Reading Notes #612

In this week’s Reading Notes, we explore cloud debugging, .NET Aspire, and more. Join us for insights, workshops, and podcasts covering a range of exciting topics! 🚀

 
Sharing my Reading Notes 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.

 

Cloud

• GalaSoft Laurent Bugnion (Laurent Bugnion) - Nice post debugging investigating a bug, that cannot be reproduce locally only in the cloud.... But with the right tools it's much easier.

Programming

• Let's Learn .NET Aspire - Start your cloud-native journey live! - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - The .NET Aspire workshop is been deliver in many languages and available online. To learn what it is, when should we use it and how it works, join a live session or watch it on demand.

• Exploring docker compose watch in Visual Studio Code (Julie Lerman) - That looks fantastic! And thanks to Julia we will avoid a few gotchas.

• Simplify Your .NET Aspire Caching With Metalama (Metalama Team) - 2 great tools in synergy make the result so much better. This nice post is good to get us started on caching.

• Join Us for .NET Aspire Developers Day – Elevate Your Cloud Native Skills! - .NET Blog (Mehul Harry) - July 23 - Check the date there will be a .NET Aspire event with more advanced stuff like building custom components and more.

• Why and How to Execute GraphQL Queries in .NET (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug... Did you know GraphQL could improve the performance of your application by avoiding over fetching?

• Apprendre .NET Aspire en français (Frank Boucher) - Another shameless plug for French content this time. I did a 1h45 long video where I explain the basic of .NET Aspire by doing a workshop and providing details.

Podcasts

• Martin Hinshelwood: Migration Azure DevOps Server to the Cloud - Episode 302 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Interesting episode about migrations and how to approach them. Because so many stories start by a migration.
• GitHub Evolving with Damian Brady (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode to learn all things GitHub... and these days that mean a lot.
• 416: Going Light + How Spatial Video Really Works (Merge Conflict) - Great episode. Is going with two phone is going light however? Hhmmmm...
• Episode 287: Why You As A Developer Must Care About Managing Your APIs (Web Rush) - The 1M questions episode! Answers are optional because the fun is about being curious... right?
• Mitch Denny: .NET Aspire Architecture - Episode 304 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Learn more about .NET Aspire what it is, because yes it's hard to explain, and what's the road map.
• How to finally have that dreaded conversation (Modern Mentor) - Yes it's hard, but pause, and do those talks.

Miscellaneous

• What is platform engineering? (Julia Kulla-Mader, Chuck Lantz) - Platform engineering is gaining in popularity, but what ibis really. This article gives a good explanation to start our learning journey.

Reading Notes #610

Happy Canada Day!
It's reading notes time! 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.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Is .NET Aspire NuGet for Cloud Service Dependencies? (Phil Haack) - I like the comparison with NuGet. Using .NET Aspire in a project does indeed simplify a lot things. I'll be waiting for that follow up post.

Programming

• Dev Home Preview v0.15 Release (Kayla Cinnamon) - Cools news updates in Dev home.

• Announcing TypeScript 5.5 - TypeScript (Daniel Rosenwasser) - Really good news for the JavaScript developers. This post shares all the new features like ECMAScript, Set Methods support, and the performance improvement included in this release candidate of Typescript.

• Refactor your code with default lambda parameters - .NET Blog (David Pine) - A really good post, last of a series of four about new features of C# 12. I really like that new way to declare defaults I think it's much clearer.

• Blazor Basics: Dealing with Complex State Scenarios (Claudio Bernasconi) - Interesting package Fluxor that help managing states. The post also explains different pros and cons of methods to maintain states.

Databases

• What is SQL Injection in Cybersecurity? How to Prevent SQLi Attacks (Jen Swisher) - This post explains what are SQL injections and how they could affect our website. When I shares how to prevent those attack the post focuses on CMS like WordPress.

AI

• Mistral Introduces AI Code Generation Model Codestral (Daniel Dominguez) - On nice! A new model that specializes into code, and many languages on top of that.

~frank

Reading Notes #607

It's reading notes time! 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. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Azure PostgreSQL, Entra ID Authentication and .NET | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great post! Of course using some identity provider is more complicated then a strait password, but it's way simpler that we may though.

• Bringing the Aspire dashboard to ACA (Mark Downie) - One of the great tool that was released with Aspire is its dashboard as it shows traces across services. This post shares how to enable this amazing tool in Azure.

• Microsoft Entra ID Tenant Starters Guide: Understanding Identity Management and Licensing (Gregor Wohlfarter) - Nice post to have an overview of this important piece of security.

Programming

• Refactor your code using alias any type - .NET Blog (David Pine) - Excellent series to learn more about recently to feature of C#.

• Blazor Basics: Child Routes & Optional Route Parameters (Claudio Bernasconi) - You know your route 101 and would like to learn more, this post is for you.

Databases

• A beginner's guide to mapping arrays in EF Core 8 - .NET Blog (Arthur Vickers) - An interesting post to that depending if your database supported features explains how EF Core could works and use arrays.

Podcasts

• The Definition of Success with author Neil Strauss (A Bit of Optimism) - For a conversation to be constructive and to learn from it not all participant needs to agree. Nice episode about success.

• 81. From APIs to natural language: The democratization of AI - with Henk Boelman (Betatalks the podcast) - Nice to listen to a colleague. Henk definitely knows the very well the topic and how to explains it clearly.

• Motivated by play (Friends) (The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source) - What a journey! Interesting episode, inspiring.

• Brady Gaster: .NET Cloud Native - Episode 295 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Aspire, aspire, aspire, you will learn all about Aspire in this episode.

~frank

Reading Notes #606

It's reading notes time! 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.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Azure Developer CLI (azd) – Build 2024 Recap (Grace Kulin) - All developers should look at how it can really speedup and simplify your Azure deployment and ease the creation of your infrastructure as code file (bicep and terraform).

Programming

Catch Up on Microsoft Build 2024: Essential Sessions for .NET Developers (James Montemagno) - Perfect for . NET developers who would like to know what's new and what's coming

Avoiding interactivity with Blazor? (Jon Hilton) - Nice post that examines how some fancy checkbox or button interactivity works in Blazor.

Must-have resources for new .NET Aspire developers (Anthony Simmon) - This post contains a list of other posts and videos about aspired really interesting if you want to get started.

Microsoft Dev Box introduces new ready-to-code and enterprise management capabilities - Wonderful powerful device where and when you need it. This post shares the most recent new features.

Developing cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio (Mark Downie) - Nice post that celebrates the general availability of .NET Aspire and shares many advantages of using it with Visual Studio.

It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files (Frank Boucher) - We all did it. Hardcoding password in code, because it's "just" a quick thing, or it's just for us, and we think it's okay... but is it? This post shares my learning while removing passwords from docker-compose file.

AI

Announcing the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (John Lam) - Nice! The favorite editor of so many now have an AI extension! I missed the Microsoft Build sessions with the demos. Lucky me they are available on demand!

~frank

Reading Notes #605

It's reading notes time! 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. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problem.

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Programming

• Reimagining Pong Wars with C# and MVUX (Uno Team) - This is a very interesting post that details all the architecture and code of this game.

• How to Check Your Docker Installation: Docker Desktop vs. Docker Engine (Jay Schmidt) - A very instructive and useful post that list all details related to Docker Desktop and Docker Engine for Mac, Linux, and Windows platform.

• Empowering Developers at Microsoft Build: Docker Unveils Integrations and Sessions (Vanessa Fournier) - Nice post. You should definitely watched the Build session where they show how to target multiple platforms, and many new features

• Docker Compose Profiles, one the most useful and underrated features (Oskar Dudycz) - Woah! For now on, I shall have a profile in all my docker compose file. We'll probably not all, but I'm definitely using them. This post is the perfect place to get started and understand what are profile and how to use it.

• General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development (Damian Edwards) - Fantastic news! It an amazing tools that simplify local development and give us the opportunity to see what is happening.

• 5 easy tips to improve your personal website performance ( Salma Alam-Naylor) - I accept the challenge, I will review my websites to see how I can improve the performance. Interesting post that shares many great ideas.

AI

• A Quick Guide to Containerizing Llamafile with Docker for AI Applications (Sophia Parafina, Marc Sherwood) - Great post tht goes over how to put our favorite AI model in a container to work locally.

~Frank

Reading Notes #602

It's reading notes time! 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.

Having interesting content? Share it!

Cloud

• Azure SDK Release (April 2024) (Hector Norzagaray) - Lots of SDKs updates for many different languages and services.

Programming

• .NET Aspire preview 6 - .NET Aspire - The more a play with Aspire the more I like it. .NET developers you must give it a try.

• How to upload a file with Blazor SSR in .NET 8? - (Jon Hilton) A nice quick tutorial with all the code snippets we need.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.7 - (Vincent Baaij) A lots o new features and improvements in this release.

• Why don’t we talk about minifying CSS anymore? - (Salma Alam-Naylor) An interesting post. I didn't think about it but it's true, we used to talk way more about minification...

• Minimal APIs Nuget Packages - (Shawn Wildermuth) Same great tools but new names to make it easier to remember and more of the same family.

AI

• #SemanticKernel: Local LLMs Unleashed on #RaspberryPi 5 - (Bruno Capuano) This is the perfect tutorial to get started with local AI. No powerful computer required.

~Frank

Reading Notes #596

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!

Suggestion of the week

• Introducing .NET Smart Components - AI-powered UI controls - .NET Blog (Daniel Roth) - Wait whaaat! This it so cool and useful and it's available now. You must see this the smart-past button needs to be on all forms...

Cloud

• Smart To-Do Creator: Combining the ease of Azure Logic Apps and the power of Generative AI (Gaurav Mantri) - A cool little project explained in this post. It uses logic apps and AI.

Programming

• .Net Aspire - A Brief Introduction (Paul Michaels) - I also started playing with aspire this weekend I must say I love it, give it a try.

• Difference Between await and Task.Wait in C# (Georgios Panagopoulos) - This nice post goes in the details to explains the difference of the two methods.

AI

• Microsoft and NVIDIA announce major integrations to accelerate generative AI for enterprises everywhere (Microsoft) - If you use AI or are planning to do it, this post will be interesting.

• Demystifying LLMS From Zero to Raccoon-Hero, with Azure and DotNet, Episode 1: Creating a CLI (Maho Pacheco) - This is a nice step by step tutorial that show us how to build a console application that use AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (Manish Shivanandhan) - An interesting aLternative to GPT when text is involved.

Miscellaneous

• Homo sapiens 1.0 (Mark Downie) - Interesting reflection about how to determine what ready important when adding features in a product or services.

~Frank

Reading Notes #595

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!

Programming

• .NET Aspire preview 4 - .NET Aspire - So much in this new release! So many possibilities.

• Generate Local .NET Secrets from Azure Deployments (Frank Boucher) - Nice new simple to get started.

• Unity extension for Visual Studio Code - Now Generally Available (Jb Evain) - That's an interesting idea! I'm not a Unity developer, but I'm curious to see the response from the community.

• Blazor Basics: Advanced Blazor Form Validation (Claudio Bernasconi) - Having control on the validation and how we guide our users is a must. This post does a great job at explaining how to to it within Blazor with clear and simple code sample.

• An introduction to the heap data structure and .NET's priority queue (Andrew Lock) - Great post that the explains how to understand the heap. This source of information could be so useful when investigating something that doesn't work as expected in our code.

• Lightweight In-Memory Message Bus Using .NET Channels (Milan Jovanović) - Messages queues are such a powerful tool when our solution work asynchronously. This nice tutorial shows us how to do it and stay local.

AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/an-introduction-to-mistral-ai/) - An interesting alternative to GPT when text is involved.

• Get started with .NET 8 and AI using new quickstart tutorials (Jordan Matthiesen) - Five extremely simple example application to explain different AI scenarios in .NET and an opportunity to give your feedback.

Databases

• RavenDB and Two Factor Authentication (Oren Eini) - Good news! Always use the two factor authentication when available.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Easiest Way To Make Your Life More Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric Barker) - Love it! Don't be stuff buy time.... Nice post

~Frank

Reading Notes #592

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, that catch my interest during the week. This week it's definitely more code focus.

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

Cloud

• Open at Microsoft - FluentUI.Blazor (Denis Voituron) - This post summarized the new series of videos about FluentUI Blazor done on Open at Microsoft, including the videos.

Programming

• An Introduction to the World of Containers with .NET 8 (James Montemagno) - A lots of information to get started with containers in this post.And the best of it is its most likely easier that you think!

• Developing Optimized GitHub Actions with .NET and Native AOT (David Pine) - There is so many good and great ideas in this post! Now I just need time to implement them.

• Using named pipes with ASP.NET Core and HttpClient (Andrew Lock) - I didn't known about these pipes, did you? Interesting tool that could simplify the communication between services.

• Introducing ASP.NET Core metrics and Grafana dashboards in .NET 8 (James Newton-King) - tons of metric and not a lot of work to get them just like we like it.

• Using dependency injection with Azure .NET SDK (Alexandre Nédélec) - Great post to learn how the Microsoft.Extensions.Azure package can really help us with our code.

• How To Use AI Assistant to Generate Test Data For .NET Applications (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - I like that! I can see myself using AI to scaffold the big part of my test and then finish them. It's like the classic 80-20. Nice post to get inspired.

~Frank

Reading Notes #589

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

• Using Azure Load Testing to test Multi-Tenant services (Frédéric Le Coquil) - Nice post that explains in details how to test a scale and cost efficiently our API.

• WASI 0.2 Preview: A New Dawn for WebAssembly (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ) - Looking forward how WASI will impact our web. Nice little post to quickly understand what it is.

• How to deploy .NET Aspire apps to Azure Container Apps - .NET Blog (Jiachen Jiang) - It looks simple enough don't you think? I'm trying it today!

• Build your Web Apps faster with the Azure Cache for Redis: Quick Start Template ( Ricky Diep) - This is definitely a simple and quick way to deploy all your assets at once. There is a video with a demo.

Programming

• Understanding C# 8 default interface methods (Andrew Lock) - Very clear post about the new feature available in interfaces, with great examples that make us understand why and when it is useful and how to implement it.

Open Source

• Celebrating One Year of Open at Microsoft (Japhlet Nwamu) - It was surely a nice first year.

Podcasts

• Code Visualization with CodeSee's Shanea Leven (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Another very interesting episode. CodeSee definitely catches my attention, I'm planning to try it with my OSS project to get started.

~Frank

Reading Notes #588

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!

Programming

• Developing & Working with .NET Containers on Windows ARM Devices (James Montemagno) - I'm a big fan and user of dev containers.But I didn't know it was hard for Arm device owner.Love the idea.If you never heard of Podman here a nice teaser.

• Overview over Microsoft's developer tools for Windows (Aaron Junker)) - So many great tools to make the dev experience even better on Windows.Did you see so many are oss projects.

• How to deal with API rate limits (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Perfect post to learn why rate limit exists (its easier to manage them if we understand them), and a few suggestions on how to deal with them.

• Persisting Data Volumes With .NET Aspire | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great tips to be more efficient with .NET Aspire preview 2

~Frank

Reading Notes #584

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

• Avoiding Accidental Function Name Collisions (Sam Cogan) - Making sure names or unique is a tricky things.Great post that will make us save time.

• Getting Started with Infra for Developers in Azure (Andreas Helland) - The ease of creating and managing virtual desktop is very useful in many scenario as this post shows. And Aspire looks just as amazing... What's your top favorite from the recent past events?

• How To: APIM Asynch to Synch Pattern (Jeffrey Chilberto) - Interesting challenge, and definitely interesting solution.

• Azure Durable Entities Revisited (Ken Ross) - Durable functions are a great tools in integration and long process activities.This post is a very nice introduction on the topic.

Programming

• Redacting sensitive data in logs with Microsoft.Extensions.Compliance.Redaction (Andrew Lock) - Another excellent post! Its great to be able to remove (aka redact) some information from the logs, and not lost all our hair in the process.

• Named Entity Recognition Using Azure AI (Carl Layton) - A cool little post from an advent series.

Podcasts

• Building a better internet with Cloudflare's Rita Kozlov (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Just like Scott said: I'm a user of Cloudflare for years, but didn't gave you any money yet, is it okay? Learn if it is and why in this nice episode.

• 388: Developer to Manager, Hybrid Success, & Capacity for Innovation (Merge Conflict) - Interesting discussion between James and Heather (in replacement of Frank) to talk about management in a tech company.

• KubeCon Live with Friends 2023 (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - A review of KubeCon, what's hot what's new and more.

• Maarten Balliauw: Developer Tools - Episode 273 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - I really enjoy this episode with Maarten where he talks about Riders, and their vision of this IDE, and other different tools.

• A Curious Mind with movie producer Brian Grazer (A Bit of Optimism) - Stay curious what ever says people around you, that could be an advice learn from this episode.

• 70. The future of global Azure: Sharing knowledge and growing the community - with Rik Hepworth (Betatalks the podcast) - Aaaah... I didn't know why the named change! Global Azure (aka Global Azure Boot Camp) will be in April. Are you planning to do something?

• Blogging with guest Andrew Lock (Weekly Dev TipsWeekly Dev Tips) - Why should you blog, I mean now in 2023/2024? Listen to Andrew answering to this question. He knows what he is talking about, he blog every weeks and he is an author (love the book too btw).

Miscellaneous

• It's The Holiday Season, Which Means I'm Goofing With My Site (Rob Conery) - Lovely! What ar your plan / side project you are planing to work on (if you have some time off)?

~ Frank

Reading Notes #582

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!

Fridge with wings, realistic rendering 

 

Cloud

• How to Write NoSQL Queries with Copilot for Azure Cosmos DB (Lee Stott) - Copilot is such a time saver.For everyone who jump from projects to projects using different languages and data sources.

• Creating Zip Files in Azure Blob Storage (Mark Heath) - Great quick post with code snippets AND a solution for some gotcha.

Data

• Getting Started with GitHub Copilot in Azure Data Studio (Japhlet Nwamu) - Data studio is the perfect tools to work your queries from any platform. With the Copilot extension it's just became even easier and faster.

Programming

• 5 Awesome C# Refactoring Tips (Milan Jovanović) - Refactoring is an important skill to have. Most code grow by patches and at some point it needs some help.

• Hot Reload for C# Dev Kit (Mark Downie) - Wow! Things are evolving so fast, we pass from syntax highlighting from hot reload so fast!

• How to Toggle Between Light and Dark Modes in Blazor (Jefferson S. Motta ) - Nice tutorial that explains how to have that great dark mode.

• Adding environment vars to .NET Aspire services (Tim Heuer) - Nice post to continue to learn about Aspire.Net.

• Validating JSON Against a Schema (Paul Michaels) - For some reason, I was expecting something more complicated.Its simple! Love it.

~Frank