Reading Notes #506

Good Monday, Already time to share my reading notes of the week. 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

• Introduction to Azure Chaos Studio (Paul Michaels) - This is a very interesting tool, looking forward to see more services included

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming in C# (Sukhrob) - A good post that takes the time to explain the why.Why we should complexify our code to make it asynchronous.
• ASP.NET Core CRUD with NoSQL: Part 3 (Matthew Groves) - We continue to learn, this time, a bit more about the sql+ and the create of the crud API.
• All Roads Lead Back to Infrastructure as Code (Joe Duffy) - From where it started to where it is going this very detailed post covers it all.
• Bringing code navigation to communities (Patrick Thomson) - This is really interesting... Looking forward to read more about it.
• Major update to the PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code (Sydney Smith) - Ok wow... I need a PowerShell script right now just to try that new version; it looks amazing!
• Visual Studio on an ultra-wide monitor - Visual Studio Blog (Mads Kristensen) - It's not a "problem" I particularly have because I used 2 regular monitors, but I heard about it. It's really nice to see that so many possibilities are available to us.

Podcasts

• Docker Desktop for Linux is Here! (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Great episode so much energy! Discussion about the brand new Docker Desktop for Linux, who to report bugs, ask for a new feature, and the DockerCon!
• Épisode 15 - Gengis Khan (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - I keep those episodes very preciously as a threat, and this one was such a good one! It's in French and the topic is the biggest empire that ever existed... No, it's the Romain.
• How to Productively Show Off What You've Learned (Modern Mentor) - Nice episode. That's a good idea I should share what I think of books and posts I read! ;) I guess I'm not too bad.
• Comparing Infrastructure-as-Code with Chris Klug (.NET Rocks!) - Terraform, Pulumi, ARM, and Bicep... All those are mentioned because it's all about Infrastructure-as-Code. Interesting talk about the different options we have.

Miscellaneous

• Understanding the Role of a Developer Evangelist (Karl Hughes) - As a cloud advocate, I don't remember how often I explained what is my role. This 360-degree post covers all angles and provides a really good answer.

~frank

Reading Notes #497

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. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• How to Upload a File to Azure Blob Storage (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice tutorial that builds using .NET a little application to interact with Azure blob storage. And there is also a video.

• New Azure for Operators solutions and services built for the future of telecommunications (Jason Zander) - Good news in the network spheres...That's good for all of us.

• Serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps (Michael Ridland) - Now I understand not only how to create a container App but where does it fit in all the container services available in Azure. Very nice post.

Programming

• .NET GitHub Actions: Intro to GitHub Actions for .NET (David Pine) - This is a great post to get started with GitHub action. Thus one is about .Net o but of course, many other languages are supported. Right now the only thing I want is to add more workflow and improve the existing ones...

• Differences Between != And Is Not Operators in C# (Code Maze) - My first thought when I saw the title was well they are the same... And then I remember the differences. Great post the really take the time the explain the similarities and the differences.

• GitHub Previews Faster Codespaces Creation with Prebuilds -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - This is awesome! I started to use containers for my development recently and the initial spark was codespace. You must try it.

• A Practical Guide to Dapper (Camilo Reyes) - A nice tour of the functionalities of the tool. It's clear how it can be useful in a Data Access Layer pattern. Not to be confused with Dapr.

Podcast

• Twenty Years of ASP.NET with Scott Guthrie (.NET Rocks!) - So nice to hear Scott Guthrie talk about those years and share a few stories.

• 568: How to Attract Attention, with Michael F. Schein (Coaching for Leaders) - An interesting conversation about our strengths and weaknesses with the author of the book: The Hype Handbook.

• Testcontainers: Using Code to Control Docker for Testing (DevOps and Docker Talk) - When, How, Why test the code running in containers... Nice episode.

• Jennie Allen On Finding Your People And Building Your Community (What's Essential) - A interesting discussion about what does it means to find your people, and how to do that.

Miscellaneous

• Why DevOps needs a change from a ‘me’ to a ‘we’ mindset (Chris Yates) - An interesting post about the required DevOps mindset.

~frank

Reading Notes #397

Suggestion of the week

• Visual Studio for Nintendo Switch? - FUZE4 Nintendo Switch is an amazing coding app (Scott Hanselman) - Whaaat?! If someone in your entourage or a citizen of your life ( like Scott says) owns a Nintendo switch...you MUST read this post.

Cloud

• SSL certificates management using Lets Encrypt, Azure Automation and Web Apps (Dominique St-Amand ) - Security, of course. Automatically ... I'm in! This post explains how to automate your renewing process.
• Serverless Deployment Best Practices (Fernando Medina Corey) - A nice post that shows some of the best practices for serverless and how AWS implements them.

Programming

• How partners like GitKraken use GitHub Actions (Marc Campbell) - So cool to see what people are doing with the GitHub Actions.
• How to make ASP.NET Core compile modified views (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice update of Asp.net core... Following the best practices
• How to make a pretty prompt in Windows Terminal with Powerline, Nerd Fonts, Cascadia Code, WSL, and oh-my-posh (Scott Hanselman) - It's great to have a step by step on how to install it. Even if the documentation is well done on Github, it could be confusing to set everything up altogether.
• Why jQuery is Obsolete and Time to Stop Using It (Chris Love) - Great post. I was a big user of jQuery, and these days I do less front end stuff, so it is nice to see how things have evolved and to understand the impact jQuery had.
• Getting Started with Git (Sarah Lean) - Great post that explains the basic functionalities of Git.

Miscellaneous

• Video Interview: Between Two Nerds ( Steve Carroll & Scott Hanselman) - Really cool and interesting video interview.

~

Reading Notes #396

Suggestion of the week

• The one who created languages (Anne-Laure Civeyrac) - Fantastic article and video. It's a must.

• What's the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell? (Scott Hanselman) - Fantastic post short and clear. It's so simple, yet could still be confusing at the same time. Well, until you read this post.

Programming

• Now is the time to make a fresh new Windows Terminal profiles.json (Scott Hanselman) - I have never been so excited about a terminal. But this one wants to do things right, option and flexibility without being too complex to use and setup.

• Blazor Server in .NET Core 3.0 scenarios and performance (Daniel Ruth) - Great post that explains which version of Blazor could be used in different scenarios and when it better to use something else.

• ASP.NET Core and Blazor updates in .NET Core 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (Daniel Ruth) - Wonderful! The release candidate is already available.

• How to build with Cake on Linux using Cake.CoreCLR or the Cake global tool (Andrew Lock) - Great post playing with .Net Core on the Linux side...does v3.0 will have an impact...

• Run an External Executable in ASP.NET Core (Changhui Xu) - An interesting post, very clear.

• Visual Studio Remotes: Simplifying developer environments (Martin Moxon) - If you didn't try yet the remote feature of VSCode, read this post and give it a try. It's a game-changing feature.

Miscellaneous

• Runtime binding with Azure Functions (Craig Shoemaker) - Great post that goes over the Azure Function binding.

~

Reading Notes #385

Suggestion of the week

• Copying Azure Blobs Between Containers the Quick Way (Mark Heath) - Pretty sure that you will get back to your code after reading this nice short (but packed of awesomeness) post.

Programming

• You can now download the new Open Source Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - Lovely! Downloading it right now!

• 7 Top Reasons for Introducing Technical Debt (Mark Heath) - Excellent post that lists a few reasons, because yah... Sometimes it okay to write less perfect code.

• Adding Reaction Gifs for your Build System and the Windows Terminal (Scott Habselman) - Brilliant post of a funny idea, and if you have a few minutes go check Tyler's stream it was awesome.

• Choosing the Right React Datepicker UI Component (Eric Bishard ) - This post will help you to avoid a few gotchas when selecting your datepicker.

• Docker ❤️ WSL 2 - The Future of Docker Desktop for Windows (Simon Ferquel) - Wow! Very exciting news! This new WLS 2 is getting better every day!

~

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.

Reading Notes #366

Cloud

• Using Environment Variables in Azure DevOps Pipelines (K. Scott Allen) - A great little tutorial that explains how to use configure our variables.

Programming

• An open source parser for GitHub Actions (Patrick Reynolds) - Looking forward to try those GitHub Actions.
• Code coverage reports for ASP.NET Core (Gunnar Peipman) - Very interesting post to learn more about how to get a useful report about our tests.
• Dependency injection in .NET Core console applications (Gunnar Peipman) - Fantastic and concise post that introduces a way to do simple dependency injection with .Net Core using Autofact.
• Rust Governance: Scaling Empathy (Manish Goregaokar) - A friend recently introduced me to Rust. This post assumed we all already familiar to it, and talk about the current problems of this new language and potential solutions.

Databases

• Migrating your existing on-prem SQL Server database to Azure SQL DB (Angelos Petropoulos) - Are you planning to migrate your app to Azure? If the database is also part of the migration here three different way to migrate it including one that doesn't require downtime!

Miscellaneous

• Benefits of using Azure API Management with microservices (Mike Budzynski) - Nice post that explains how to structure Azure Functions (microservices) with Apim and explains why it's a good practice.
• Designing for Dark Mode (kirupa) - Interesting topic indeed. As I'm migrating one of my blog the timing is excellent.

How to create an Azure Container Instance (ACI) with .Net Core

For a project I just started, I need to create Azure resources from code. In fact, I want to create an Azure Container Instance. I already know how to create a container from Logic Apps and Azure CLI/PowerShell, but I was looking to create it inside an Azure Function. After a quick research online, I found the Azure Management Libraries for .NET (aka Fluent API) a project available on Github that do just that (and so much more)!
In this post, I will share with you how this library work and the result of my test.

The Goal

For this demo, I will create a .Net Core console application that creates an Azure Containter Instance (ACI). After it should be easy to take this code and migrate to an Azure Function or anywhere else.

The Console Application

Let's create a simple console application with the following command: dotnet new console -o AzFluentDemo cd AzFluentDemo dotnet add package microsoft.azure.management.fluent The last command will use the nuget package available online an add it to our solution. Now we need a service principal so our application could access the Azure subscription. A since way to create one is the use Azure CLI az ad sp create-for-rbac --sdk-auth > my.azureauth This will create an Active Directory (AD) Service Principal (SP) and write the content into the file my.azureauth. Perfect, now open the solution, for this kind of project, I like to use Visual Studio Code so code . will do the work for me. Replace the content of the Program.cs file by the following code.

using System;
using Microsoft.Azure.Management.Fluent;
using Microsoft.Azure.Management.ResourceManager.Fluent;
using Microsoft.Azure.Management.ResourceManager.Fluent.Core;
namespace AzFluentDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string authFilePath = "/home/frank/Dev/AzFluentDemo/my.azureauth";
            string resourceGroupName  = "cloud5mins";
            string containerGroupName = "frank-containers";
            string containerImage  = "microsoft/aci-helloworld";
            // Set Context
            IAzure azure = Azure.Authenticate(authFilePath).WithDefaultSubscription();
            ISubscription sub;
            sub = azure.GetCurrentSubscription();
            Console.WriteLine($"Authenticated with subscription '{sub.DisplayName}' (ID: {sub.SubscriptionId})");
            // Create ResoureGroup
            azure.ResourceGroups.Define(resourceGroupName)
                .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
                .Create();
            // Create Container instance
            IResourceGroup resGroup = azure.ResourceGroups.GetByName(resourceGroupName);
            Region azureRegion = resGroup.Region;
            // Create the container group
            var containerGroup = azure.ContainerGroups.Define(containerGroupName)
                .WithRegion(azureRegion)
                .WithExistingResourceGroup(resourceGroupName)
                .WithLinux()
                .WithPublicImageRegistryOnly()
                .WithoutVolume()
                .DefineContainerInstance(containerGroupName + "-1")
                    .WithImage(containerImage)
                    .WithExternalTcpPort(80)
                    .WithCpuCoreCount(1.0)
                    .WithMemorySizeInGB(1)
                    .Attach()
                .WithDnsPrefix(containerGroupName)
                .Create();
            Console.WriteLine($"Soon Available at http://{containerGroup.Fqdn}");
        }
    }
}

In the first row, I declare a few constants. The path of the service principal created earlier, resource group name, the container group name, and the image I will use. For this demo aci-helloworld. Then we get access with the Azure.Authenticate. Once we got access, it's y easy and the intellisense is fantastic! I don't think I need to explain the rest of the code as it already self-explanatory.

Got an Error?

While running you main in contour an error message complaining about the namespace not being registered or something like that ( I'm sorry I did not note the error message). You only need to register it with the command:

az provider register --namespace Microsoft.ContainerInstance

It will take a few minutes. To see if it's done you can execute this command:

az provider show -n Microsoft.ContainerInstance --query "registrationState" 

Wrap it up

And voila! If you do a dotnet run after a minute or two, you will have a new web application running inside a container available from http://frank=containers.eastus.azurecontainer.io. It's now very easy to take that code and bring it to an Azure Function or in any .Net Core Application that runs anywhere (Linux, Windows, Mac Os, web, containers, etc.)!

In a video, please!

I also have a video of this post if you prefer.

References

• Azure Management Libraries for .NET

~

Reading Notes #204

Suggestion of the week

• AzureCon Keynote Announcements: India Regions, GPU Support, IoT Suite, Container Service, and Security Center - This post summarizes all the AzureCon announcements. If you have more time, I suggest you to watch the keynotes.

Cloud

• View and analyze Azure Audit Logs in Power BI and more (Ashwin Kamath) - This post explains witch to use to get the maximum of our logs.

• Meet the new OneDrive for Business - Good post that explains all the advantages of the new OneDrive for business.

• Download Microsoft AzureCon Sept. 2015 Sessions Using PowerShell - The perfect script for all of us that want to see everything from AzureCon.

• How To Resize an AWS Volume Using The AWS Console or PowerShell (John Grover) - Great tutorial that explain how to get our self out of a difficult situation when things didn't go as planned.

• Introduction to Azure Search - | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog - This post clarifies things about what Azure Search is and what is not.

Programming

• 31 Days of Visual Studio 2015 Tricks and Treats (Steve Smith) - Very promising and interesting series, more to come...

• Kanban Updates, new Branch Policies, and more... – Sep 18 - All the details about the last VSO features release.

Databastes

• Create and Edit DocumentDB Server Side Scripts in the Azure Preview Portal (Stephen Baron) - Great tutorial that shows how to use that new functions of DocumentDB.

Miscellaneous

• Going Back to One (Alexandre Brisebois) - Organize our work to become a performer, could be easily done in Windows 10.

• Introducing Digital Triage - Interesting thoughts about how we should structure our resources to triage the priorities.

• Static Site or CMS? - (Brian Rinaldi) - Nice post that gives insights to answer one of the most frequent questions when people start a blog/website.

Reading Notes #196

Suggestion of the week

• Push-to-succeed: a look into Azure Notification Hubs for business (Alexander Laysha) - Interesting post that explains how Azure and his Notification Hubs could be really useful in marketing.
  
• Getting Started with Windows 10 - This week it's the Windows 10 week. And this post regroups many useful tutorial to get started.

Cloud

• July update for Web apps and App Service environments in the Azure preview portal (Ron Tardif) - This post is a great summary of the new July features.

Programming

• One of My Favorite PowerShell Functions - Nice and useful little piece of code.
  
• Describe Your PowerShell Variables - Nice quick tips to help us remember what we thought when we created those variables.
  
• Installing EF Power Tools into VS2015 (Julie) - Interesting tutorial that shows how to "upgrade" an extension to use it in VS...
  
• Five Common Daylight Saving Time Antipatterns of .NET Developers - Ah the "time"... The more you play with it, the more confuse you can be. Interesting post to avoid common mistakes.

Miscellaneous

• The Secret (and Oh So Simple) Way to Get People to Pay Attention to You (Betty Liu) - Interesting post about business relationship.
  
• How to stay productive while working from home (Xavier Nayrac) - Being myself a remote worker a found this post very close to the reality and inspiring.

~Frank