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

Reading Notes #124

Suggestion of the week

• Windows Azure: Staging Publishing Support for Web Sites, Monitoring Improvements, Hyper-V Recovery Manager GA, and PCI Compliance (ScottGu) - Great update again this week, may of the new features will be very appreciated.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Websites Development Stacks Support (Mark_BrownMS) - Nice post about how Azure website manages config version with his different supported languages.
  
• Using the Same Client-Side User with Multiple Azure Mobile Services (Chris Risner) - This nice post explains what are our options to bridge a UserID across multiple mobile application.
  
• GUIDs VS. IDs on Windows Azure SQL Database - Nice post, where the author gives is answer to a timeless question.
  
• Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure” - Interesting talk that you can now download as text. However, the video is still available...

Programming

• Code First Goodies in Entity Framework 6 - Nice article that explains more in details some new features of EF 6.0.
  
• Comments should be sentences (About me) - Interesting point of view about how should be the comments and why.

Miscellaneous

• WTF is an Architect Anyway? - Interesting thoughts about the definition of the role architect.
  
• How Do I Get Things Done? New Pluralsight Course Reveals All My Secrets - Learn the best tips from a real Jedi.
  
• 5 Myths that Can Ruin Project Management - Interesting post that uncovers some myths in project management.
  
• 30 Ways To Leave Google Apps Behind (Ciara Byrne) - Great post not because I agree or disagree with the title idea, but because it presents a lot of great applications.

Reading Notes #123

Suggestion of the week

• Scott Hanselman's 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows (Scott Hanselman) - A post to read, and bookmark. I always find awesome tool that I didn't know.
  
• Introducing Visual Studio Online - This post is a lot more than only an introduction. It explains all the options we will encounter to start our first project, but it also describes how to use it, build with a CI, test, monitor, etc.

Cloud

• A new year's present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure (Maarten Balliauw) - Really interesting tools that provide a lot of useful information. I need to try this.
  
• Quick ways to edit your files hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), other than re-deploying - Nice quick tips that can save you a lot of time... and troubles.
  
• Do you serve your Azure Web Site hot or cold? - Useful use for the scheduler to improve website performance.
  
• New Windows Azure Network Security Whitepaper (Ashwin Palekar) - This is the post to improve your knowledge about network security, since it references the windows Azure white paper on the topic.
  
• Cloud Cover Show - Episode 125: Getting started with Application Insights for Visual Studio Online - Really great video. If you don't have time to read the MSDN Mag article or to get a better of the Online experience, this is the video.

Programming

• Composite Pattern: Handling child node collections - Interesting code solution. To read a second time.
  
• Temporary is The New Permanent - Interesting point of view about caring about our code.
  
• The Quality of Code (Paul W. Homer) - One of the best posts I read about this topic since a long time. It explains very well how easy it is to lose the focus.
  
• TypeScript: A New Language for .NET and JavaScript Developers - Nice introduction and quick overview of TypeScript.
  
• Prefixing ID columns with the table name in Entity Framework - See a time saving tips in this post to rename all ID property of your datamodel.

You can find out more about these conventions in the blog post Custom Code First Conventions (EF6 onwards)

Architecture

• How to Become a Software Architect - Interesting list.

Miscellaneous

• Finding a low-memory browser (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting information, and a simple but useful PowerShell script to get the info.
  
• What blogging was - Interesting thoughts about what blog became.

Reading Notes #122

Cloud

• Download the Windows Azure Training Kit (Rob Margel) - Good news, It had been long since the last update.
  
• Notification, New Dashboard, Another Check - Nice update in the AWS dashboard..
  
• Release unused space from your Windows Azure Virtual Hard Disks to reduce their billable size - A post to read. How you could save money really easily.

Programming

• Getting started with Node.js development in Visual Studio (Dhananjay kumar) - Excellent post to get started with the new node.js feature of Visual Studio.
  
• Entity Framework 6: The Ninja Edition (Julie Lerman) - Really great article about how Entity framework works and the plan about it's future.

Architecture

• SOLID Architecture principles using simple C# examples (Shivprasad koirala) - Nice post. The first time I eared about SOLID was at //Build 2013. 8nteresting concept.