Reading Notes #462

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, 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.

Cloud

• Azure Functions in C# quick FAQs and tips ( Dominique St-Amand) - Nice post that answers the frequent questions and shares best practices.

• Using Multiple Accounts with Azure (Sam Cogan) - Nice tips a must. So helpful.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core Dependency Injection: What is the IServiceCollection? (Steve Gordon) - A very clear and complete tutorial.Taking us from zero and teaching us what it is, how it works, how to use it, and some best practices.

• Announcing Dapr v1.0 (Dapr project maintainers) - A great new open-source tool just got to v1. This post will tell you all about it.

• Building an Android app with .NET 6 (Nick) - This is so cool. Looking Good.

• DotNet Boxed includes prescriptive templates for .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - This is super cool. I really like and appreciate how the .Net CLI is builded.

• Visual Studio 2019 Docker Tooling (Mark Heath) - A nice post that shows how those two great tools work together.

• What is the difference between a DTO and a POCO (or POJO) (Steve (ardalis) Smith) - A very clear explanation. Straight to the point.

• Blazor on Desktop (Sam Basu ) - This post demonstrates by showing how to build those two flavors that it is possible to build a desktop app. Interesting.

Miscellaneous

• 7 Ways to Improve Your Developer Ads � DeveloperMedia - Marketing is hard. I'm not sure developers are that different than others. those tips felt good, they are probably good with all audiences.

~Frank

Reading Notes #423

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are 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 an interesting post, share it!

My office is in the basement... so I didn't conplained.

Cloud

• Integration Testing Azure Functions with SpecFlow and C#, Part 5 –... (Jonathan George) - Excellent post that concludes a series on Specflow, an interesting tool to tests our code.

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 5 release now available (Daniel Ruth) - New preview coming our way. Nice.
• Creating and Packaging a .NET Standard library | Visual Studio Blog (Sayed) - A very cool tutorial that explains all the steps to get to sharing your NuGet package.
• How to resolve a git merge conflict ( Brian Breniser) - Nice tutorial Git merges are so frequent...
• Windows Terminal Preview v0.11 Release | Windows Command Line (Kayla) - Hmmmmm.That terminal! Awesome.

Podcasts

• Michelle Khare - Her YouTube Series "Challenge Accepted": Training with the FBI, Marines & NASA (That Creative Life) - A very inspiring episode. We can push our limits with a lot of works.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The #1 Ritual You Need To Do Every Day (Pandemic Edition) - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric Barker) - A very nice story, and very simple things we can all do to say, happy healthy humans.
• How to Remote Desktop (RDP) into a Windows 10 Azure AD joined machine (Scott Hanselman) - Nice little tips here to RDPing.
• Injecting Services Into ASP.NET Razor Views (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice and simple post that explains the injection in the newest .Net framework.
• Local Azure Storage Development with Azurite, Azure SDKs, and Azure Storage Explorer (Jon Gallant) - A really cool tool that virtualized completely storage into a local version.Very interesting.
• Quarantine work is not Remote work (Scott Hanselman) - It's not normal...

~

Reading Notes #409

Every Monday, I share my reading notes. Those are 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.

Cloud

• Azure Cloud Shell + zsh, oh-my-zsh, tmux, and badass terminal! (Jessica Deen) - Cool walkthrough that explains all to get a nice looking cloud shell.

• Updating the my blog from AppService to Containers...finally (Shayne Boyer) - Awesome walkthrough. As an ex-user of Ghost on Azure I understand the trouble. Containers and a database as service are perfect for this situation.

Programming

• CLI vs GitKraken Git GUI Speed Test (Jesus Murillo) - I love GitKraken, I still use the CLI and the integrated git in VSCode, but to really see things... It's the best, and wow it looks cool.

• ASP.Net Core 3 – Dependency Injection (Michał Białecki) - A nice tutorial that explains an important concept, and shows how to implement it.

• Create fake user for ASP.NET Core integration tests (Gunnar Peipman) - An awesome tutorial that explains how to build a very useful utility...a fake user.

• Yori - The quiet little CMD replacement that you need to install NOW (Scott Hanselman) - I love it. I didn't even finish reading this post and one thing bringing another I was streaming live installing and playing with Yori.

Podcasts

• Episode 49 - Blazor, .Net Core 3.1 and spelling reforms with Daniel Roth (Coding After Work Podcast) - Great episode with the very energetic Daniel. A ton of information and thank you for all the URLs in the notes.

• SPI 404: The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team with Patrick Lencioni (The Smart Passive Income) - I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team a few years ago and loved it. It was really interesting to listen to the author talking sharing all that wisdom. A must! (book and episode).

• Entity Framework Core 3 with Julie Lerman (.NET Rocks!) - What a great episode with Entity framework goddess in person. As I'm planning to use EF in a new project, this refresh was awesome!

• #23: John Sonmez - Becoming a Finisher, Part 1 (The Solo Coder Podcast) - I know, read and follow Simpler Programmer. It was so great to heard all the work that was put in to arrive to the current status. So many of us think it's a night success... Looking forward to listening to part 2.

Miscellaneous

• 8 reasons why we should all walk more (BBC Radio) - Interesting post that shares the benefits of a nice walmk.

• How to Create Great Tech Demos and Presentations (Thomas Maurer) - Awesome list of tips to give the best presentation possible.

Reading Notes #142

Suggestion of the week

• How To Refactor for Dependency Injection -- Visual Studio Magazine (Ondrej Balas) - I really liked this post. Seriously, I'll be referring to it each time someone will be asking why we should use IoC.

Programming

• Web Performance Optimization is Simple - Can Your Developers Execute? (love2dev.com) - Nice post that explained why knowing more than a hello word is important.
  
• Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 - Ah. Great.
  
• The Magic of using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET 4.5 plus an important gotcha (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains very clearly how we should do our async call in a web app.
  
• Using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET MVC 4 - Great tutorial that covers everything we need to know about async in a web application context.
  
• Test Plan and Test Suite Customization with TFS2013 Update3 (Manoj Bableshwar) - Visual studio is already to update 3! This post shows one of the new feature that was the most requested by users.
  
• Becoming SOLID in C# - Really interesting article that encoureage us to know more about SOLID principles in C#.
  
• Change Risk Anti-Patterns & Code Complexity - This post explains an interesting method to calculate the risk of your code when facing changes.

Mobile

• Xamarin.Forms - Write Once, Run Everywhere, AND Be Native? (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting post that proved how amazing Xamarin is becoming.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today - A really interesting article that explains an concept in a simple way.
  
• Waterfall to Agile (Andy Watson, B. Clay Shannon JD Meier) - I likethis post because it shows strong images to explains the difference between waterfall and agile.
  
• Self-Improvement In Agile Teams - Interesting post about how we should think when we feel to do something more, in an agile team.

Reading Notes #128

Suggestion of the week

• What is Windows Azure? - This post gives the definition of Azure that is short enough to be said in one breath.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Remote Debugging (Anjana Mazumder) - Really useful tips when searching for that bug how's only happening in the cloud...
  
• How to Setup and Protect an Azure Application with a Barracuda Firewall (Ashwin Palekar) - Great tutorial the builds a real application that used network security.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #4 – C#, Node.js, and Python side-by-side – Three Simple Command Line Tools to Copy Files up to Windows Azure Blob Storage (Bill Wilder) - Nice and useful snippets.
  
• “The Cloud Never Goes Down”, Azure SLAs and other availability trivia - This post explains what we should expect from the cloud (from all providers) SLAs.

Programming

• If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014? (Scott Hanselman) - Learning a new language every year is a good practice, but we all run out of time. Here are some suggestions to get stared.
  
• Dependency Injection with Unity (Dominic Betts, Grigori Melnik, Fernando Simonazzi and Mani Subramanian) - Fantastic book that covers completely the Dependency Dnjection topics. It used Unity framework. A lot of code samples, detailed informations on different patterns and unit tests are also in this book.
  
• EF 6.1: Turning on logging without recompiling - I'm always impressed by all the little things in EF that could simplify our life as developer.
  
• Intercepting Asynchronous Methods Using Unity Interception - Great post that explains how to use IoC with Unity in an async situation.
  
• Understanding Entity Framework Code First Migrations (More..) - All steps are explained in this nice tutorial.
  
• Content Negotiation and Web API for the ASP.NET MVC Developer - Web API is a big step forward in a web architecture.

Miscellaneous

• Download Wrappers and Unwanted Software are pure evil (Scott Hanselman) - It is more and more difficult to install something without also installing unwanted stuff...

Reading Notes #114

Suggestion of the week

• Episode 117: Introducing the new Windows Azure Management Libraries (Channel 9) - Very good explanation from Brady in this Cloud Cover show episode.
  
• Using a Surface 2 (RT/ARM) to get actual work done + Remote Desktop + Visual Studio + Azure - Amazing post full of tips and golden information. A must-read article.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Storage Queues VS Windows Azure Service Bus Queues - Nice and useful post that compares azure storage queues and Azure Service Bus queues.
  
• Remote PowerShell in Azure IAAS Virtual Machines (Sri Harsha BS) - Troubleshooting and resolving of different issues using Remote PowerShell.
  
• Snip/Shot by Toddy Mladenov - Good clarification about the very popular buzzword: as a Service.
  
• SoundCloud Now Reaches 250 Million Listeners In Its Quest To Become The Audio Platform Of The Web - See how this company has grown in the past few months.
  
• Some tips and tricks for azure table storage (Purbasha Ghosh) - Very interesting post that shows why it is to think differently to really take advantage of the cloud capabilities.
  
• Windows Azure Guidance - Cloud Design Patterns Alpha drop... - This post announced a new drop of an incredible source of information about Cloud Desing Pattern.
  
• Exploring the AutoScale feature in Windows Azure Websites - Nice tutorial that shows some of the new feature in Azure autoscale.

Database

• Create Database Diagrams of Your Windows Azure SQL Databases - Really? I though it was possible to connect with sql manager and make a diagram. I must try the dbforge tool, looks pretty slick.
  
• SQL Express v LocalDB v SQL Compact Edition (jerry-nixon) - Excellent post to demystify the differences between these Microsoft's database.

Programming

• Adaptive Access Layers + Dependency Injection = Productivity - Nice article that told how a company implemented some pattern to improve their productivity.
  
• Programming CSS: Bundling and Minification - Excellent article to get started with the bundling and minifying concept to get better performance.
  
• Configuring DB Connection and Code-First Migration for Identity Accounts in ASP.NET MVC 5 and Visual Studio 2013 - Good tutorial that explains really clearly how to use the migration feature in EF with the new as.net and VS.
  
• MVC Patterns (Active and Passive Model) and its implementation using ASP.NET Web forms (Khademul Basher) - Interesting post about MVC pattern using pasove Model.
  
• Katana 2 is Available! (Brian Benz) - This post announced the release of Katana 2.0 and reference another post to get started with this project.
  
• Command Pattern - Simple and very clear introduction to Commands Patter.

UX

• You Definitely Want to Beta Your App - Nice post where the author shares is experience about the benefit of beta testing our application.

Miscellaneous

• Got a HOT Post on Your Blog? Here’s What to Do To Find and Optimise It (Darren Rowse) - Interesting tips.

~Frank

Reading Notes #46

 

Cloud

• War in the Cloud ! (Pradeep) - Today few big players are fighting to get their part of the cake. This post try to found how could be the winner.
• Article: I’ve built a SaaS solution on Windows Azure: now, how do I know what to charge my customers? - Great idea. A tool to help monitoring our application.
• Preparation is key to a successful cloud deployment - This post gives some advice to prepare our cloud life
• 5 Reasons to Start Working with Windows Azure - Highlight some keys features of Windows Azure especially debugging tools.
• Automating Azure deployment with Windows PowerShell (adambird.com) - Quick intro and nice script to get started about using Azure PowerShell cmdlets to deploy.
• All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels) - Big announcement from AWS for the .Net community. Amazon is releasing is RDS for MSSQL and a tools kit for Visual Studio.
• Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution (Switch Mark Thiele) - Nice post that will help you to focus on the good things and ask you the good questions when planning your cloud adventure.
• Is AWS or Windows Azure the Right Choice? It’s Not That Easy. - Really good question that compare AWS with Azure.

 

Programming

• Ajax Control Toolkit May 2012 Release - Great! The timing is perfect. One day after this new release some project arrived and they need exactly this new version of the upload control... thanks!
• Request Filtering, URLScan With Windows Azure Web Role (Avkash Chauhan - MSFT) - Simple script for start-up task to install URLScan since it's not there by default with IIS7.
• Create a Continuous Client Using Portable Class Libraries - Very nice article. By following the realisation of an application to solve a real world problem, the author introduces the client portable library “cpl” that gives the opportunity to easily write a cross platform application.

“there is, as Joshua Topolsky puts it, “a missing link in our computing experience” (engt.co/9GVeKl). “

• The key to AddOrUpdate (Arthur Vickers) - While waiting for the next release of EF this post explain very clearly how to implement an extension method to help use in a more generic context when we want the same functionality of the DbSet.Find in a AddUpdateEntity method.
• Mocking Dependencies != IoC (or at least it doesn’t have to) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting tutorial that explains an alternative to mock without using dependency injection IoC by using the Lazy.

 

Integration

• Michael Stephenson - Tips on when not using BizTalk config file and reference on another post to more details.

"I wrote a blog post a few years ago around the options for where you could put configuration settings in BizTalk (Click here)."

 

Miscellaneous

• The Blog of Scott Hanselman - Interesting post here Scott explain how he did introduce Star Wars to is kids. I like the 20 minutes segment idea.
• The Myth of Informed Consent - I agree, how many times did you got a firewall or anti-virus popup asking to approve something that you really don't know about? That why we install them, so they should take the decision...
• The key to AddOrUpdate (Arthur Vickers) - While waiting for the next release of EF this post explain very clearly how to implement
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't make sense anymore (hanselman.com) - Really funny, if you are older than 30... So just for fun ask around to the junior people if they know about those techs.

~Frank