Reading Notes #596

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!

Suggestion of the week

• Introducing .NET Smart Components - AI-powered UI controls - .NET Blog (Daniel Roth) - Wait whaaat! This it so cool and useful and it's available now. You must see this the smart-past button needs to be on all forms...

Cloud

• Smart To-Do Creator: Combining the ease of Azure Logic Apps and the power of Generative AI (Gaurav Mantri) - A cool little project explained in this post. It uses logic apps and AI.

Programming

• .Net Aspire - A Brief Introduction (Paul Michaels) - I also started playing with aspire this weekend I must say I love it, give it a try.

• Difference Between await and Task.Wait in C# (Georgios Panagopoulos) - This nice post goes in the details to explains the difference of the two methods.

AI

• Microsoft and NVIDIA announce major integrations to accelerate generative AI for enterprises everywhere (Microsoft) - If you use AI or are planning to do it, this post will be interesting.

• Demystifying LLMS From Zero to Raccoon-Hero, with Azure and DotNet, Episode 1: Creating a CLI (Maho Pacheco) - This is a nice step by step tutorial that show us how to build a console application that use AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (Manish Shivanandhan) - An interesting aLternative to GPT when text is involved.

Miscellaneous

• Homo sapiens 1.0 (Mark Downie) - Interesting reflection about how to determine what ready important when adding features in a product or services.

~Frank

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

How to edit a JSON object inside an Azure Logic App

I use Azure Logic Apps in many of my solutions, I find them so conviennant to integrate different systemes. Recently one of them was failling and by lookink at the error message: The property value exceeds the maximum allowed size, I knew what was wrong. I was tying to save a JSON object into a Storage table but one property was too long. For this particular case I didn't need the value contain in the property so the plan was to delete it. At first, I thought it wasn't possible to edit a variable of type object in a Logic Apps, but it is!

In this post I will show how to use Compose action and setProperty to perform data operations in Azure Logic Apps.

The Context

First think to know is that the Compose action does not update the the current object but creates a new one. In this demo the JSON object use is quite short to simplyfy the demo.

{
	"firstname":"Frank",
	"lastname":"Boucher",
	"alias":"fboucheros",
	"bio":"With many years of experience in the IT industry, François (Frank) Boucher is a trusted Microsoft Azure professional whose expertise and bilingual service are relied upon in large Canadian markets (Ottawa and Montreal) as well as internationally. Among his many accolades, Francois has been awarded four times Microsoft Azure MVP status, named a Microsoft Azure Advisor, and Microsoft Azure P-Seller. Frank created the “Cloud 5 minutes” show. Where every second week, a new episode that answers a different technical question, is published both in French and English (cloud5mins.com). "
}

The Details

The Logic App recieve a JSON object from the request body. This is transfom as an Person object. To empty the bio property the action Compose will be used.

Inside the Compose action, use the context menu to find setProperty in the Expression section. The expression setProperty takes three parameters: the object, the property name, and the edited value. In this demo the goal was to empty the property therefore and empty string will be assign like this:

  setProperty(variables('Person'),'bio','').

The edited object is accessible from the output of the Compose action and this what will be return in the Response action.

The Result

By adding a single action it's possible to edit JSON object in a Logic App without requiring to use inline code or external tools. A demo wouldn't be complite without a end-to-end run so here the result of a HTTP POST to the Logic App passing the Person JSON and the returned result.

Video version

If you prefer, I also have a video version of this post.

Useful links

• 🔗 Compose Action: https://c5m.ca/Compose
• 🔗 SetProperty: https://c5m.ca/setProperty

~ Frank

Reading Notes #490

Good Monday, time to share my reading notes. 

It's a habit I started a long time ago where I share a 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 SDK Release (January 2022) (Azure SDK team) - I'm always so impressed by all the changes happening each month... Are you?

• How to Create an Azure Function App Using C# (Claudio Bernasconi) - This is a nice tutorial paired with a video. In fact, there is an entire channel of tutorials about Azure, .NET, and Visual Studio.

• Secure messages to Teams with Azure Logic App (Tobias Almen ) - This is a good tutorial to secure communication done by Logic Apps.

Programming

• Postman Announces Support for gRPC in Beta (Wendell Santos) - Great news to see that the toolings follow the tech.

• Announcing .NET MAUI Preview 12 (David Ortinau) - Things are getting pretty... Nice update.

• Dependency Injection in .NET 6 - Adding and Injecting Dependencies (Matthew Jones) - We all agree that testing is important dependency injection is part of a great test strategy. This is the second post of a series.

• Model Binding in ASP.NET Core using Razor Pages (Elisenda Gascon) - A clear tutorial about the binding to simplify and improve our code.

• What Is Single Project in .NET MAUI? (Leomaris Reyes ) - I'm just getting started with MAUI and it's very impressive. I really like this post as it explains why and how the structure of the project is set.

Podcast

• 561: How to Reduce Burnout, with Jennifer Moss (Coaching for Leaders) - As I was listening that episode, I realized that the team I'm in we already did a lot of those things. The past months were hard for all of us but I think we did well. Very interesting episode, and it could be a good idea to share to your teammates.
• 288: Turning Hacks into Reality (Merge Conflict) - Super interesting to listen Frank and James as they share their progress about there App development and how a simple "wind speed" question became a thing!
• No More Lonely Friends with Marissa Meizz (A Bit of Optimism) - Wow! It's always very impressive what can happends when you mix social media and good intention.
• 562: How to Make Progress When Starting Something New, with Michael Bungay Stanier (Coaching for Leaders) - Very nice episode with Michael Bungay Stanier, author of the book also poart of this Reading Notes (but not the book they talk in the episode), about how to get started. Love it, very honest, and real.

Miscellaneous

• Windows 11 is getting a new Task Manager design (Tom Warren) - Oh yes! Things evolved, get better, faster, and takes fewer resources...

Books

The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever 

(Michael Bungay Stanier) 

- I really liked this book. Yes, I read The Coaching Habit, that's a nice one too, but in The Advice Trap has something that feels more adapted for when we get started. The book shares many gems and important points to get us started on a better path (or to change our habits). It's may not necessarily be easy, but it's clear what needs to be done, well in this case not done.

~frank

Reading Notes #356

Suggestion of the week

• Security Headers (Tanya Janca) - Interesting post that shows the code/configuration we need to add, in order to get a more secure website.

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure portal December 2018 update (Peri Rocha) - Nice new update.. The last one of the year.
• Serverless Google App Engine Flex Custom Docker Runtime & Cloud SQL Backend with Swift & Vapor Web API (Alfian Losari) - Great tutorial that explains how to build a web backend.
• Créez vos Logic Apps via des templates ARM (Wilfried Woivré) - An excellent post in French that explains step by step how to build our ARM template to deploy an Azure Logic Apps.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 2.2 Parameter Transformers for clean URL generation and slugs in Razor Pages or MVC (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains a new feature of the new core release.
• How to become a Git expert (Aditya Sridhar) - A very nice post that explains how to fix common mistake users does and also explains how to keep our history clean.
• Web Architecture 101 (Jonathan Fulton) - This is a very complete article that does a tour of every piece of a web solution.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Books That Will Help You Become a Better Writer (Glenn Leibowitz) - A nice little list of books for the holiday...
• Becoming a better supporter of women in tech (Tom) - Great post. Share it.
• Leadership Mode Activate (Allen Pike) - Don't be affray to move forward and smash!
• Write more compact SQL Server code using new features (Sergey Gigoyan) - This is a nice way to learn how to be more efficent with SQL.

Books

Fast Focus: A Quick-Start Guide To Mastering Your Attention, Ignoring Distractions, And Getting More Done In Less Time! (Damon Zahariades) - Great book well organized. Simple strike to the point. It is divided into three parts: understanding focus, creating an environment for focus, and employing tactics to focus. It lists the top 10 obstacles to staying focused and gives you a great idea on how to get start your journey.











~

Reading Notes #342

Cloud

• Logic Apps, Flow connectors will make Automating Video Indexer simpler than ever (Uri Greenberg) - This post explains how to extract a lot of insights from a video in a codeless solution. I did something similar with the v1 here.
• .NET Rocks! vNext (Carl and Richard, John Papa) - How could you not try to do some node on Azure after listening to that episode?

Programming

• Writing a Blazor App (David Pine) - This tutorial shows how to build a simple blazor app...and it's NOT the hello-word or todo.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Ghost 2.0 (John O'Nolan) - Woo that a big change! If you don't know Ghost already, it worth a try.
• Azure Block Blob Storage Backup (Hemant Kathuria) - A very cool tutorial that explains all steps to build a full incremental back-up between azure blob storages (in two different subscription)]
• How do you even know this crap? (Scott Hanselman) - An interesting post that successfully connects developers, dungeon & dragon, and poop~?
• OBS for Twitch (John Papa) - A quick post about the OBS that everybody is talking about.
• TPZ160: Bikepacking Iceland and Sri Lanka with George Maurer (Paul Schmid, George Maurer) - An incredible trip story.

Reading Notes #331

Cloud

• Advanced Architecture for ASP.NET Core Web API (Chris Woodruff) - Nice and detailed post that describes the architecture pattern.
• Analyzing images using Azure Cognitive Services (Gunnar Pei[man) - Cool post that introduces the API and shows some examples.
• Cloning Azure Logic App to create a new one (Abhijit Jana) - This is soooooo sick! (In a good way)
• Getting Started with Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - Nice new course available on Pluralsight.
• Quickly rollback Azure Logic Apps to the Previous Version (Abhijit Jana) - Really cool!

Programming

• Carriage Returns and Line Feeds will ultimately bite you - Some Git Tips (Scott Hanselman) - I didn't know that what I'm doing (coding CLI) was weird... But yeah I can feel the pain.
• How I Increased My Productivity With Visual Studio Code (Michael Hoffmann) - Nice little post, learn how to get better with VsCode.
• Microsoft + GitHub = Empowering Developers (Satya Nadella) - This was a big news this week. I profoundly think its for the best.

Books

• Wait, What?: And Life's Other Essential Questions (James E. Ryan) - Simple, short, but very interesting book.

Miscellaneous

• When Do People Read Blogs? The Best Times to Post (null) - Looks like timing may not be everything... But it's a big part of the equation.

Reading Notes #329

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Logic Apps, tips from the real world (gord) - Nice post that explains a real-life situation fixed using Logic Apps.

Cloud

• Create Your First ‘No Code’ Logic App in Microsoft Azure (Timothy Warner ) - Another great example of how easy and useful logic apps are.
• How I choose which services to use in Azure (Barry Luijbregts, Scott Hanselman) - Oh wow! Very interesting video, presenting a nice and structured way to pick our cloud services.
• Import Azure Portal Dashboard (Abhijit Jana) - Nah! I didn't know you could import/ export... That's cool.
• Quick Navigation using Azure Portal Keyboard Shortcuts (Abhijit Jana) - Nice reminder... I'll definitely have a new look at them and use them more.
• Serverless with AWS Lambda and Scala (Rob Hinds) - Interesting Tutorial to get started with the AWS Lamba Amazon Serveurless offer}
• Exploring Azure App Service – Web Apps and SQL Azure (Andrew B Hall) - Quick and simple tutorial about Azure webapp with EF and a database.

Programming

• Installing PowerShell Core on a Raspberry Pi (powered by .NET Core) (Scott Hanselman) - It looks like the Raspberry Pi is now "more accepted" into the familly. It's time to try docker and PowerShell again.
• Building, Running, and Testing .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 2.1 in Docker on a Raspberry Pi (ARM32) (Scott Hanselman) - Fantastic! Now that .Net Core is So easily portable on Pi, I can start building my summer project with a familiar language.
• Introducing Play with Kubernetes (Mano Marks) - Bookmark this post, next rainy day ( or before) let's learn some new stuff.
• Do you need to speak English to Code? Noor - An Arabic Programming Language (Ahmed Abdalla, Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting question, and even more interesting the solution Ahmed built! Great episode.

Books

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World (Gary Vaynerchuk) - Great book, for all of us you are trying to tell something, pass a message on the social media... This is a must.

Miscellaneous

• Why invest in backend developers when your customers don’t care? (Forrest Brazeal) - Interesting post about serverless and architecture patterns.
• Entreleadership #263: Thriving in the Age of Overload (Juliet Funt, Ken Colman) - I love that idea of Whitespace. Great episode very inspiring.

Reading Notes #308

Suggestion of the week

• Serverless^2 - Azure Logic Apps and Azure Container Instances (Michal Smereczynski) - Great news! So much simpler than installing Azure PowerShell into the Function App... I'm starting to use it right away!

Cloud

• Continuous Deployment of Azure Functions with Slots (Thomas Ardal) - Nice tutorial that explains how to deploy Azure functions and why doing it that way.
• Azure Application Architecture Guide (Mike Wasson) - A free book (pdf only) with all the best of the AzureCAT team? You really don't want to miss that opportunity.
• Azure Cloud Shell (Scott Hanselman) - Ooooooh, I love it!
• Running the Azure Functions runtime in containers on Kubernetes and more (Shayne Boyer) - Very cool update that opens many possibilities.
• Serverless^2 - Azure Logic Apps and Azure Container Instances (Michal Smereczynski) - Great news! So much simpler than installing Azure PowerShell into the Function App... I'm starting to use it right away!
• Understanding Azure Event Grid ( Jason Roberts) - Nice little post that introduces event grid, differentiate it from the service bus, and quickly go over the pricing.
• Cloud en 5 minutes (Frank Boucher) - If French is your primary language, I just start a Youtube channel where every Wednesday I will publish a new video. // Si le français est votre langue première, je viens de lancer une chaine Youtube où à chaque mercredi je publirai un nouveau vidéo.

Programming

• Introducing metaparticle.io - making Kubernetes and Docker idiomatic for developers (Shayne Boyer) - Wow.pretty cool idea, I like it. It looks so simple.

Miscellaneous

• How to download embedded videos with F12 Tools in your browser (Scott Hanselman) - Very useful hack to build your airplain mode video Playlist.

Reading Notes #270

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Command Line 2.0 now generally available (Kamaljit Bath) - Azurecli definitely made a great jump in this version 2.0. With it reaching GA, we should all start using it.

Cloud

• Azure Managed Disk–Overview (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon ) - This post is a nice quick introduction on what are managed disks.
  
• Azure brings 5 new services to Canada (Chelsea Carter) - Good news for our clients that need to stay in Canadian Data centers, they now have a lot more tools in their box.
  
• Deploying ARM Templates using Visual Studio Team Services (Jakob Ehn) - This post shows how to automate Azure deployments. It doesn't do it with the usual happy path, but with a very common situation where we need access Key and other information from the deployed resources to complete the deployment.
  
• Deploying a web app and an Azure SQL database with ARM template without providing any password (Vivien Chevallier) - Great tutorial that gives us a very good opportunity to learn some best practices.
  
• Integrating SharePoint With Other Services Using Azure Logic Apps - Part One (Nakkeeran Natarajan) - Nice quick intro to the SharePoint connector in Logic Apps.
  
• Serverless architecture with Azure - Simple Talk (Christos Matskas) - Good post that does a little tour of the serverless services in Azure.However, I would disagree on the simplistic view of Logic Apps and its limitation. Furthermore, I would have talked more about are extremely powerful these services can become if put together in a solution.

Databases

• Loading files from Azure Blob Storage into Azure SQL Database (Jovan Popovic) - Cool. This bulk command has been so useful on-premises; it's great to have them back.
  
• Deploy Docker Container to Oracle Cloud Service (Arun Gupta) - Great post that explains a lot on how to use databases in dicker containers.

Miscellaneous

• GitKraken vs the CLI (Brett Goldman) - Cool comparison between the Git prompt and GitKranken.
  
• Introducing Raspberry Pi Zero W - Great news from Raspberry Pi this week, this new version is simply gorgeous.

Reading Notes #269

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Functions Proxies public preview (Matthew Henderson) - I think this news is a game changer, in a very positive way, for Azure Functions. I'm really looking forward to trying it.

Cloud

• Service Fabric and Windows Containers sample (Service Fabric Team) - Another perfect repository to get started with Fabric, a little simple solution that shows a multi-container implementation.
  
• Protecting Azure Logic Apps Using Azure API Management - This is a good post. It introduces to backbends Azure services (and also less known), and explains how together get more powerful a d how they can help in our solutions.
  
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Running and Managing LOTS of Web Apps on a single Azure App Service - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - Another great gem from Scott. This post is a must for all developers.

Programming

• Clean up unused git branches (Steve Smith) - Nice quick tutorial to help us cleaning our Git repositories.
  
• Configuring ASP.NET Core Applications in Azure App Service (Adrian Hall) - Fantastic post to get a little deeper with .Net Core and Azure.

Miscellaneous

• Are Manufacturers Taking the Right Precautions to Safeguard Cars Against Hacking Attacks? (Matthew Young) - Interesting post that asks that raises even more interesting questions.

Reading Notes #203

 

 

Suggestion of the week

• Adding Insights and Telemetry to Logic Apps through Power BI (Jeff Hollan) - Fantastic post that explains how to integrate Logic Apps and Power BI. And for the lazy one that doesn't want to read, check the first haft of this video.

Cloud

• September update: Azure Preview Portal improvements (Leon Welicki) - The portal is changing again, and you can see how Microsoft is really listening to his users.
  
• Azure Service Fabric 101 - This video explains in only ten minutes, what is service fabric and why we should care.
  
• Azure Service Fabric 102 (Scott Hanselman) - You know our bases or you watch the 101; this post goes the code and explains how it can work.

Programming

• Battle of the Free Code Editors (Brian Rinaldi) - Nice post that compares three free, popular, and powerful code editor.

Databastes

• Easily Transform JSON Data When Importing to Azure DocumentDB (Stephen Baron) - Great post that explains powerful ways to import our data in DocumentDB.

Miscellaneous

• Going Back to One (Alexandre Brisebois) - Organize our work to become a performer, could be easily done in Windows. 10.

~Frank 

Reading Notes #195

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing the Azure SDK 2.7 for .NET (Brady Gaster) - Sooooo many new features, options, and tools in only one release!! This post reviews a lot of them.

Cloud

• Announcing Cortana Analytics Suite and New Partner Investments at WPC 2015 (Takeshi Numoto) - I'm looking forward to trying it out.
  
• How exactly does Event Hubs Throttling Work? (Dan Rosanova) - Thi post shares useful information about a frequent question.
  
• Three big areas of focus for Microsoft’s Canadian channel (Paolo Del Nibletto) - Interesting news about Microsoft's focus.
  
• Importing Data to DocumentDB Just Keeps Getting Better (Stephen Baron) - If you never ear about DocumentDB Migration Tool, this post is for you. It explains how you ca import documents, even from another NoSql database like DynamoDB.
  
• Why I got the MCSD Azure Solutions Architect Certification (Chris Pietschmann) - Really great work, thanks for sharing.
  
• Azure Logic Apps – monthly update July 2015 (Saravana Kumar) - The Azure Logic Apps team did their monthly release this week, this post tells all about the new features.
  
• Azure SQL Database Web and Business edition retirement September 12th, 2015 (Guy Haycock) - Time to upgrade, September is coming pretty fast.
  
• Can’t recover VMs in Azure with volumes greater than 1TB? Use Storage Spaces! (Anoob Backer) - Great tutorial to get super performance.

Database

• Available now – Cross-region Replication, Triggers, and Streams - Nice new feature.
  
• Azure SQL Database with direct connect – Microsoft Power BI Preview - Nice tutorial to explore our Azure database.

Programming

• Performance and Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 (Dan Taylor) - This post is the perfect point to get started about all the great diagnostics tools available in VS2015 for everyone...because it's included in all versions.
  
• The Glimpse Team Joins Microsoft (Visual Studio Blog) - Great new, I really like Glimpse.

~ Frank