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!
All Things Azure with Dwayne Monroe (Screaming in the Cloud) - People asked me those questions very often: Why Azure? How did you start? Dwayne's answer is excellent... Great podcast honest and true.
15 Statistics You Should Know About A Career In UX Design (Ben Aston) - Interesting post that does the tour of the UX job. I wished I had that kind of information on all types of jobs back in the day. If you are considering UX its a must.
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!
How to Think Like a Boss with Kate Crocco (Influencer Entrepreneurs with Jenny Melrose) - Creating, building feeling good in a business while being a parent is hard.
I took me about one year to read that book. Way longer then it should. It was a good book and it is really easy to read. Maybe it's the fact that it was a "real" book and not in my kindle? But I think it was the format. This book look like a comic book with a director cut. There those little story bubbles and there is the text. The content is amazing, but I felt like I was always losing the vibe while transitioning to the text, or the bubbles.
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!
Building a notifications client with Xamarin and Azure (Laurent Bugnion) - A very nice post that describe how Laurent started to build his cross platforms tools. Sharing the gotchas and a few tips along this first post of the series.
7 principles for modern tech leaders (William Peachey) - Nice post about the evolution of roles in our field of expertise and what could/ should be a a leader roles.
Red Teaming with Leron Gray (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A quite interesting episode about playing the bad guys for the good cause. I enjoyed each second of this episode. I new those them existed, but it's great to learn more about them.
Baking Bread with Eric Wolfinger (Wild Ideas Worth Living) - I've been doing my bread for probably fifteen years, and just recently start messing around with sourdoughs... I'm not crazy.. Making bread is both simple and complex... and of course so fun.
Remote Debugging .NET Containers (Karol Deland) - A nice tutorial that explains clearly first the difference between remote and local debugging and then explains how to do it.
Screen Sharing with an Ultrawide Monitor (Kenny Lowe) - Really interesting post.As I think about getting a new screen and heard bad experiences sharing ultrawide screens this look like a nice solution.
An interesting book that shares the best practices about making videos today. How to plan, record, edit... What to do and not do. A quick, direct to the point and complete tutorial to get started. This book was done like today's videos.
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!
Unit Testing in ASP .NET Core 3.1 (Shahed C) - A nice post that shows how to get started with xUnit the voted most popular test framework.
Miscellaneous
APIs in the 2020s Panel (.NET Rocks!) - A virtual panel of awesome speakers that talked about API, REST, GraphQL, oData and so more. Lovely episode.
471: How to Say No Without Saying No, with Lois Frankel (Coaching for Leaders) - Saying No... being open. Really interesting topic. I put Lois Frankel: Nice Girls Don’t Speak Up or Stand Out in my to read list, that book maybe written for women in mind, but I think it is really interesting.
Leveraging Our Emotional Goals (Developer Tea) - An interesting episode that talk about goals and what we need to do (or not) to achieved them.
203: Updating Open Source Projects (https://castbox.fm/episode/203%3A-Updating-Open-Source-Projects-id2117504-id267802246) - As I just create my first version in one of my open-source project I found the topic more than interesting... Thank you, great show.
How to Stop Windows 10 Updates (5 Methods) (Mohammed Siddiqui) - I think you should only prevent auto-update when you really know what you are doing. Updates are easy to forget and therefore your PC could be at risk. That said, sometime it could really be a must.5misc.windows.update]
An incredible adventure yes around the globe, but more important over the personal limits. I found this book very inspiring. I felt following him across the Antarctica... In the blizzard or in those deep moment. Great memoir, great adventure.
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. As you will quickly see This week is heavily tinted by the Microsoft Build event. I still have tons of videos to watch since I was was busy monitoring the chat during most of the performances.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Chocolatey with Rob Reynolds (.NET Rocks!) - Awesome episode talking about all the good and the great of Chocolatey that awesome package manager.
A path to technical leadership with Keavy McMinn (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Because the most interesting path are more then often not the straight one... Great talk about the choice we make in our lives...
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!
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.
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.
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!
070: Securing DevOps in the Cloud (CloudSkills.fm) - Great episode talking about security yes but also best practices and to change mindsets. Love it.
Running a successful dev shop with Martin Gratzer (Software Engineering Unlocked) - This show is one of my new favorites. Always interesting and very dynamic. This time it was about the hard reality of "dev shop". Very interesting, so true!
The Overreaction Paradox (Developer Tea) - I never thought about it that way... But it's so true. Are we celebrating the wrong things?
197: I Need a Website (Merge Conflict) - They got me 50% of the time... I think they are talking to me: 'Frank we are ....'. Nice episode sharing some dreams about a perfect tool (aka website) for apps developers.
Most solutions, if not all, are composed of multiple parts: backend, frontend, services, APIs, etc. Because all parts could have a different life-cycle it's important to be able to deploy them individually. However, sometimes we would like to deploy everything at once. It's exactly the scenario I had in a project I'm working on where with backend and one frontend.
In this post, I will explain how I use nested Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and conditions to let the user decide if he wants to deploy only the backend or the backend with a frontend of his choice. All the code will be available in GitHub and if you prefer, a video version is available below. (This post is also available in French)
The Context
The project used in this post my open-source budget-friendly Azure URL Shortener. Like mentioned previously the project is composed of two parts. The backend leverage Microsoft serverless Azure Functions, it a perfect match in this case because it will only run when someone clicks a link. The second part is a frontend, and it's totally optional. Because the Azure Functions are HTTP triggers they act as an API, therefore, they can be called from anything able to do an HTTP call. Both are very easily deployable using an ARM template by a PowerShell or CLI command or by a one-click button directly from GitHub.
The Goal
At the end of this post, we will be able from one-click to deploy just the Azure Functions or to deploy them with a frontend of our choice (I only have one right now, but more will come). To do this, we will modify the "backend" ARM template using condition and nest the ARM template responsible for the frontend deployment.
The ARM templates are available here in there [initial](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before) and [final](https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener/tree/master/tutorials/optional-arm/before/after) versions.
Adding New Inputs
We will nest the ARM templates, this means that our backend template (azureDeploy.json) will call the frontend template (adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json). Therefore we need to add all the required information to azureDeploy.json to make sure it's able to deploy adminBlazorWebsite-deployAzure.json successfully. Looking at the parameter required for the second template, we only two need values AdminEMail and AdminPassword. All the other can be generated or we already have them.
We will need also another parameter the will act as our selection option. So let's add a parameter named frontend and allowed only two values: none and adminBlazorWebsite. If the value is none we only deploy the Azure Function. When the value is adminBlazorWebsite we will deploy the Azure Function, of course, but we will also deploy an admin website to go with it.
Following the best practices, we add clear detail and add those three parameters in the parameters section of the ARM template
"frontend": {
"type": "string",
"allowedValues": [
"none",
"adminBlazorWebsite"
],
"defaultValue": "adminBlazorWebsite",
"metadata": {
"description": "Select the frontend that will be deploy. Select 'none', if you don't want any. Frontend available: adminBlazorWebsite, none. "
}
},
"frontend-AdminEMail": {
"type": "string",
"defaultValue": "",
"metadata": {
"description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) The EMail use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
}
},
"frontend-AdminPassword": {
"type": "securestring",
"defaultValue": "",
"metadata": {
"description": "(Required only if frontend = adminBlazorWebsite) Password use to connect into the admin Blazor Website."
}
}
Nested Templates
Let's assume for now that we always deploy the website when we deploy the Azure Function, to keep things simple. What we need now is to used nested ARM template, and that when you deploy an ARM template from inside another ARM template. This is done with a Microsoft.Resources/deployments node. Let's look at the code:
If we examine this node, we have the classic: name, type, dependsOn, resourceGroup, apiVersion. Here We really want the Azure Functions to be fully deployed so we need the FunctionApp to be created AND the GitHub sync to be complete, this is why there is also a dependency on Microsoft.Web/sites/sourcecontrols.
In properties we will pass the mode as Incremental as it will leave unchanged resources that exist in the resource group but aren't specified in the template.
The second property is templateLink. This is really important as it's the URL to the other ARM template. That URI must not be a local file or a file that is only available on your local network. You must provide a URI value that downloadable as HTTP or HTTPS. In this case, it's a variable that contains the GitHub URL where the template is available.
Finally, we have the parameters, and this is how we pass the values to the second template. Let's skip those where I just pass the parameter value from the caller to the called, and focus on basename, AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl.
For basename I just add a prefix to the parameter basename received, this way the resource names will be different but we can still see the "connection". That's purely optional, you could have added this value in a parameter to azureDeploy.json, I prefer keeping the parameters a minimum as possible as I think it simplifies the deployment for the users.
Finally for AzureFunctionUrlListUrl, and AzureFunctionUrlShortenerUrl I needed to retrieve the URL of the Azure Function with the security token because they are secured. I do that by concatenating different parts.
Component
Value
Beginning of the URL
'https://'
Reference the Function App, return the value of hostname
Now that the second ARM template can be deployed, let's add a condition so it gets, indeed, deploy only when we desire. To do this it's very simple, we need to add a property condition.
In this case, is the value of the parameter is different then none, the nested template will be deployed. When a condition end-up being "false", the entire resource will be ignored during the deployment. How simple or complex are your conditions... that's your choice!
Visual Studio Codespaces (Nik Molnar) - I really like the new name I think it says more about what it is. And seriously how can I not like the new price! Less than 2$/day for a machine!
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. You think you may have an interesting post, share it!
My office is in the basement... so I didn't conplained.
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!
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/
I don't know for you but I share links/ URLs very often. And a lot of time it's from videos, so it needs to be short and easy to remember. Something like https://c5m.ca/project is better than a random string (aka. GUID). And this is how I started a project to build a URL Shortener. I wanted to be budget-friendly, easy to deploy and customizable.
In this post, I will share how I build it, how you can use it, and how you can help!
How I build it, with the community
This tool was build during live streams coding sessions on Twitch (all videos are in available in my YouTube archive). It's composed of two parts: a Serverless backend leveraging the Azure Function & Azure Storage, and a frontend of your choice.
The backend is composed of a few Azure Functions that act as an on-demand HTTP API. They only consume when they are called. They are in .Net Core, C# to be specific. When publishing this post, there are four functions:
UrlShortener: To create a short URL.
UrlRedirect: That's the one called when a short link is used. An Azure Function Proxy is forwarding all call to the root.
UrlClickStats: Return the statistic for a specific URL.
UrlList: Return the list of all URLs created.
All the information like long url, short url, click count are save in an Azure Storage Table.
And that's it. Super light, very cost-efficient. IF you are curious about the price I'll but references in the footnotes
The frontend could be anything that can make HTTP requests. Right now in the project, I explain how to use a tool call Postman, there is also a very simple interface done that you can easily deploy.
This simple interface is of course protected and gives you the options to see all URLs and create new ones.
How YOU can use it
All the code is available into GitHub, and it's deployable with a one-click button!
This will deploy the backend in your Azure subscription in a few minutes. If you don't own an Azure subscription already, you can create your free Azure account today.
Then you will probably want an interface to create your precious URLs. Once more in the GitHub repository, there is a List of available Admin interfaces and ready to be used. The Admin Blazor Website is currently the most friendly and can also be deployed in one-click.
How You can help and participate
Right now, there is really only one interface (and some instructions on how to use Postman to do the HTTP calls). But AzUrlShortener is an open-source project, meaning you can participate. Here some suggestions:
Build a new interface (in the language of your choice)
Improve current interface(s) with
logos
designs
Better UI 🙂
Register bugs in GitHub
Make feature request
Help with documentation/ translation
What's Next
Definitely come see the GitHub repo https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener, click those deploy buttons. On my side, I will continue to add more features and make it better. See you there!
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. Enjoy!
Add Discord Notifications to ASP.NET Core Apps (Steve Smith) - Really nice post that shows us how to use GitHub actions and Csharp to push info into Discord. I need to try something like that someday....
Try gh, GitHub's new CLI (John Papa) - Oh, that's really nice I like that. I find it funny that t should like you just got a hit in the chest. However, it looks powerful enough to cut your breath... so it probably deserves it.
How to Succeed In Building Developer Tooling with Peter Pezaris (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Don't blink, don't even blink. Not sure if it really apply when you listen to podcast, but this episode was so packed of great content. I really like the open discussion. An awesome show.
0241 - Etienne Tremblay - GitHub Actions (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Great episode that compare, discuss, and speculate with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. It's in French. I miss you guys it's been too long... Great show.
How I Manage and Plan Tasks as a Remote Worker (Thomas Maurer) - It's very interesting to see how others are doing, and the kind of tools they are using..Even better when it's your colleague.
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. This week I was less in a reading mode...
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. Enjoy!
Suggestion of the week
Approval Workflows With GitHub Actions (Aaron Powell) - Wow! That's a very clever and impressive way to have step flow in GitHub. All the details are in the post if you would like to create your own.
GitHub with Azure DevOps | Premier Developer (GitHub with Azure DevOps) - Very interesting post that explains al the benefits of using this mixt, and why an enterprise would be interested to do that.
193: UI Is Messy (Merge Conflict) - I, once more, had a nice moment listening to that discussion/ argumentation about different patterns pros and cons.
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. Enjoy!
Des fonctions courtes, qui font une chose (Les Semi-Colons) - First time for me listening to this podcast, third time for them. A very interesting podcast in "Canadian French". They are passing through the book Clean Code of Robert C. Martin. This episode was about chapter 3.
vygl - Le balado Ep.17 (vygl) - Great podcast in French. It was my first try and I really liked it. We can ear the experience of the speaker in their voice but also by the quality of this audio.
An Update on the MSDN and TechNet Migration to docs.microsoft.com (Jeff Sandquist) - It was looking mostly like an impossible mission, but with a lot of work, it is really incredible the things that can be achieved. This post shares the status of the migration of each section.
Are you worried when deploying a new application about our billing? Or afraid that you will receive an invoice from your cloud provider at the and of the month that put you in a bad situation? You are not alone, and this is why you should definitely look at the Azure Cost Manager.
In the video below, I explain how to use the Azure Cost Manager to see the actual cost and forecast for a specific application in the cloud and build a dashboard with your favorites information. Note that I said "cloud" because Azure Cost Manager can monitor both Azure and AWS resources. That's perfect for when we are "in" the portal, and that's why I will also show how you can make budgets, and set alerts, so you can track your resources automatically.
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.
Enjoy!
Azure Free Account? Is it really free? ( Michael Crump) - Ooh yeah! I still remember that moment where I created my first service.... Get started free is free.
