Reading Notes #48

Cloud

• Windows Azure Start-up Tasks Part 1 - First of a series this nice post explain the basics of start-up task when deploying in Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure Start-up Tasks Part 2 - Great post that gives a lot of information on Azure start-up tasks: environment variables, useful xPath query, important tips that will save you a lot troubles.
• Windows Azure Myths - Nice post that demystify 5 important myths about Windows Azure.
• Cloud SLAs: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You - SLAs are an important topic. Here is a good post to have a better understanding of it. This post talk about SLAs in general so you will also need to get more info from your cloud provider.
• Amazon Attracts Windows and .NET Developers to the AWS Cloud (Saroj Kar) - Amazon is really pushing harder to be attractive for the .Net developer. That good news since it will give you more options ;)
• My CDN Progression - Great post about true life experience. This post will definitely help people, looking for a CDN, to take better decision or at least start their search with more wisdom.
• Debugging Windows Azure Web Role Application_Start() method in Global.asax.cs (Avkash Chauhan - MSFT) - Nice quick tips to reach break point in Application_Start().
• 5 Issues Cloud Computing Can’t Solve (Xath Cruz) - The cloud is good but not magic. Here are 5 frequent ideas where in fact the cloud (whoever is your provider) can’t help you.

Programming

• Automating Visual Studio 2010 builds and deployments with Nant.Builder (Iain Hunter) - Really interesting series. The steps are simple and well explained. In the next one deploy to Azure...
• [MONITORING] Les 10 raisons de développer son application en HTML5 (Web App) (Gamorlive) - If you agree with the fact that your user must be connected (like when looking your web site), then here are 10 reasons why you should do your new application in HTML5.
• Le Monkey Patching - I'm new to the idea of dynamic code, and I tend to use it to help me testing/ mocking. These posts illustrate how it could be very useful in other situation.
• Quick Status of Your Windows Azure Apps with PowerShell - Really nice script. Thanks Steve!

Miscellaneous

• I took Hanselman's advice and now look at me... - Nice post a thru story telling how by following Scott Handselman advice someone become more productive.
• Cool Tools: How to Find Free and Cheap Ebooks - Good references of tools to get eBooks and also to search them.

[…]Sources, InkMesh is the best search engine I have found for identifying if an author or a book is available in eBook form,[…]

 
~ Frank

Reading Notes #47

Cloud

• Is AWS or Windows Azure the Right Choice? It’s Not That Easy. - Really good question that compare AWS with Azure.
• Downloading Windows Azure Publish Settings (Subscription Configuration) file (Avkash Chauhan - MSFT) - Time saver quick tips to retrieve Azure Publish settings in one click.
• Avoiding cloud lock-in - Nice post that explain why it is important keep our application loosely couple. Or if we don't to know what we do.
• Corporate Filesharing with Security and Control - This is the perfect alternative for a super private "DropBox" and it is true that it make full of sense in a corporate perspective.
• WordPress on S3: run a beautiful website on Amazon S3 cloud storage (Artem Livshits) - Great initiative! This is a perfect example of a application that take the advantage of the cloud safe cheap and that will grow with your need.
• Comparing Windows Azure Blob Storage and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)–Summary (Gaurav) - Very long and exhaustive comparison between those 2 services. I didn't even know some features... Nice post.
• Episode 80 - Getting Started with SQL Azure Data Sync Preview (Channel 9) (Nick Harris Nathan Totten) - Really nice episode. I try the Azure Data Sync in one of my project (I should post something about it...) it is a very promising tool.
• Maarten Balliauw {blog} (maartenba) - Nice post about the changes that append now because of the cloud computing.
• Why You Need Compuware for Application Performance Monitoring - This looks like a very useful tool.
• Comparing Windows Azure Blob Storage and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)–Part I (Gaurav) - Amazing post that covers ALL features of both Windows and Amazon cloud service. This is the part 1 of a series and it focus on containers and buckets.
• CloudTip #13-What do you need to know to get started? (mbenkov) - Great post that presents all 9 screencasts of soup of nuts. If you like watching video to quickly get started, you will like this one.
• Comparing Windows Azure Blob Storage and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)–Part II (Gaurav) - Second part of a series, this one compares Azures blob storage to Amazon Simple storage. It covers all details even the different methods to upload and download files.
• Cloud Ninja Metering Block - Really promising project that provides tools to measuring a multi-tenants Azure solution. More to come.
• Windows Azure Service Bus EAI Doesn’t Support Multicast Messaging. Should It? - The Azure service bus EAI is still at a hurly stage right now, but Seroter is highlighting a good point... It should.
• An Introduction to Windows Azure (Part 2) - Really nice post part 2 of 2 this introduction post is focussing on available services in Windows Azure.
• Scott Guthrie on Cloud-Powered Revolutions (scottgu, Jonathan Rozenblit) - Really nice (and funny) introduction of Azure by the great Scott Gu. (1h video)

Programming

• An Introduction to NuGet - Nice post that explain quickly what is NuGet and witch tools are available.
• Why I Hate Unit Testing - What a nightmare! I'm not sure that this post will help the undecided to join the unit testing but this JusMock tool deserved a look.

"This is easy to do with Telerik JustMock. I wrote about using JustMock to get you started in From Legacy to Dependency Injection.
Steve Forte and Joel Semeniuk have a great presentation on this called The Agile Buffet Table."

• Automating Visual Studio 2010 builds and deployments with Nant.Builder (Iain Hunter) - Really interesting series. The steps are simple and well explained. In the next one deploy to Azure...

Miscellaneous

• A Super-Efficient Email Process (Peter) - Explain a simple method to be more productive and efficient with e-mail management.
• the Continuous Client (Joshua Topolsky) - So true, I'm looking for a continuous Twitter client for a long time now. I don't understand why this isn't in all application. Congratulation to Kindle for this! You can start reading on one device and continue to another one without effort.
• 9 Steps to Take When You Loathe Your Own Blog (Guest Blogger) - Having a blog is a lot work. Here are 9 tips to keep you inspired and proliferates.
• 5 Things to Ask Your Cloud Backup Services Provider - I'm a Mozy user and really happy with it. Of course this post is also a sales pitch but the questions are the good one and should be considered when selecting your backup solution. When did you do your last backup?
• 5 Steps To Choosing The Right Challenges (Brendon Burchard) - Nice post that give good tips to identify good challenges.

~Frank

Reading Notes #46

 

Cloud

• War in the Cloud ! (Pradeep) - Today few big players are fighting to get their part of the cake. This post try to found how could be the winner.
• Article: I’ve built a SaaS solution on Windows Azure: now, how do I know what to charge my customers? - Great idea. A tool to help monitoring our application.
• Preparation is key to a successful cloud deployment - This post gives some advice to prepare our cloud life
• 5 Reasons to Start Working with Windows Azure - Highlight some keys features of Windows Azure especially debugging tools.
• Automating Azure deployment with Windows PowerShell (adambird.com) - Quick intro and nice script to get started about using Azure PowerShell cmdlets to deploy.
• All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels) - Big announcement from AWS for the .Net community. Amazon is releasing is RDS for MSSQL and a tools kit for Visual Studio.
• Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution (Switch Mark Thiele) - Nice post that will help you to focus on the good things and ask you the good questions when planning your cloud adventure.
• Is AWS or Windows Azure the Right Choice? It’s Not That Easy. - Really good question that compare AWS with Azure.

 

Programming

• Ajax Control Toolkit May 2012 Release - Great! The timing is perfect. One day after this new release some project arrived and they need exactly this new version of the upload control... thanks!
• Request Filtering, URLScan With Windows Azure Web Role (Avkash Chauhan - MSFT) - Simple script for start-up task to install URLScan since it's not there by default with IIS7.
• Create a Continuous Client Using Portable Class Libraries - Very nice article. By following the realisation of an application to solve a real world problem, the author introduces the client portable library “cpl” that gives the opportunity to easily write a cross platform application.

“there is, as Joshua Topolsky puts it, “a missing link in our computing experience” (engt.co/9GVeKl). “

• The key to AddOrUpdate (Arthur Vickers) - While waiting for the next release of EF this post explain very clearly how to implement an extension method to help use in a more generic context when we want the same functionality of the DbSet.Find in a AddUpdateEntity method.
• Mocking Dependencies != IoC (or at least it doesn’t have to) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting tutorial that explains an alternative to mock without using dependency injection IoC by using the Lazy.

 

Integration

• Michael Stephenson - Tips on when not using BizTalk config file and reference on another post to more details.

"I wrote a blog post a few years ago around the options for where you could put configuration settings in BizTalk (Click here)."

 

Miscellaneous

• The Blog of Scott Hanselman - Interesting post here Scott explain how he did introduce Star Wars to is kids. I like the 20 minutes segment idea.
• The Myth of Informed Consent - I agree, how many times did you got a firewall or anti-virus popup asking to approve something that you really don't know about? That why we install them, so they should take the decision...
• The key to AddOrUpdate (Arthur Vickers) - While waiting for the next release of EF this post explain very clearly how to implement
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't make sense anymore (hanselman.com) - Really funny, if you are older than 30... So just for fun ask around to the junior people if they know about those techs.

~Frank

Reading Notes #45

Cloud

• 5 tips for surviving a cloud outage (Brandon Butler) - More focus in Amazon web services this post in fact is saying don't put all your eggs in the same basket.
• Say Hello to Windows Azure, The World’s Most Misunderstood Cloud (Cade Metz) - Azure is different. It represents the new Microsoft. This post relates two stories of companies that move from Amazon to Azure.

“Azure lets us focus on our product rather than focusing on how we need to scale the application”

• Windows Azure Storage for the ASP.NET Developer (Adam Hoffman) - What a nice post. Clear explanations, with great references and it come from a series.

“For a rich comparison of SQL Azure and Windows Azure Table storage, see Joseph Fultz’s MSDN Magazine article at: http://aka.ms/SQLAzureVsAzureTables.”

• Scale-First Approach to Database Design with Federations: Part 2 – Annotating and Deploying Schema for Federations (Cihan Biyikoglu) - Second part of a series about Azure SQL Federations, this post explain all the particularities of the database to know before deploying for a optimum results.
• Joining the dots in the cloud - Nice post about the new collection of cloud tools that will help you to connect services or applications together and the things you should be aware of.
• CloudDrive: Possible Data Loss when calling Create() or CreateIfNotExist() on existing drives - Hopefully the SDK 1.7 is coming soon and the "feature" will be fix. However this is a excellent workaround.
• Load Testing in cloud using Visual Studio (Vignesh C) - Good idea for a load test using Azure.

“This blog has three posts that give detailed explanation of how a test rig with Controller and Agents can be created in Windows Azure.”

• Networking in the Cloud–Understanding Windows Azure Traffic Manager - Great post to get started with the Azure Traffic Manager. Of course to master it you should do the lab, but this post will help to understand the high level concepts.
• Four Different Ways to Get Windows Azure Accounts and Services - I'm sure there one that fits you.
• Run the Azure worker role in elevated mode to register HttpListener - Nice workaround to be able to use Raven in an Azure worker role.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Start Here (Brian H. Prince) - Preface of the great learn Azure post series and introduce a contest.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 100 (Brian H. Prince) - First of a series that regroup a lot of information to get started on Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 200 (Brian H. Prince) - Great exercises about storage
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 300 (Brian H. Prince) - Third of a series, this post regroup advanced exercises reference (level 300) about the Azure connectivity options.
• Part I of III - How to access an Azure OAuth v2 ACS secured service with Java (mbutler01) - First post of series of three about how to use oAuth v2 with Java using ACS.

“There does not seem to be any good working OAUTH v2 examples for Java using ACS”

• Windows Azure App Scaling to Need (Grigori Melnik, Julian Dominguez) - Very nice video about Wasabi the Windows auto-scaling Application block. A must.
• How to Use Windows Azure for a Small Web Site (avsol) - Good tutorial that give a lot of tips on how you could do you setup for a small web site.

Programming

• Introducing Workspace Reloader - A Visual Studio AddIn to save your open files across project reloads - Nice post about a little Visual Studio Add-in that will keep your files open when the solution is re-loaded.
• Ruby tricks: Array syntax (chatgris) - Quick post quick tricks... now I looking forward the next time I will try it.
• Ajax Control Toolkit May 2012 Release - Great! The timing is perfect. One day after this new release some project arrived and they need exactly this new version of the upload control... thanks!

Miscellaneous

• Thinking The Wrong Things About E-Book Pricing - Interesting topic: How much should cost a e-book?
• Trust Me, I'm Lying (Jeff Atwood) - Interesting post. Why lying is necessary.
• SlideShare and LinkedIn sitting in a tree… (rashmi) - Great new for both SlideShare and LinkedIn... A perfect match.

~Frank