Reading Notes #92

Suggestion of the week

• BizTalk Mapper Extensions UtilityPack v1.5 - New version available with 7 new functoids - Great utility Pack that will save us a lot of time, and it's free!

Cloud

• NoSQL Data in the Cloud with Windows Azure Tables - Really great article that explains all aspects the Azure Storage Table from the architecture to the querying.
  
• Cloud Cover Show - Episode 105 - General Availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service - Great show. I really liked the code presentation; it gives a lot of details.
  
• How To Find a Certificate in the Certificate Store - Nice helper, be sure to save this somewhere close.
  
• New Preview Features for Windows Azure Active Directory (TheRockyH) - This post gives more details about the new capabilities of Active Directory.
  
• Publishing from Dropbox to Windows Azure Web Sites (Kaushal Kumar Panday) - It couldn't be more clearly explained. A screenshot by step you will learn how to deploy a website on Azure with Dropbox as the repository.
  
• Building Windows Azure Cloud Services App with Web Role, Worker Role, Table Storage and Service Bus - Great tutorial that shows how to build a multi-tier application. The code is also available.
• Improvements to Virtual Networks, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and a new Ruby SDK (Scott Gu)- New features like Remote PowerShell, Linux SSH provisioning enhancements, and a new Ruby SDK to play with Azure Storage and Service Bus.

Programming

• 88% of spreadsheets have errors (Jeremy Olshan) - This post gives you suggestions to stay in the few spreadsheets that doesn't contains error.
  
• How to Write a Chrome App for your Website in 5 Minutes (Amit Agarwal) - Interesting post. Some testing or diagnostic tool could be useful for web developer team. It's 5 minutes wisely spent.
  
• Running Bash Commands From Ruby - Useful tips that all coder should now.
  
• Ruby Versions Demystified - Very interesting post that explains in one article all the differences between Ruby's components versions.
  
• Introducing: Practical JavaScript (Peter Vogel) - Nice post that describes quickly the evolution of JavaScript. This post could be the first of an interesting series about using JavaScript (and some framework) today in real projects.
  
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: How to run a two day Virtual Conference for $10 - Wow interesting project that combines a lots of really good stuff.

• Metaprogramming Fibonacci (Eno Compton) - A fun exercise with recursively in Ruby.

UX

• Magic Numbers in CSS - If you are doing web development this reading is a must. For all the other read it, you will learn important css base.
  
• Stop Your Console App The Nice Way) (Mike Hadlow) - This post some best practice to do a better management of the console application. It's not because it's a console app that UX is not important.

Miscellaneous

• The Blog of Scott Hanselman - Interesting post for all bloggers, you are not alone...
  
• How to Make a Decision When Your Team Doesn't Agree (Margaret Heffernan) - Interesting post on well kwon situation.
  
• What to Do When You’ve Made Someone Angry - Nice and simple. This advice could have a big impact on your entourage.

~Frank

Reading Notes #85

Suggestion of the week

• Windows Azure Updates: Android Support, SQL Reporting Services, Active Directory, More… - Wow wow wow! So many new features, and in many spheres: mobile, reporting, service bus, etc.... A post to read!
• How To Train Your Robot: how I teach kids to program without computers - I really like the idea. An it could be sincerely funny... for the kids. ;)

Cloud

• Using nConf and Azure to avoid leaking secrets on GitHub » Encosia (Dave Ward) - Very clever utility. It will definitely find a place in my toolbox.
• 2 Cloud Computing Concerns And How To Deal With Them (business2community.com) - Yes going to the cloud mean that your expose to some risk, as not going to. Being well-informed and prepared is the key.
• AWS Free Usage Tier Now Includes Amazon ElastiCache - Good new for all AWS that gets more for the same 0$.
• Windows Azure Mobile Services adds Android support and extends availability to East Asia - Excellent overviews of the new Android capabilities of Windows Azure and nice reference to a tutorial on how to build your first app.
• Microsoft Acquires Cloud Performance Management Service MetricsHub, Makes It Available For Free On Azure (Frederic Lardinois) - MetricsHub a new free product to try!
• Windows Azure, now with more enterprise access management! (Alex Simons) - Nice introduction to the new Active Directory features available in the Azure portal.
• Moving Your Applications to Windows Azure - Very complete article about all aspects of what moving an application to Azure imply.

Databases

• Why am I Getting so Many Deadlocks From Windows Azure SQL Database?(Alexandre Brisebois) - Really great post that explains every detail of the problem and of its solution, even for EF.
• Do you know big data's top 9 challenges? -- Washington Technology (Mark Hoover) - Interinsting list, because it's true that challenge mean opportunity.
• Different ways to Backup your Windows Azure SQL database (Ki Yi) - Very complete list of eight solutions to take your SQL Azure database backup. The list also gives website references, pros and cons and for each solution.

Integration

• Data/Contract Coupling in Messaging (Channel 9) (Clemens V) - Excellent video that puts in simple words fundamental concepts.

Programming

• Chrome Dev Tools: JavaScript and Performance - And I though I knew my Chrome Dev Tools... very nice post.
• Polymorphism Part 2: Refactoring to Polymorphic Behavior (John Teague) - Going dipper this exellent post is the second in the series to explain the concept of polymorphism.
• Continuous integration using TFS on the Cloud (Stephen Ebichondo) - For many people continuous integration sound so complicated that they don't want to try it. Here is an excellent tutorial that will guides you through your first build.
• ASP.NET Web API Queryable with OData (Channel 9) (Brady Gaster Cory Fowler) - Nice show with a lot of info on new oData coming soon. Also, the first On Location interview Scott Hunter; tease of some new functionalities to come in VS.
• New Pluralsight Course: Building ASP.NET Web API OData Services - Overview of the new course available on the oData updated features.

Miscellaneous

• Want a More Productive Week? Clean Your Darn Desk! (Guest Blogger) - Because sometimes, its need it.
• 5 Things That I’ve Learned About Working Remotely (Richard Seroter) - Interesting post written in response to another post from Scott Hanselman.
• 10 Things Really Amazing Employees Do - As an employee, I'm looking forward to become one of those amazing people...
• Programming's not for you? How about thinking? Be empowered. (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting thoughts on how to stimulate our kids or younger.
• Episode 101 - Real-World Windows Azure with Auth0 (Nick Harris, Nathan Totten) - Great show this demo was great.

~Frank

Reading Notes #74

Cloud

• Windows Azure Mobile Services: A Robust Back End for Your Device Applications - Great article that explains how Windows Azure Mobile services work through a nice tutorial. You must read that.
• Provisioning a MySQL Database from the Windows Azure Store (SyntaxC4) - Learn how to get add-on like a MySql database with the Windows Azure Store (currently only available in US).
• iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services – now with Push Notifications (Scott Gu)- Another great news for iOS developers who want to use Windows Azure.
• Doctrine supports SQL Database Federations for massive scalability on Windows Azure - Great news for PHP developers since Doctrine is now supporting Azure SQL Database Federation. Note that other than Doctrine PHP developers can also use Symfony to code with Azure.
• Windows Azure now supports federation with Windows Server Active Directory (Alex Simons) - Amazing post. First, it shares some great identity-related improvements made to Windows Azure that leverage the capabilities of Windows Azure AD. Then a tutorial that explains how to do it.
• Windows Azure SQL Database Backup and Restore - A must. If you have data in Azure, then you must read this post.
• Introducing the AWS SDK for Node.js (Developer Preview) - Good news for Node.js developers.

Integration

• BizTalk Mapper Patterns: How to Map Name Value Pair to a Hierarchical Schema - Very interesting post that explains how to do this type of mapping with functoids and by XSLT script.
• We are presenting BizTalk360 at – BizTalk Summit 2012 (Saravana Kumar) - Nice event that is coming soon. I would love to see the Biztalk360 presentation by myself, but I will need to relay on my coworkers’ story.

[…]The session is going to be 100% technical, without a single sales slide. The session structure is going to be 15 minutes slides (intro/background) and 45 minutes demos. […]

• Setting Up BizTalk Server 2013 Beta on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine (Stephen W. Thomas) - This post is a little older(1 month), but gives more details. Since new Windows Azure images are available in the gallery, I think it should work better now.
• New minor release of BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter for BizTalk Server 2010 is now available - Announce a new release of BizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter that fixes some minor issues.

Programming

• Resolving “certificate for the given thumbprint could not be loaded” error with Azure Tools for Visual Studio - Nice catch! With so many different account and development vm, I’m sure that this situation will append. Then I will know what to do.
• Web Essentials nightly builds - That tool looks awesome I'm looking forward to trying it.
• Tis the season (Tyler Doerksen) - Multiple web camp are coming soon and this week it was VS 2012.
• My collection of favourite TFS utilities - Great list of tools that can make our TFS better.
• Building Beautiful, Interactive, and Fast Web Sites (Jonathan Rozenblit) - Web developer this was a great web camps! In case you missed it, stay tuned for the video on-demand that should be publish sonly.
• AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell - AWS is finally let us use PowerShell to manage our environment. Over 550 cmdlets.

Miscellaneous

• 15 Super Useful Apps for Busy Entrepreneurs (Kevin Smith) - SwiftKey, Evernotes and a lot more of these applications that help us.
• When I’m most productive - Nice post that could help to find why we are more profitable sometimes and not that much on other.
• If You’re Afraid of Your To-Do List, It’s Not Working (JD Meier) - Nice quick tips to be productive.
• My next PC will be an Ultrabook (Scott Hanselman) - Didn't know that ultrabook could be that powerful. This type of PC starts to be really interesting then.
• Don’t let IT ground your company - Interesting article that explains the importance of planning and to have plan B... If you want to stay in business.
• Your Emails Are Too Long: Here's How to Fix Them - Interesting sharing.
• How to be a Consultant, Part 6: Effective Presentation Content (David Pallmann) - Nice post that explains what good presentations look like and what are the rules to create them.
• How Big Data and the Cloud are Changing Customer Service Solutions - Very interesting thoughts about what should be "smart application" today since the so much information is easily accessible through Big Data.
• Windows 8 Shortcuts (Lee Stott) - How to be quicker with a keyboard on Windows 8

 

~Frank

Reading Notes #73

Cloud

• A Refresh of the Windows Azure Authentication Library Developer Preview (Vittorio Bertocci) - Really nice a complete post. Explain the new change and improvement of the Azure Authentication Library (AAL).
• Adding Auth and Logging out of an iOS Windows Azure Mobile Services App (Chris Risner) - Nice explanation of a real life situation. This post is done using the iOS but it's true for all other platform also.
• Windows Azure SQL Database Management (Shay Yannay) - This post explain how you could do a PowerShell script to speed up your deployment by automating the database creation and some other tasks.
• Adding multiple endpoints to your Windows Azure Virtual Machines by using a CSV file - Really useful script to automatize endpoint creation on Azure VM. I really need to see how this script works.
• Visual Studio Identity Support Works with .Net 4.5 Only - Good! That confirmed some assumption that I made.
• Connecting Windows Azure Web Sites to On-Premises Databases Using Windows Azure Service Bus - Very nice article that combine multiple elements on-premise and in the cloud. It clearly reflect the reality of many companies. Also available in video on Channel9.
• Windows Azure Training Kit - November 2012 - What?! Already! Wow that what I call staying up to date.
• PHP 5.4 available in Windows Azure Web Sites - Great news for the PHP developers. It will be a lot easier now for them.
• Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Make Sure You Follow the Documentation (Buck Woody) - Good advice. It will save us a lot of time.
• Windows Azure Active Directory Processes 200 Billion Authentications - Connecting People, Data and Devices Around The Globe (Bill Hilf) - Very interesting post that explain Active directory in numbers and also gives different possible scenarios.

  […]respond to 9,000 requests per second and in the U.S. the average authentication takes less than 0.7 seconds. […]

• easyJet transforms business model with cloud and Azure (HowieT) - Interesting real life story about a company who leverage is legacy application and then use this to build something completely new.
• Configuring Online Backup for Windows Server 2012 - Good tutorial about how to configure the great feature of Windows Server 2012 such as online backup (with Windows Azure).
• Amazon Web Services Blog: Enable Single Sign On to the AWS Management Console - Great news using Active Directory in business context is so convenient!
• Cloud is begging for governance, analyst argues | ZDNet (Joe McKendrick) - Interesting article; the cloud is still young and people still need to learn.
• Google’s approach to Big Data is BigQuery (Scott Matteson) - Very interesting post learn more about BigQuery and Google Sql Database.

  […]the first 100GB of data you process each month is free[…]

• Windows Azure Mobile Services: A Robust Back End for Your Device Applications - Great article that explain how Windows Azure Mobile services works truth a nice tutorial. You must read that.

Integration

• October Images of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 Available for Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Stephen W. Thomas) – Aah… That great I will also to that then. Looking forward to try the new BizTalk 2013.

Programming

• Use Big Data to gain insight about small business customers (David Gitonga) - Interesting post that explains how BigData could be you in your business... even if you are in a small company.
• Combining Files in PowerShell (Robert Bernstein) - Nice PowerShell tips.
• SqlDependency with Entity Framework 5.0 - Very nice tutorial that explain how to get change notification with EF and beyond... Good job.

Miscellaneous

• 10 Simple Things you should do to Protect your Privacy - Good tips... and I think I should do more of them.
• Why Great Teams Build Great Products - Does (n x developer) = output? Really? This post explains why.
• 6 Concrete Ways to Improve Business Communication - Nice way to improve
• What are the best and worst things about working at Microsoft? - Learn the truth about was it is to work at one of the biggest tech company.
• How to Publish Your Blog on Amazon Kindle (Guest Blogger) - Since I’m a Kindle user I confirm that I would love to see more 0blog available on this platform.

~Frank