Reading Notes #124

Suggestion of the week

• Windows Azure: Staging Publishing Support for Web Sites, Monitoring Improvements, Hyper-V Recovery Manager GA, and PCI Compliance (ScottGu) - Great update again this week, may of the new features will be very appreciated.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Websites Development Stacks Support (Mark_BrownMS) - Nice post about how Azure website manages config version with his different supported languages.
  
• Using the Same Client-Side User with Multiple Azure Mobile Services (Chris Risner) - This nice post explains what are our options to bridge a UserID across multiple mobile application.
  
• GUIDs VS. IDs on Windows Azure SQL Database - Nice post, where the author gives is answer to a timeless question.
  
• Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure” - Interesting talk that you can now download as text. However, the video is still available...

Programming

• Code First Goodies in Entity Framework 6 - Nice article that explains more in details some new features of EF 6.0.
  
• Comments should be sentences (About me) - Interesting point of view about how should be the comments and why.

Miscellaneous

• WTF is an Architect Anyway? - Interesting thoughts about the definition of the role architect.
  
• How Do I Get Things Done? New Pluralsight Course Reveals All My Secrets - Learn the best tips from a real Jedi.
  
• 5 Myths that Can Ruin Project Management - Interesting post that uncovers some myths in project management.
  
• 30 Ways To Leave Google Apps Behind (Ciara Byrne) - Great post not because I agree or disagree with the title idea, but because it presents a lot of great applications.

Reading Notes #45

Cloud

• 5 tips for surviving a cloud outage (Brandon Butler) - More focus in Amazon web services this post in fact is saying don't put all your eggs in the same basket.
• Say Hello to Windows Azure, The World’s Most Misunderstood Cloud (Cade Metz) - Azure is different. It represents the new Microsoft. This post relates two stories of companies that move from Amazon to Azure.

“Azure lets us focus on our product rather than focusing on how we need to scale the application”

• Windows Azure Storage for the ASP.NET Developer (Adam Hoffman) - What a nice post. Clear explanations, with great references and it come from a series.

“For a rich comparison of SQL Azure and Windows Azure Table storage, see Joseph Fultz’s MSDN Magazine article at: http://aka.ms/SQLAzureVsAzureTables.”

• Scale-First Approach to Database Design with Federations: Part 2 – Annotating and Deploying Schema for Federations (Cihan Biyikoglu) - Second part of a series about Azure SQL Federations, this post explain all the particularities of the database to know before deploying for a optimum results.
• Joining the dots in the cloud - Nice post about the new collection of cloud tools that will help you to connect services or applications together and the things you should be aware of.
• CloudDrive: Possible Data Loss when calling Create() or CreateIfNotExist() on existing drives - Hopefully the SDK 1.7 is coming soon and the "feature" will be fix. However this is a excellent workaround.
• Load Testing in cloud using Visual Studio (Vignesh C) - Good idea for a load test using Azure.

“This blog has three posts that give detailed explanation of how a test rig with Controller and Agents can be created in Windows Azure.”

• Networking in the Cloud–Understanding Windows Azure Traffic Manager - Great post to get started with the Azure Traffic Manager. Of course to master it you should do the lab, but this post will help to understand the high level concepts.
• Four Different Ways to Get Windows Azure Accounts and Services - I'm sure there one that fits you.
• Run the Azure worker role in elevated mode to register HttpListener - Nice workaround to be able to use Raven in an Azure worker role.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Start Here (Brian H. Prince) - Preface of the great learn Azure post series and introduce a contest.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 100 (Brian H. Prince) - First of a series that regroup a lot of information to get started on Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 200 (Brian H. Prince) - Great exercises about storage
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 300 (Brian H. Prince) - Third of a series, this post regroup advanced exercises reference (level 300) about the Azure connectivity options.
• Part I of III - How to access an Azure OAuth v2 ACS secured service with Java (mbutler01) - First post of series of three about how to use oAuth v2 with Java using ACS.

“There does not seem to be any good working OAUTH v2 examples for Java using ACS”

• Windows Azure App Scaling to Need (Grigori Melnik, Julian Dominguez) - Very nice video about Wasabi the Windows auto-scaling Application block. A must.
• How to Use Windows Azure for a Small Web Site (avsol) - Good tutorial that give a lot of tips on how you could do you setup for a small web site.

Programming

• Introducing Workspace Reloader - A Visual Studio AddIn to save your open files across project reloads - Nice post about a little Visual Studio Add-in that will keep your files open when the solution is re-loaded.
• Ruby tricks: Array syntax (chatgris) - Quick post quick tricks... now I looking forward the next time I will try it.
• 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!

Miscellaneous

• Thinking The Wrong Things About E-Book Pricing - Interesting topic: How much should cost a e-book?
• Trust Me, I'm Lying (Jeff Atwood) - Interesting post. Why lying is necessary.
• SlideShare and LinkedIn sitting in a tree… (rashmi) - Great new for both SlideShare and LinkedIn... A perfect match.

~Frank