Reading Notes #581

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

• ASP.NET Core Basics: Essential NuGet Packages (Part 1) (Assis Zang) - Great idea this post! Those five packages are definitely very useful, and I like that they are not just mentioned but also explained and implemented in the demo solution.

Programming

• Announcing .NET 8 - .NET Blog (Gaurav Seth) - Tons of update with as many videos. Enough to satiate everyone.

• Entity Framework Core 8 (EF8) is available today - .NET Blog (Arthur Vickers) - Of course the Entity framework update to follow .NET of course.

• Get ready for .NET Conf, Microsoft Ignite, and GitHub Universe (Matt Graven) - So many events and news packed in a single month. This post helps to do an overview so help us make an ideas.

• Connect to localhost from inside a dev container (Jim Bennett) - Interesting... I thought Dapr was the easiest but the solution presented in this post could be a easier workaround, at lease while coding/ testing it.

• Fake It Til You Make It...To Production - .NET Blog (Martin Taillefer) - This post shows 3 pretty useful fake/mock included in .NET 8: Logger, Clock, and Metric.

• Building debugging context for Copilot Chat (Mark Downie) - Cool extension for Visual Studio.

• Announcing .NET Chiseled Containers - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - The new image are available.Yay

Databases

• Importing Flat Files into Azure SQL DB (Josephine Bush) - Omg! That makes Azure Data Studio the easiest and low friction tool to import data from a flat file into a Ms SQL database

Miscellaneous

• OpenAI drama is over. (Kim Menikh) - Well.I was curious.I didn't follow all of it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #362

Suggestion of the week

• ARM Templates vs Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - What a great post that answer (well..explains) the pros and cons of each method. Great post Mark!

Cloud

• Creating a Massively Scalable Blog with Ghost, MySQL and Azure (Rob Conery) - Nice script, neat explication and tweak.
• Deploying a personal blog with GitHub Actions (Den Delimarsky) - Very cool tutorial... Nice to see a static generator in Go.
• Moving your ASP.NET applications to the Microsoft Cloud (Premier Developer) - If you are thinking to migrate to the cloud, it's important to plan your migration. This post is the perfect point to get started, it contains references to deeper books and documents.

Programming

• Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server in NodeJS Applications (Michael Szul) - Nice tutorial that shows how to write some test in Typescript.
• What are all the Chocolatey repositories for? (Gary Ewan Park) - Woooh.I didn't know Chocolatey had so many repos! Awesome and very instructive post.
• Kubernetes Ingress Controllers and Certificates: The Walkthrough (Jessica Deen) - Awesome video!
• The Life of a GitHub Action (Jessie Frazelle) - A nice quick post that clarifies things around those actions.
• The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code (Lyn Levenick) - Cool statistics about editor usage. Not sure of the real correlation with the editor used and the skill level, but it's still an interesting coincidence.

Miscellaneous

• How to Forget About Work When You’re Not Working (Art Markman) - Interesting post that treats an important topic.
• Stream Deck Tricks for Streamers… and Muggles too! (Jeff) - Fantastic post that explains so much why that little thing can save you so much pain. As THE day when I'm starting to stream get closer and closer... This is gold.

~

Reading Notes #347

Cloud

• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 162 - ARM Templates Demystified (Michael Crump) - Nice little intro to know what is ARM at a very high level. Seriously every introduction talk about ARM should start like that.
• Azure Portal October update (Peri Rocha) - I'm sure you noticed... The portal is always evolving getting better every day. This post list all the changes, what have you missed?

Programming

• How to get HTTPS working on your local development environment in 5 minutes (Daksh Shah) - Tired to get the unsecured notification when working locally? This tutorial will explain all the steps to fix that.
• Introduction to Vue.js with a Single Page Application (SPA) in Visual Studio - Simple Talk (Damon Armstrong) - Very complete and detailed article, the perfect one to get started with vue.js
• Update on .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8 (Scott H) - Great update and a glimpse of the Frameworks roadmap.

Data

• Fun with SQL Server Containers (Donovan Brown) - Interesting post. Perfect to get ready in 5 minutes.

Miscellaneous

• An Introduction to AI at LinkedIn (Deepak Agarwal) - Interesting reel life case where AI is used... Not crazy sci-fi, very day to day improvement.

From a Docker container to MySQL as a Service in Azure in 5 minutes

Hello MySQL! It's been a while eh? You were at version 3 something, I was just getting stated with my professional career. We had fun for years... Then you know things changed, and I did something else. I was really happy when Microsoft announced, at the MSBuild,  the availability of MySQL as a Servive in Azure.
 


Creating a MySQL database with the portal is extremely simple. As usual, you enter the server name, database name and the Admin's password. At the time I'm writing this post, it was not possible to use any CLI, but I'm sure it will be available shortly. For the ones who are not used at Database as Service in Azure, one thing you will need to do to get access to your database from your computer is white listed your IP. It's very easy to do from the Azure Portal, just select the Connection Security tab on the left menu and add your address. Oh! And don't forger to click the save button. ;)



During my tests, I've tried different applications (WordPress, Azure WebApp, custom on-premise app.) that use MySQL as backend database, I didn't notice any problem, and performance were great. It was just... simpler; no server to configure, no VM to configure, no update. The only "issue" I got was trying to connect Power BI Desktop to a MySQL, but I think it more related to the drivers since the service was still in early preview. I notified Microsoft, and I'm sure it will be available shortly.

Since it's been a while since I did some reel work with MySQL I didn't have any client install on my laptop. In fact, I had no idea which one I should take.

I knew we can run some CLI inside a Docker container with an interactive interface. So I decided to give it a try. A quick docker search mysql shows me that an image existed. Here are the steps to get setup.

First, let's download the image, and create an instance named mySQLTools of MySQL 8.0:

docker run --name mySQLTools --env "MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=Passw0rd" -d mysql:8

Then using the -it let's bring the bash prompt to our terminal.

docker exec -it mySQLTools bash -l 

Finally we connect to our client using the usual settings (note that you must have no space between -p and your password):

mysql -h _ServerName.database.windows.net_  -u _UserName@ServerName_ -p_MyPassword_ _DatabaseName_

Voila! That's all what it takes to get started. And by the way, it will also work great with a Azure SQL Database.

docker pull shellmaster/sql-cli 

docker run -it --rm --name=sqlTools shellmaster/sql-cli mssql -s ServerName.database.windows.net  -u UserName@ServerName  -p YourPassword -d DatabaseName -e

Reading Notes #262

Cloud

• AzCopy 5.1.1 Release (Michael Curd) - New version more secure.
  
• Azure Portal UI now generally available including a preview of new APIs experience ( Anton Babadjanov) - Looking forward to doing more in the new blade of ApI Managemennt.
  
• Azure Region Pairs Explained (Chris Pietschmann) - This post clarifies an important architecture point that could affect our solution monthly fee.
  
• Free Training! Azure Day is coming to Montreal January 17th 2017 (Stéphane Lapointe) - Nice free training for Montreal people.
  
• Invoke Azure LogicApp over HTTPS with HTTP triggers (Christos Matskas ) - This tutorial that explains how to play with Azure Logic App to manage http calls.
  
• Using Key Vault Secrets in PowerShell (Chris Clayton) - Great tutorial that explains clearly how to use keyvault in our deployment.

Programming

• 4 Easy Steps to Custom Sections In web.config (Eric Sanner) - Good little tutorial to help us keeping our web.config clean.
  
• Cloud Scale, means Out, not Up (Chris Pietschmann) - Nice clarification post. So many people still use one term when talking about the other.
  
• Free Intermediate ASP.NET Core 1.0 Training on Microsoft Virtual Academy (Scott Hanselman) - Because you saw the beginner course or just because you want more... Fantastic!
  
• ReSharper Interactive Tutorials | ReSharper Ultimate Blog (Alexey Totin) - I just started to use Resharper, and I find it.... huuuuuuuge! I found this nice tutorial that help to get started... enjoy!
  
• Securing Web Applications - Simple Talk (Vishwas Parameshwarappa) - Security should be in our priority in this time of APIs and IoT.... Excellent post to get started with multiple security breaches and how to fix them.
  
• Tuples In C# (Mahesh Chand) - Tuples are one feature introduced in .Net 4.0 that can simplify our life a lot. Learn how in this post.

Databases

• SQL Server Extension for Visual Studio Code (Robert Green) - Awesome!

Miscellaneous

• Identity vs Permissions (Dominick Baier) - Good post that demystifies some point between two distinct but very often mixed concept.

Reading Notes #147

Suggestion of the week

• What happened to Code Spaces could happen to you. On Amazon, Azure and any host out there. (Maarten Balliauw) - Great post that highlight today's security concerns and responsibilities.
  
• Day 12: Implement Search Using Inline Forms and AJAX (James Chambers) - Great tutorial to build a Ajax control in an Asp.Net MVC context.
  

Cloud

• Deploying WordPress on Azure and using MySQL in a VM (Chris) - Nice post where the author tells us his journey when he was looking for a new blog engine and how effortless it was to get it online.
  
• Microsoft #Azure – Where Should I Start? - This post is a great starting point for anyone looking for good references: books, e-books, podcast, websites, etc.
  

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: ASP.NET Web API Caching with CacheCow and CacheOutput (Scoot Hanselman) - Useful Nuget package to manage the cache.
  
• Day 8: Semi-Automatic Bootstrap – Editor Templates (James Chambers) - Nice post. simple and efficient. Day 10: HtmlHelper Extension Methods - Nice tutorial on how to create a Html Helper using Gravatar as context.
  
• CodeLens for Git improvements in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Update 3 RC (Real McCoy, Peter Jean-Marc Prieur) - Really amazing add-ons this CodeLens. I hope the next project I will work on will be on Git so I can try it. ;)
  
• ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory (Ken Kilty) - Interesting introduction to a new feature that come with SQL Server 2014.
  

Miscellaneous

• Creating custom data graphics in Visio (Visio Team) - Nice tutorial that explains how to improve our diagrams very easily.

~Frank