Reading Notes #426

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated 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

• Free Certs for Azure App Services (Mark Downie, Ray Fan) - Marvelous! Perfect timing. All documented, a nice step by step.

• May 2020 Azure SDK Release (@Adrian Hall) - Nice new update coming on the Azure SDK.

• Migrate to Azure: Save now, be future ready (Julia White) - Nice little post that explains some reasons to migrate to the cloud and gives a few links to get started.

Programming

• Different ways to host Blazor WebAssembly (Wasm) (Tim Heuer) - A really interesting post with a lot of little gems.

• Announcing Blazm (Grid component) (Jimmy Engström) - Nice I think I just found the grid I was looking for...

• Git Branching Strategies (Chris Ayers) - Nice post that describes 3 popular solutions base on your teams' skills and experience.

Podcasts

• Making Docker lovely for Developers with Simon Ferquel (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Incredibly interesting podcast episode where they discuss about Docker on Windows. How it was working before and how it works with WSL2. A must.

• SPI 422: Email Marketing Audit: Which of These Email Marketing Strategies Are You Actually Doing? (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - I don't have an email list, I don't have anything to sell. However, sometimes I wish I had one to share some event coming, or new videos/post/live... I really like the respectful approach.

• 5 Reasons It's Better to Be A Small Streamer - Twitch Tips (Stream Coach: Twitch Stream Tips | Partner Interviews | Pro Advice) - A nice episode that list some advantages of being a smaller streamer. I've been streaming for one year now, I'm pretty happy with my journey, learned a lot, and still learn so much. I don't feel disadvantaged, but that's maybe just because I don't really focus on growth.

• 469: See What Really Matters, with Greg McKeown (Coaching for Leaders) - Nice episode that talks about the essential, how to find it, how to not pass over it. Very interesting. The book, Essentialism, from seems interesting too... And hop! On the to-read list.

Miscellaneous

• Whiteboarding for Developers: Yes, You Have To ( Chris Gustafson) - An excellent post that will help you to remember why whiteboarding is important. It will also provide nice guidance to restart doing it efficiently.

• Why to OneNote instead of Whiteboard? (Vesa Nopanen) - I love OneNote ...but strangely never draw inside of it... I'll definitely give it a try.

~

Reading Notes #284

Cloud

• Azure TLS Certificates changes (Rashmi Jha) - Because security is always a big concern, I thought it would be nice sharing this post.
• Deploying Visual Studio 2017 Function Projects with VSTS (Donna Malayeri) - This tutorial explains in simple steps how to configure our build in vsts, a reel time saver.
• Docker for AWS and Azure: Secure By Default Container Platform - Docker Blog (Riyaz Faizullabhoy) - Like they say build it ship it run it.
• Kicking The Tires On This Serverless Thing (Rob Conery) - Very interesting post that introduces many different flavors of serverless.
• New sample model for Azure Analysis Services (Josh Caplan) - Nice little post that gives everything we need to get started.
• What is Azure PowerShell? How It Works, Installation, Best Practices, and More (Angela Stringfellow) - The perfect post to get started. It a really good source of references.

Programming

• .NET and Docker (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting post that clarifies the purpose of all those dotnet container.
• Connecting Power BI to your Visual Studio Team Services Account (Charles Sterling) - It't always cool (and potentially useful to get better) to visualize our data like that.

Miscellaneous

• How to buy and read e-books in Windows 10 Mobile Creators Update (Cale Hunt) - Nice tips. However, I do read from tine to time books on my Surface, but I simply use the App from my e-book reader.
• Pomodoro Technique – the Good, the Bad and the Tomato | Rubik's Code on WordPress.com (Nikola Zivkovic) - Interesting method. Simple and yet efficient.
• The humble checkbox (OneNote Team) - Nice to see how a simple checkbox could change your work.

Reading Notes #281

Cloud

• 5 simple steps to create and test your first Azure Function App (Abhijit Jana) - It couldn't be simpler.
  
• Azure CLI 1.0 vs 2.0 Compared, Installation and Usage (Chris Pietschmann) - This is such a nice post. It compares side by side both versions.
  
• Upgrade classic Backup and Site Recovery vaults to ARM Recovery Services vaults (Aruna Somendra) - Nice post that shares a good overview of all the news related to vault.

Programming

• BUILD 2017 Conference Rollup for .NET Developers - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - I'm sure we'll continue to see more of those MsBuild summaries, but this one is from Scott directly and focuses on .Net.

Databases

• Dear DocumentDB customers, welcome to Azure Cosmos DB! (Rimma Nehme) - This post explains where CosmoDB is coming from.
  
• Introducing Per Minute (RU/m) provisioning to lower your cost, increase your performance (Arnaud Comet) - Great post that explains the relation between RU/m and RU/s two very important notion in CosmoBD.
  
• Migrating to Azure Data Sync 2.0 (Joshua Gnanayutham) - I always found that tool useful, and I'm happy to see it continues to evolve.

Miscellaneous

• Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update, just don't (Troy Hunt) - A very interesting post about a painful situation, and user's obligations.
  
• Is There a Correct Way to Comment Your Code? - NDepend (Erik Dietrich) - Interesting post that tries to find the answer of the eternal question comment or not comment.
  
• Note-taking made easier for everyone—redesigning OneNote (OneNote Team) - Nice new features. To unload your Onenote, simply click on file (or th left arrow), then account, and finally the update button.
  
• Suggestions and Tips for attending your first tech conference - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - I think I will do a copy of that one, and I will share-it with people who come with me on an event. Really nice.

Reading Notes #184

Last week, Microsoft released tones of news during the //Build 2015. The event was broadcast live, but if you are like me, you probably work during the day.... That smile because the conferences were recorded and are now available on Channel 9

You should definitely take a look and create your own schedule, but in all cases, you must watch the day's one Keynote
Enjoy!

Suggestion of the week

• Sometimes You Just Have to Scale Up! (Alexandre Brisebois) - Awesome tutorial again from Alexandre, that put together a very useful script for us.

Cloud

• Improving the GitHub workflow for the Microsoft Community - Get the details about this release here.

Programming

• NPM for Everything - This post explains hw to use Node Package Manager (npm) to do... well everything.
  
• Preview the OneDrive API for Work and Life - That a real good news, and I know exactly how I can will use it. Perfect timing...
  
• Extensions for Visual Studio Online, REST APIs for TFS 2015 RC, and more from Build 2015 - Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management - Site Home - MSDN Blogs (Will Smythe) - A concentrated of the latest news about visual studio.
  
• Application Insights now supports ASP.NET v5 applications (Sergey Kanzhelev) - Perfect post to get started.
  
• Introducing Visual Studio Code for Windows, Mac, and Linux (Scott Hanselman) - Quick intro to VisualStudio Code, that was released at Build.
  
• Node.js Tools 1.0 on GitHub and VMs Available  - A very nice tool, if you are doing Node.js it's a must. Even more since it's now included in the Azure community VMs...

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft is becoming cool again  - Interesting post about the "new" Microsoft.

Reading Notes #144

 

Programming

• Automate Backups using PowerShell  - Great post that explains how to do backups, but also shows how powerful is PS scripts.
  
• How To Simplify Asynchronous Programming with Await and Async – Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - Good tutorial that explains clearly how to use Async in a Windows Form context.
  
• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.

Miscellaneous

• Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 8.1 (Scott Hanselman) - Useful post to refresh our memory. I mean the memory in our head… and gain disk space in your PC.
  
• Introducing OneNote Clipper for Chrome and Springpad to OneNote migration tool (blogs.office.com) - Since a year now, I’m a big user of OneNote. Why only one year? Because, I never try it before. Since I started, I just use it more and more… I’m really happy about the new chrome extension.

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 #132

Suggestion of the week

• TypeScript for C# Programmers (Steve Fenton) - Great book that in less than hundred pages, explains to me how to code in TypeScript. I feel so comfortable already I will add TypeScript in my next web project, and I will strongly recommend this book to everyone. If you are a C# developer, know your base in JavaScript this book is available in PDF for free!

Cloud

• Cloud projects and cross-country moves ( Buck Woody) - Nice story a like the correlation with IT projects.
  
• I put my Azure website in the wrong location, now what?! - I like when posts are based on reel life "problem." This post is one of them, and is really interesting.
  
• Windows Azure = Security + Privacy + Compliance (Jonathan Rozenblit) - This post provides a very crisp answer for some essential cloud related questions.
  
• How do you Inject Configurations into Windows Azure Cloud Service Startup Tasks? - A great tutorial indeed! It shows how to have dynamic configuration in our startup tasks, and who doen't?
  
• Saved by a ZIP File and a Command Line - Interesting option to zipfile in a Windows Azure startup task. Could it be easier with PowerShell?

Programming

• Facade Pattern - Nice explanation of the facade pattern also knew as a proxy pattern.
  
• Welcome to the OneNote API! - Great news, a new API to build great application and/or tools.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #9 – Embrace SSL During Development when authenticating with Azure Active Directory (Bill Wilder) - Nice quick tips with a fantastic introduction to security using certificates.
  
• Five Reasons ASP.NET Developers Should Care About Node.js - This post is a strong, but very honest, promotion of Node.Js and highlights the reasons why .Net developer's myth be interested in.
  
• Automate your development tasks using Grunt (Marco Franssen) - This post explains what's Grunt, and how to configure and execute Grunt tasks.
  
• Pester - This is the readme of an incredibly easy to use PowerShell unit test framework.
  
• Sublime is Sublime Part 1 - I do like sublime, really. However, myth I be interested to use it instead of VisualStudio.... that's another story but in this series, the author explains how SublimeText could become your IDE for everything. Part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7

Miscellaneous

• OneNote and Microsoft's quiet API revolution (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains the impacts and meaning of the new OneNote features (API) release.