Reading Notes #146

Suggestion of the week

• Day 2: Examining the Solution Structure (James Chambers) - Mandatory post to any new (or less new) web developers, learn what's in an MVC project.

Cloud

• Trying Redis Caching as a Service on Windows Azure (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains how easy it is to use Redis cache everywhere.
  
• ASP.NET Scalability: the Good, the Bad and the Hype (Dino Esposito) - Excellent post that explains everything we should know about the famous buzz word scaling.

Programming

• Day 0: Bootstrapping Mvc for the Next 30 Days (James Chambers) - Very promising series. Day 1, Day 3 , Day 4 , Day 5, Day 6
  
• Adventures in Custom Testing Infrastructure - This is an interesting post about building a unit test tool.
  
• Glimpse 1.8.6 released (Anthony van der Hoorn) - Nice update for glimpse.
  
• How to Automate IIS 7 Configuration with .NET -- Visual Studio Magazine (Patrick Steele) - This post is a incredibly well done tutorial that explains how to create a tool to automate configurations, exploiting the capabilities of the library Microsoft.Web.Administration.

Architecture

• The Onion & The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ (The Open Group Blog) - This post expains the analogy between an onion and a business process and is limits.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Tough Questions You Should Ask Your Team Today BY Paul B. Brown  @FromPaulBBrown (Paul B. Brown) - Really interesting thoughs about how to make your company evolve.
  
• Sometimes Clothes Make the Presentation BY Steve Cody  @RepManCody (Steve Cody) - Interesting point of view about cloths...

~Frank

Reading Notes #145

Suggestion of the week

• Thinking About Strings, Quotes, Tokens, And Tildes In Less CSS - Less CSS seams really interesting. Next web projects, I seriously think use it.

Cloud

• Lessons Learned – On #Azure, Log Everything!s (Alexandre Briseboi) - Great post about how we should use the Event Trace Windows (ETW) to do our logs.
• Using Time-based Partition Keys in #Azure Table Storage (Alexandre Briseboi) - Nice tips about how saving our logs in Azure.
• How to get notifications from a Windows Azure website - Wow, this is truly amazing and really easy to do.

Programming

• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.
• PowerShell Tools - v0.8.0 - Now with REPL! - Time to get or update this great add-ons in our Visual Studio.
• Thinktecture.IdentityManager as a replacement for the ASP.NET WebSite Administration tool (Scott Hanselman) - This post introduces a great project to manage our memberships in our Asp.Net projects through a nice interface.

Mobile

• Windows First: A New Strategy for Mobile Development and Beyond - Programming multi platform application is becoming much easier. This post explains some of your options.

Architecture

• The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ Starts to Take Shape (The Open Group Blog) - This post talks about an interesting white paper. What’s good in it and why we should read it. This new 3.0 platform look very promising.

Miscellaneous

• How to use an Xbox One controller on your Windows PC (Scott Hanselman) - Really.?! That simple? That’s great!
• Windows Live Writer going Open Source? - This post explains why our help is needed in order to give a future to Windows Live Writer.

Reading Notes #144

 

Programming

• Automate Backups using PowerShell  - Great post that explains how to do backups, but also shows how powerful is PS scripts.
  
• How To Simplify Asynchronous Programming with Await and Async – Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - Good tutorial that explains clearly how to use Async in a Windows Form context.
  
• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.

Miscellaneous

• Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 8.1 (Scott Hanselman) - Useful post to refresh our memory. I mean the memory in our head… and gain disk space in your PC.
  
• Introducing OneNote Clipper for Chrome and Springpad to OneNote migration tool (blogs.office.com) - Since a year now, I’m a big user of OneNote. Why only one year? Because, I never try it before. Since I started, I just use it more and more… I’m really happy about the new chrome extension.

Reading Notes #143

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure and Open Source Power Grid Computing - A nice article about an integration solution using JavaScript (with different components) and the cloud.
• How do you build features on #Azure? - Nice post that describes a real job situation and a really good team spirit.
• AppVeyor - A good continuous integration system is a joy to behold - (Scott Hanselman) - Wonderful post that gives us a taste of what VenyorApp is capable of.

Programming

• Managing NuGet packages dependencies with the Package Visualizer tool (Pascal Laurin) - Wow what a useful tool. I just have a very painful moment upgrading an application. Using this tool could have saved me a lot of troubles. Looking forward to see the other tools that his talking about.
• Comparing LINQ with Stored Procedure - Quick tips to help us to decide if we pick linq or sproc when starting a new project.

Miscellaneous

• What fuels your development efforts? - Hey, it looks like you just level up brother and got +1 of wisdom…

Note: Less reading this week, I spent some time re-installing my PC. Thanks to boxstarter.org, part of it was really easy.

~Frank

Reading Notes #142

Suggestion of the week

• How To Refactor for Dependency Injection -- Visual Studio Magazine (Ondrej Balas) - I really liked this post. Seriously, I'll be referring to it each time someone will be asking why we should use IoC.

Programming

• Web Performance Optimization is Simple - Can Your Developers Execute? (love2dev.com) - Nice post that explained why knowing more than a hello word is important.
  
• Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 - Ah. Great.
  
• The Magic of using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET 4.5 plus an important gotcha (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains very clearly how we should do our async call in a web app.
  
• Using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET MVC 4 - Great tutorial that covers everything we need to know about async in a web application context.
  
• Test Plan and Test Suite Customization with TFS2013 Update3 (Manoj Bableshwar) - Visual studio is already to update 3! This post shows one of the new feature that was the most requested by users.
  
• Becoming SOLID in C# - Really interesting article that encoureage us to know more about SOLID principles in C#.
  
• Change Risk Anti-Patterns & Code Complexity - This post explains an interesting method to calculate the risk of your code when facing changes.

Mobile

• Xamarin.Forms - Write Once, Run Everywhere, AND Be Native? (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting post that proved how amazing Xamarin is becoming.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today - A really interesting article that explains an concept in a simple way.
  
• Waterfall to Agile (Andy Watson, B. Clay Shannon JD Meier) - I likethis post because it shows strong images to explains the difference between waterfall and agile.
  
• Self-Improvement In Agile Teams - Interesting post about how we should think when we feel to do something more, in an agile team.