Reading Notes #517

Good Thursday, 

back from a nice time off, I'm all recharged and it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Controlling Blazor Environments on Static Web Apps | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - This is a very neet tip; short and simple.
• Host your website on Azure Static Web Apps for free (Julia Muiruri) - There you have it, two different sets of three-step to get your Azure static web app.
• How to deploy a Local Docker Container to Azure Container Apps (Vincent Nwonah) - An excellent tutorial to get started with Azure Container App.
• Ultimate Guide to Deploying Azure App Service WebJobs Using Azure DevOps (Wael Kdouh) - Wow! This post has so many little time-saver tips (aka gotchas). Great content.

Programming

• Git-Flow, GitHub-Flow, Gitlab-Flow and Trunk Based Development explained (Steven Giesel) - This is a nice post to see different alternatives for your Git pattern
• Keys to Effective Regression Test Development (Amy Reichert) - This post shares a lot of info about test planning and structure. A nice read to get inspired and learn more on the topic.

Podcasts

• Rust for Beginners with Nell Shamrell-Harrington (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm studently craving to learn Rust thanks to Scott and Nell in this episode Rust for Beginners
• 315: A Proper Podcast (Merge Conflict) - Fun episode about Frank's and James' personal life.
• How to have a hard conversation (Modern Mentor) - Those moments are hard and I believe we can all benefice from a few tips to prepare ourselves.
• 0267 - Serge Tremblay - Microsoft Loop (Visual Studio Talk Show) - (In French) Microsoft Loop?! If you have the same reaction as me when reading this title, then this episode is for you. A nice episode where three friends talk about new technology.
• Steve Sanderson: The future of Blazor and WebAssembly - Episode 202 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - A really interesting episode about Blazor...

~frank

Reading Notes #307

Cloud

• Azure WebJobs vs. Azure Functions (Simon Timms) - This post answer a question that is often asked... What's The difference...
• How to Create a Logic App Connector in an ARM Template | Vincent-Philippe Lauzon's on WordPress.com (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Here it is guys, the definition of the CosmoDb connector for ARM.

Programming

• DevOps for Data Science – DevOps Maturity (Buck Woody) - This post is the fist of an interesting series.
• Different code styles for different code blocks in ReSharper and Rider (Maarten Balliauw) - Pretty cool comparison.

Miscellaneous

• Extreme Remote Work: The Pros And Cons Of Teamwork Beyond Borders (Tanya Accone) - Are you working in has remote or does your team has remote member? If yes, you should read this post.
• The Value of Continuous Delivery (DAVE NICOLETTE) - This is a really good post that talk/ question why cd.

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 #277

Cloud

• Azure Functions Tools Roadmap (Andrew B Hall) - Interesting post that explains why we should prefer the Azure function template over the VS2015 tooling.
• Monitoring errors in Azure WebJobs with the ErrorTrigger extension (Vivien Chevallier) - Nice tutorial, with the full solution available on Github, that explains how to catch the error in our Azure webjobs.
• Unmasking your swagger with proxies in Azure Functions (Shayne Boyer) - This post explains how to use Azure functions Proxy to improve the developers' experience.
• Use a container to show your function swagger (Shayne Boyer) - Nice quick tutorial to get a more professional structure easily.

Programming

• Dockerizing Nerd Dinner: Part 1, Running a Legacy ASP.NET App in a Windows Container (Elton Stoneman) - Interesting walkthrough where a legacy application is packaged in a Docker container.
• Dockerizing Nerd Dinner: Part 2, Connecting ASP.NET to SQL Server (Elton Stoneman) - Second step in a great tutorial that goes further than the usual hello word, showing how to migrate an application into a multi-container solution.
• Easy data generation with Faker.Data (Guy Barrette) - A quick introduction to a nice little gem that saves us a lot of time.
• Getting Started With Chart.js: Line and Bar Charts (Monty Shokeen) - I've use Chart.js in a project recently, and should I had this great tutorial would have saved me a lot of time.
• Using memory cache in ASP.NET Core (Gunnar Peipman) - Great quick tutorial to know how to setup cache and distributed cache (required in cloud solution).

Miscellaneous

• Bots are the new Apps – Part 2 (Alexandre Brisebois) - This post asks a lot of questions. .Bots are could be very powerful but are they easy to build? Iterate, test, fail, learn, and try again.

Reading Notes #275

Cloud

• Do more or less with default values in the Azure CLI (Shayne Boyer) - That clever! Great optimization of the CLI.
  
• HTTP-triggered Azure Functions (Gunnar) - Azure functions are such a powerful tool. This post explains how to use them with a Http endpoint.
  
• How to send emails with SendGrid in Azure WebJobs using the SendGrid extension (Vivien Chevallier) - Nice tutorial that explains very clearly how to use SendGrid in our solution. All the code is also available.

Programming

• Microsoft + Docker – Investing in the future of your applications - It's a very exciting time to build an application. This post lists the Microsoft-related talks at the DockerCon.
  
• Testing Azure Functions with Postman and Swagger (Shayne Boyer) - Great update to an already awesome tool.

Miscellaneous

• Shutting down CodePlex ( Brian Harry) - If you have a project sitting at Codeplex, don't panic. This post explains what will happen, and if you would like to migrate, what are your options.
  
• Password managers don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having one (Troy Hunt) - Interesting post about password managers. Are you using one? Learn here why you should.

~Frank

Reading Notes #271

 

 

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Functions vs Web Jobs: How to choose? (Chris Pietschmann) - Wow! This is the best post I've read about Azure Function. It really describes clearly the differences between the two. A must for every cloud developer.

Cloud

• Creating Azure Key Vault with logging using Azure Resource Manager ARM templates (Stéphane Lapointe) - Nice post that shows how to use the quick template and explains how pieces work together.

Programming

• Announcing New ASP.NET Core and Web Development Features in Visual Studio 2017 (Jeffrey T. Fritz ) - With the release of VS2017this week comes also a lot of great improvements in the .Net Core tooling, and that a good news.
  
• Azure App Service Authentication in an ASP.NET Core Application (Adrian Hall) - Interesting tutorial to learn more about security (authentification) with Asp.Net Core.
  
• Azure Functions Visual Studio Tools Preview (Chris Pietschmann) - Great improvement, we can now work, code, and debug in our "home " comfort.
  
• Simplifying Bundling and Minification in ASP.NET Core (Shayne Boyer) - This post is the perfect tutorial, short and complete. After reading it, you will be ready to use this package.

Databases

• Azure Data Lake Tools for VSCode (Preview) - March Update (Jenny Jiang) - Really cool extension.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Data Sync update (Joshua Gnanayutham) - This post shares the road map of a very useful tool. Glad to see it coming in the new Azure Portal.
  
• Microsoft has created an A.I. that can write its own code (QuHarrison Terry) - Interesting innovation, it will be nice to see where that will bring us.
  
• Swarm Mode with Fleet Management and Collaboration now in public beta, powered by Docker Cloud (Borja Burgos) - Interesting new feature available on all the main "Docker platform".

Reading Notes #223

Cloud

• Background tasks for your web site using Azure WebJobs (Jon Hilton) - Interesting post that introduces storage queues and webjob to manage background process.
  
• Azure Logic Apps Connectors (Jeff Hollan) - This post is a nice introduction to trigger. These ca be use in Azure Logic Apps but also in Power Apps.
  
• Download Azure Resource Manager Tools for VS Code - Another nice extension for Visual Studio Code (vscode).
  
• Get Last Sync Time for Read-Access Geo-Redundant Azure Storage - This post contains a lot of detail and information about disaster recovery and how to create a nice PowerShell module as a tool to help us.
  
• Accessing v1 APIs and BizTalk APIs from Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - Nice post that shares interesting tips about Azure API Apps.
  
• Getting to Know #Azure Mobile App - Nice tutorial that leverage the recently GA Azure Mobile App to build AskAlex: an universal application that looks promising...;)
  
• Exception Handling with Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - Great tutorial that shows how to solve a extremely frequent problem... the exception handling.
  
• Using Logic Apps Webhook Triggers (Jeff Hollan) - Fantastic tutorial that shows how to create an HTTP trigger in today's interface/ designer.
  
• Deploying in the Logic Apps Preview Refresh (Jeff Hollan) - Very interesting post for the initiated that explains few pro tips when deploying our Azure Logic App.
  
• Using the Azure Resource Manager: Part 1 Virtual Machines (Rachel Hagerman) - First post in a very promising series. This on sets the table and shows how to use VS to deploy a VM.
  
• Using the Azure Resource Manager: Part 2 Networking Templates (Rachel Hagerman) - This second post in this series gives more details about a very common piece in our deployments the network.

Databases

• Making Entity Framework 7 and Azure Data Sync work together (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice tweak to solve a problem in small database context.

Programming

• Automated Testing with Visual Studio (Lachezar Arabadzhiev) - An episode to watch... Everyone should do tests.

Miscellaneous

• Microservices as an Evolutionary Architecture - Interesting post about an architecture pattern that becomes more popular.

Reading Notes #222

Suggestion of the week

• Long Running Tasks in Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - This nice post explains how Logic App support natively long running task, and how to do it.

Cloud

• Deploying Nano Server to Microsoft Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - Another great tutorial / recipe like we love them... with all the code then the explorations.
  
• Announcing more open options and choice on Microsoft Azure (Corey Sanders) - Cool announce that should satisfy Linux lovers.
  
• Leverage OCR to full text search your images within Azure Search (Liam Cavanagh) - Interesting post that shows options until OCR capability is integrated to Azure Search to extract texts for images.
  
• Upload a VHD to Azure Storage Using AzCopy (Alexandre Brisebois) - We all needed or will need this tool at one point in time... a post to remember.
  
• SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster Template updated with internal listeners and optimized performance (Ninar Nuemah) - This post introduces a great infrastructure for high-performance solution without compromising the security.
  
• Annotations detail blade now available in Application Insights (Mike Gresley) - So much information at the tips of our fingers .
  
• Background tasks for your web site using Azure WebJobs (Jon Hilton) - Interesting post that introduces storage queues and webjob to manage background processes.

Data

• Introducing: Elasticsearch with Azure File storage (Hans Krijger) - Great tutorial that explains how to get started.

Reading Notes #221

Suggestion of the week

• Why You Should Learn JavaScript in 2016 (Ken Powers) - I eared a lot of people complaining about Javascript, this excellent post explains why you undeniably, we should all know it, an if it's not the case why 2016 is a great time to learn it.

Cloud

• Azure Logic Apps : Orchestrating business processes and systems integration (Carey Payette) - This is a very nice tutorial that shows how to build an Azure Logic App with twitter and Sql Databe's connector.
  
• How to Setup Application Insights in an Azure WebJob (Jon Gallant) - Nice quick post that will make you save a lot of time.
  
• Azure IoT Hub general availability overview (Nayana Singh) - IoT Hub is finally GA, get to know all included components in this nice overview.
  
• Azure Search indexer for Azure Blob Storage now in public preview (Eugene Shvets) - This excellent tutorial explains how we can benefite of all the magic in this azure search preview.

Programming

• VisualStudio Code v0.10.8 (January 2016) - Learn more about what's new in this latest release.
  
• Search now available on Visual Studio Marketplace (Harysh Menon) - Did you know you can add extension to visual studio team services (vsts) and code (vscode)? This is the perfect post to get started.
  
• Chris Pietschmann - Nice post that explains very clearly why we really soundn't be writing none tested code.

Data

• Power BI Service February Update (Amanda Cofsky) - Fantastic! This update will give us the possibility to share outside ou organization... And many other things.

Miscellaneous

• What Does a Petaflop Look Like on Azure? (Alexandre Brisbois) - Interesting dive in the supercomputer universe.
  
• ASP.NET MVC: Keep Private Settings Out of Source Control - Simple an efficient.
  
• Multitasking is Killing Your Brain — Life Tips. (Larry Kim) - Really interesting post that comment on a very popular debate: Can w multitask?

~Frank

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 #200

Suggestion of the week

• Débuter avec Azure Resource Manager (Channel 9) (Julien Stroheker) - Really one of the best videos a saw. If you understand French, this is a must.

Cloud

• Using Travis to Deploy Apps to Azure - This post explains how to build a CI for Azure.
  
• New GS-Series VM (Daniel Wu) - Nice post that not only announces the new type of VM, but also how to convert your actual VM to this type.
  
• Using continuous integration with Azure & GitHub - Perfect post to get started with CI and Azure.
  
• Updates in Azure WebJobs SDK (1.1.0-alpha2) (Pranav Rastogi) - Learn more about the new singleton, redis trigger, logging, and all the other new features in this post.
  
• Seamlessly Migrate Your Application from AWS to Azure in Four Simple Steps (Rajesh Goli) - Wow only four steps to convert… nothing else to say.
  
• Introducing Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging (Clemens Vasters) - This post gives a short intro about the services bus.

Databases

• Azure DocumentDB’s LINQ provider just got better (Aravind Ramachandran) - This quick post lists the feature in the SDK.

Books

• Microsoft Azure Essentials_ Fundamentals of Azure (Michael S. Collier & Robin E. Shahan) - This week a felt like returning to the sources, and read the essentials. Difficult to summarize a summary, but all principal family of features are approached and the “must have” tools are over… Even some scenarios. A really good book, evenmore it’s for all.

Reading Notes #187

Cloud

• Publishing an ASP.NET 5 app to Docker on Linux with Visual Studio (Scott Hanselman) - Nice tutorial for a cross-platform Hello word.
  
• Create a CentOS Virtual Machine Using #Azure Resource Manager (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice deep-dive to Azure Resource manager creating a Raid0 Linux VM.
  
• Protect Mission Critial #Azure Virtual Machines from Accidental Deletion - An accident is so fast done...Thanks for the tips!
  
• Is Microsoft Changing Azure Too Much? (Paul Ballard) - Interesting thought. And you what do you think?
  
• Delphi Turns Every Car into a Connected Car with Affordable, Cloud-Based Telematics (microsoft.com) - Interesting use case about Azure, IoT.
  
• Hooking up a scheduler job to a WebJob - Nice post that explains different options when we are using Azure webjob or scheduler.

Programming

• 10 Leading HTML5 Frameworks You'll Find Hard to Miss - Your next mobile project.
  
• Using TypeScript for Visual Studio Online Extensions (Serkan Inci) - Little introduction to a useful extension.

Miscellaneous

• Making the Complex Simple - Interesting article about how to become a true leader.
  
• Atom.io for Markdown editing (Larry Franks) - This post explains how to transform the great editor Atom in an amazing markdown editor.
  
• And the Release Date for Windows 10 Is... (Paul Thurrott) - The official date is finally out!

Reading Notes #182

Suggestion of the week

• Orchestrating massive parallelisation of Azure WebJobs for fun and profit (Troy Hunt) - An awesome post. I really like those post where we learn step by step what has been tried and failed, and how to move from point A to Z.

Cloud

• Azure Mobile Services and APIs – RESTful and Custom (Adarsha Datta) - Nice tutorial about how to use Azure service Api and customizes it.
• How Azure Web Apps Hosts an ASP.NET 5 Application (tugberkugurlu.com) - Interesting post th0at shows how aspnet works with Azure under the hood.
  
• NoSQL database service Azure DocumentDB now Generally Available (John Macintyre) - Know everything you need to get started on DocumetDB, now in GA. Nice free import tool was also released.

released the DocumentDB Data Migration tool, an open source solution that imports data from a variety of sources, including JSON files, CSV files, SQL Server, MongoDB and existing DocumentDB collections.

• Mostly Cloudy - April 14th - This post is a nice overview of the Azure actuality for April.
  
• Think #Microservices - Very interesting post that explains why microservices could be so promising.

Programming

• How to Update a Forked Repository (blog.falafel.com) - Nice little how to for Github and sourcetree.
  
• Understanding Internationalization in ASP.NET MVC (About the Author) - Nice tutorial that explains the difference between: Internationalization, localisation, globalisation and how to use them to build a nice app.net website.
  
• New book: Node.js for .NET Developers (KimSpilker Kim Spilker) - Today nodejs is an unavoidable language, this book explains how it works from a c# point of view.

Miscellaneous

• Free ebook: Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Online (KimSpilker Kim Spilker) - A free book, that's always welcome.
  
• Avoiding Common Executive DevOps Mistakes (Ericka Chickowski) - Interesting post about common mistakes when people are trying to do agile methodology.
  
• Microsoft BUILD Announces #BuildTour (MVP Award Program) - Great news!
  
• Dropbox can now open documents straight into Microsoft Office Online (Dave Yin) - Now that what I call a reel int0egration, and a great feature!

~Frank B.

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 #160

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Blob Storage Uploading Large Blobs - Great post that explains all possible scenarios to upload file in Azure storage and how to do it.

Cloud

• Azure Service Bus – ‘NamespaceType’ default value change (Piyush Joshi) - Better to know before, is time to reviews our scripts.
  
• Microsoft Azure Websites WebJobs is now GA in the Microsoft Azure Platform - This post, besides bringing a fantastic news, is the perfect place to get started with webjob.
  
• La courbe d’adoption de l’infonuagique (André Giroux) - Good analogy that explains how we can start moving to the cloud.

Programming

• A basic Katana application - This tutorial is a nice little dive in the Katana world.

• Don't Frown on CSVs - Nice post that explains why we shouldn't over look the good old CSV format.

Miscellaneous

• Modeling exercise: The grocery store’s checkout model (Ayende Rahien) - Interesting exercises, some kind of brain push-up. I like it.

• Business Benefit from Public Data (The Open Group Blog) - Interesting post that explains how well it would be if more enterprise were sharing some data.

• Put yourself out there and publish that Open Source project today (Scott Hanselman) - Again a really inspiring post.

~Frank Boucher

Reading Notes #139

Suggestion of the week

• Refactoring your CSS with LESS in Visual Studio Web Essentials (David Paquette) - Web essentials is really essential! This post explains how easy it is to manage our CSS files with LESS.

Cloud

• Simple Web Site Backup retention policy with WebJobs (Eduardo Laureano) - That’s a really nice tutorial that explains how to use Azure webjobs.
• Basic Tier Virtual Machines (Kenai Kwa) - It’s time to save money. We need to change the type of our VM to be basic for all Azure VMs that don’t need load balancer or scalability.
• IIS Reset on Windows Azure Web Role (Value Maker) - Safe yourself sometimes and gray hair by reading this post before you got to do IISReset on an Azure VM…
• Cloud Power: How to scale Azure Websites globally with Traffic Manager (Scott Hanselman) - Great example of scaling a website with Azure.
• Managing your Azure Storage account with Zudio - This post introduces a very intuitive tool for when we want a quick and simple view of our stuff.

Programming

• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone - Part 1 (Lori Lalonde) - This post lists the prerequisites required to do a UI unit test that will be explains in a future post.
• What should I be looking for during Code Reviews? - Very interesting post that gives us a good idea of what we should think about when doing a code review.
• ASP.NET MVC Helper - MoreLessText (James Curran) - That’s a nice HTML helper simple and efficient, like all the best are.

Mobile

• Build Some Ears on Your App and then Listen! (Mark B Schramm) - This post lists the best practices about how we should take care of our apps once they are live.

Miscellaneous

• SonicAgile Now with Dropbox Integration - Nice new add-on to this great management tool.
• FREE Pluralsight video: “Get Involved” in community! (Scott Hanselman) - Excellent video that will help you to get started. You don’t have any excuse anymore since it’s free!
• VM Image PowerShell ‘How To’ Blog Post (Christine Avanessians) - Really useful post that gives a lot of code snipets with the explication on what they do. A must.

~Frank

Reading Notes #136

 

Suggestion of the week

• Open Source is a thankless job. We do it anyway (Scott Hanselman) - A post that brings back the essence of what supposed to an open-source project and what it means to participate.

Cloud

• Creating an Azure Mobile Services .NET backend from scratch (Carlos Figueira) - Great tutorial here without magic. Every steps are well explained.
  
• Microsoft Azure Load Balancing Services (Marios Zikos) - Great article that explains how the load balancer work and how to configure it based on our needs.
  
• Information on Microsoft Azure and Heartbleed (Andrew Cushman) - This post explained when, even if running on Microsoft Azure, the Heartbleed vulnerability could affect your app.
  
• Size Matters… A LOT! - This post gives nice options to minimize the impact of a mobile application using the cloud as backend.
  
• Reading from a queue in an Azure WebJob - This post got us started with Azure webjobs.
  
• VM Image (Christine Avanessians) - Wonderful, so many new functionalities! I'm really looking forward to know more and try it.
  
• VM Agent and Extensions – Part 1 (Kundana Palagiri) - This post introduced the currently available extensions with a quick example. VMExtension looks a very promising feature with a lot of potential.
  
• Azure Updates: Web Sites, VMs, Mobile Services, Notification Hubs, Storage, VNets, Scheduler, AutoScale and More (Scott Gu) - I don't know where to start. This last release contained so many new features it's incredible. You must read this post.
  
• Les architectures émergentes, l'innovation en architecture et les nouvelles tendances - Annonce d'un événement à Montréal sur l'architecture notamment pour le "cloud".
  
• How to assign a private Static IP to a Windows Azure VM - Useful powershell script to manage your Azure's VMs.
  
• IT Pros ROCK! - This post explains very clearly all the options with their pros and cons when shutting down AzureVM.
  
• Automating Environment Creation using Microsoft Azure PowerShell - Nice scrit!
  
• Deep dive: Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC and Azure SDK 2.3 (Mohit Srivastava) - Great post that goes into details in all the major new features from the last Azure SDK and visual studio release.

Programming

• Developing for Windows Phone 8.1 using XAML (Nick) - This post got us started with the three choices we have to develop windows phone application.
  
• Announcing release of Microsoft Avro Library (Maxim Lukiyanov) - Great news, a new serializer for .Net and it's available on NuGet.
  
• Exploring ASP.NET Web Pages - A fully-featured MiniBlog using just Razor (Scott Hanselman) - This post introduced another but quite minimalist blog engine call miniBlog.
  
• Il était une fois… Modernizr (Anne B) - Outil très utile pour le développement web.

Miscellaneous

• Merge conflicts in csproj files - Nice post that explained why the merge method had to change in Git to merge Visual Studio project file.
  
• What price might you really be paying for Woolworths “free” wifi? - Aaah marketing, when will you stop to surprise me?

Reading Notes #125

Suggestion of the week

• Get Better Acquainted with Azure (Mark BrownMS) - Wow! All kinds of resources are coved here. A post to read to find your next book or blog to subscribe.
  
• With great Azure VM comes great responsibility(which is why you really want an Azure Web Site) - Great post that compares website and VW.

Cloud

• Announcing Reduced Pricing on Storage - How can we be not happy to pay less for a nice service?!
  
• 2013 Year in Review: New AWS Technical Whitepapers, Articles and Videos Published - Great recap of all the AWS resources published in 2013.
  
• Identity in your own apps with Windows Azure Active Directory (MVP Award Program) - Great tutorial that explains how to use Windows Azure Active Directory in a web project with the new VS2013.
  
• Measuring all the things with Azure Web Sites and friends - Great post, a lot of information on the tools available to help us tracking info in our Azure website.
  
• Introducing Windows Azure WebJobs – Wow, webjob is so simple to use compare to all the steps that we needed to with a worker role.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #1 – Rename Your Windows Azure Subscription (Bill Wilder) - Nice tips to get a more structured subscription list in Azure.

Programming

• Roslyn performance (Matt Gertz) - Cool post that gives a good insight about how performance is treated in Microsoft team.
  
• Simple Git workflow is simple - Good post that explained the workflow. Now we just need to practice it.
  
• Why TDD Makes Me a Happy Developer - Interesting opinion about TDD. If you don't know what is TDD, this post is for you.
  
• NuGet Package Manager Console tip (Girish stuartle) - Nice tips, like the author I had never tried that before.

Architecture

• What makes models interesting (Nick Malik) - Interesting post about enterprise business model.
  
• Why is Software Architecture Important? - Very nice analogy.

Miscellaneous

• Why You Should Stop Pretending To Be So Important - Wisdom post that remembers us to give time, to be there for other.
  
• Yak Shaving Defined - I'll get that done, as soon as I shave this yak. - Ha ha ha. It explains also why retreated people have no free time...

~Frank