Reading Notes #628

For this week reading notes, I have some exciting blog posts and podcast episodes. Covering topics including .NET scaffolding, Visual Studio updates, the Builder Pattern in C#, and OpenAPI in .NET 9. Plus, tips on validating identity with GitHub, improving Azure Identity, and podcast highlights on GitHub Universe and presentation skills. 

Cloud

• Better Azure Identity authentication support and performance during local development with .NET Aspire (Anthony Simmon) - A cool demo/tutorial with all the code snippets and explanations.

Programming

• dotnet scaffold - Next Generation Content Creation for .NET - .NET Blog (Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi) - Yay! Scaffolding CLI and it looks well done too! It's time to try it and if you are interested it's an OSS project.

• Making you more productive with Visual Studio v17.12 - Visual Studio Blog (Mads Kristensen) - Mad's blog post are always synonym of fun and happiness as it means Visual Studio has new cool features that ease or day and make us more productive. I love that that simple copy error message one.

• The Builder Pattern in C# [2024] - This is a very nice post that explains clearly with code different scenarios where that pattern would make sense.

• OpenAPI document generation in .NET 9 (Mike Kistler) - This is a great new feature in NET9 when building APIs. The post shares how to update existing APIs to get it. I'm looking forward to migrating my stuff.

Podcasts

• 435: GitHub Universe Recap + M4 is here with a NEW Mac mini!!! (Merge Conflict) - Cool summary and nice news for iOS user about xCode.

• How to prepare for a nerve-wracking presentation (Modern Mentor) - Good strategies for new or experienced speakers.

Miscellaneous

• Validate your identity on Bluesky with your GitHub account (Mark Downie) - That's a neat trick, sir!

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 #571

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

• Serverless Playwright the easy way with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - I didn't think about that scenario but wow! Thats very efficient ant much easier.

Programming

• 6 Best Practices for Documenting APIs (Nduka John) - Documentation is often what makes the difference. Bad docs may cause users to not use correctly the APIs.

• New .NET Upgrade Assistant version with feature updates and .NET MAUI improvements! - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - Wow that a pretty cool and powerful tool! I really like the mixed upgrade with project file and version.

• Generative AI and .NET - Part 2 SDK | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Nice series where we explore the SDK building a .NET poroject.

Open Source

• Walkthroughs in the Windows Terminal Repository (Mike Griese) - Contributing to big oss project is challenging.The Windows Terminal team had a cool idea to make it easier.There is a video version of this blog is you prefer.

• Microsoft PowerToys v0.73.0: A Comprehensive Overview (Kunal Chowdhury) - Cool post that shares new utilities in PowerToys and explains the optimization of the others.

Miscellaneous

• Navigating Developer Burnout: Causes, Impacts, and Strategies for a Ba (Christopher Johnson) - A truthful and realistic post. If you never been exposed to burnout, take 2 minutes to read this.

~Frank

Reading Notes #546

Cloud

• How to build, test and deploy your application using Azure and GitHub - Azure DevOps Blog (Liam Hampton) - A nice DevOps tutorial that requires no installation because it all happens in the browser.
• Introducing the Reliable Web App Pattern for .NET - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup, Nish Anil) - This post explains the best practices build on top of the well architect Azure framework.

Programming

• Run Appwrite on a Raspberry Pi (Jim Bennett ) - This post will make you save money and time while setup your dev environment.
• Can WebAssembly Solve Serverless's Problems? (Cameron Gain) - This is an interesting post that shares why WASM is an excellent idea and how it can help today's businesses.
• How to Read and Parse a JSON File in C# (Januarius NjokuUnknown) - Multiple ways to parse a file. How many did you know?
• How to automate your dev environment with dev containers and GitHub Codespaces (Kedasha Kerr) - Since I discover the devcontainer I use it all the time. Lucky for me my computers are powerful enough to manage my simple project. Codespace provides all that comfort but online...Have a look.
• Write a high-quality README for NuGet packages - The NuGet Blog (Lynn Dai) - Wonderful initiative! I believe that well-written documentation is the missing piece to many great hidden projects.

Podcasts

• 344: Exploring CoreData and CloudKit (Merge Conflict) - Honestly it felt good hearing about those two genius struggling with data. But more than that to see them continue to look for different alternatives, and try new tools and patterns. Great episode, as usual.
• 51. Minimal web API’s and API Management & learning by teaching - with Jonah Andersson (Betatalks the podcast) - Jonah is just amazing! I knew her before listening to the episode, I just love her even more! Brilliant mind mixed with a contagious passion!

Books

• 
  
  Learning Blazor (David Pine) - This book is just perfect! It explains a bit of everything. It is packed with real examples and code variation (because there are so many ways to write something). There was even a full chapter un test with playwright, I didn't expect that and it was great!

Summary of Week 34

Every beginning weekend, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hours longs, so I thought a short summary to know if the topic interest you could be useful. Watch only the summary or relax and enjoy the longer version that up to you!

   

• Aysegul Yonet - What kind of reality is that? - https://c5m.ca/aaa-ep27

• Em Lazer-Walker - Using AI to avoid touching your face - https://c5m.ca/aaa-ep28

• Stream 121 - Working on deployment doc for Tiny Blazor Admin - https://c5m.ca/stream-ep121

• ARM Series #6: Template Output - https://c5m.ca/learn-arm-ep6

• Stream 122 - Learning Node.js CloudBot - https://c5m.ca/stream-ep122

• All Around Azure blog - https://c5m.ca/aaa 

~

Recap/ Summary week #33

 Every beginning of weekend, I will share a recap of the week and at the same time a summary of my streams. Those videos are at least two hour longs, so I thought a short summary to know if topic interest you could be useful. Watch only the summary or relax and enjoy the longer version that up to you!

   

• Coding Python: Deploy Django and Postgres Apps to Azure with VS Code - c5m.ca/aaa-ep25
• Stream 119 - How easy can we make the deployment of TinyBlazorAdmin -  c5m.ca/stream-ep119
• Stream120 - Celebrating 500 followers and working on the Chat bot -  c5m.ca/stream-ep120

~

Reading Notes #402

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 Functions with QueueTriggers and .NET Core – Configuration and Troubleshooting (Jeff) - Poor Jeff, I was there on his stream and he struggles so much to understand what was happening. And honestly me too! Despite the fact that I know and use Azure Function regularly I completely missed the missing instruction... The good news is since the documentation is open-source we can improve it...

Programming

• A quick overview of ASP.NET Core with Rider (Rachel Appel) - I never used Rider in a real project. However, the quality of this code IDE is not in question. It looks awesome and this post shows how it supports the latest version of .Net Core.
• An Introduction to Blazor and Web Assembly (Jeremy Likness) - The perfect post to get started with Blazor and also learn where it comes from.
• Visual Studio Extensions: 8 You Should Check Out (Carlos Schults) - A nice post that shares useful extensions for developers. I also like the fact that in the title it's 8 and in the url it's 7 LOL...

Miscellaneous

• How Serverless is Working in Azure SQL Database – SQLServerCentral (Steve Jones) - Interesting post where the author shares his experience with serverless database version.

Books

The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

I'm still balanced about this book. It was a good book, even if I found some chapters that were too long. I also got lost by moments. I had the impression that some thoughts or ideas were not developed correctly and more quickly wrapped. In counterpart, some were very well served and clear.

Reading Notes #324

Cloud

• Using Chocolatey with Azure VMs (Dan Patrick) - If you are on Windows you must know Chocolatey.
• Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a leader in enterprise integration (Microsoft Azure) - It's always interesting to see the Gartner Magic Cadran result every year.
• How to quickly refer all available Azure services? (Abhijit Jana) - Nice post that gives a few key places to view the list of services available in Azure.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 2.1 Preview on VSTS (Adam Storr) - This post explains a nice quickfix for your VSTS build flow.
• Searching docs using a .NET Core global tool (Shayne Boyer) - I didn' t know that dotnet-doc project! It's not only pretty cool but it just got better now available globally!
• Using HTTPS with Azure Functions in local development (Christos Matskas ) - Pretty cool quick post that explains the local https feature of the Azure Function v2.
• Windows Template Studio 2.0 is now available! (Clint Rutkas) - This is the perfect post to know what happened under the hood of this new version.

Miscellaneous

• Do you have to know English to be a Programmer? (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting post... At the end, English may not be a blocker...but you need some base. Otherwise, how could you even read this post!
• Release Flow: How We Do Branching on the VSTS Team (Edward Thomson) - Really interesting post about the Git practice at Microsoft and why they are doing it that way.
• The Canadian Real Estate Association delivers a better house-buying experience in the cloud (null) - Nice post about a reel business going in Azure.

Books

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Author: Brian Tracy

A short book that pushes to action. I really enjoyed it. A book to read and read again.

ASIN: B01MYEM8SZ

Reading Notes #257

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Connect(); 2016 Recap (Joseph Hill) - Three full day of great content. However, if you are like me, you didn't that much free time. Fortunately, all the presentations are available in video on demand. You need a summary because even if the keynote was really good... it is still 2h30, this post is the place to start.

Cloud

• .NET Web Development and Tools Blog (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - Really cool tutorial with Visual studio, Docker, and Azure that repeat the Connect keynote demo.
  
• Five Days of Azure Functions (James Chambers) - Nice post to know more about these Azure functions that everyone is talking about.
  
• Azure App Services Continuous Delivery (Gopinath C) - This post explains how easy it is to setup a continuous integration with Azure.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate (John Montgomery) - More details about all the new stuff announced this week related to VS.
  
• The expanding Visual Studio family of products - Another post that lists all the new Visual Studio's news for the week.
  
• Using MongoDB with Web API and ASP.NET Core (Mahesh Sabnis) - Dotnet core is now much more stable and so much more performant. It worth to try it.
  
• Visual Studio Code just keeps getting better - with extensions (Scott Hanselman) - Visual Studio Code is awesome; get a list of some cool extensions in this post.

Miscellaneous

• 8 million GitHub profiles were leaked from GeekedIn's MongoDB - here's how to see yours (Troy Hunt) - Interesting post about a leak of information related to Github account.
  
• Reconnect Outlook 2016 or Outlook 2013 to Outlook.com to fix issues after Outlook.com upgrade - Outllook.com is doing a facelift. That an important upgrade could impact your access to it. If you are syncing it from Outlook on your desktop. This post explains what to do, when to it, and how to proceed.
  
• Docs.microsoft.com - I didn't have the chance to look yet, but now that have done it... Wow great job, and well organized.

Reading Notes #231

Suggestion of the week

• Introducing docs.microsoft.com - Great post that explains all the nice features of the first glimpse of the new Microsoft documentation. They did a fantastic work, a post to read; a site to remember.

Cloud

• Why Service Fabric? - You heard about the buzz word your tech guys are exited, but you would like to know why service fabric could be good for your business? This post is for you.
  
• Azure Active Directory – Why You Should Care - Nice post. It's all in the title...

Programming

• Simplifying API documentation for a great first user experience (abhinav) - Nice post that touches a very important point... docs.

Data

• The 95th Percentile - Like they say the devil is in the details.
  
• Using The R Visual in Power BI - Interesting usage of two powerful tool.
  
• 10 things to know about DocumentDB Partitioned Collections (Aravind Ramachandran) - Perfect post to stay up to date with the latest DocumentDB features.

Miscellaneous

• How does criticism hit your brain? (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting thoughts, loaded of wisdom.
  
• Here's how I verify data breaches - Interesting post, because even hacks must be validated.

Reading Notes #230

Suggestion of the week

• Data Locality - Great troubleshooting session explained, definitely a post to read.

Cloud

• A first look at Azure Functions (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Nice little post that demystifies Azure functions.
  
• Azure Gives Storage the Cold Shoulder! (Dan Patrick) - Now Azure has is own long storage for a very little price. Learn more in this post.
  
• Data Locality - Great troubleshooting session explained, definitely a post to read.
  
• What is Azure Resource Manager? - Very nice post that clarifies what's ARM where it comes from and witch gap it comes to fills.
  
• Introducing Azure Cool Blob Storage (Sriprasad Bhat) - Everything about the new Azure storage option.

Programming

• Getting Angular Intellisense in Visual Studio Code (Laurent Duveau) - Nice reminder how great is vscode and how easy it could become even better, just for you.
  
• Visual Studio Code Snippets - Another quick tip to customize your vscode.
  
• Simplifying API documentation for a great first user experience (abhinav) - Nice post that touches a very important point... docs.

Photo credit: Claus Tom via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND