Reading Notes #705

This week’s collection features a mix of critical .NET lifecycle updates and practical strategies for optimizing your database interactions. These selected articles offer helpful insights into everything from edge computing deployments to the evolving landscape of AI in modern workflows.

AI

• AI Raised the Bar (And Now We're All Tired) (Golnaz) - It's so true! So much can be done quickly today. An interesting question is: how do we avoid burning out resources and tokens? How, as human we stay smart? After all, life is a marathon, not a sprint!

Cloud

• How to Deploy Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) – Bringing Azure to the Edge (Thomas Maurer) - This post shares many information about what is possible to deploy on edge devices. It's not a how-to, however.

Databases

• EF Core LINQ Querying: Filtering, Projections, and Performance (Nick Cosentino) - This is a great post to quickly learn key principles and immediately improve the performance of our interactions with the database when using EF Core.

• EF Core vs Dapper in .NET: When to Use Each (Nick Cosentino) - Great post for developers or architects planning a future project. Both tools are great, so the decision factor depends on the context.

• Optimizing PostgreSQL on Azure directly in Visual Studio Code (Jesse Sullivan) - Interesting new tools in VS Code and Azure for PostgreSQL users. Curious to learn more about that Azure HorizonDB.

DevOps

• WSL container is now available for public preview (Craig Loewen) - This is great news; this will help improve deployment as now people can have an environmental test in WSL.

Programming

• Creating Dual Use Windows GUI and Console Applications (Rick Strahl) - I never thought about that complexity, and you would think that in 2026 it would be much simpler. Good to know!

• SkiaSharp 4.0 is here: announcing the first stable release - .NET Blog (Matthew Leibowitz) - Learn more about SkiaSharp that run under things like .NET MAUI and UNO platform. This new release should improve performance a lot.

• .NET 8 and .NET 9 will reach End of Support on November 10, 2026 - .NET Blog (Rahul Bhandari) - Time flies; it's good to have a reminder. This post includes a helpful timetable and references to help you migrate.

Miscellaneous

• Evaluating performance and efficiency of the GitHub Copilot agentic harness across models and tasks (Shibani Basava & Carlos Castro) - This is a nice post to learn a little about benchmarks.

~frank

Reading Notes #492

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• General availability: Azure API Management updates in January 2022 (Azure API Management team) - Nice new update coming up our way.

• Rightsize to maximize your cloud investment with Microsoft Azure (Diana Gao) - A very nice post to help us save money when deploying our resources in Azure.

Programming

• 7 Features of Blazor That Make It an Outstanding Framework for Web Development (Nishani Dissanayake) - I already liked Blazor, but the more I learn about it the more I love it.

• Authentication in ASP .NET Core (Chris Noring) - This is a nice tutorial with code and very clear explanations.

• CRUD operations on PostgreSQL using C# and Npgsql (Davide Bellone) - This post is a very good tutorial about how to make a simple query with all the code and explanation required for a great start.

• How to get the optimal image size for web (Joel Hans) - So many options are possible. This post explains the impacts of different contexts and provides guidance on how we could improve, or what we should look at.

Podcasts

• Ximena Vengoechea On How To Hear What Really Matters (What's Essential) - Very interesting conversation. Ximena is the author of the book Listen Like You Mean It. Well... It's just get added to my to-read list.
• L'intuition... pas juste une affaire d'alimentation! (Grand écart) - It's in French but really interesting. I think now I understand the intuitive idea about nutrition and exercise... Now it makes sense.
• Languishing? Here’s How to Turn it Around (Modern Mentor) - There is a name for feeling "meh"! And there are also things we can do to feel better. Very captivating, and now I want to learn more about it.
• My True Crime Episode with David Mittelman (A Bit of Optimism) - When I saw the title of the episode I was a bit confused... True Crime? WHat's the connection? But it was fascinating, so much passion!
• 139: Cloud Strategy, Tactics, and Leadership with Andrew Wertkin (CloudSkills.fm) - So much information and great ideas about leadership and mentoring, I love it.

Miscellaneous

• Dual-screen gaming on Microsoft Surface Duo - Surface Duo Blog (Nguyen Thanh Tung) - This is an interesting post from an established game developer who shares how they thoughts adapting their games for a dual-screen.
• Microsoft PowerToys 0.55.0 gets three new utilities ( Kunal Chowdhury) - This new release is packed with so many fixes and improvements. And the thing that is even better is that community works!
• Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 Release - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Amazing post, yes we learn about the new features, but we also read about the learning and experimentation of this team and collaborators involvement. Great work.

~frank

Reading Notes #319

Cloud

• Azure Log Analytics ML: Using the evaluate operator with the app() or workspace() scope function (Iris Classon) - A nice blog post that shares some beat stuff to make our queries to work.
• Custom Vision service deployment on Azure with ARM template (Vivien Chevallier) - The perfect post to get started following the best practices.

Programming

• Setting up Application Insights took 10 minutes. It created two days of work for me. (Scott Hanselman) - Application Insights is really an incredible tool. A must-have in any online project... Not only the cloud one, just need to have internet access.
• Using Swagger to automatically generate the client code (Evgeny Zborovsky) - A nice tutorial that explains how to do cool stuff with swagger.

Databases

• Making Azure the best place for all your applications and data (Rohan Kumar) - A few great products that turn GA are announced in this post.

Miscellaneous

• Finding What's Changed in Your Code (Peter Vogel) - This post is like a big slice of wisdom cake...
• Follow Your Passion Is WRONG? (What About MONEY?) (John Sonmez) - Follow your passion or what I personally refer to "fun".It's very important.