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 #549

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!

The suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Teams: Advantages of the new architecture (Sumi Singh) - Nice journey on performance optimization, embracing the open source. Learn more about your new Teams and the details and effort to make it better in this post.

Cloud

• Downloading Files from Azure Container App to your Local Machine via Azure Blob Storage (Nikhil Vetteth) - This is a useful tip to extract our logs or other local files.

Programming

• Manage networking with Docker Compose (Eric Goebelbecker) - Nice post that explains with a sample how communication is possible between containers just by using Docker compose.

• Build custom communication experiences with Azure Communication Services UI Library for Microsoft Teams users (David de Matheu) - Nice new library for the Teams developers. You can now build more with less code by leveraging Azure Communication Services (ACS).

Podcasts

• The Wisdom of Anxiety with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (A Bit of Optimism) - A very interesting episode about mental fitness... I love it!

Miscellaneous

• Welcome to the new era of Microsoft Teams (Jeff Teper) - Get more memory and CPU back! I start using it and it makes a great difference. See you there.

• New Microsoft Loop app is built for co-creation | Microsoft 365 Blog (Wangui McKelvey) - I've been hearing about loop for a while now... I'm excited to finally try it.

~frank

Reading Notes #497

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes that catch my interest during the week. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• How to Upload a File to Azure Blob Storage (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice tutorial that builds using .NET a little application to interact with Azure blob storage. And there is also a video.

• New Azure for Operators solutions and services built for the future of telecommunications (Jason Zander) - Good news in the network spheres...That's good for all of us.

• Serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps (Michael Ridland) - Now I understand not only how to create a container App but where does it fit in all the container services available in Azure. Very nice post.

Programming

• .NET GitHub Actions: Intro to GitHub Actions for .NET (David Pine) - This is a great post to get started with GitHub action. Thus one is about .Net o but of course, many other languages are supported. Right now the only thing I want is to add more workflow and improve the existing ones...

• Differences Between != And Is Not Operators in C# (Code Maze) - My first thought when I saw the title was well they are the same... And then I remember the differences. Great post the really take the time the explain the similarities and the differences.

• GitHub Previews Faster Codespaces Creation with Prebuilds -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - This is awesome! I started to use containers for my development recently and the initial spark was codespace. You must try it.

• A Practical Guide to Dapper (Camilo Reyes) - A nice tour of the functionalities of the tool. It's clear how it can be useful in a Data Access Layer pattern. Not to be confused with Dapr.

Podcast

• Twenty Years of ASP.NET with Scott Guthrie (.NET Rocks!) - So nice to hear Scott Guthrie talk about those years and share a few stories.

• 568: How to Attract Attention, with Michael F. Schein (Coaching for Leaders) - An interesting conversation about our strengths and weaknesses with the author of the book: The Hype Handbook.

• Testcontainers: Using Code to Control Docker for Testing (DevOps and Docker Talk) - When, How, Why test the code running in containers... Nice episode.

• Jennie Allen On Finding Your People And Building Your Community (What's Essential) - A interesting discussion about what does it means to find your people, and how to do that.

Miscellaneous

• Why DevOps needs a change from a ‘me’ to a ‘we’ mindset (Chris Yates) - An interesting post about the required DevOps mindset.

~frank

Reading Notes #288

Cloud

• Building an Azure Analysis Services Model on Top of Azure Blob Storage (Kay Unkroth) - A very detailed and interesting series that explains at every step the reasons behind it choices and how to do them.

• Step-By-Step: Configuring a site-to-site VPN Gateway between Azure and On-Premise (Dishan Francis) - Most cloud solutions are hybrid or use resources on-premise. For those, a VPN is often the best solution to stay secure, and this post explains how to do it and clearly identify what you need before getting started.

• Why Docker Can’t Solve All Your Problems in the Cloud (Chris Gervais) - Definitely a good post to read when thinking about going all in with containers.

Programming

• 10 Myths About Docker That Stop Developers Cold (Derick Bailey) - This post is a must. With Docker being more and more popular, it's a good idea to have a little education before those conversations reach you.

• Keep your ASP.NET Core secrets safe in production using Azure Application Settings. (Jon Hilton) - To every secret his solution.

Reading Notes #259

Cloud

• 'But it works on my cloud!' – are your developers still making the same mistakes in a world of DevOps and PaaS services? (James Broome) - This post shares an interesting thought about the new situation of developers, who works with the cloud.
  
• Announcing Azure DevTest Labs support for creating environment with ARM templates (Xiaoying Guo) - Never heard of Azure Devtest lab? Well, you should! Now all your best formulas will be deployable with ARM, that's even better.
  
• Announcing general availability of preview features and new APIs in Azure Search (Liam Cavanagh) - Even if the 2015-02-28-preview is still supported, it will now be safe to change for something more ...recent.
  
• Azure App Service is really 2 services, not 4 (Chris Pietschmann) - This is an interesting post that explains how and why the Azure Apps are packages that way. Once you understand that you see that you will not be limited by your initial pick.
  
• Introducing: Time picker in Application Insights Analytics (Noa Kuperberg) - Nice little detail that will simplify our queries.
  
• Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer: November update and summer recap (Cristy Gonzalez) - Learn all the details about the new features and the old bug fixes in this post.
  
• Migrate a Storage Account to ARM (Alexandre Brisebois) - Important PowerShell tooling that we should ALL have... A least if you've been doing some Azure for a little while.
  
• Static Website Hosting in Azure Storage (Chris Pietschmann) - A website for 1$ by month yes, it is possible on Azure, but with some limitation.
  
• Step-By-Step: Multi-Site Azure VPN Revisited (Pierre Roman) - Great re-design of a network/ infrastructure in the cloud.
  
• Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions (Andrew B Hall) - Since the day one of Azure Functions, this tool is requested by the community. The early adopter can now start using this first preview.

Programming

• Use Visual Studio Team Services As A Continuous Integration Platform for GitHub - These great tutorial shows how to realize a perfectly integrated CI solution between Github and VSTS.

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 #246

Cloud

• Accelerate your insights with Application Insights Performance Counters (Mackenzie Frackleton) - We always get more and more with Application Insights...
  
• Announcing Azure App Service MySQL in-app (preview) (Sunitha Muthukrishna) - Wow! Many PHP developers must be waiting for this since so long. It's a very good news, and I'm sure many Wordpress users will be extremely happy too.
  
• Extending Azure Logic Apps Using Azure Functions (MVP Award Program) - Nice post that shows are easy it is to put together Azure logic App and Azure functions.
  
• Portal support for Azure Search blob and table indexers now in preview (Evan Boyle) - Easier than ever, this portal is so powerful. Good job.
  
• New BizTalk Server connector preview rollout complete! (Jon Fancey) - The integrated integration platform....

Programming

• Architecture in code (Sebastien Lambla) - Interesting short post about coding best practice.
  
• Cloud-first, mobile-first: Microsoft moves to a fully wireless network (Mikkel Riis) - Nice interview with a Microsoft IT professional.
  
• PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux (Jeffrey Snover) - Now that bash is available on Windows machine and PowerShell on Linux... everything is possible!
  
• Visual Studio's most useful (and underused) tips (Scott Hanselman) - His post is a must for all VisualStudio users.

Databases

• JSON support is generally available in Azure SQL Database (Jovan Popovic) - Cool. Now you can have both types of data in the same place. Not for every situation but pretty convenient.

Miscellaneous

• How Do I Write Good Code? (Erik Dietrich) - Simple tips that will make our code rocks.

Reading Notes #243

Suggestion of the week

• IaaS isn’t your only path to outsized gains (James Staten) - Excellent post full of true and interesting facts that, at a very high level, explains the real power of the cloud.

Cloud

• Azure Advanced Data Center Bootcamp class now available (mwasham) - Great opportunity to pass at the advanced level.
  
• Azure PowerShell support for Enterprise Integration pack features now available (Jon Fancey) - Quick tutorial that uses PowerShell to create LogicApp.
  
• Getting to Know Actors in Service Fabric - This is the post is about all we need to know about microservices with actors. Even few patterns are described.
  
• Why Does My SQL Server Availability Group Need a Load Balancer in Azure? (Paul Burpo) - This post is the answer of a very common question and also explains how to do it correctly.
  
• Introducing Microsoft Stream: the secure destination to manage and share videos for businesses of all sizes (James Phillips) - Really exiting news, get started in less than 5 seconds and share video only for the viewer(s) you wish, on any devices, and securely.

Programming

• Exploring a minimal WebAPI with ASP.NET Core - Interesting new series that explores the possibilities with dotnet and different component.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Logic Apps Reaches General Availability (Jeff Hollan) - Exiting news, the availability of so many great features and tool like the LogicApp editor inside VS.
  
• Stop the madness! Ridiculous security scare tactics revealed - Like always, by being informed half the problem is already solved.

Reading Notes #216

Cloud

• Best practices: How to handle sensitive data in Azure Resource Manager templates using Key Vault (Stephane Lapointe) - Good first post of a very promising series about Azure Key Vault.
  
• Azure Automation: Graphical and textual runbook authoring (Chris Sanders) - Nice post that shows th nice graphical interface available to edit our Azure cookbooks.
  
• New book: Modern Authentication with Azure Active Directory for Web Applications (Kim Spilker) - Another book that goes on my to read stacks...

Programming

• What’s New in Fiddler 4.6.2 (Eric Law) - In today's world of connectivity, a tool like Fiddler is a must. This post shared the features of the last release, and what need to be done once you upgrade.
  
• 10 Visual Studio tips to improve your development productivity - This post group 10 useful article that explain ho to can customize VS to be more productive.(or at least more comfortable).

Data

• Introducing a simplified configuration experience for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines (Ninar Nuemah) - Wow, this is very convenient upgrade... Really cool.

Podcast

• .NET Rocks! vNext - Really interesting podcast episode. I think it's the clearer and more comprehensible explanation of Git I have ever eared.

Miscellaneous

• No, you can’t join my wifi network (Troy Hunt) - Just after the holidays, after a lot of people visit others to their houses... This is a scary but really interesting post to read.
  
• It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?! (Troy Hunt) - Nice post about the not so nice reality of today's internet.
  
• Join us in congratulating MVP awardees! - Congratulations to all of you.
  
• A Project Guide to UX Design And Content Strategy - Very nice document that tells us how a team organizes their work to create a great user experience. Step by step, we pass what look like a real case.
  
• New Year, new Git release - Can an awesome tool become even more amazing? Learn how Git did it.

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 #202

 

Suggestion of the week

• Lost in Translation - Azure Networking For Cisco Professionals - A post to bookmark, very useful in our new network related discussion.

Cloud

• Source Control Integration in Azure Automation (Beth Cooper) - Fantastic news. This post shares with us how to take advantage of this useful new feature and configure our source control.
  
• Announcing general availability of backup for Azure IaaS VMs (Trinadh Kotturu) - Great! Now in GA, with some little new extra features like PowerShell script.
  
• How I passed my Azure Certification (MCP) Exams (marc) - Passing a Microsoft certification is a big commitment, this post shares some tips to pass it with success.
  
• Load Testing from different geographies with Cloud-based load testing (Charles Sterling) - Nice quick tutorial.
  
• Azure Adventures - Deploying a JSP Web App to Azure App Service - Great post, first of a series, to get started with the famous mix Java - Azure.
  
• Node.js support for Azure Mobile Apps (Openness Team) - Good news we now have one more option to code our App Service backend.
  
• What’s new with DocumentDB? (John Macintyre) - It's all in one post, all the latest and greatest news about DocumentDB.
  
• Azure Automation-Hybrid Runbook Worker FAQs (Ravi Kiran) - That a lot of very useful questions in one post.

Programming

• Web Development - Building Responsive Web Sites with Bootstrap - Because it's only a question of time before you need it, this is a nice introduction tutorial to a light UI framework.
  
• VSCode Documentation moves to GitHub (Chris Dias) - I really think the documentation is a major piece of VSCode. Having it " to the is a fantastic thing.
  
• How I Use Git On Windows – Remote Repositories (Jesse) - Interesting post that explains how to get setup to work with Git without loc repo.
  
• Free Training at Microsoft Virtual Academy - Introduction to ASP.NET 5 - Awesome series of video to learn very useful stuff.
  
• Dynamically Generating Sitemap.xml for ASP.NET MVC - Good tutorial about a dynamic and benefice tool for our website.

Miscellaneous

• How to write better and faster using templates - Interesting post that shares with us a way to speed-up our writing. Personally, found very productive the time to structure the post since use it to organize my thoughts. Like in "old time" when we were passing through the code to adjust the indentation.
  
• The home media technology of the future is depressingly fragile - Ok I admitted it. I laugh while reading this post, but only because I got an impression of deja vu...

Reading Notes #93

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET (Scott Gu)- Wow! Don't miss this post. It's a big one, but it's filled with a lot of good stuff. Enjoy!
  
• Released: Windows Azure Training Kit – April 2013 (SyntaxC4)- Yeah! New update of the Widows Azure Training Kit (WATK). Learn what updated in this post.
  
• Building a live blog app in Windows Azure - That why the cloud is so fantastic, we can build incredible stuff without big money! Great post!
  
• A Responsible Programmer - Excellent post. These are, in fact, the best practices to be a good programmer/ developer.

 

Cloud

• Help! I Cannot Attach My Azure Data Disk to my Windows Azure Virtual Machine (Stephen W) - Nice catch, the list of available disk and the reasons why some or unavailable could be clearer.
  
• Subscribe to Windows Azure Using Your Organization ID - Nice update, we can now sign-in as an organization to Windows Azure and use our AD credential.
  
• The Windows Azure SDK for Ruby (Larry Franks) - Nice post that details what is available for Ruby developers in Azure.
  
• Setting up software based Site-to-Site VPN for Windows Azure with Windows Server 2012 Routing and Remote Access - Nice tutorial about the new site-to-site feature of Azure.
  
• Just released - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6 (Grigori Melnik) - Nice update. If you don't know Enterprise Library (EntLib) it time to jump in! And for Azure developers check out the integration pack! It's a must.
  
• Episode 106 - Scott Guthrie Discusses Windows Azure SDK 2.0 (Channel 9) (Scott Guthrie) - Excellent presentation of the novelties.
  
• Copy files >2GB to your cloud VM (Paul Lou) - Very useful post that gives a solution to a very annoying problem.

 

Programming

• Script to automatically configuring Remote PowerShell for Windows Azure Virtual Machines on your machine - Useful PowerShell script shared.
  
• NuGet your Enterprise? - Interesting thoughts about NuGet.
  
• Visual Studio Tools for Git Update available (Brian Harry) - This post details the update of the VisualStudio extension. An extension to try.
  
• Utilize Roslyn to create the next level plugin capability (Filip Ekberg) - Nice presentation about this great idea: a compiler as a service! Roslyn
  
• Git Explained: For Beginners - If you don't know Git, or you still not familiar with it? This is definitely the post for you. From vocabulary to code sample this tutorial explains all you need to knows.

 

UX

• April Showers Lead to May Flowers…and an Updated Windows Store App (Jonathan Rozenblit) - Nice update to windows app due to the not so nice weather.

Miscellaneous

• The thoughtLEADERS Blog - Mentoring is gaining in popularity, and I'm happy with that because it really a win-win scenario.
  
• Upgrade Your Blogging Skills (Aaron Aders) - This post summarize an interesting book that easly found is place in my to-read stack.
  
• Swipe launches into beta as a Web app to create and share presentations to anyone on any device) (Ken Yeung) - This application look very promising. I really look forward to see what will come out of that.
  
• 8 Risks When You Ignore Social Media (Hollis Thomases) - Social media for business is an interesting discussion topic, but this article brings something that sure: ignoring is not a good solution.
  
• The “Consumerization” of IT and the Dark Side of the Cloud (Bob Buck Woody) - Interesting thoughts about relation between IT and business.
  
• Moving 4th & Mayor to Windows Azure Web Sites - Interesting story of someone migrating, he's application from AWS to Windows Azure.

~Frank