Reading Notes #568

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!

Programming

• What Does an Open Source Triage Team Do? (BekahHW) - There are so many ways to get involved in the community and make an OSS project better. It's fantastic.

• Replacing Mock and Stub with a Fake by Mark Seemann (Mark Seemann) - Learn more about how fakes can simplify your test and some best practices in this post.

• 5 Benefits of a Container-First Approach to Software Development (Ben Cotton) - Container without being the solution for everything did indeed change a lot in the industry. Nice post that highlights that.

• EF Core Fundamentals for EF Core 7 (Pluralsight) (Julie Lerman) - Great course from Julia to learn the fundamental of EF 6 or 7.

• Using SQL Server as a Message Queue with Wolverine (Jeremy D. Miller) - I love the idea of reusing SQL instead of adding more components to your system. Well done Wolverine.

Data

• Unleashing SQL Sorcery: Increasing Performance and Complexity with GitHub Copilot (Subhojit Basak) - Copilot is a very useful pair programming partner. This post shares how to use it for your queries.

Low Code

• Power Automate Standards: Variables (Matthew Devaney) - Nice series about best practices in flows.

Open Source

• On Moq and our Part in the OSS Sustainability Social Contract (Sean Killeen) - An excellent post that explains the controversial event that occur with the Moq project recently and shares thoughts.

~Frank

Reading Notes #517

Good Thursday, 

back from a nice time off, I'm all recharged and it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Controlling Blazor Environments on Static Web Apps | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - This is a very neet tip; short and simple.
• Host your website on Azure Static Web Apps for free (Julia Muiruri) - There you have it, two different sets of three-step to get your Azure static web app.
• How to deploy a Local Docker Container to Azure Container Apps (Vincent Nwonah) - An excellent tutorial to get started with Azure Container App.
• Ultimate Guide to Deploying Azure App Service WebJobs Using Azure DevOps (Wael Kdouh) - Wow! This post has so many little time-saver tips (aka gotchas). Great content.

Programming

• Git-Flow, GitHub-Flow, Gitlab-Flow and Trunk Based Development explained (Steven Giesel) - This is a nice post to see different alternatives for your Git pattern
• Keys to Effective Regression Test Development (Amy Reichert) - This post shares a lot of info about test planning and structure. A nice read to get inspired and learn more on the topic.

Podcasts

• Rust for Beginners with Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm studently craving to learn Rust thanks to Scott and Nell in this episode Rust for Beginners
• 315: A Proper Podcast (Merge Conflict) - Fun episode about Frank's and James' personal life.
• How to have a hard conversation (Modern Mentor) - Those moments are hard and I believe we can all benefice from a few tips to prepare ourselves.
• 0267 - Serge Tremblay - Microsoft Loop (Visual Studio Talk Show) - (In French) Microsoft Loop?! If you have the same reaction as me when reading this title, then this episode is for you. A nice episode where three friends talk about new technology.
• Steve Sanderson: The future of Blazor and WebAssembly - Episode 202 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - A really interesting episode about Blazor...

~frank

Reading Notes #280

Cloud

• Announcing AzCopy on Linux Preview (Sercan Guler) - Fantastic news! One tool for everywhere.
  
• At Build, Microsoft expands its Cognitive Services collection of intelligent APIs (Microsoft Azure) - The Microsoft Build is always full of announcements, and this year wasn't an exception. Many novelties in the world of AI from new services to a new MVP category.
  
• Build a Serverless MBaaS with Azure Functions (shellmonger) - Nice tutorial that shows how to leverage Azure function with DocumentDB and node.js.
  
• What’s new for Serverless at Microsoft Build 2017 (Raman Sharma) - Another post that shares the novelties announced at Build, this time with serverless in mind.

Miscellaneous

• Login and Authentication for your ASP.NET Core Web API – The Big Picture (Jon Hilton) - Nice quick post about the different options regarding authentication and authorization for our API with also an explanation of the difference between them.
  
• Microsoft Flow + Azure Storage + WebJobs + MailChimp + Outlook (Troy Hunt) - Great post about a real life integration story.

Reading Notes #278

Cloud

• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Lift and Shift vs App Services - When a VM in the Cloud isn't what you want (Scott Hanselman) - This post is about how to transform a lift and shift to a real cloud application. And for what I know it represents 90% of our starts in the cloud.
  
• Serverless like a Superhero with Azure Functions (Shayne Boyer) - Cool tutorial about leveraging Azure function to build an API.
  
• Turn your Postman Collection into a Microsoft integration (Asavari Tayal) - I just love it. How could I've not thought about it myself?

Programming

• Everything You Need to Build A Chatbot (Sage Franch) - Great post to read before starting to code your first bot.
  
• Ruby on Rails on Azure App Service (Web Sites) with Linux (and Ubuntu on Windows 10) (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting post on how to get Ruby to work using today's tooling... on Windows.

Miscellaneous

• Designing a Conversation (Alexandre Brisebois) - Interesting post that digs into the paradox where "us", humans have been communicated since our beginnings but still have trouble doing it, now we want to plan ahead and architect communication with machines.
  
• Introduction to Microsoft To-Do (Gunnar Peipman) - Interesting app Microsoft finally did his ToDo service.

Reading Notes #268

Cloud

• Azure Application Insights JavaScript SDK: reliability and performance improvements (Beckylin Orooji) - That's a good news! Time to update our packages.
  
• Access on-premise SQL Server data from Azure Logic Apps via On-Premises Data Gateway (Eldert Grootenboer) - Nice tutorial that explains step by step how to connect securely our on-premises resources to Azure.
  
• Cognitive Services APIs: Speech - Wow! So many ideas to play with those services... But that would be in another post.
  
• Serverless Integration with Logic Apps, Functions and Cognitive Service API (Steef-Jan Wiggers) - Another good integration example leveraging services in Azure.
  
• Microsoft Integration (Azure and much more) Stencils Pack v2.4 for Visio 2016/2013 is now available (Steef-Jan Wiggers) - We are always searching for images do use in our diagram. Here is your chance to update your tool with a nice pack.

Programming

• Running Cross Browser Automated Testings in Visual Studio Team Services - Fantastic tutorial that explains how to have a real impact on our deployment's speed by automating our UI testing on VSTS.

Miscellaneous

• Considerations on using Microsoft Flow or Logic Apps to sync documents (Steef-Jan Wiggers) - This post answers a question that many people I meet asked. Very clear, and yet simple to understand.

Reading Notes #256

Cloud

• What’s this all about? (Alexandre Brisebois) - The cloud broth with him new patterns in the technology world, but knows that the business should also adapt.
• Azure Container Registry preview (Steve Lasker) - Containers, containers, containers, containers.... sound familiar? They are everywhere, learn more about this new service that will be available in preview in mid-November.
• Fluent API Libraries for Azure .NET SDK - These new azure commands definitely look good.
• Simpler Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Asir Selvasingh) - It looks very friendly, looking forward to trying it.
• Ten ways to minimize Azure costs (Iris Classon) - Nice few tips to save money... Time to do your checklist.

Programming

• 10 Tips for Using GitKraken (Sara) - I really like this kind of format for tips. You learn so much in a snap.
• Extensibility in Visual Studio '15': Increasing Reliability and Performance - This post lists few key elements for extension author, don't miss it.
• Mobile DevOps - The Source of Truth: The Role of Repositories in DevOps (Kraig Brockschmidt) - Very interesting article about devops real word.
• Stateless 3.0 - A State Machine library for .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting tutorial that shows how that new lib could be useful.
• Using MongoDB with Web API and ASP.NET Core (Mahesh Sabnis ) - Dotnet core is now considerably more stable and so much more preferment. It worth try it.

Miscellaneous

• How to Make Time for Blogging During Your Lunch Break - Not a idea. However, I think it's more realistic to lower the number of posts produced... at least in my case.
• Introducing Markdown Monster - a new Markdown Editor (Rick Strahl) - Yet a markdown editor.... Will it be your new favorite? This post lists most of the feature and also contains a video if you prefer.
• Microsoft Flow is Now Available - Thurrott.com (Paul Thurrott) - Build on top of the excellent LogicApp platform Flow is free and doesn't require an Azure subscription but benefits from a lot of connectors.

Reading Notes #250

 

Suggestion of the week

• Is that Really Good Quality Code You’re Writing? - Always good to have our memory refreshed.

Cloud

• Announcing the release of Azure Mobile Apps Node SDK v3.0.0 (Adrian Hall) - Nice upgrade that includes a low of features. Be aware of the breaking changes.
  
• Data Factory supports multiple web service inputs for Azure ML Batch Execution (Harish Kumar Agarwal) - Cool! Simple AND powerful.
  
• Refreshing user logins in App Service Mobile Apps (Mimi Xu) - Great news, no more painful and complicated process, in the code App

Programming

• Build cloud apps at warp speed (James Staten) - Awesome tools, I'm very curious to see what people will create with those.
  
• NGINX for ASP.NET Core In-Depth - Interesting post that explains this very popular web server. It also very easy to use with docker.
  
• Self-contained .NET Core Applications - Great post that clarifies little things, but yeah... The devil is in the details!