Reading Notes #422

Cloud

• Azure Functions: Extend Execution Timeout Past 5 Minutes (Chris Pietschmann) - Very cool post that explains how to take advantages of this new feature.
• Create, Build, Deploy and Configure an Azure Function with Azure DevOps and Azure CLI (Damien Bowden) - The perfect tutorial to get started with Azure DevOps.It contains all the code we need and a ton of references
• Introducing the Azure Key Vault Credentials Provider for Jenkins (Tim Jacomb) - Great news for all the Jenkins users and nice extension for Keyvault.
• Making an Interactive Cognitive Portrait Exhibit using some Creativity, .NET, Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Magic (Dmitry Soshnikov) - Very cool project mixing art and techno.

Programming

• GitHub is now free for teams (Nat Friedman) - That was definitely a piece of good news this week.
• Bring your own machine to Visual Studio Online | Visual Studio Blog (Allison) - Fantastic news! Before it was possible to access a powerful developer environment from our poor local devices. Now we can also access our own powerful machine from elsewhere! That's very very nice!
• Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Jason Etcovitch ( Jason Etcovich) - An incredible post there is so many awesome tools and references in it.

Podcasts

• 195: The Hanselman Machine Learning Model (Merge Conflict) - Great episode where Frank and James discuss how James could build a sentiment analysis of Hanselman tweets, is it possible or not and what would be the cost (effort, and money).
• GitHub Actions with Enrico Campidoglio (.NET Rocks!) - I think it's my first .Net Show since the Pandemie. Well with was a create show that dig deeper in the GitHub Action. Loved it.
• 068: How to Build Your Personal Brand (CloudSkills.fm) - I really liked this episode as I did "created" my personal brand (without really realizing it ) a few years ago.
• 455: How to Create Great Relationships, with Colleen Bordeaux (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion with the author of the book: Am I Doing This Right?: A Philosophical Guide to Life in the Age of Overwhelm, that is now in my to read list/

Miscellaneous

• Backing up SQL Server databases to Blob Storage using Impersonation (Dominique St-Amand) - Nice post that not only shows us and to do backups, but how to do it in a very secured and structure way.Excellent!
• Free SSL vs. Paid SSL Certificates: Why Pay for SSL? (Chip Securis) - Before reading this post I assumed what could be the differences. NOW I know.
• How viewers can be actors in streams on Twitch (null) - Interesting post about streaming and how to leverage the channel points
• Microsoft Learning Blog (Alex Payne) - This is nice.

~

Reading Notes #415

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

Cloud

• Creating a RESTful Serverless API with Azure Functions and MongoDB (Will Velida) - This is a great tutorial that uses Azure function mongo and c# to build a project from scratch. It is simple enough to make sense and be easy to understand.

• Running Containers in Azure with Rancher (Tom Callway) - This post introduces Rancher, a tool thatt looks really interesting.

• Step-by-Step: Finding and Analyzing Microsoft Azure Cloud Usage Costs (Sonia Cuff ) - Great post that provides a few tips to better see or highlight some cost sending in Azure.

Programming

• Build your own Azure CLI Extensions (Michael Crump) - A very cool tutorial that explains how to do our own extension.

• How to set up Docker within Windows System for Linux (WSL2) on Windows 10 (Scott Hanselman) - Nice update; tons of info about wsl, docker, ssh and more.

• Pulling your DEV.TO Stats into a Google Sheet (Jeremy Morgan) - That's a cool little project, and I'm pretty sure it can be used by a lot of authors...on devto.

• Using Cognitive Services: Custom Vision Service with Azure IoT Edge - Cloud | Mobile | Edge (Jared Rhodes) - A nice tutorial that shows how to use Python and vscode to create an awesome app.

• What's New in Visual Studio Online | Visual Studio Blog (Allison Buchholtz-Au) - Wow, a turbo mode! But this time(remember the turbo on our old 486 beige pc), it makes totally sens...

Miscellaneous

• What are Azure CLI Extensions? (Michael Crump) - An interesting first article of a series. This one introduces us to the extension... Hmmm. I think I have an idea.

~

Reading Notes #207

Suggestion of the week

• A Beginner’s Mind - A very inspiring article, especially for the younger, but also for the more experienced, that want to keep their interior flame.

Cloud

• Build it, Use it, Destroy it! - Interesting thoughts about a different approach when working with VMs.
  
• Public Cloud Anxiety – Dealing with maintenance & failures of VMs (marc) - Very nice pot that explains how Azure can be stable even during "bad" events.
  
• How to Incorporate Application Insights into a JavaScript Web App (Mansib Rahman) - An incredibly detail and precise tutorial about Application Insights.
  
• Playing with Azure Connectors (Adarsha Datta) - Twilio IFTTT and Logic App are incredible connectors.

Databases

• How to create a MySQL Database on Azure (Susan Ibach) - Excellent post that explains how to have a MySQL database in Azure.
  
• October update for Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Matt Usher) - Learn more about the latest improvements.

Programming

• Lazy Loading Images on the Web - (Brian Rinaldi) - Very cool post that share (and explains) a lot of tools and frameworks to implement a lazy loading process.
  
• Integrating Visual Studio Code with dnx-watch to develop ASP.NET 5 applications - Cool task in VsCode to auto-refresh asp.net website.
  
• It's happening - OpenSSH for Windows...from Microsoft - Great news for any and every PowerShell user. We are moving forward!
  
• An Introduction to the new TFS/VSO Build System (Lachezar Arabadzhiev) - Great video that will give you everything you need for doing your next project in VSO.
  
• ASP.NET - ASP.NET 5 Anywhere with OmniSharp and Yeoman - Amazing post, the perfect starting point to all developers on Mac... or Linux.
  
• Visual Studio - Bower: Modern Tools for Web Development - Fantastic post that demystify bower and an excellent tutorial.
  
• How to use Visual Studio Online to Streamline Your Application Development with Agile Methodology (Mansib Rahman) - Great tutorial that gives us a little tour of VSO work section.

Miscellaneous

• My Story: How I work, the services I use (Simon May) - Interesting post where the author shares his favourite tools and how he uses them.

Reading Notes #206

Cloud

• Automating Azure Resource Group deployment using a Service Principal in Visual Studio Online: Build/Release Management (Roopesh Nair) - Great tutorial who step by step explains how to setup a continuous deployment in Azure.
  
• My Azure Virtual Machine Won’t Start (Alexandre Brisebois) - Great quick fix, simple and efficient.
  
• Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview (David Justice) - It time to move forward and stop using Switch-AzureMode. Check what's coming next in Azure PowerShell with this post.
  
• Azure Site Recovery with Azure Pack Update (Ashish Gangwar) - Interesting: Disaster Recovry as a service.
  
• Troubleshooting - Can't Delete Azure Resource Group (Alexandre Brisebois) - I found this post really interesting (sorry Alex) because things are not always going as planned. However, that when we learn the most.
  
• Monitoring an already-live Azure Web App (Beckylin Orooji) - Very useful post that explains how to get Application Insight profiling our web app without redeploying or having access to the code.

Programming

• Learn You Node with VS Code (G. Andrew) - This post is really an excellent starting point to learn Node.js. It gives good references, tools, and tips.

Miscellaneous

• MVP Award Update - Oct 2015 - This post explains the changes done to the MVP program to improve it. A must to all current and future MVP candidates.

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 #204

Suggestion of the week

• AzureCon Keynote Announcements: India Regions, GPU Support, IoT Suite, Container Service, and Security Center - This post summarizes all the AzureCon announcements. If you have more time, I suggest you to watch the keynotes.

Cloud

• View and analyze Azure Audit Logs in Power BI and more (Ashwin Kamath) - This post explains witch to use to get the maximum of our logs.

• Meet the new OneDrive for Business - Good post that explains all the advantages of the new OneDrive for business.

• Download Microsoft AzureCon Sept. 2015 Sessions Using PowerShell - The perfect script for all of us that want to see everything from AzureCon.

• How To Resize an AWS Volume Using The AWS Console or PowerShell (John Grover) - Great tutorial that explain how to get our self out of a difficult situation when things didn't go as planned.

• Introduction to Azure Search - | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog - This post clarifies things about what Azure Search is and what is not.

Programming

• 31 Days of Visual Studio 2015 Tricks and Treats (Steve Smith) - Very promising and interesting series, more to come...

• Kanban Updates, new Branch Policies, and more... – Sep 18 - All the details about the last VSO features release.

Databastes

• Create and Edit DocumentDB Server Side Scripts in the Azure Preview Portal (Stephen Baron) - Great tutorial that shows how to use that new functions of DocumentDB.

Miscellaneous

• Going Back to One (Alexandre Brisebois) - Organize our work to become a performer, could be easily done in Windows 10.

• Introducing Digital Triage - Interesting thoughts about how we should structure our resources to triage the priorities.

• Static Site or CMS? - (Brian Rinaldi) - Nice post that gives insights to answer one of the most frequent questions when people start a blog/website.

Reading Notes #197

Suggestion of the week

• Deploying a VM using Azure Resource Manager – Part 1 (Marc Gagné) - Really great tutorial that is the perfect. How to deploy with Powershell using Azure Manager Resources 101.

Cloud

• A Complete List of Microsoft Azure Tools (Scott Ge) - Pretty good list of tools available today to work or plan your work with. Azure.
  
• What is the Azure Marketplace? (marc) - This is a good post to get started on Azure Market place.
  
• Ruby, TinyTDS, and Azure SQL Database update (Larry Franks) - Nice update, looking forward to upgrade some Ruby scripts of mine.
  
• Scheduling Azure Automation Runbooks with Azure Scheduler (Christopher Mank) - Great tutorial on Automation, very complete.
  
• Transitioning Application Insights from the VSO Portal to the Azure Portal (Dale Koetke) - We have until October to move our Application Insights in VSO to Azure. All you need to know to have a smooth migration is here.

Programming

• Five Common Daylight Saving Time Antipatterns of .NET Developers - Ah time, the more you play with the more confuse you can be. Interesting post to avoid common mistakes.
  
• Dependency injection in ASP.NET 5 - | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog - Dependency injection is a very good structure to facilitate testing. The new Asp.Net 5 help a lot going that way.
  
• 5 Tips for Dealing with Unreliable Web APIs - Summary of best practices when working with APIs.
  
• Continuous deployment (Gabriel Schenker) - Nice post to get started on continuous delivery and what it’s means.

Podcast

• .NET Rocks!  - I really like Glimpse, and it was nice to learn more about the journey of its creator and have a peek on what coming next.
  
• Systems Thinking: Less Coding, More Thinking with Kishau Rogers - Very stimulating episode, a lot of great ideas…

Miscellaneous

• Making the Complex Simple - Interesting thoughts about productivity traps.
  
• Making a clean exit – how to leave your company with friends, not dependencies - Interesting post on how to be professional when leaving.
  
• Apt-Get for Windows - OneGet and Chocolatey on Windows 10 - A new tool in Windows call OneGet… a package manager… manager.
  
• 10-minute workouts to improve your writing - Really interesting exercises… that are easy to fit in any schedule.
  
• New Package Roundup (izuzak) - Cool list of new Atom packages.
  
• Scrum or Kanban: Which form of Agile is best for you? - Nice post that explains the main differences between the two more popular Agile methods.

Reading Notes #190

Suggestion of the week

• Cloud Success Comes in Completing the Cloud Handshake (James Staten) - Great post that places different tools or services in context one to the other, that helps to get a better view of the big picture.

Cloud

• Testing Visual Studio on Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - If you need to deploy a dev environment, this post explains how to leverage the AMR to do the quick and smart way.
  
• Locking a Virtual Machine Resource - Azure Resource Manager Template (Alexandre Brisebois) - A post to read, period.
  
• Azure Bits #3– Adding a Message to an Azure Queue (Rik Robinson) - Nice tutorial that shows how to interact with Azure Queues from an Asp.Net MVC web site.

Programming

• Visual Studio Online Wunderlist extension on GitHub (Clemens Reijnen) - Interesting idea of a VSO extension.
  
• Deploying an Azure Web Site using the new build system in Visual Studio Online (Charles Sterling) - This post shows ow easy it is to build & deploy a simple website using VSO.
  
• Visual Studio Web Development Tip - Add Chrome Incognito Mode as a Browser (Scott Hanselman) - The great tips are often the simpler! That should be in by default.
  
• Why to avoid fat controllers (Gunnar Peipman) - Interesting thoughts about different types of architecture and their testability.
  
• Historical Debugging, Profiling, New Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 (Scott Hanselman) - Another good reason to start using VS2015.

Miscellaneous

• Write Once, Publish Anywhere (Jonathan Rozenblit) - An energizing post that shows here to find writting oportunities
  
• How to Build Your Blog’s Audience with Long Form Evergreen Content (Darren Rowse) - Interesting reflection on how the length of our post affects the traffic of our blog.

~Frank

Visual Studio Online is definitely more than text editor online!

5 powerful features that make Visual Studio online an indispensable tool

If you are a .Net developer then you know Visual Studio. Few months ago, Microsoft released a new version of this tool call Visual Studio 2013 Community edition. This version offers all the features and is completely free. Many of us already have downloaded and installed this version. Another version is also available, but doesn't have the popularity of his brothers... yet. Let's talk about Visual Studio Online.
 

Get Started

Did you know that Visual Studio Online is available for free? Go to http://www.visualstudio.com/ and create an free account that will included:

5 FREE Basic user licenses

Unlimited team projects and private code repos

FREE work item tracking for all users

FREE 60 minutes/month of build

and much more.... 

1- It's a Source Control

It may be called Visual Studio Online, but it has all the features from Team Foundation Server (TFS).
Let's create a new project. From your home page, under the tab Overview (selected by default) click on New. This will pop the form to create a new team project. One interesting thing to note is that both TFS and Git are supported as Version control system.
For the post I will create my project MyBookManager using Git.

2- It's an Agile board

Now that we have a project, it's time to describe it. Visual Studio Online has an entire section just for collaborative work. From the home screen of your VSO click on _Users_ tab. Create your users, roles and manage their permissions.
It's now time to time to describe all the features of the project. Click on _Overview_ tab to get back to Home. Select your project, then click on _Work_ tab. From here you will be able to create all the features you need, and split them in tasks and sub tasks; perfect to fill-up a backlog item list and plan your next sprint.
Once a sprint is started, it's also from here that you will be able to see and interact with the Board.

From this board, cards can be move by dragging them in the column that reflected the current status of the work. Open the on-premise Visual Studio. From the bar Team Explorer click on the little plug, and select: “Select Team Project…”. If your VSO Server is not present, just add it, then select the your project (ex: MyBookManager).
For this post I will create an empty Asp.Net MVC project. In the Models folder I add a new class Book with very basic code.

public class Book
{
     public int BookID { get; set; }
     public string Title { get; set; }
     public bool Read { get; set; }
}

Then by right-clicking on the folder Controllers select the Add new Scafolded Item option, and use that to create our CRUD controller and views for the Book model we just created. Let’s check-in the code, and go back to VSO. You should see the code.

To give more visibility to the work’s status, you can create very nice chart and pinned them on the Home page. To add a new chart, go in the Work tab select Queries.  You can use the existing query or simply create a new one. To add a chart to the Home page right-click on the query and select Pin to Home page.

3- It's a build / Deployment server

If it's one think that seem always complex for a developer is the automation build and deployment server setup. With VSO no need for all that complexity and resources, only follow a short wizard and your build machine will be setup in Azure ready to deploy as soon as you want.  You can setup an automatic build and deployment from the Azure Portal and Visual Studio. In this post, I will use Visual Studio.

From the Team Explorer bar in Visual Studio, click on Builds then New Build Definition, to get the wizard.



First step, just put a name who makes sense.



Step two, we need to choose what will trigger the build. I select continuous integration, so the build should start at every check-in.



When I create my project I select Git as a source control, so for the next step I will need to expand the Build process template zone, by clicking Show details.  Then from the list select GitContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml.

The build definition is done, save and let it there for now.

4- It's a Code Editor

If it's one feature that you could expect from a tool like VSO is to be able to edit code online.  The online version is obviously less powerful then the on-premise one, but still you will it very convenient and easy to use.

Let's change the button in the book list to be more modern. First, select Code tab.  Now let's find the Index.html file under the View folder. Once the file is selected, click on Edit button. It's time to add some bootstrap classes to transform the look of our button. As you can see even we are in a web  browser we have IntelliSense. 



Hit Save and it will commit our change. Since we create a continuous build, this one should kick-in and build and deploy our changes. We can see the status of our build by going in the Build tab in Visual Studio Online. It’s also possible to see it in the Home page by pinning it.
When the build will be done, our change will be visible in the website. Of course, this build is very simple, unit test and more complexes processes could also be implemented.

5- It's a Test server

Another great feature is the possibility to create a test plan for the quality assurance (QA) tester. You could create it via VSO as a test plan by going in the last tab Test. And create a checklist,  so they can follow it to test the application feature by feature.  You could also record the action with Microsoft Test Manager and then do a load test on the website by running simultaneously multiple tests on different instances in Azure.

Verdict

Visual Studio Online is a great tool and win to  be now more. What are the features you enjoy the most in VSO?


~Frank B

References

http://www.visualstudio.com/

Reading Notes #172

Suggestion of the week

• Using #PowerShell to Upload Content to #Azure Storage - Very useful script here that will save you a lot of time more than once… A post to bookmark!

Cloud

• Starting with Continuous Integration in the Cloud with Steven Edouard - Very interesting podcast episode to learn all about CI. I like the compilable resume.
  
• Security and Performance Tips for Azure Storage Queues - This post is a great list of tips, and you will also find answers to frequent asked questions about security.
  
• Free ebook: Microsoft Azure Essentials Fundamentals of Azure (Jan Kim Spilker) - Fantastic, all that in one book…a free book!
  
• Announcing Azure Preview Portal Improvements (Leon Welicki) - Wow! This preview portal is was nice, but with all those little tweaks… It a great tool.
  
• Azure vs Amazon vs Rackspace vs HP vs Google - Interesting infographic that compares some major cloud providers.
  
• Continuous Delivery on Windows Azure Websites using Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Great tutorial about doing continuous integration using Visual Studio Online. A must to all .Net developer.
  
• Azure WebJobs are awesome and you should start using them right now! - Everything is said in the title, Azure Websites are awesome.
  
• Securing Production #Azure SQL Databases - This post if the perfect security checklist.

Miscellaneous

• Automating Azure Virtual Machine Deployment with Chef (Diego Viso) - This post is a quick introduction about how Chef could help you in your automation.
  
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Pairing Experience - Interesting post to read before your next team work.
  
• VIDEO: Do you really know how to use Microsoft Word? The Power of Tabs and Indents (Scott Hanselman) - Awesome video. you must watch this.it for everyone!

~Frank B.

Reading Notes #141

Suggestion of the week

• Moving to Microsoft Azure (Filip Ekberg) - Another story about a blog migration on Azure. It's always interesting to learn what kind of trouble the people got while doing that.

Cloud

• Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler (Maarten Balliauw ) - Not only this post explains how to optimize our calls to blob storage, but it means that MyGet is a lot faster!
  
• Visual Studio Online Update – May 20th (Brian Harry MS) - Heads up about the last update on Visual Studio Online and what's coming next. BTW try it's very nice.
  
• Puppet Module Updates to Better Manage Microsoft Azure Resources (Ross Gardler) - Quick post that introduced a new featured of Azure that look incredibly powerful.

Programming

• All ASP.NET MVC Forms Need To Include Html.AntiForgeryToken() For Security (Peter Kellner) - This post is a nice quick explanation of an important security feature in Asp.net Mvc.
  
• From Requirements to Deployment: The Modern SW Developer using TFS (Tom Walker Jonathan Rozenblit) - Nice video.
  
• Bloggers: Know when to use a JPG and when to use a PNG and always Squish them both (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - This post contains useful tools to compress the images inside your posts, and some nice tips for the format selection.
  
• NuGet Package of the Week: ImageProcessor - lightweight image manipulation in C# (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - Another useful tool library to edit our images in our code.
  
• Setting up an Internal PowerShellGet Repository (Kris Bash, Roman Kuzmin, Peter Kriegel) - This post introduced a nuget for PowerShell packages, and how to install our private repository. Nice!
  
• The Future of .NET on the Server: ASP.NET vNext content and videos from TechEd 2014 (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - This post suggested to two videos presented at TechEd about vNext. If you are curious about what is coming next in .Net world it's a must.
  
• Indigo Studio from a Developer Perspective - I was also skeptical, the first-time someone talked me about Indigo. However, the best way to make your idea about something is to try it...

Mobile

• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone–Adding Assertions (Lori Lalonde) - This post is the third of a great series on how to test the UI of a phone application.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today - Really interesting article that explains important concepts in a simple way to understand.