Reading Notes #525

Usually, it's on Monday, I know, but a technical issue prevented me to publish faster this week... 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Cost Management updates—September 2022 (Michael Flanakin) - Nice update about the mobile app and the docs.

Programming

• Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions (By Liam Mooney) - A nice tutorial that helps getting started building your first GitHub actions.

• Improve your pipeline maintainability with test categories in xUnit (Dennis Frühauff) - A nice post that describes two strategies about unit tests in our CI-CD.

• Bring Continuous Integration to Your Laptop With the Drone CI Docker Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Kamesh Sampath) - This CI-CD container looks very interesting. I will keep an eye on it but may wait until it shows up in the marketplace, or that I need it.

• How to Use the Alpine Docker Official Image (Tyler Charboneau) - Alpine is a must to know for all dev and DevOps people (and probably many more}. This post is perfect for getting you started.

Podcast

• 40. The future of Azure services & the benefits of being bilingual in Tech - with Frank Boucher (Betatalks the podcast) - Shameless plug for a podcast episode where I was the guest. We talk about why content in other languages than English is important and so much more.

• Mark Miller: The Science of Great UI in Software - Episode 212 (Azure DevOps Podcast) -

• Why the C64 Demoscene matters with Clay Token's Bilgem Çakır (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Scott has been sharing content about the Commodore 64 these days and that make me wanna jump back as it was my first computer... But this time I would understand English without having to search for each word in a dictionary.

Miscellaneous

• Systemd support is now available in WSL! - Windows Command Line (Craig Loewen) - Nice WSL is getting better.

~Frank

Reading Notes #519

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!

Suggestion of the week

• .NET 6 is now in Ubuntu 22.04 (Richard Lander) - So many amazing news in this post, all .NET dev must read it.

Cloud

• Announcing Microsoft Dev Box Preview (Anthony Cangialosi) - That seems very interesting! Developers don't need powerful machines all the time.

• Deploying Logic App Standard resource through DevOps pipeline (Shree Divya) - This is an excellent example of deployment, that includes all requirements.

Programming

• Thoughts on Copilot (Dave Rupert) - Interesting opinion about copilot after a few months.

~Frank

Reading Notes #513

Good Monday, it's time to share new readingnotes. 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!

The suggestion of the week

• Deploy Azure Static Web Apps With Bicep | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great tutorial that explains how to build a well-structured deployment pipeline using bicep and GitHub action. I will need this for sure, bookmarked.

Cloud

• Azure Container Hosting Demystified - 2022 Edition (Sam Cogan) - Great post that lists all Azure services that use containers, with their pros and cons.

• Building Messaging Endpoints in Azure: Container Apps (Jimmy Bogard) - This excellent tutorial shows all the steps from code to deployment.

Programming

• The Best C# .NET Web Application Tech Stack: Choosing The Front End (Michael Shpilt) - Nice post that describes all C# frontends with their pros and cons.

• ApiController Attribute in ASP.NET Core Web API (Code Maze) - This post contained many best practices and detailed explanations to get a great API and make sure the user experience is the best possible.

• Continuous Integration Vs. Continuous Delivery: Know the Differences & Draw a Line (Hiren Dhaduk) - This post is very interesting as it describes both parts of the flow, and lists the benefices and challenges.

• Incremental ASP.NET Migration Tooling Preview 2 (Mike Rousos) - The second preview already! Things are looking good...

• Understanding your middleware pipeline in .NET 6 with the Middleware Analysis package (Andrew Lock) - This post introduces a nice package to have better visibility into our code. Nice.

Miscellaneous

• New Resources to Get Started with .NET MAUI - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup) - Are you planning to learn something new this summer? I suggest you .NET MAUI, to build an application that can go everywhere. This post shares tons of references to get you started.

• Why Microsoft Measures Employee Thriving, Not Engagement (Dawn Klinghoffer, Elizabeth McCune) - Interesting article.

~frank

Reading Notes #507

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

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

Cloud

• #11: Share Content with Docusaurus & Azure Static Web Apps ( Nitya Narasimhan) - Another great example of a static web app this time for documentation perfect match!

• Azure Static Web Apps: named preview environments with Azure DevOps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is pretty cool, a unique URL for the staging/ qa environment...I like that

• Blazor WebAssembly for Headless CMS on Azure Static Web Apps (Justin Yoo ) - Woo! Amazing idea, you get the comfort of WordPress for writing and the lightweight of a static webapp.

• Create and connect to an Azure SQL DB in 6 easy steps (Davide Mauri) - Learn how to build an excellent Azure CLI script in this post. Sort and useful.

• Deploying Blazor WebAssembly applications to Azure Static Web Apps (Damir Arh) - Nice overview of the static webapp double with a tutorial to build a CI-CD using GitHub Action.

Programming

• The Magic of Docker Desktop is Now Available on Linux (Chris McLellan) - Wonderful, I believe that offering the same experience to your users independently of the platform is a sign of maturity.

• Configuring the Diagnostics Port for dotnet monitor (Mark Downie) - This post shares news about this monitoring tool that is as cross-plaforn as .NET is.

• Docker Extensions: Discover, Build & Integrate New Tools into Docker Desktop (Amy Bass) - This is really good. Now the entire community can add functionalities to the environment.

• DockerCon 2022: Community-powered, Developer-obsessed (Scott Johnston) - I watch the keynote and it was very interesting. Looking forward to see those demos

• How to run Kubernetes clusters locally on Windows - Simple Talk (Boemo Mmopelwa) - This tutorial goes over the functionalities of Kind. One of the two tools available to help us use Kubernetes locally. It looks simple and fun!

~frank

Reading Notes #505

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

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

Cloud

• Application Insights telemetry in Azure Functions (Orestis Meikopoulos) - Application Insights is so powerful and just one click away! Learn more about it in this post.

• Azure Function with PowerShell and the Power BI REST API – SQLServerCentral (Koen Verbeeck) - This is a nice step-by-step tutorial to write an azure function. All important points to do and avoid are present just like the code.

• Just Give Me an Access Token (Phil Jirsa) - Nice video tutorial and code snippet to get all the access your API needs.

• Update Your Azure Functions Table Storage Bindings (Mark Heath) - Nice post. Upgrading can be frightening sometimes, even more, when you know there are breaking changes.

Programming

• Auto publish your data using Travis (Montana Mendy) - A super quick example of ci-cd with Travis.

• Build configuration for Azure Static Web Apps (craigshoemaker, anthonychu, Reshmi-Sriram, changeworld) - Continuous deployment is so powerful it is very useful to understand the options and how you can set your things together.

• Introduction to Testing Blazor WebAssembly With bUnit (Code Maze) - Wow! An incredibly complete tutorial about bUnit. It is the best lace to get started.

• Multiple Directories for Static Files in ASP.NET Core (Shawn Wildermuth) - Nice journey of an issue that in the end wasn't one. It's time to learn.

• Why isn't my ASP.NET Core app in Docker working? (Andrew Lock) - A very interesting post that describes the learning process while building and fixing a container.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric) - Nice excerpt from a book about communication, this part is couple focus.

~frank

Reading Notes #503

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.

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

Cloud

• Quickstart: Container Apps using Bicep (Jason Haley) - Nice tutorial to get started with bicep and Azure Container Apps.

• Azure SDK Release (April 2022) - Always good to know what is updated. Did you know the team also maintains slides for you?

• Configure Azure Cosmos DB Continuous Backups (Rajendra Gupta) - Backup can be so powerful! You could return in time just before an error to understand what happens... Or so many other scenarios.

• Quickstart: Deploy an existing container image to Container Apps using Bicep (Jason Haley) - Great tutorial

• Unlock cloud savings on the fly with autoscale on Azure | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Diana Gao) - This is the perfect post to get started with autoscaling. Witch services what can you expect and more.

Programming

• Announcing Docker SBOM: A step towards more visibility into Docker images (Justin Cormack) - Oh, that's pretty cool! Easy to try. Give it a shot!

• How To Run PowerShell Scripts (Brien Posey) - A script can be frightening at first, but this nice post will help you to understand them better. Perfect for less technical people.

• Introducing Qodana for Azure Pipelines (Anastasia Khramushina) - Qodana is can analyze your code in CICD on many platforms, and now also in the Azure DevOps.

• Uploading Files with HttpClient in .NET 6 (Calvin) - Nice tutorial to upload a file all the code is there.

~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 #471

Cloud

• Lost in Azure cloud identity - part 1 (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - That looks very promising. A series of posts to learn more on Azure Active Directory.

• Building and auto-deploying an ASP.NET Core application (Imar Spaanjaars) - A nice step-by-step tutorial to build your own deployment.

  

• Localize your website with Microsoft Translator (Krishna Doss) - Really interesting services.

Programming

• Converting a 13 year old .NET WPF app called BabySmash to a self-contained .NET 5 app with the .NET Upgrade Assistant (Scott Hanselman) - This is interesting, I remember Babysmash! I need to check that stream to see that tool in action.

• Create a Windows 10 development virtual machine (Thomas Maurer) - Great tutorial to create a dev environment.So useful when we need to create a specific context or use a different version to investigate client issues.

• Visual Studio 2022 (Amanda Silver) - I'm always impressed by how new features are continuously added to VS. Such a great tool.

Miscellaneous

• Why you should never quit too early ... (Donn Felker) - An inspiring post to help us persevere and time is hard. But also to try to step aside and have an open mindset.

~frank

Reading Notes #456

The suggestion of the week

• Using the latest version of the Azure CLI (Gregor Suttie) - Whaaat! This is a master ninja tricks! Well, at the minimum it is freaking cool and useful. Awesome!

Cloud

• More with Gruut: Use the Microsoft Bot Framework to analyze emotion with the Azure Face API (Dave Brock) - This is a very complete tutorial to build a cool demo. Second in a series.
• 4 common analytics scenarios to build business agility | Azure blog and updates | Microsoft Azure (Kaiser Larsen) - Very interesting post that shares real-life scenarios where businesses used Synapse to create a great solution.

Programming

• Creating a Serverless Docker Image (Jason Robert) - A nice demo/ tutorial using Node.js to help us running things where we want.
• Entity Framework Core 5 free resources (Erik Ejlskov Jensen) - This is wonderful! A curated list of great EF documentation/ tutorials.
• Getting Started with Windows Terminal (Kayla Cinnamon) - Uh! I didn't know the preview version was also that easy to get. Pretty cool.
• Jump Start your Developer Skills with Visual Studio Code Coding Packs (Jen Looper) - So simple and yet so powerful! It's an awesome idea.
• How to Create a Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CI-CD) Solution for a Docker Project (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug. It's a simple solution, but I'm pretty proud of it and it does the job marvelously.

Podcasts

• Épisode 84 - Le bonheur de s’entraîner (Grand écart) - I'm not a runner, but I like (or use to) move and be outside. This francophone podcast is really motivating, and interesting.
• Eating Frogs with Brian Tracy (The Productivityist Podcast) - I just found this podcast. I liked that book when I read it a few years ago. It was nice listening to this episode talking about it. Brought back great ideas.
• Épisode 5 - La Chasse aux Sorcières (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - Okay, THIS IS A MUST. Seriously is yo understand French, it's both educational and funny. Great job!
• 2020 sucked - A year-end wrap-up with Scott's Wife, Mo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm so glad Mo accepted to comes on the show once more. This dynamic is very interesting. I need to make my wife listen to this episode and to my daughter too (she studying to be a nurse).
• 628 - How to Be Confident, Not Arrogant (Modern Mentor) - The line between those two is easy to cross. I appreciated the reflection time about it, that this episode offers.
• The Infinite Game with Dr. James Carse (A Bit of Optimism) - The Infinite Game, a great book that I read last year. It was awesome to listen to Simon talk about those ideas with Dr. Carse.
• #187 – Building a $38k/Month SaaS Business as a Solo Founder with Jorda O'Connor of Closet Tools (Indie Hackers) - When you like learning, and that you are not afraid to work hard, a little idea can bring you really far.
• 0251 – Joel Quimper – Microsoft Graph (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Why Microsoft Graph? It's all in this episode (in French). Great show once more.

Miscellaneous

• Attention Matters More than Time (Josh Duffney) - So true. The balance is hard to find, but let's keep trying to be better at it.
• What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2020 - Wow, a very impressive list of new features. I'm looking forward to testing a few of them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #448

Cloud

• When, Why and How to Use Azure Key Vault (Paul F. Wood) - A nice tutorial that explains how to setup a keyvaul to use in our pipeline.

Programming

• Develop Secure Apps with WebSockets and Node.js (Nickolas Fisher) - An interesting post that guides us and gives us all the code to build a chatroom using WebSockets and Nodejs.
• Distro installation added to WSL --install in Windows 10 insiders preview build 20246 ( Craig Loewen) - Wsl is a very nice tool, looking forward for that installer.
• How to: Choose Which Advanced Installer Azure DevOps Task You Need? (Ciprian Burca) - A quick intro to powerful tools.
• Setting Up Cloud Deployments Using Docker, Azure and Github Actions (Ben De St Paer-Gotch) - Part two of building a nice Containerized deployment environment.

Miscellaneous

• 15+ Chrome extensions you should have in your pocket. (Jane Tracy) - A nice list of extensions. I have a few of them already. It's Always hard to find the balance between all the ones that are great and what you really need.
• Getting started with DevOps automation ( Jared Murrell) - A greatt post that describe all the pieces of DevOps. What is means and how it could be uses.

Podcasts

• Getting Guests To Share Your Podcast Show (Feed Your Brand) - Nice episode focus on how to get guests, how to work with them/ for them to grow. Very interesting.
• Episode 11 - DevOps Rockstar Abel Wang Talks Azure DevOps (AzureABILITY Podcast) - First time listening to this podcast... Great show loved it!
• YouTube Channel Art Ultimate Guide (Your Thriving Side Hustle) - I really go show. I was just thinking about that in fact, the timing was excellent! Very interesting..
• How to Get More Traffic and Exposure for Your Brand with Brittney Lynn (SPI Podcast) - Interesting topics. I agree with what Pat... She made look like it's easy, but it's a lot of work.

Reading Notes #404

Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

Cloud

• Azure Mystery Mansion - Microsoft in Business Blogs (Em Lazer-Walker) - Very interesting post. As I'm writing myself a text-based adventure game(just for fun) it's interesting to see the different approaches and tools available.

• Azure DevOps Hidden Gems #8 - Turn Azure Board Queries into Dashboard Chart Items (Graham Smith) - Useful and simple tutorial to build great dashboards in Azure Devops.

Programming

• Updating an ASP.NET Core 2.2 Web Site to .NET Core 3.1 LTS (Scott Hanselman) - Great tutorial that shows us a few things to check when migrating... Because of its time.

Podcasts

• Stream Coach - How hard should you HUSTLE with Sara Dietschy - Twitch Tips and Advice (Ashnichrist) - Two very smart women Sara and Ashnichrist discuss about that "luck"... that is is in fact hard work. An excellent episode, very motivating. Looking forward to your the next episode on both podcasts.

~

Reading Notes #401

Cloud

• Run Azure Cloud Shell in Windows Admin Center (Thomas Maurer) - Nice tutorial and demo video to enable Cloud Shell.
• Serverless HTTP With Durable Functions ( Jeremy Likness) - Great post that shows, with code examples, the new functionalities for the Durable Functions.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 3.0 MVC Secure Authentication | Okta Developer (Lee Brandt) - Nice tutorial to add authentication to an existing .Net Core App.
• Custom Terminals and User Interface (UI) in Windows Terminal (Jeremy Likness) - Learn how to get and customize your Windows Terminal in this quick post.
• GitHub Actions for Azure is now generally available (Usha Narayanabhatta) - Fantastic news..and perfect timing... At least for me!
• GitHub Learning Path (Premier Developer) - Nice source of info to get started or... Get better.
• What is Blazor? A Tutorial on Building Web Apps with Authentication (Andrea Chiarelli) - Great article that describes in detail how to create a simple blazor app with authentification.

Miscellaneous

• Easily move WSL distributions between Windows 10 machines with import and export! (Scott Hanselman) - First I was Whaaat!? Very simple yet useful feature no need now do redo all your customization on all your computer...just export and import.

Reading Notes #371

Cloud

• How to query Azure resources using the Azure CLI (Neil Peterson) - Nice post that gives a few tips and tricks about how to query Azure resources with Az.
• Setting up Jenkins X on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (Chee Chan) - A very simple tutorial that explains how to install and get started with JenkinsX with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

Programming

• Using npm's ls command for Fun and Insight (Tierney Cyren) - A useful discovery about a node.js command and how to use it in our different environments.
• Intro to web programming in Rust for NodeJS developers (Bastian Gruber) - Jump aboard this new promising series to learn Rust...

Miscellaneous

• How do You Structure Your Code When Moving Your API from Express to Serverless Functions? (John Papa) - When structured the code is always better. A nice post that explains just that with serverless.

Does the Azure DevOps projects are worth it?

Imagine you just arrived at the office. You only took a sip or two of your coffee or tea. You look at the tasks that need to be done today (well yesterday based on the request): a new project is starting, and you need to configure everything the team needs to start building that web application. The need a repository, a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, a place to deploy, monitoring tools, and of course you need to create an environment where they will be able to track their work. Should you panic? No, because you will use the new Azure DevOps Project available in Azure.

Let's Create the project

From the Azure portal (portal.azure.com) click on the plus button and search for "devops". Select DevOps Project, then click on the Create button. Then follow the five steps and Azure will create everything for you.

What is deployed

• Your application from many popular frameworks
• Automatic full CI/CD pipeline integration
• Monitoring with Application Insights
• Git Repository
• Tasks/ Bugs tracking board
• Deployment to the platform of your choice

In Video please!

Conclusion

The DevOps projects are really fantastic and are very useful. The fact that everything is all packaged together and automatically deployed is a considerable time saver. In short, are the Azure DevOps projects worth it? Oh yeah!