Reading Notes #547

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

• Managing your Azure Cognitive Services Costs (Matt Eland) - Cost management is always a good idea. This post is part of a series of spring cleaning is not an exception.

• Uploading Large Blobs in Parallel with the Azure SDK (Mark Heath) - Wonderful! I tried recently to write a little POC of something like that but it did work as expected. Looking forward to digging into this code as I think I already see my mistake. Great post.

Programming

• Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing (Kin Lane) - This is an interesting post not about code but more about words, ideas, plans, and more.

• Adding Dependency Injection to a Console App in .Net 7 (Paul Michaels) - Short an simple the perfect answer to a how-to question.

• How to write your own cron Job scheduler in ASP.NET Core (like Quartz, Hangfire, ...) (Steven Giesel) - A really cool post that shows and explains how to build a simple background Service. I love those kind of projects as you learn so much doing them by yourself.

• PSReadLine 2.3.0-beta0 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - I'm a big fan of the Predictor, looking forward to trying this upgrade.

Miscellaneous

• How atomic Git commits dramatically increased my productivity - and will increase yours too (Samuel Faure) - A simple best practice to avoid pain later... I like it!

~ Frank

Reading Notes #445

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

• Azure Machine Learning helps customers stay ahead of challenges (Erez Barak) - A nice post to get us inspires to start our journey.

• Azure introduces new capabilities for live video analytics (Jason Hogg) - The custom vision was already as impressive as a service. So easy to use and powerful. But now in a video...that's incredibly cool.

Programming

• How to use, open, resize, and split Panes in the Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - Tabs are so useful! And now it's native...awesome.

• 10 Azure DevOps – Work Items Tips & Tricks that you should know (Abhijit Jana) - Nice post. Did you know all those?

• GitHub Docs are now open source (Janice Niemeir) - Open-source documentation is the best. Faster updated, often more accurate and complete... And all of it at one URL easy to remember fantastic.

• How to use autocomplete at the command line for dotnet, git, winget, and more! (Scott Hanselman) - I love that shell/ terminal series... Learn something new each time.

• Writing JavaScript tools in other languages – a new trend? (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer) - Javascript or not javascript... I'm surprised how the opinions are so strong.

Podcasts

• #23 Fatal Conveniences™: Caffeine: Consuming Coffee With Caution (The Darin Olien Show) - Apparently not a usual episode ( I don't know it was my first one), but really interesting deep dive into the coffee world; the effect, origin and more.
• Podcast Crasher – The Binge Factor: Pat Flynn On Building An Online Business From a Podcast (Feed Your Brand) - This episode it the counterpart of another episode that happens on Pat Flynn show. Really interesting topic I don't think about my content that way... Maybe I should, a little.
• #54: Yihua Zhang - From Fitness to Coding [S03-E12] (The Solo Coder Podcast) - WHen you like what you are doing I think it shows. It doesn't mean you will always be a super start, but at least you will be happy and most of the time it will be really good for your career. Fantastic story, inspiring.
• Microsoft Identity for Developers (CloudSkills.fm) - Nice episode I think Identity/security is a really hard topic to abort, and those guys are doing a great

Miscellaneous

• 40 Microsoft Teams tips and tricks: from novice to expert. - Great tips for beginners to advanced Teams users.

~ Have a nice week!

The Dog-Not-a-Dog Workshop

I recently presented, a workshop at the TOHack to get started with Azure. The goal was to try different Azure services, and see how we could augment an existing website using serverless function and artificial intelligence.
(Aussi disponible en français)

During this workshop, a website is deployed automatically from GitHub. Then by adding an Azure Function and using the Vision API of Azure Cognitive Services, the final solution is able to detect when uploaded pictures are or not dogs and keep our image folder "clean". We call that application: The automatic Not a Dog application.

The step by step instruction with the code can be found on GitHub - Not-a-Dog-Workshop. The workshop can be done in about 45-60 minutes.

I also did a video that is available on my YouTube channel:

You have questions, you are blocked, it will be a pleasure to help you.

Reading Notes #317

Suggestion of the week

• Migrating to Azure SQL Database with zero downtime for read-only workloads (Joseph Sack) - Learn the best practices and more about the tools available to you in this great post.

Cloud

• Analyzing a karting image with Azure Cognitive Services (Vivien Chevallier) - It's time to play with these Cognitive services. This post is a nice quick start.
• Microsoft updates Cognitive Services terms (Microsoft Azure) - Good to know.
• Oops! I Deleted My Blobs! What Can I Do? (Gaurav Mantri) - A nice new feature! Is it time to upgrade all our cloud solutions to use it? It could be a good idea.

Programming

• az webapp new - Azure CLI extension to create and deploy a .NET Core or nodejs site in one command (Scott Hanselman) - Azure CLI is a super handy tool. New commands are being created, it's time for us developers to get involve read this post and clone that GitHub repo!

Miscellaneous

• 10 Characteristics of a Successful Internal IT Champion (Richard Seroter) - Awesome post! Next time changes are in the pipeline, you should think about these 10 little things.
• Azure Cosmos DB training webinars | Azure Roadmap | Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Team) - Fantastic news, I know a lot of people were waiting for this kind of training.

Reading Notes #315

Suggestion of the week

• DAX optimization examples (Alberto Ferrari) - An incredible dive into a DAX performance analysis. I loved it.

Cloud

• Bing Speech API extends its text to speech support to 34 languages (Qinying Liao) - Great new languages supported.
• Brand Detection in Microsoft Video Indexer (Dr. Abed Asi) - This is a great addition to this service.
• In order event processing with Azure Functions (Jeff Hollan) - This post explains how to keep our Functions in control to respect the message order.
• Monitoring issues on Stack Overflow with serverless, CosmosDB and Teams (Shayne Boyer) - Awesome post that gives all the detail on how a reel life solution is built.

Programming

• Docker for Windows Desktop... Now With Kubernetes! - Docker Blog (Jim Armstrong) - This post explains all the wonderful things you will have only by checking one simple checkbox.

Databases

• Share reports with your teams and partners | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI (Lukasz Pawlowski) - Perfect, we can now share report directly like we could with dashboard.
• Power BI Desktop February Feature Summary | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI (Amanda Cofsky) - So my great new features!

Miscellaneous

• How Long is Long Enough? Minimum Password Lengths by the World's Top Sites (Troy Hunt) - Do you use good passwords? Because length is not the only thing.

Photo credit: nickpettican on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND