Reading Notes #589

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

• Using Azure Load Testing to test Multi-Tenant services (Frédéric Le Coquil) - Nice post that explains in details how to test a scale and cost efficiently our API.

• WASI 0.2 Preview: A New Dawn for WebAssembly (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ) - Looking forward how WASI will impact our web. Nice little post to quickly understand what it is.

• How to deploy .NET Aspire apps to Azure Container Apps - .NET Blog (Jiachen Jiang) - It looks simple enough don't you think? I'm trying it today!

• Build your Web Apps faster with the Azure Cache for Redis: Quick Start Template ( Ricky Diep) - This is definitely a simple and quick way to deploy all your assets at once. There is a video with a demo.

Programming

• Understanding C# 8 default interface methods (Andrew Lock) - Very clear post about the new feature available in interfaces, with great examples that make us understand why and when it is useful and how to implement it.

Open Source

• Celebrating One Year of Open at Microsoft (Japhlet Nwamu) - It was surely a nice first year.

Podcasts

• Code Visualization with CodeSee's Shanea Leven (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Another very interesting episode. CodeSee definitely catches my attention, I'm planning to try it with my OSS project to get started.

~Frank

Reading Notes #372

Suggestion of the week

• How Azure Resource Graph is gonna change the way you search and script (Stephane Lapointe) - Whaat?! 15x faster! If you are not using Azure graph yet... This post is for you. If you do use graph, still read that you may learn a few tricks. In short, it's a mandatory read for anyone using Azure.

Cloud

• Azure Blueprints: ISO27001 Shared Services (Eric Leonard) - This excellent second post of a series goes dipper and shares details about one specific blueprint template. And explains some pitfall to avoid.
• Azure Blueprints: Intro (Eric Leonard) - If you don't know Blueprint this post is an excellent first contact.
• Connecting to Azure Redis Cache with Docker (Dominique St-Amand) - Great tutorial that explains every step to build a safe environment leveraging Docker.
• Different Ways to Parse Http Request Data in Http-triggered Azure Functions ( Jason Roberts ) - How many ways do you think we can get our values from inside an Azure Function? This post passes them all in a review.

Programming

• Getting Started with .NET Core and Docker and the Microsoft Container Registry (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that shows a few examples of how containers could be used with .Net Core at different stages of your application development.
• Building a Visual Studio Code Extension (Brian Clark) - Great post that explains in details the different type of extension and how to build them.
• Securing ASP.NET Core in Docker (Muhammad Rehan Saeed) - A nice little trick to get more secure with our containers.

Miscellaneous

• Continuous database deployments with Azure DevOps (John Miner) - This nice tutorial explains what's in Azure DevOps and how to use it to maintain a database with it. Very complete article.
• F7 is the greatest PowerShell hotkey that no one uses any more. We must fix this. (Scott Hanselman) - A Funny, and true little story about one Key.How to convert an IMG file to an standard ISO easily with Linux on Windows 10 (null) - Del
• Was MongoDB Ever the Right Choice? (Justin Etheredge) - Nice post that put in perspective what's NoSql and why MondoDB could or not be a good solution for our project.

Reading Notes #287

Cloud

• .NET: Manage Azure Container Service, Cosmos DB, Active Directory Graph and more (Asir Selvasingh) - I'm a bit scared about this .Net new feature, but at the same time curious to see where it will go.
• Azure Redis Cache Geo-Replication in Public Preview (Ye Gu) - Nice tutorial that will help to have a better disaster recovery plan.
• Deploying Applications to Azure Container Service (atulm) - Great tutorial to start orchestrating containers on Azure.
• Designing Globally Resilient Apps with Azure App Service – Opsgility (Chris Pietschmann) - Great post that lists a lot of tools available in Azure to get a better architecture for your solution.
• Enhanced app usage monitoring and investigative features in Azure Application Insights (Rahul Bagaria) - Wow, so many new features, exactly what I needed!
• Microsoft’s Logic Apps Aims to Bring Serverless Functionality to Non-Coders (Mark Boyd) - Nice post that gives a glimpse at the Logic Apps future.
• Receive emails from Azure WebJobs when errors are detected (Vivien Chevallier) - Nice tutorial that explains how to manage error in a webjob and implement the best practices.

Programming

• Docker for .NET Developers (Part 4) - Steve Gordon's Blog (Steve Gordon) - This post of the series explains the Docker file and few useful commands. I really like this series.
• Porting a 15 year old .NET 1.1 Virtual CPU Tiny Operating System school project to .NET Core 2.0 (Scott Hanselman) - We all have those prehistoric pieces of code, and it required lots of courage to share them with the public. However, what all of us learn from it, is priceless. Thank you, Scott.
• Speed of dotnet run vs the speed of dotnet for published apps (plus self-contained .NET Core apps) (Scott Hanselman) - Great post that explains a few differences between the published and just builds performance.

Miscellaneous

• How to Get into the Habit of Time Tracking - Toggl Blog (Liza Plotnikova) - I don't count the times where Toogl "saved my life" when it was time to do my timesheet. A tool to try.

Reading Notes #253

Suggestion of the week

• Why Can’t I View My Power BI Content Pack?  - This post is a big slice of answers, spiced with experience and a touch of wisdom.

Cloud

• Azure Managed Cache and In-Role Cache Service shutdown reminder (Ye Gu) - In less than two weeks your solution could be in big trouble if you didn't change the cache type...
  
• Top 4 reasons for using Azure Security Center for partner security solutions (Yair Tor) - Seriously, it worth try it.

Programming

• Is jQuery Still Relevant? (TJ VanToll) - Very interesting and instructive conversation about THE JavaScript framework that everyone knows:JQuery .
  
• Localization & Routing in ASP.NET Core 1.0 - Hisham - Nice post ,right to the point.

Databases

• Temporal Tables are generally available in Azure SQL Database (Borko Novakovic) - Useful new feature to track changes across time.
  
• SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 (Luis Vargas) - Woohoo the server is now available.

Reading Notes #237

Cloud

• Azure Redis Cache May 2016 update (Pranav Rastogi) - Quick overview o this update.
  
• Release of Service Fabric SDK 2.1.150 and Runtime 5.1.150 - Have you played with Azure Fabric yet? Here is your chance with new SDK that provides more features and fixes some bugs.
  
• Application Insights is a Business Tool (Alexandre Brisebois) - Indeed, Application Insights is a business tool and a good one. Even more since it's available Azure services.
  
• Azure Media Services is now available in the new Azure portal (Mingfei Yan) - Fantastic another big piece that joined all the other services in the new portal.
  
• Power BI - Microsoft Azure Media Services and Power BI - Great tutorial that explains how to setup a cool dashboard and help you to get more about your media consumers.

Programming

• How to Debug and Run .NET CORE RC2 direct from within Visual Studio Code (Luís Henrique Demetrio) - Wow. I try on Windows, and it takes least than 5 minutes to get setup. Really cool.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn - This is a really big move ... even more at the and of the fiscal year.

Reading Notes #213

Cloud

• Announcing the Azure SDK 2.8.1 for .NET (Brady Gaster) - Great new feature and improvement in this last SDK release..
  
• General availability of Premium tier (Pranav Rastogi) - Great announcement, plus details about the difference between the regular and the premium version.
  
• Azure Resource Manager Authentication In PowerShell (Scott) - Interesting sharing... It doesn't work always on the first try.
  
• Azure Container Service preview (Ross Gardler) - Get ready to play with Linux container... And soon Windows one.
  
• Continuous Delivery of Azure WebJobs via Git (Jan Hentschel) - Great tutorial that gets us started with Webjobs and continuous deployment.
  
• Partner Incentives – the move to Active Usage - Very interesting post that explains why Microsoft has changes their way to look at their Azure metrics.
  
• Announcing Azure Portal general availability (Leon Welicki) - The portal finally gets to the quality level that was targeted by Microsoft... well, long time ago. The portal will still continue to evolve, but it's now a full fledge product.
  
• Things to remember when you work with Azure and the new Team Build (Matteo Emili) - Nice post that gives us a little more depth about get ready to use build in the cloud.

Programming

• Application contracts with Swagger powered APIs for .NET or Why SwaggerProvider - This post explains how swagger can simplify our Api coding time.
  
• Glimpse at Application Insights Telemetry (Beckylin Orooji) - Awesome news, the great tools that or now integrated together. I'm really looking forward to trying that.
  
• PowerShell Tests released on GitHub (Karol Kaczmarek, Steve Lee, David Wilson) - Nice announcement from the powershell team that shared on github their tests' strategy... Expect some Pester!

Databases

• Transactional Replication to Azure SQL DB now in public preview (Jean-Yves Devant) - Since most of the time the first project is a migration, this new tool, will be very useful.

Reading Notes #209

Cloud

• Microsoft and Red Hat partner to deliver more flexibility and choice (Scott Guthrie) - Great news.
  
• Using Redis as a Service in Azure to speed up ASP.NET applications - Nice post that shares some good reasons why we should use Redis cache (Azure SaaS).
  
• Azure Runbook – A complete (simple) example (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - This post is a great introduction to Azure automation (aka runbook).
  
• Azure Logic Apps Automation - Nice quick post to tease us about what we can do with Azure Logic App.
  
• Application Insights Content Pack for Power BI (Dale Koetke) - Really cool content pack that was announced.

Databases

• DocumentDB: The move towards NOSQL – Part 1 (Adarsha Datta) - Nice little post of a series to get us started about documentDB.

Programming

• Visual Studio Update 1 RC - It's already the time of an new release...
  
• Trace your Application Insights events inside Visual Studio Diagnostic tools (Abhijit Jana) - Wow! Application Insights alone is awesome, with the new VS2015 it's just turn it to eleven.

Reading Notes #205

Cloud

• Introduction to Azure Search (Gunnar Peipman) - This post clarifies things about what Azure Search is and what is not.
  
• New capabilities for Logic Apps in Azure portal - Great new features that will facilitate the edition.
  
• Why the Azure Cloud? (Nicole Herskowitz) - Wonderful post that explains all the news announced in AzureCon, but with very simple words.
  
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Your web app doesn't need 64-bit (Scott Hanselman) - The devil is in the details, well this post explains one of them.
  
• Azure Redis Cache: Public preview of premium tier (Pranav Rastogi) - This is really a good summary about Redis cache; road map, documentation, etc.
  
• Getting started with Azure Data Factory and Azure Machine Learning (Wee Hyong Tok) - It really the post to get started with Azure Data factory.
  
• Automating Azure Resource Group deployment using a Service Principal in Visual Studio Online: Build/Release Management (Roopesh Nair) - Great tutorial that step by step explains how to setup a continous deployment in Azure.

Programming

• Case Study: Adding Application Insights to a website (Beckylin Orooji) - Really interesting post that explains all the steps done by Glimpse's team to optimize their website.

Miscellaneous

• Savoir-faire Linux and Microsoft Canada announce a close partnership in the open source field - That an impressive news, a Linux open source shop partner with Microsoft... I like it.
  
• Presentation Tips – It’s all about timing (marc) - Interesting post that gives essential tips to prepare our next presentation.

~Frank

Reading Notes #194

Suggestion of the week

• How to use Azure Search with D3.js to Build Interactive Data Visualizations (Liam Cavanagh) - An awesome idea to display the result of Azure Search, and it look really cool.

Cloud

• My First Azure DocumentDB Account (Eitan Blumin) - Nice tutorial that explains how to create a documentDB from scratch.
  
• Azure Preview Portal Improvements (June Update) (Leon Welicki) - Wow! See how little things can have a great impact on the user experience.
  
• Hey Azure, how's my Web App doing? - Great post about web apps metrics.
  
• New DocumentDB ORDER BY Features in the Azure Preview Portal (Stephen Baron) - Nice new feature.
  
• Cloud Cruiser and Microsoft Azure Billing API Integration - Interesting post that shows how we can use the new Azure billing API as data to there services.
  
• Gain insights into your Microsoft Azure resource consumption (BryanLa) - Interesting post to know more about our consumption.
  
• Azure Redis Cache Updates for June 2015 (Pranav Rastogi) - Nice quick post about the new Redis Cache features.
  
• Move VMware, AWS, Hyper-V and Physical Servers to Azure (Abhishek A. Hemrajani) - An amazing tool, and a great opportunity to try it for free!

Customers can replicate on-premises workloads to Azure with Azure Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge

• Integrate your on-premises infrastructure with Azure (Jim Dial) - A great tool to visualize the infrastructure to help in a hybrid situation.
  
• Announcing Cortana Analytics Suite and New Partner Investments at WPC 2015 (Takeshi Numoto) - I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Programming

• Microservices Guide - This is the perfect post to get started with micro services. a nice overview what it is, and when to use it.
  
• Are You Making These 10 DDD Mistakes? (Daniel) - Nice infographic about the most frequent mistakes.
  
• Transitioning from ASP.NET Web API 2 to ASP.NET MVC 6 - Great post that will walk you through all the things to watch before doing a transition to Asp.net 5 and Mvc6.
  
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the ASP.NET Web API and AngularJS (Dhananjay Kumar) - Nice tutorial that presents a complete but simple scenario easy to follow.
  
• Node.js: Understanding NPM - This is the perfect post to get started on the Node NPM. A tool that every developer should know.

Documentation

• Role-based access control in the Microsoft Azure portal (Justin Hall) - Very complete doc.

Miscellaneous

• Cortana for Android Leaks Early, Available for Download (Kellex) - Nice, we can try Coryana today!
  
• Microsoft’s Global Partner Conference in Toronto July 2016 - Not far from home, this is really good.

~ Frank