Reading Notes #141

Suggestion of the week

• Moving to Microsoft Azure (Filip Ekberg) - Another story about a blog migration on Azure. It's always interesting to learn what kind of trouble the people got while doing that.

Cloud

• Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler (Maarten Balliauw ) - Not only this post explains how to optimize our calls to blob storage, but it means that MyGet is a lot faster!
  
• Visual Studio Online Update – May 20th (Brian Harry MS) - Heads up about the last update on Visual Studio Online and what's coming next. BTW try it's very nice.
  
• Puppet Module Updates to Better Manage Microsoft Azure Resources (Ross Gardler) - Quick post that introduced a new featured of Azure that look incredibly powerful.

Programming

• All ASP.NET MVC Forms Need To Include Html.AntiForgeryToken() For Security (Peter Kellner) - This post is a nice quick explanation of an important security feature in Asp.net Mvc.
  
• From Requirements to Deployment: The Modern SW Developer using TFS (Tom Walker Jonathan Rozenblit) - Nice video.
  
• Bloggers: Know when to use a JPG and when to use a PNG and always Squish them both (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - This post contains useful tools to compress the images inside your posts, and some nice tips for the format selection.
  
• NuGet Package of the Week: ImageProcessor - lightweight image manipulation in C# (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - Another useful tool library to edit our images in our code.
  
• Setting up an Internal PowerShellGet Repository (Kris Bash, Roman Kuzmin, Peter Kriegel) - This post introduced a nuget for PowerShell packages, and how to install our private repository. Nice!
  
• The Future of .NET on the Server: ASP.NET vNext content and videos from TechEd 2014 (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - This post suggested to two videos presented at TechEd about vNext. If you are curious about what is coming next in .Net world it's a must.
  
• Indigo Studio from a Developer Perspective - I was also skeptical, the first-time someone talked me about Indigo. However, the best way to make your idea about something is to try it...

Mobile

• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone–Adding Assertions (Lori Lalonde) - This post is the third of a great series on how to test the UI of a phone application.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today - Really interesting article that explains important concepts in a simple way to understand.

Reading Notes #140

 

Suggestion of the week

• Azure: VM Security Extensions, ExpressRoute GA, Reserved IPs, Internal Load Balancing, Multi Site-to-Site VPNs, Storage Import/Export GA, New SMB File Service, API Management, Hybrid Connection Service, Redis Cache, Remote Apps and more… (Scott Guthrie) - So many new great features that were expected since a long time.

 

Cloud

• Virtual Machines Best Practices: Single VMs, Temporary Storage and Uploaded Disks (Drew McDaniel) - Nice tips to improve vm’s users experience.
  
• Using OneNote API to count degustated beers - This short post describes a real and interesting project using OneNote, and how easy it looks!

Programming

• Tips to improve Entity Framework Performance (rahulgbhatia) - This post gives nice and simple tips to optimize our Linq to entities queries.
  
• Performance Considerations for EF5 - If you are doing or planning to do a project with Entity Framework, this white paper really worth the reading.

~Frank

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 #138

Suggestion of the week

• Logging with the .NET backend for Azure Mobile Services (Carlos Figueira) - Great post that optimizes a logger by adding layers over layers of customization at every paragraph.

Cloud

• Azure: 99.95% SQL Database SLA, 500 GB DB Size, Improved Performance Self-Service Restore, and Business Continuity - A database for 5$ / Month! That's nice. This post explained all the new features around databases.

Programming

• Getting Started on the Roslyn Journey (Erik Dietrich) - This post announced an interesting series where we should get started with Roslyn.
  
• "It's just a software issue"- Edge.js brings Node and .NET together on three platforms (Scott Hanselman) - Great project that could be very useful in many different situations.

Mobile

• The Full Story of Featured and Spotlighted Apps on Windows Phone (Sébastien Lachance) - Interesting post to prepare the launch of our next mobile application.
  
• Build Some Ears on Your App and then Listen! (Mark B Schramm) - This post that listed the best practices about how we should take care of our apps once they are live.

~Frank