo about the new dependency injection feature of Azure Function.

Programming

• Clever little C# and ASP.NET Core features that make me happy (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post about some C# gems...If I can say that.
• 10 Top Blazor Tools Just a NuGet Away -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - Wow, so many great projects...
• Top 10 C# Developer Books for Summer 2019 (Claudio Bernasconi) - Great list of books to get started with C# or as a developer. I'll definitely refer people to it when asked where to start.

~

Reading Notes #356

Suggestion of the week

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

Miscellaneous

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

Books

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











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Reading Notes #346

Cloud

• Thoughts on Azure DevOps (Scott Allen) - Interesting review of the rebranded tool.
• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 160 - The BEST of Azure Tips and Tricks is now available as a FREE ebook (Michael Crump) - Fantastic! The BEST of Azure Tips and Tricks is now available as a FREE
• Introducing Azure Functions 2.0 (Eduardo Laureano) - Wow, the Azure Functions has evolved so much since the beginning. It's time to upgrade our old functions.

Programming

• Exploring the Docker Extension for VS Code and .NET Core (Shayne Boyer) - Wow, really nice update! It looks so easy.
• Hacktoberfest: Tips for growing open source communities in October and beyond | Microsoft + Open Source (Stephanie Morillo) - Nice post that provides a little bit more context about how to do things for the Hacktoberfest.
• Headless CMS and Decoupled CMS in .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that lists some of the most popular headless CMS.
• Join our #Hacktoberfest 2018 celebration! | Microsoft + Open Source (Bernd Verst) - Microsoft announced it's one month long hackaton on all his opensource projects. Learn more about where to find that list in this post.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft Ignite Aftermath ( Chris Pietschmann, Dan Patrick) - If you are like me and need to catch up on what append to Ignite, this post is a really good place to start as it contains a list of all the links we need.

~

Reading Notes #215

Cloud

• Azure Learning Paths (Laurent Duveau) - Did you know that the Azure documentation site has a set of 25 learning paths? I didn't, and it's awesome.
  
• Using Azure Storage Queues from .NET - Nice post that explores the Azure queues through .net, and feature th very useful cloud config...
  
• Advanced Use of Azure Virtual Machine DSC Extensions - Very nice tutorial about how to troubleshooting.

Programming

• Exploring the new .NET (Scott Hanselman) - This is the first post I read about the "dotnet compile" since the MVP Summit, and it looks at as much interesting as before.
  
• Why build scripts? (Amir Barylko) - This post changed my mind about F#, now I'm looking forward to try it.
  
• Signing into Windows 10 with your Face - Using an Xbox One Kinect with Windows Hello (Scott Hanselman) - I didn't think it was that easy to setup a XBox Kinect to a Pc...
  
• Visual Studio Shortcuts: Comment Selection / Uncomment Selection (Jeremy) - Time to learn some little time saving tips with this short post.
  
• Visual Studio Shortcuts: Format Document (Jeremy) - Recently, I have been surprised to learn that some people are still not aware of that very powerful feature o VisualStudio.

Data

• More Power BI Feature Updates: Power BI Desktop December Update and new Power BI service features - This post detailed the features of th December update.

Miscellaneous

• 12 Most Influential Books Every Software Engineer Needs to Read (roelljr) - Fantastic list of essential books to read. A must.
  
• Google Spotlight Story Special Delivery is a nice YouTube gift for the holidays (Jeff Causey) - Really interesting little animation movie in a 360 degree environment.
  
• First Update Released for Open Live Writer (Richard Hay) - Awesome new, and it works!
  
• Announcing Programmer Tools! (Henry Spencer) - We all need some little tools from time to time. This post lists many useful tools, and what's nice about them is that they are available from everywhere because they are online tools.

Reading Notes #167

Suggestion of the week

• SQL Server to Azure Search Synchronization (Scott Klein)- Great demo with Liam C. This is a 15-minute video that you don't want t miss.

Cloud

• Now easier to create a sample Azure SQL Database and develop schema in Visual Studio (Sanjay Nagamangalam) - Wow, I cannot be easier than that. The post also contains a short video that shows how to do it.

• How to Sync SQL Server Data with Azure Search (Liam Cavanagh) - This post explains all the advantage to use Azure Search to implement a fulltext search in your application. It also shows how to do it.

Programming

• .NET Blog (Christiaan Rakowski, Linux Al, Ron, Nathan Dimitriades, Warren, EShy, Thomas Levesque, Svolo4, Jeremiah Gowdy, les, James S, Srigopal C Immo Landwerth [MSFT]) - Very interesting and complete post that explains the goals behind the .Net Core and how it is useful to us.

• Clean Code – Is my code always readable? - A simple but very efficient way to think when we a writing or re-factoring our code. I like it.

Books

DynamoDB Applied Design Patterns
By Uchit Vyas, Prabhakaran Kuppusamy
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Released: September 2014
ISBN 13: 9781783551897

This book takes you where you are and brings you directly in the cumulus. It starts gently by explaining the basic of the NoSQL, then move to DynamoDB fundamental: what is a data model and how to create a table.

Chapter after chapter, the book moves you to the next level by bringing new complexities and explains how to manage them with his simple but complete scenario. All the code samples are in Java and extremely well explained. With my .Net background, I always understood.

The book ends by presenting many best practices to get the best of DynamoDB, and compare it to other popular NoSQL databases.

I will definitely recommend this book to all people looking for a NoSQL database. DynamoDB is unavoidable when we are looking for a no-relational database, and this book is a must to have in our bookshelf.

Miscellaneous

• How to Ask for Feedback That Will Actually Help You - Interesting post about the importance of a good communication.

~Frank B