Reading Notes #548

The suggestion of the week

• GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience (Thomas Dohmke) - Wow! Very excited about this news. Copilot is way more than just a buzz. After using it for a while I really appreciate the suggestions it was making. Looking forward to trying that next release.

Cloud

• Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - A nice online event is coming up. I'm honored and excited to be part of the sneakers. Looking forward to it.

• General Availability: ASP. NET web app migration to Azure App Service using PowerShell Scripts - This a nice tool that can help so many with that first step.

Programming

• A first look at Blazor and .NET 8 (Damien Bowden) - The future of Blazor looks very promising and interesting in .NET 8

• Announcing Docker+Wasm Technical Preview 2 (Djordje Lukic) - This wasm+docker is making progress fast! I feel like it was yesterday when they announced the first bits.

• Secure your .NET cloud apps with rootless Linux Containers - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - In this post, the .NET teams explain their decisions ti make the images more secure. Safer containers are always better, right?

• Turn your database into an API in minutes with Data API builder for Azure Databases (Jasmine Greenaway) - A pretty cool open-source project that can definitely help.

Miscellaneous

• What’s different about these layoffs (Eira May) - It is a troubled period. how many of us were affected directly or indirectly.

~frank

My Ubuntu laptop finally works with my docking station!

I've been running Ubuntu on my personal laptop, a Dell Inspiron 13. I love it. It's slim, performant and I can code, play, read, stream without any difficulty. Yet when I try to use my bigger PC monitors by connecting my laptop to a docking station, I've had a lot of trouble. I've tried 2 docking stations, but none of them worked with Ubuntu. Some solutions found online suggest rebuilding my kernel, but I didn't want to do that, it felt too extreme for what should be trivial.

This post is about how I finally got my docking station to work with Ubuntu 22.04.

My current docking station is a Targus USB-C Docking Station and it works perfectly with other Windows devices. While doing some cleaning on my desk a logo catches my attention on the dock; the Displaylink logo. And that was the beginning of the end for the problem with that dock station.

After a quick search (aka Googling with DuckDuckGo) I found exactly what I was looking for on Synaptics web site. A solution for the older Linux versions! 

Following the instructions: How to install DisplayLink Software - Ubuntu, I was able to downloads the Synaptics Ubuntu Driver Download and install them in a few minutes. After a reboot... It worked!

I hope it will help others with the same problem. 

Reading Notes #547

It is 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, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

 If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Managing your Azure Cognitive Services Costs (Matt Eland) - Cost management is always a good idea. This post is part of a series of spring cleaning is not an exception.

• Uploading Large Blobs in Parallel with the Azure SDK (Mark Heath) - Wonderful! I tried recently to write a little POC of something like that but it did work as expected. Looking forward to digging into this code as I think I already see my mistake. Great post.

Programming

• Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing (Kin Lane) - This is an interesting post not about code but more about words, ideas, plans, and more.

• Adding Dependency Injection to a Console App in .Net 7 (Paul Michaels) - Short an simple the perfect answer to a how-to question.

• How to write your own cron Job scheduler in ASP.NET Core (like Quartz, Hangfire, ...) (Steven Giesel) - A really cool post that shows and explains how to build a simple background Service. I love those kind of projects as you learn so much doing them by yourself.

• PSReadLine 2.3.0-beta0 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - I'm a big fan of the Predictor, looking forward to trying this upgrade.

Miscellaneous

• How atomic Git commits dramatically increased my productivity - and will increase yours too (Samuel Faure) - A simple best practice to avoid pain later... I like it!

~ Frank