Reading Notes #551

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

• Microsoft Cost Management updates—March 2023 (Michael Flanakin) - Because we all need it and or worry about it. Learn the new features that are available for you in the cost management.

• Azure Spring Clean: Compliance for Bicep with Checkov (Sam Cogan) - That's a pretty cool tool to add to our box. I need to get that onto my pipeline...like now!

• Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - April 2023 (Kent Weare) - One of my friends shared this with me, and I loved it! It's packed with information about new features, and upcoming events...

• This Month in Azure Container Apps: March/April 2023 (Anthony Chu) - I caught the live stream by pure chance and they pass through all the news contained in the post. Very happy to see Azure Container App growing so quickly!

Programming

• Run dotnet core projects without opening visual studio (Karthik Chintala) - Yes, it is possible and even fun! I code in VSCode 80% of the time.

• How to Do an Inner Join in LINQ? (Code Maze) - Nice post to get started about relations between tables type of joints and of course how to do it with LINQ.

• Running .NET Console Apps in Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - A neat way to run an application in the cloud. Have a special look at how the secret config is managed to avoid pushing them into the code repository.

Podcast

• Let's Chat About AI (Ep 76) (Community Pulse) - Extremely interesting episode about AI. Should we be worried, what would be the impact? So many great questions asked.
• 54. Cloud native and the Container landscape on Azure - with Daniel Paulus (Betatalks the podcast) - A little bit about the container's history, its present, and potential future.
• Chris Sainty: Blazor in Action - Episode 238 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - I already like Blazor, but I think you will also after listening to this episode.
• Down A Rabbit Hole with Seth Godin (A Bit of Optimism) - Great episode is about many different little things to make life better. You can feel the complicity between Seth and Simon.
• Windows WSL and Containers in 2023 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - WSL what it is and why people say it's so useful. All that and more in this episode.

Miscellaneous

• Technical Writing 101: Working with SMEs - Big Nerd Ranch (Cole Henry) - effectively.

~frank

Reading Notes #337

Cloud

• Using Azure QnA Maker (MS Bot Framework V4 Preview Edition) - This post is an excellent tutorial to get started, it explains everything step by step and you can download the final code.
• The moment I came to play with .NET Standard 2.0 – Azure Functions (Dominique St-Amand) - Nice advice/walkthrough to update our Azure Fonctions.

Programming

• Step by step: Detecting files added between two commits in git (Maxime Rouiller) - Awesome! It makes total sense to be able to filter and manipulate the query outputs, but I never thought of doing it... I still use a lot GUI App...
• .NET Core Code Coverage as a Global Tool with coverlet (Scott Hanselman) - I think it's a really cool time to be a developer as so many great tools are available (and free).
• ASP.NET Core Hidden Gem – QueryHelpers (Muhammad Rehan Saeed) - Cool little tricks.
• LINQ Challenge #3 (Mark Heath) - Okay, I know I'm not a LINQ expert but ... I'm curious to see the answers and will definitely give it a try.
• Unit Testing in ASP.NET Core Web API (Milos Davidovic) - Great tutorial that explains every bit of the inversion of control and how to create your unit tests.

Data

• Building a Real Time Data Pipeline in Azure – Part 2 (Jason Farrell) - Interesting start (part 2) of a series build and editing a solution.

Miscellaneous

• Lynx is dead - Long live Browsh for text-based internet browsing (Scott Hanselman) - Wow that's really interesting... It's True though that it feels like ... The old time.

Reading Notes #252

Cloud

• Azure Subscription Migration to CSP (Kirill Kotlyarenko) - Excellent post that explains the differences between the different types and how to migrate ... with a minimum of pain.
  
• New lower Azure pricing (Takeshi Numoto) - Really good news more VMs types and lower prices.
  
• Storing and using secrets in Azure (Bertrand Le Roy) - This p is great tutorial that explains all h steps to configure use the Azure Vault, when our secrets need more then sits in a config file.

Programming

• Sharing Authorization Cookies between ASP.NET 4.x and ASP.NET Core 1.0 (Scott Hanselman) - Nice tutorial to implement a single sign-on experience with multi part website.
  
• DevOps - Commit to Git: Source Control in Visual Studio 2015 (Jonathan Waldman) - Git is a must for all developers, this post explains all the bells and whistles in Visual Studio to manage it.

Databases

• Avoid ORDER BY in SQL Server views (Aaron Bertrand) - Sometimes we need workarounds to bend some services to our wishes, but we must keep in mind the real best practices.

Reading Notes #251

Cloud

• Announcing Azure DNS General Availability  - One of the many announcement at Ignite, it will be pretty convenient to have it in Azure portal.
  
• Availability of H-series VMs in Microsoft Azure - New type of high-performance vm, that's welcome.
  
• Azure Functions in practice (Troy Hunt) - Cool post that shows a real-life situation where Function Apps are helpful.
  
• Load Balancing Managed Services in Azure (Daniel Szweda) - Great tutorial that explains very clearly how to configure our balancer.

Programming

• Optimising LINQ - Optimization is a world by itself, this post shares few tips and tools to get better at it.
  
• Using the Postman Chrome App? Implications from the Recent Google Announcement  - Most of us are Postman users, so this news will have an impact... Be prepared.

Miscellaneous

• Being A Developer After 40 (Adrian Kosmaczewski) - Great post, a must whatever you are older or younger than 40.

Reading Notes #140

 

Suggestion of the week

• Azure: VM Security Extensions, ExpressRoute GA, Reserved IPs, Internal Load Balancing, Multi Site-to-Site VPNs, Storage Import/Export GA, New SMB File Service, API Management, Hybrid Connection Service, Redis Cache, Remote Apps and more… (Scott Guthrie) - So many new great features that were expected since a long time.

 

Cloud

• Virtual Machines Best Practices: Single VMs, Temporary Storage and Uploaded Disks (Drew McDaniel) - Nice tips to improve vm’s users experience.
  
• Using OneNote API to count degustated beers - This short post describes a real and interesting project using OneNote, and how easy it looks!

Programming

• Tips to improve Entity Framework Performance (rahulgbhatia) - This post gives nice and simple tips to optimize our Linq to entities queries.
  
• Performance Considerations for EF5 - If you are doing or planning to do a project with Entity Framework, this white paper really worth the reading.

~Frank

Reading Notes #112

Suggestion of the week

• UNIT of Work Design Pattern (Shivprasad koirala) - Good post that explains an important design pattern.

Cloud

• **Easy Background Processing with WebAPI and Windows Azure (Erez Harari) - Great tutorial that gets you ready to make your apps.
  
• Big Data – Role of Cloud Computing in Big Data – Day 11 of 21 (Pinal Dave) - Interesting post about Big Data history.
  
• CSI: Re-enabling Remote Desktop with PowerShell after you've blocked it with your own firewall rule (Scott Hanselman) - Very useful tips.
  
• Winsmarts.com (Sahil Malik) - Short post about how to get setup and enjoy Azure PowerShell.
  
• Using web.config transforms with NLog configuration - | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog - Nice post that explains how to configure our config file so it will work with transform, NLog and Azure.
  
• Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side - Very complete tutorial with a lot of details that cover also tests.
  
• Microsoft SQL Server Hybrid Cloud Blog Series (Madhan_Arumugam_Ramakrishnan) - A lot of good article references.

Programming

• **Time Saving Tips to Get Your Windows Phone App Started (Lori Lalonde) - Useful post that quickly summarizes all the options you have when starting a new phone project.
  
• IEnumerable VS IQueryable (More..) - Nice quick post that explains clearly with sample two often mismatch classes.
  
• Var VS IEnumerable (More..) - Nice post that shows some subtile differences that could have an unexpected impact.
  
• Difference betweeen ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC (Imran Abdul Ghani) - Aaah! Loud and clear.
  
• Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework (asp.net) - You probably eared about the brand new Visual Studio 2013, but to know what new in it, this is the post to read.

Miscellaneous

• Enterprise Architecture: Reflections on My Journey of Becoming A Systems Thinking Enterprise Architect (Alan Hakimi) - I liked this post where the author share is experience on how he became an architect.

~Frank

Reading Notes #111

Cloud

• Dev and Test in the Cloud: Explained (Jonathan Rozenblit) - For dev and tests environment, windows Azure is a must.
  
• Quick Script: Copy All Blobs to New Storage Account Using PowerShell (Tyler Doerksen) - Nice and useful script.

Programming

• jQuery UI Demystified: Part 1 - Since jquery and jqueryUI are so often used use these days, avoid just doing copy-paste. Take few minutes and read this nice tutorials that explains how to use the jqueryUI widget.
  
• Tools: SlowCheetah - XML Transforms (Igor Zalmanovich ) - Definitively, a tool to have.
  
• Sorting with LINQ, Dynamically -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - Nice quick tips to sort a grid by any columns dynamically.
  
• HTML5 Sparkline chart for data-intense, small-scale Data Visualization - Evangelism - Great tool, it looks easy to use and powerful enough for many different situations. Looking forward to trying it.
  
• How to Get Started with the Ignite UI Layout Manager - Interesting "UI organizer" and look simple to use.

Database

• ASP.NET MVC: Configuring ASP.NET MVC 4 Membership with a SQL CE Database - Nice tutorial that shows how to configure SqlCe to be used as a database for membership.
  
• Creating NONCLUSTERED INDEXES on Massive Tables in Windows Azure SQL Database - Nice post that demystify the indexes and explains why we should use them.
  
• SQL Server Compact 4 desktop app with simple Private Deployment and LINQ to SQL (ErikEJ) - Very complete tutorial that explains an easy deployment with SQLCE.

Miscellaneous

• Why You Should Be Able to Work from Home - Interesting thoughts about working from home and how it would be good for you, and your work.
  
• Stop asking people what they think! (and start watching what they do) - I agree. How many times did I ear don't give what the clients asks but what they needs.
  
• Have you seen Google Trekker? (Baffin Paddler) - Wow! Google always found a new way to impress me.
  

~Frank

Reading Notes #108

Suggestion of the week

• Windows Azure IaaS Deployment Methodology with PowerShell Part One (YungChou) - First of a very promising series, this post explains that basic of a good Azure deployment.

Cloud

• Don’t Budget for Cloud (Jason Bloomberg) - Nice post that helps to understand how to budget for the IT future of companies; It could be in the cloud, could be not, and it could be a mix...
  
• Connecting Clouds – Creating a site-to-site Network with Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure (mwasham) - Great post! A post to bookmark, that a nice tutorial to build a fail over solution cross cloud provider.
  
• Dell mantra: one cloud, not even Amazon’s, doesn’t fit all - This post explained how deferent Dell wants to be in his cloud services.
  
• Architecture, Agile and Cloud Challenges - Good post that explains how we should analyses changes in our project architecture when deploying in the cloud. (Here it's Azure but it could be all other providers).
  
• Inside Dropbox’s Quest to Bury the Hard Drive (Marcus Wohlsen) - Interesting post to know more about what's planning this big player.
  
• WordPress with SQL Azure on Windows Azure Websites (mksunitha) - What1? It's that easy? No more excuse.
  
• Delivering push notifications to millions of devices with Windows Azure Notification Hubs - Create post that explains push notification and notification hubs in Windows Azure.

Programming

• Internal tools – cheap and tasteless? - DevOps definitively worth more of our attention.
  
• Top 10 ASP.NET MVC Interview Questions (Imran Abdul Ghani) - If you eared about asp.net mvc, and want to know more about it, here's the post for you.
  
• Book Review: Building Interactive Queries With LINQPad (Latish Sehgal) - Interesting book that introduces the very useful linqPad and the omnipresent LinQ.
  
• New Online Course: TDD and BDD in Ruby - 5 days to be up to speed with testing, mocking in Ruby... or get your money (35$) back.
  
• 30 Days of TDD: Day Three – Your First Test (James Bender) - Third post of a very promising series to learn from nothing how to build our tests (unit tests, integration tests, etc.) in a .Net environment. The tools used in the series are nunit, justmock, justcode and nuget of course.

Miscellaneous

• 10 Web apps to help you plan and promote a great event (Brinda Ayer) - Nice tools to know.
  
• Scott Hanselman - Interesting post, it's nice to see explication of what I though was happening.
  
• It’s not Scrum if… (Mark Levison) - Nice post that helps us to get back on the good path.
  
• Keeping Your Life Synced Up - Nice recap of the most popular tools to help us.
  
  

~ Frank

Reading Notes #55

Cloud

• Monitoring your Windows Azure Web Site (Brian H. Prince) - Nice post that explain how to see the statistics of your servers with the new Azure graphic interface.
  
• Overview of the Windows Azure Platform (Neil Mackenzie) - Great overview in this post about all the features of Windows Azure, specifying the advantages of each one.
  
• Azure for Developers: Introduction to the Tutorial - Wow great job! This series of 8 post will explains all the basics (and more) about Windows Azure by constructing, step by step a real application. A perfect get started for all developer.
  
• Windows Azure IaaS Overload (Michael Washam) - All regroup in one posts a lot of videos about crash course on Windows Azure IaaS.
  
• Windows Azure Caching (Preview) and Ruby Cloud Services - Nice job from Larry Franks to the brand new Azure Cache with Ruby.
  
• Migrated to Azure Web Sites - Nice post, all the steps needed to move an existing Wordpress blog to Windows Azure.
  
• Switching to Windows Azure - Interesting post, from someone who changes is mind, and went to Windows Azure.
  
• Announcing the Developer Preview of Windows Azure Active Directory - Great news, even if it's in a very early age this is very interesting... now let's play with it!
  
• Comparing Windows Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage (Gaurav) - Always very interesting those posts where two or more products are compared...

Programming

• Is recursion really bad? - Interesting demo about efficiency of recursive code compare to loop and stack. I would have liked to see the code that was used to test.
  
• Azure CDN Cache busting CSS image references and minification (Iain Hunter) - Interesting tricks to take advantage of the Azure CDN with minified css using pre-build event.
  
• Rhino Mocks Isn’t Complicated (Jim Cooper) - This post by doing code sample comparison between convinces me to try it again. It's true that a Rhino mocks has change since last time I worked with it. The "new" syntax is really clearer.
  
• Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed - Nice post very detailed that show how powerful is LINQ.
  
• Create Reminders in Windows 7 Without Outlook (groovypost.com) - Nice reminder ;) about the one of the great tools available on windows platform the task scheduler.
  
• Integrating Balsamiq Mockups with Google Drive (googleappsdeveloper.blogspot.ca) - Great news! I'm a big fan of Balsamiq and this "move" really makes sense.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft Announces New Cloud Opportunities for Partners - Interesting post about the WPC that append on the week on July 10th.
  
• 10 crazy IT security tricks that actually work (Roger A. Grimes) - Good tips about security, even if some of them are for servers the other are simple to apply and should be very efficient.
  
• The Best Strategy for Reducing Stress (Peter) - Great post, in today's word being able to manage is stress could be life saver.
  
• Motivate Employees: 4 Techniques to Try (John Baldoni) - Interesting thoughts about some technics you use to motivate people you work with.

~Frank