Reading Notes #543

Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

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

The Suggestion of the week

• What is .NET, and why should you choose it? (.NET Team) - This is not an ordinary blog post. It makes me think of those deep interesting MSDN articles. A great read for young or older developers that would like to know more about .NET or refresh their memory.

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Pipelines: If Expressions and Conditions (John Folberth) - This nice post in the series on Azure Pipeline focuses on conditions. Avery has efficient tools to customize our pipeline just like we want them.

• What is an Azure Load Balancer? (Cary Roys) - Do you know what an Azure Load Balancer is or you only thing you know? In this nice post not only you will learn what it really is but it the post shares some OSS tools to test your ALB and explains how to use them.

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming Patterns in .NET (Code Maze) - This is a great tutorial that explains 3 asynchronous patterns with code samples and explanation. Perfect to get started and understand legacy code or write new one.

• Coding 102: Writing code other people can read (Max Pekarsky) - This is an excellent post with so much wisdom in it. Writing readable code is extremely important. Whether it's just a few lines in excel, a script, a query for a database, or a full app.

• Use multiple identity providers from a Blazor WASM ASP.NET Core App secured using BFF (Damien Bowden) - An interesting post that explains how to implement authentification.

Podcasts

• Sustainable Open Source with Sarah Novotny (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode with the Microsoft Open Source Lead talking about why truly open source is important and how Microsft really believes in its future.
• Digging Up the Past with Sarah Parcak (A Bit of Optimism) - Using satellite images to do archeology... wait what?! Great episode really interesting from the early second until the last one.

Miscellaneous

• ChatGPT: One million people have joined the waitlist for Microsoft's AI-powered Bing (Liam Tung) - What a first day! This is a little post that shares a little info about the new Bing and its kickoff.

~Frank

Reading Notes #542

Cloud

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 1 - Azure Service Bus (James Dawson) - In this post the author switch the pub sub service and it looks so simple. Interesting.

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 0 - Introduction (James Dawson) - This first post of the series provides us details about the plans and why Dapr seams interesting as a resource for this project.

• Azure Communication Services February 2023 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Happy to see the new release coming up packed with useful features and capability.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - February 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Wow! The Dev CLI is kicking the new year with a big release. New templates on many languages and new features.

• General availability: Mount Azure Storage as a local share in App Service Windows Code (Unknown) - Important milestone reached. Congrats!

Programming

• A Fancy Hover Effect For Your Avatar (Temani Afif) - Wow! From my point of views this look loke magic. With only one HTML element and a few lines of CSS... Bravo!

• Blazor and Azure OpenAI (Michael Washington) - Cool demo using OpenAI API. Because yes ChatGPT is fun but there are APIs to build real apps.

• How to use Entity Framework Core in ASP.NET Core (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - This is a very nice tutorial that guides us each steps along the way. Clear detailed, very nice.

• Merging Git repositories without losing history (Dennis Doomen) - Great tutorial that not only provides the solution but explains step by steps why we do each of them.

Podcasts

• 341: Frank Masters In-App Subscriptions (Merge Conflict) - A big thank you to Frank and James for sharing that journey. We too often only ear about the happy path, and it's great to listen to all those challenges you incountered and how you managed to move forward.
• Embracing The Fall with Carla Hall (A Bit of Optimism) - YES! So true! Falling instead of failling. Like a very wise man told me long time ago, the important is to bounce; get back on your feet and standup.
• Alice and Bob Learn App Security with Tanya Janca (.NET Rocks!) - Great great episode with the amazing Tanya. Looking forward for that next book!
• 49. Using Azure Container Apps, KEDA, Infrastructure as Code and ARM - with Eduard Keilholz (Betatalks the podcast) - From the MVP stories, to the infrastructure as code with the detour around the bulletproof demo or candies... This episode is indeed like a delicious candy.

~Frank

How to edit a JSON object inside an Azure Logic App

I use Azure Logic Apps in many of my solutions, I find them so conviennant to integrate different systemes. Recently one of them was failling and by lookink at the error message: The property value exceeds the maximum allowed size, I knew what was wrong. I was tying to save a JSON object into a Storage table but one property was too long. For this particular case I didn't need the value contain in the property so the plan was to delete it. At first, I thought it wasn't possible to edit a variable of type object in a Logic Apps, but it is!

In this post I will show how to use Compose action and setProperty to perform data operations in Azure Logic Apps.

The Context

First think to know is that the Compose action does not update the the current object but creates a new one. In this demo the JSON object use is quite short to simplyfy the demo.

{
	"firstname":"Frank",
	"lastname":"Boucher",
	"alias":"fboucheros",
	"bio":"With many years of experience in the IT industry, François (Frank) Boucher is a trusted Microsoft Azure professional whose expertise and bilingual service are relied upon in large Canadian markets (Ottawa and Montreal) as well as internationally. Among his many accolades, Francois has been awarded four times Microsoft Azure MVP status, named a Microsoft Azure Advisor, and Microsoft Azure P-Seller. Frank created the “Cloud 5 minutes” show. Where every second week, a new episode that answers a different technical question, is published both in French and English (cloud5mins.com). "
}

The Details

The Logic App recieve a JSON object from the request body. This is transfom as an Person object. To empty the bio property the action Compose will be used.

Inside the Compose action, use the context menu to find setProperty in the Expression section. The expression setProperty takes three parameters: the object, the property name, and the edited value. In this demo the goal was to empty the property therefore and empty string will be assign like this:

  setProperty(variables('Person'),'bio','').

The edited object is accessible from the output of the Compose action and this what will be return in the Response action.

The Result

By adding a single action it's possible to edit JSON object in a Logic App without requiring to use inline code or external tools. A demo wouldn't be complite without a end-to-end run so here the result of a HTTP POST to the Logic App passing the Person JSON and the returned result.

Video version

If you prefer, I also have a video version of this post.

Useful links

• 🔗 Compose Action: https://c5m.ca/Compose
• 🔗 SetProperty: https://c5m.ca/setProperty

~ Frank

Reading Notes #541

Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

Cloud

• Learn Azure DevOps from Zero to Hero (April Edwards) - Nice series of videos to learn Azure DevOps.

Programming

• Jan. Extensions: Deploy Kubernetes and Run Cloud Apps Locally (Amy Bass) - I like those extension of the month post. It makes you discover little gem that you have not be interested at first.

• 5 .NET MAUI Features for Building Great Desktop Apps (James Montemagno) - Nice top five that shows us one more time how .NET MAUI is a great idea when it's time to create an application UI.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1! Better, faster MVVM source generators, .NET 7 support, and more! (Sergio Pedri) - Great new toolkit with many honestly very cool features.

• Generating Sample Data with Bogus (Shawn Wildermuth) - We all need seed data, test data, temp data... Bogus seams sample and efficient. I'm definitely trying it, in my next project.

• How to Get an Enum Member as a String in C# (Code Maze ) - This post provides a nice overview, with code samples, of three different ways to get the text value of an enum.

• Generating argument expressions for minimal APIs (continued): Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 5 (Andrew Lock) - Another nice post in that series that explains how things works under the hood for Minimal API.

Books

Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance 

Author: Erica Dhawan 

It's been a while since I had so many "ah-ah" moment while reading a book. Digital body language is about communication using many different technologies by different culture, generations and individuals... 

It a must if you care about how your message are received.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day (Eric Barker) - A nice post that reminds us of simple things to regain or productivity.

• How I Use Stream Deck (Brian T. Jackett) - Its always interesting to see how others are using some tools. It provides inspiration for our own setup.

~frank

Reading Notes #540

Good Monday!

Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Accelerate your Azure cloud management using Azure Cloud Shell with Predictive IntelliSense (Jason Helmick) - That's excellent news! After trying it locally, I cannot stop using it.

• Take your Azure CLI skills to the next level (nadavbh) - Oh wow, nice! I'm customizing my prompt right away!

Programming

• Bringing GitHub Actions to GitHub Mobile (Maximilian Sachs) - I'm Involved in a few repos, and being about to review some PR or questions and be able to answer them quickly is super nice. Learn more about this app in the post.

• How I built the first PDF report for KlipTok using IronPDF (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - A nice tutorial that shows how this tool was used with a Blazor static web site to print reports. A real implementation with his real challenges.

• Windows Package Manager 1.4 (Demitrius Nelon) - The more I use this tool the more I like it. Nice update that makes it even easier to use.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.17 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Nice new features, new configurations...I like that mica effect.

Databases

• Azure Data Studio 1.41 release - Microsoft SQL Server Blog (Erin Stellato) - Nice new update on this nice tool. Not all of them are visible, but the impact is big nevertheless.

Miscellaneous

• Practice Tests released on Microsoft Learn (Georgia Kalyva) - So many of you asked me about where they could find those tests... Happy to provide an easy answer moving on.

Reading Notes #539

Good Monday! 

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!

 

Programming

• Making an Asynchronous Breakfast in .NET (Assis Zang ) - This post explains so well using a task that we all did the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code. It's in .NET, but valid for all languages (that support async code of course).

• A first look behind the scenes of minimal API endpoints: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First, of a series, this post digs into the code to understand why minimal APIs are so performant. There is a lot in there, looking forward to reading the next one.

• December Extensions Roundup: Improving Visibility for Your APIs and Images (Amy Bass) - I use more than I create docker images these days but I can see how this extension would be useful.Very cool!

• Exploring the model-binding logic of minimal APIs: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 3 (Andrew Lock) - The third post in a series where we dig into how Minimal APIs do their magic.

• Extracting metadata from a minimal API handler: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 2 (Andrew Lock) - Another deep technical post of the series where Andrew shows us are things works under the hood of minimal APIs.

• How To Use GitLens To Figure Out Who Introduced A Change In Your Code (Mohd S.) - Great post that shows how to use a tool with a real case. Nicely done!

• Reducing Blazor WASM size by providing custom ICU data - Gérald Barré (Gérald Barré) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to help us understand and get started.

Podcasts

• Best of DevOps 2022 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Nice review of 2022, DevOps style, by 3 Docker captains.

• Source Open vs Open Source and IdentityServer with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen (.NET Rocks!) - I used in the past IdentityServer and didn't know the story. Very interesting post about Open source.

~Frank

Reading Notes #538

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - January 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Easier to install and more secure. A nice update.

• Develop Your Cloud App Locally with the LocalStack Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Harsh Mishra) - Interesting tools that can emulate your AWS environment locally, perfect to develop and not stress about the cloud cost busting your budget.

Programming

• 6 Command Line (PowerShell & CLI) Tips & Tricks for Microsoft Azure you should know about! (Thomas Maurer) - Great tips that really enable us to be more productive and efficient.

• Get Started with GitHub Actions (Mandy Hubbard) - This is a great post to get started with CICD. GitHub is free and accessible, give it a try and then automate some tests or a deployment.

• Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - New Pluralsight course announcement.

• The Problem With Dependency Injection Frameworks (James Shore) - A very interesting post that continues to explain why DI frameworks are bad even though they help us.

• Public Preview: Azure Automation Visual Studio Code Extension - Nice I like Azure automation. An extension to manage those cloud cron jobs, I say yes.

• Release notes for Microsoft Q&A - Love that new look!

• Why tuples in C# are not always a code smell (Dennis Frühauff) - I didn't use Turple yet but it's not hard to see the potential and how it could become ugly. This post shows and explains a few simple rules to stay clear.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Cosmos DB to Azure Data Explorer Synapse Link (public preview) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Two worlds touched. This new connection looks super cool.

• Lazy and once-only C# async initialization (Ian Griffiths) - An amazing post that explains so much and that has all the code snippets to be clear about it. I will have to copy-paste those into some test applications to really try them, but it is clear what I should expect.

~frank

Reading Notes #537

Good Monday, 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!

The suggestion of the week

• Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Conclusions (Jonathan George) - Last post of an excellent series. It's a must-read for anyone planning building and API. Azure Container App is not the answer to everything, but it must be considered.

Cloud

• Azure Storage Caching and Compression – The Missing Piece (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - This post shares all the gotchas learned along the way in developing and trying to optimize an application. The result is a faster application, a better experience for the client, and more money that stays in your pocket.

Programming

• Build Containers Without a Dockerfile (Rockford Lhotka) - An interesting thing to be able to create a container without a dockerfile. This post explains why it can be useful and of course how to do it.

• How do I get started in web development? (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Exactly. So true.

• PowerShell IntelliSense completion (Mark Downie) - I noticed that a few days while being active in the prompt to do a bunch of installation and configuration. Super happy that prediction is finally part of the release.

Databases

• The Best C# .NET Web Application Tech Stack: Choosing a Database (Michael Shpilt) - A nice post that goes through all the questions we should ask ourselves when selecting a database and go over many Azure solutions.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Boards – Organize and Plan All of Your Work (April Edwards) - Amazing post that not only go over a few great features of azure DevOps board but also explains the why.... why should we use them.

• Finally a clean and easy way to add Table of Contents to dev.to articles 🤩 (Lucy Linder) - Anice tools to help us generate a table of content (TOC) while publishing to the platform DevTo.

~Frank

Reading Notes #536 (Book edition)

Good first Monday of 2023!

As a way to close the Reading Notes of 2022, I changed a little today's post by sharing the books I read during the year. I didn't include the novel and thriller as I'm not sure they would be relevant in this kind of post.  However, if you are interested, find me at goodreads.com/fboucheros.

Let's make this new year a better one, and as usual, I'm always happy to receive your blog post and recommendations.

Books

Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection  
Author: Ximena Vengoechea

I like the stories and examples in this book. I mean it's 'easy' to say listen carefully but demonstrating how the opportunity was missed, and how to correct it is way more complex. Nice book.

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Author: Chip Heath, Karla Starr

I really enjoyed reading this book. Data is in the middle of everything, and when communicating that information it's often translated into numbers. To have an impact, the way we communicate those number is crucial. A book to read and probably read again after a while to refresh our memory.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Authors: Chip Heath, Dan Heath

This book oversimplifies a really complex topic, but I believe it was important to make each point clear. Nice read, it will help to be less afraid of making changes.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

A nice book that mixt great advice and more 'easy' ones. Nevertheless, it was interesting to revisit what I already knew and to learn new things. With so many distractions around us, focusing is important.






Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons 

Author:  Ben Riggs

Big fan of D&D and this book is a great read. It is a history of the game and the people behind it. It is an excellent read for anyone who is interested in the game or its history of it. I had no idea of all the "drama", and honestly even I didn't know either what it takes to create those books/games.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work 

Authors: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

The important message here where we can achieve a lot more with less. The book shares many examples and breaks them down into simple principles. I recommend it to anyone who is looking to improve their work-life balance.





Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds 

Author: David Goggins

The mind is incredible. Goggins pushed it to not eleven... to twelve! We all encounter difficulties in our lives, and the lesson here is that the real limit is way past what we think. Great book and he just published a new one.

Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping 

Author: Richie Norton

The first time I heard of that book it was in a podcast and it seems very promising. Even though I didn`t fall in love with that book the ideas are interesting and definitely worth the time to learn them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #535

Good Monday,
it's the last ReadingNotes of 2022! So many great articles, podcasts, and blog posts. More than 350 of those catch my interest this year...

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

Cloud

• Azure App Configuration, Key Vault and Managed Identity Implementation (Kevin Logan) - Security is essential and yes it adds complexity at first, but not that much. Have a look.

• Microsoft Azure CLX: A personalized program to learn Azure | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Priyanka Rawat) - More options to learn, and this one has a practice test in it, something that so many are looking for.

Programming

• 11 Ways of Making Your C# Harder to Use (Brendan Enrick) - A refreshing topmost post that shows the best practices. Well done!

• Containerized Blazor: Microsoft Ponders New Client-Side Hosting (David Ramel) - Looking forward to this feature being out.

• How Wolverine allows for easier testing (Jeremy Miller) - This looks like a great tool for testing.

• Introducing Wolverine for Effective Server Side .NET Development (Jeremy Miller) - The first time I read about that tool looks very interesting.

• WebAssembly vs. Kubernetes (Cameron Gain) - Very interesting thoughts. Only time will show if it's true.

Miscellaneous

• Can the Kindle Scribe replace the yellow notepad? Notes on taking notes with Amazon’s new device (Todd Bishop) - Didn't Know Remarcable 2 had a competitor. I like the idea of reducing paper usage but right now the solutions seem too expensive, at least for my usage. I will continue to use a digital keyboard or tablet pen notes app.

~Frank

Reading Notes #534

Good Monday, 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

• Introducing a better way to integrate Azure AD with API Management (Adrian Hall) - Cool, new features for APIM.

• The Life of Sadukie (Sarah Dutkiewicz) - This is a nice tutorial part of a series to build a website. Very well done.

Programming

• 5 new MVC features in .NET 7 (Andrew Lock) - With .NET 7 a few nice features we introduced, and this post list seven of them.

• Entity Framework Core 7 JSON Columns | Mapping | Querying | Updating | Example (Bommidi Naveen) - This post shows a simple mapping done with EF 7. The perfect bite-sized tutorial.

• Get your developer news - Visual Studio Blog (Mads Kristensen) - So many happy developers! After being missing for a few years, the dev news is back and better than ever!

Podcasts

• How to Avoid the Quiet Firing Trend with Dr. Tim Elmore (The EntreLeadership Podcast) - An interesting episode about those rebranded trends and how to avoid them.
• Do I stay or do I go? - Tech career advice with Mekka Williams (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - There is I believe a generation behavior here, but who's right? Interesting discussion.
• Les exoplanètes à portée d’œil avec le futur télescope James Webb (Fascinant!) - The star is at million of light years, but they managed to say what gaz is present in the atmosphere. Incredebile!
• Hacking APIs with Dana Epp (.NET Rocks!) - While listening to this episode I felt like I needed to put on the hood of my hoodie, take my laptop and go to a dark corner. Very interesting episode.

Miscellaneous

• DasBlog support for WebFinger (Mark Downie) - Interested to integrate your domain to a mastodon server? This post is for you

• Microsoft is adding a quick launcher to PowerToys for easy access to the best Windows utilities (Sofia Wyciślik-Wilson) - Who doesn't like new toys?

~frank

Reading Notes #533

Good Monday!

It's time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles and blog posts, that caught my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

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

Cloud

• Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions in Public Preview (Renato Losio) - This is interesting this way you could beneficiate the trigger and keep the code outside of the database.

Programming

• Install Terminal App Themes in Windows 11 (Sofia Sondh) - Simple and we have the choice, great!

• My Top 10 Visual Studio Code Extensions for 2022 (John Kilmister) - Oh wow, there were a few gems I didn't know in this post. Great list.

• Ref vs Out C#: Which is the Better Choice when? (Byte Hide) - A simple post that lists the differences between those two keywords.

• Web Security 101 - Part 1: Secrets (Abbey Perini) - This is a nice post that lists places or methods to save our secrets and explains the pro and cons of each.

• Fluent Insights EP4: Slots (Paul Gildea) - The new episode of Fluent UI Insights is out. This one talks about slots, JSX children, and triggers.

Miscellaneous

• 10 SEO Tips For Technical Writers And Software Developers (Mahesh Chand) - A great post about SEO and why we should care.

~Enjoy!

Reading Notes #532

Good Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that caught my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

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

Cloud

• Setup the Auto-shutdown on VM using Bicep template (Massimo Bonanni) - VMs are so useful. One of the best ways to save money is to turn them off when you are not using them. Part 6 about Bicep explains how to do it in your IaC script.

• What is Azure Container Registry? (MakendranG) - A quick intro on Azure Registry and how to create one.

Programming

• Authorization and Authentication in Minimal APIs (Assis Zang) - This is a great tutorial...Time to secure our APIs

• Converting Markdown to DOCX and PDF in C# (Bjoern Meyer|) - Interesting post with all the code required to do this project.Shorter than I thought.

• How to publish .NET 7 apps directly to Docker (Dennis Frühauff) - Pretty cool stuff. I need to try it.

• Make a Web Reporting App Using a Blazor Reporting Tool & Microservices | ActiveReports.NET (Sergey Abakumoff) - Report services... That brings memories! I like the idea of using Blazor as the container to display the reports.

• The dangers and gotchas of using scoped services in OptionsBuilder (Andrew Lock) - A very complete post that shares all you need to know about scopes.

Miscellaneous

• My IoT problem: the garage door opener : Algorithms for the masses - julian m bucknall (Julian M Bucknall) - Technology! Marvelous, when it works...

~frank

Reading Notes #531

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Azure SDK Release (November 2022) - Azure SDK Blog (Azure SDK team) - New release with tons of updates.

Programming

• .NET 7 Web API CRUD Using Entity Framework Core (Naveen Bommidi) - This is a good tutorial to build our first simple API with EF...and it uses the brand new .NET 7.0

• 7 Reasons for Startups to Choose ASP.NET Over Node.js (Michael Shpilt) - I believe the most crucial point is to use a language that your team is comfortable with. If everyone already masters Node, then continue with that. If you are starting a new team or need specific performance or requirements that Node doesn't provide then, of course, .NET must be considered.

• 7 common mistakes new contributors make in Open Source Software - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 (Jessica Wilkins) - Good health check of our practices when collaborating on an open-source project.

• Minimal API validation with ASP.NET 7.0 Endpoint Filters - Ben Foster (Ben Foster) - That minimalist API can really make us save some keystrokes

• Multi-repository Support Released! - Visual Studio Blog (Jessie Houghton) - That's very good news and so many developers will be happy about it.

• .NET Interactive Notebooks is now Polyglot Notebooks! - .NET Blog (Claudia Regio) - A new name, the same great tool with a bright future.

~frank

Reading Notes #530

Good Monday!

It's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. Are you done watching all the videos from .NET Conf and GitHub Universe? I know I don't...

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

Cloud

• The cloud isn't the issue, you're just using it wrong (Jeremy Daly) - Great post about, unfortunately still, a controversial topic: the cloud!

Programming

• Fundamental ASP.Net Minimal API Integration Tests (Peter Ritchie) - This post is the perfect high overview to get started with testing.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit v8.1.0 Preview 1 (Sergio Pedri) - So many updates. Have an overview in this post.

• Welcome to C# 11 (Mads Torgersen) - This blog is the perfect appetizer to get us excited to learn more. C# 11 seems to be a great new version.

• What's New for ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 7 (David Ramel) - So many goodies in this update from both .Net 7 sides and Blazor. This post overview most of them.

• What's new in Orleans 7.0 (Brady Gaster) - Simplified, faster, and so much more learn all the news about Orleans 7 in this post, and join them on Discord.

• What’s new with Codespaces from GitHub Universe 2022 (Nik Molnar) - I'm a big fan of codespace and DevContainer. I was delighted to learn about the global availability and the free monthly hours. This makes it a must for many open-source projects.

Miscellaneous

• How Link Building Can Help You Grow Your Blog (Sam Bowman) - Are links and backlinks still a good practice in the world of SEO? This post answer this question in detail.

• Why You Should Make Time for a Seasonal Cleanup (Suzanne Scacca ) - It takes a little bit of time, but I guess it is worth it since we and our devices will run more efficiently.

~frank

Reading Notes #529

Good Monday (standard time for many :) ),

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

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) – November 2022 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - New beta version released with java and bicep updates...Great work.

• Azure SQL Database Overview (Daniel Calbimonte ) - This post is a great one to get started on Azure SQL Database. It answers many of the initial questions and provides the answers.

• Build a globally resilient architecture with Azure Load Balancer | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Mahip Deora) - An azure load balancer is definitely a powerful tool when your customers aren't centralized. This post provides a nice overview.

Programming

• Create your .NET portfolio in the .NET Conf student zone (Katie Savage) - The .NET Conf conference is next Tuesday (Nov. 8) and students have a very special place. Have a look!

• How to Implement Decentralized Storage Using Docker Extensions - Docker (Marton Elek) - Second and last part of a series discussing about the storage with docker.

• Performance improvements in ASP.NET Core 7 (Brennan Conroy) - It's both impressive and inspiring to see so much improvement in performance in that next version.

• [Improving Your Desktop Applications—ToolTips in .NET MAUI](Leomaris Reyes ) (https://www.telerik.com/blogs/improving-desktop-applications-tooltips-dotnet-maui?utm_source=readingnotes) - Tooltips are now here!

• Personalize a static site based on a previous site referral (Salma Alam-Naylor) - This is a cool tutorial that explains how to leverage Netlify edge code to change a static website page base on where the visitor came from.

Miscellaneous

• Bicep for Real Site Launched (Sam Cogan) - Wonderful! The tutorial a was waiting for and it will be good because it's done by Sam.

~frank

Reading Notes #528

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Roadmap update (Gloridel Morales) - Nice update for Azure DevOps, and more details for us.

• Azure Service Bus Performance - Azure SDK Blog (Paul Michaels) - A nice post that explores the edge of the service Bus services in terms of speed and size of the messages. It could have a big impact on your design, depending on your business scenarios.

• Use Power Automate to Retrieve Data from an Azure Function for Reporting – Code with Dan Blog (Dan Wahlin) - This post teaches how to build a cool tool without code.

Podcast

• 42. Programming languages; from .NET and C# to JavaScript, from Python to Rust, and even Rockstar - with Dylan Beattie (Betatalks the podcast) - Another great episode of Betatalks the podcast about that passion burning inside that make people do so many wonderful things.
• Celebrating the Second Edition of Code with Charles Petzold (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - What an amazing interview with the author of the book Code. I heard so much about this book, and now with this new edition++, I think I should put it on my reading list.
• Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara (A Bit of Optimism) - Whaaat?! This is such a great idea! I need to read that book and go to that restaurant. I love the idea.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing the Docker+Wasm Technical Preview (Michael Irwin) - It seems like a good mix. I really need to try it out.

• Windows Terminal is now the Default in Windows 11 - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Woot Woot! Great work for all these people. Windows terminal is a great project well though. Learn more about its journey in this post.

~frank

Reading Notes #527

Good Monday, 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!

Programming

• Blazor WASM Custom 404 Page on GH Pages (Justin Yoo) - This is a lovely double tutorial. Learn first how to write a 404 not found page in Blazor then learn how to use custom 404 when using GitHub as a hosting platform.

• 9 Tips for Containerizing Your Node.js Application - Docker (Ajeet Singh Raina, Johan Giraldo) - A nice list of smart tips.

• Cake - Cake v2.3.0 released (Mattias Karlsson) - Nice to see more features available in Cake. You can do complex and advanced stuff now.

• Docker and WebAssembly together at Wasm Day NA 2022 (Chris Crone) - Wasm + Docker...That seems promising...

• I changed my mind about writing new JavaScript frameworks (Salma Alam-Naylor) - JavaScript is its own universe with so many options and variations. Looking forward to seeing the WTF tool and learning more about how she builds it.

• Introducing Spectre.Console (Steve Smith) - It's for sure a library that I will try. Console applications are a very useful tool so anything that can speed up the creation process is a must.

• Learn how to improve your ASP.NET Core controllers with these principles - dateo-software (Dennis Frühauff) - A very interesting post to learn more about how to improve our code.

• Make The First Letter of a String Upper Case in C# - Code Maze (Code Maze) - I didn't even know the aspan method...Do you? Nice performance / fine-tuning post.

Podcasts

• HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal (Screaming in the Cloud) - MySQL database as a service on Oracle cloud, this sounds interesting and looks like the price is too.

• Developing .NET on AWS with Isaac Levin (.NET Rocks!) - Yes!! Of course, .NET is everywhere but now we hear about it! A captivating episode where Isaac makes a quick tour of all the possibilities for .Net developers on ASW.

• 137. Anti-Time Management with Richie Norton (Part 1)-id2920271-id538368995) (The Greg McKeown Podcast) - I was not sure what to expect from "Anti-Time Management" and I like what I heard. looking forward to listening to part two.
• Rob Richardson: Web Services in .NET 6 - Episode 213 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - What a great episode covering so much! Expect to learn more about how things work like the authentification and authorization.

~Frank

Reading Notes #526

Good Monday, 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

• Azure Functions – 2022 update (Eamon O'Reilly) - So great to have news from the Azure Function team. Of course, I'm pretty happy about v4 isolated and the .NET updates but there is so much more.

• Introducing the Azure Static Website Component (Sean Holung) - This is a nice tutorial that shows how to deploy a static web app using Pulumi.

Programming

• How to get ready for Hacktoberfest 2022 (Michelle Mannering ) - Oh boy, we are already mid-October and I just realized that... Did you jump on?

• ASP.NET Core - Why async await is useful (Steven Giesel) - Ah ha! Learn the real reason... A nice quick post that explains it all.

• DevContainers for Azure and .NET (Justin Yoo) - Dev Containers are so great. This post explains how they work, and lists many components to customize them. Here it's about .NET but all languages are supported.

• How to generate header images for blogs and ASP.NET Core (Thomas Ardal) - Nice tools to simply create custom images.

Podcast

• Securing Containers, First Steps in Docker and Kubernetes (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Because security is an important topic, this episode is worth your time.

• C64 OS - A new operating system for the Commodore 64 with Gregory Naçu (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A new OS for the old C64? Yes, and it's open source... How cool is that?!

Miscellaneous

• Should we hire junior developer advocates? (Rizèl Scarlett) - Great post, I was already on the yes team but it is worth reading in you are not sure.

~Frank

Reading Notes #525

Usually, it's on Monday, I know, but a technical issue prevented me to publish faster this week... 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Cost Management updates—September 2022 (Michael Flanakin) - Nice update about the mobile app and the docs.

Programming

• Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions (By Liam Mooney) - A nice tutorial that helps getting started building your first GitHub actions.

• Improve your pipeline maintainability with test categories in xUnit (Dennis Frühauff) - A nice post that describes two strategies about unit tests in our CI-CD.

• Bring Continuous Integration to Your Laptop With the Drone CI Docker Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Kamesh Sampath) - This CI-CD container looks very interesting. I will keep an eye on it but may wait until it shows up in the marketplace, or that I need it.

• How to Use the Alpine Docker Official Image (Tyler Charboneau) - Alpine is a must to know for all dev and DevOps people (and probably many more}. This post is perfect for getting you started.

Podcast

• 40. The future of Azure services & the benefits of being bilingual in Tech - with Frank Boucher (Betatalks the podcast) - Shameless plug for a podcast episode where I was the guest. We talk about why content in other languages than English is important and so much more.

• Mark Miller: The Science of Great UI in Software - Episode 212 (Azure DevOps Podcast) -

• Why the C64 Demoscene matters with Clay Token's Bilgem Çakır (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Scott has been sharing content about the Commodore 64 these days and that make me wanna jump back as it was my first computer... But this time I would understand English without having to search for each word in a dictionary.

Miscellaneous

• Systemd support is now available in WSL! - Windows Command Line (Craig Loewen) - Nice WSL is getting better.

~Frank