Reading Notes #454

Cloud

• .NET 5 support on Azure Functions (Anthony Chu ) - Great news we cant start playing with the preview today

• Remote Debugging for Azure Functions Can Be a Breeze (Simon Timms) - A nice post that gives a little bit of history and architecture information, before showing how to use the product named Ozcode for debugging.

Programming

• Best 5 Tools for Node.js Monitoring (Olivia Diaz) - As a new Node.js developer I am pretty pleased to see all these tools. All bookmarked.

• How to MongoDB in C# - Part 1 (Rami Honig) - A really great tutorial with tons of code and examples to learn how to use MongoDB.

• New from Universe 2020: Dark mode, GitHub Sponsors for companies, and more (Shanku Niyogi) - Don't miss the keynote (it's available on demand), it's 15 mins highlighting some pretty cool new features... Or this post.

• You should be customizing your PowerShell Prompt with PSReadLine (Scott Hanselman) - Wanna customized your prompt? This post contains references to all previous tweaking posts and goes into detail about PsReadline.

Podcast

• PI 450: Entrepreneur Growth, Self-Discovery, and Pivoting in Tough Times (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Very inspiring women that definitely knows how to "bounce" when things don't go how planned.

• Optimizing for Happiness with Alfonso Cabrera (Screaming in the Cloud) - Great episode all DevOps related

Books

Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It 

(Adam Savage) 

- I really liked this book. In fact, As I was reading the first chapter I was "earing" Adam's voice. So instead of creating that voice in my head I bought the audiobook and let Adam himself tells me his story. This is the best book I listen to this year. It was inspiring and empowering.

Reading Notes #372

Suggestion of the week

• How Azure Resource Graph is gonna change the way you search and script (Stephane Lapointe) - Whaat?! 15x faster! If you are not using Azure graph yet... This post is for you. If you do use graph, still read that you may learn a few tricks. In short, it's a mandatory read for anyone using Azure.

Cloud

• Azure Blueprints: ISO27001 Shared Services (Eric Leonard) - This excellent second post of a series goes dipper and shares details about one specific blueprint template. And explains some pitfall to avoid.
• Azure Blueprints: Intro (Eric Leonard) - If you don't know Blueprint this post is an excellent first contact.
• Connecting to Azure Redis Cache with Docker (Dominique St-Amand) - Great tutorial that explains every step to build a safe environment leveraging Docker.
• Different Ways to Parse Http Request Data in Http-triggered Azure Functions ( Jason Roberts ) - How many ways do you think we can get our values from inside an Azure Function? This post passes them all in a review.

Programming

• Getting Started with .NET Core and Docker and the Microsoft Container Registry (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that shows a few examples of how containers could be used with .Net Core at different stages of your application development.
• Building a Visual Studio Code Extension (Brian Clark) - Great post that explains in details the different type of extension and how to build them.
• Securing ASP.NET Core in Docker (Muhammad Rehan Saeed) - A nice little trick to get more secure with our containers.

Miscellaneous

• Continuous database deployments with Azure DevOps (John Miner) - This nice tutorial explains what's in Azure DevOps and how to use it to maintain a database with it. Very complete article.
• F7 is the greatest PowerShell hotkey that no one uses any more. We must fix this. (Scott Hanselman) - A Funny, and true little story about one Key.How to convert an IMG file to an standard ISO easily with Linux on Windows 10 (null) - Del
• Was MongoDB Ever the Right Choice? (Justin Etheredge) - Nice post that put in perspective what's NoSql and why MondoDB could or not be a good solution for our project.

Reading Notes #364

Cloud

• Azure Automation of A-to-Z, Part I (dbakevlar)
  - This is a great post very instructive, that explains how and why we should structure our scripts.
• Azure Policies (Gregor Suttie) - One of the best tools to he
  lp us with the governance in Azure is the policies. This post is a nice introduction to how it could help.
• Setting Up Azure Key Vault w
  ith an Azure Website (Web API) (Luis Valencia) - This is the second post of a very instructive series, and this time it focuses on Keyvault.

Programming

• Debug your live apps running in Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes (Visual Studio Blog) - Nice addition to the rem
  ote debugger experience
• How to set up Gatsby and Auth0 for easy authentication on your next project -
  A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller ) - Cool post that shows how to implement an auth authentification within a static website.
• Top 5 Open Source Features i
  n Azure Pipelines (Edward Thomson) - Learn why the Azure DevOps Pipelines are so great in this post about the evolution of an opensource
  project.

Miscellaneous

• A Few Coding Patterns with the MongoDB C# API (Julie Lerman
  ) - An instructive post about how to use MongoDB.
• If You Think “Digital Transformation” is About Kubernet
  es, You’re Wrong (Richard Seroter,) - Interesting thoughts, looking forward to read what's next.
• Why Containers are a Game Changer for Software Development (Mike Hadlow) - Very interesting
  post about containers and the raise of gitOps.

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Reading Notes #359

Cloud

• GitLab 11.6 Supports Serverless Function Deployment (Sergio De Simone) - Interesting post that introduces a CI/CD tool that works really well with the serverless offering from all providers.
• How to migrate from AzureRM to Az in Azure PowerShell (Madeleine Clayton) - A mandatory read to migrate without hiccups.
• Great News, Azure Developers! Microsoft is Simplifying Your Path to Certification! (Liberty Munson ) - That's excellent news!

Programming

• 11 Of the Best Scrum Tools to Increase Your Team’s Productivity (Ben Aston) - Nice list of great tools. I would add Azure DevOps to it.
• Background jobs in ASP.NET Core made easy with Hangfire (Matthew D. Groves) - This post helps us to be quickly set up with hangfire.
• How to Use a jQuery Progress Bar in Your Web App (Alberta Williams) - This post shows many different ways to use some progress bar as long as you have Kendo UI.
• Introduction to Bash Scripting: Iterative Statements Using Loops (Daniel Farina) - Great introduction tutorial to the fundamental loops. This time it's in bash... Yeah, if you didn't know, you probably need it.
• Quick Introduction to C# Span. (Doug Mair) - A nice new feature in C# that is absolutely not related to the span in Html that we know....aaah!
• Using Visual Studio Code to program Circuit Python with an AdaFruit NeoTrellis M4 (Scott Hanselman) - Very cool son-dad project post and how to use the tool we like.
• When You SHOULD Comment Your Code (Peter Kellner) - Commenting or not commenting... Should it be THE question?

Databases

• MongoDB on Windows in Minutes with Docker (Jeremy Likness) - This post is a fantastic setup tutorial, perfect to get started in a snap! Using docker so easy...

Miscellaneous

• Enjoy some DOS Games this Christmas with DOSBox (Scott Hanselman) - With DOSBox and Retropie... We should be good for the holidays... If you don't have a Raspberry Pie this post is perfect for you since it focuses on DOSBox.

Books

How to Be a Bawse A Guide to Conquering Life
Lilly Singh
Not only the message is strong, but the way she delivers it is awesome. Many times I laugh and nod of the head... Definitely a great book to read at the end of the year when resolution time is not far...









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Reading Notes #290

Cloud

• Artificial Intelligence tunes Azure SQL Databases (Veljko Vasic) - Very interesting article that shares a real-life situation where a Microsft Partner used SQL Auto tuning capability of SQL Database in Azure to optimize all his databases.
• Azure For Developers – Part 2: Your First App Service (Jesse Liberty) - Great new series that just started. It's a good point for beginners whom would like to have an overview.
• How Azure Security Center helps protect your servers with Web Application Firewall (Hayden Hainsworth) - Tools exist guys... They aren't perfect, but they will cover your ... for a good part. Take two minutes and have a look.

Programming

• A Comparison of Docker GUIs (Chris Ward) - This post surprises me by his very long list of graphical interfaces for Docker. I only knew the default one, but I'm now very tented to try other ones.
• Setting up Raspian and .NET Core 2.0 on a Raspberry Pi (Dave) - This post is packed with tons of little advice and tips that will save us time and energy.

Databases

• Building MEAN Apps with Cosmos DB - Part 1 (John Papa) - Pretty awesome series of little videos that explain step by step how to build the Mongo Express Angular Node (MEAN) application.
• First release candidate of SQL Server 2017 now available (SQL Server Team) - SQL server 2016 was such a big release, that it's nice to see that the 2017 version will also be packed.
• Tableau and Azure SQL DB, a match made in the cloud (Joseph Sack) - Interesting post that lists few best practices.

Miscellaneous

• 13 hours debugging a segmentation fault in .NET Core on Raspberry Pi and the solution was... (Scott Hanselman) - Aaaah, damn it. We all have those moments where nothing seems to make sense... Thanks for sharing Scott.
• Installing Visual Studio 2017 Made Easy (Mayur Tendulkar) - Pretty awesome tricks to install tons of Visual Studio without killing your Internet bandwidth.
• Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures (Scott Hanselman) - Pretty cool hack. I mean I knew those characters existed, but I didn't know they had a name, and that we had display options.

Reading Notes #240

Cloud

• Azure App Services - Using Azure App Services to Convert a Web Page to PDF - Great tutorial and even more because it’s useful.
  
• Connect to your on-premises data sources from Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - That’s a really useful connector.
  
• Everything you need to know about loading a free Let’s Encrypt certificate into an Azure website - Nice tutorial on how to create a certificate in Azure.
  
• New Application Insights metric widget for Visual Studio Team Services (Mike Gresley) - Cool another great tile to add in our VSTS project page.
  

Programming

• Simplifying Technical Presentations with Docker - Interesting idea, definitely something to keep in mind when I do my next presentation.

Data

• DocumentDB protocol support for MongoDB (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Woooo. That huge! We can now swap any mongodb for a documentdb and your tooling or app will continue to work.

Miscellaneous

• Automation Showdown: IFTTT vs Zapier vs Microsoft Flow - Interesting comparison of three power tools that don’t exactly target the same users but that are similar.
  
• Evernote is crippling their free service, here’s how to move to OneNote - Interesting to know, and the timing is good me, I was just asking myself he same question…
  
• Is your stuff backed up? Recovering from a hardware failure - A good backup plan is crucial, the drive my old server died recently, and it saved me a lot of pain.
  
• Microsoft shows how bad Chrome is for your laptop’s battery (Tom Warren) - Wow when a friend of mine shared me that post, I didn’t expect Edge to be that good. And with the new release that is bridging back add-ons… Does Microsoft just came back in the race to be the best web browser?!
  

Reading notes #183

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing Azure Service Fabric: Reducing Complexity in a Hyper-scale World (Mark Russinovich) - A very exiting news. I am looking forward to play with that Azure Service Fabric.

Cloud

• Think #Microservices - Very interesting post that explains why microservices are so promissing.
  
• BizTalk in Azure Infrastructure as a Service - Nice post that shares all kinds of scenario for BizTalk in an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) context.
  
• UPDATED for 2015: How to install the nodejs Ghost blog software on Azure Web Apps (and the Deploy to Azure Button) (Scott Hanselman) - It can be that easy, right? Well, it is!
  
• With Machine Learning, Amazon Wants to Multiply the Power of Big Data (Saroj Kar) - Amazon is joining the machine learning market. the future promise to be interesting.
  
• Tutorial: Using Ant and Jenkins to automate the deployment of Java projects from the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse - MS Open Tech (Martin Sawicki) - Very nice tutorial when java is your thing and Azureyour destination.
  
• Announcing General Availability of Azure Premium Storage - Good news, now we can get more performance from our storage.
  
• Azure PowerShell 101 - Managing the Cloud from the Command Line (Channel 9) (Scott Hanselman) - Great video that shows few tricks to get started with Azure powershell commands.

Programming

• Mobile app privacy insanity – we’re still failing massively at this - Interesting and scaring post about the lack of security in mobile apps.
  
• IoT: Do you really should have knowledge in electronics? (Sergiy Baydachnyy) - Interesting thoughts about how to get started.

Databases

• MongoDB vs. Azure DocumentDB - Interesting post that compares the new kid on the block with an older one.

Miscellaneous

• Windows 10 - The Fast Ring and BUILD 10061 (Scott Hanselman) - Nice video that shows us the evolution of the very processing windows 10.