Reading Notes #472

Cloud

• Announcing NubesGen, an Open Source tool to automate Azure deployments (Julien Dubois) - A very interesting project use can use it participate and learn.
• Azure Bicep Refreshed (Justin Yoo) - Infrastructure As Code with Bicep. It looks great.
• Effective ways to delete resources in a resource group on Azure in 2021 ( Stephane Lapointe) - Nice post that shows us how to be smarter even when we delete resources.
• Getting Started with Azure Web PubSub Service (Abhijit Jana) - This is a great new service and the cherry on the top... It's fully managed!
• What’s the most configurable Kubernetes service in the cloud? Does it matter? (Richard Seroter) - Interesting post that compares the configuration options of the different service providers. From my point of view (code focus), it's not who has the more options that are the more appealing. It's Who let me go with the fewer click with a good setup.

Programming

• Build and ship software better with GitHub and Microsoft Teams (Teams team) - I installed the app with pure curiosity, but I kept it because it is useful. I'm happy to see those new features.
• 10 Reasons to Attend DockerCon LIVE 2021 - Docker Blog (David Oro) - It's coming soon...
• Blazor - Component Mockup Library (Cody Merritt Anhorn) - Anice tutorial that explains how to get started with this lib.
• Securing an ASP.NET Core app and web API using windows authentication (Damien Bowden) - Nice tutorial with tons of code snippets.
• tabs ↹ over ␣ ␣ ␣ spaces (Jiri Cincura) - Experimenting is still one of the best ways to learn things. Just like in this post.

Podcasts

• Designing the Future with Brian Collins (A Bit of Optimism) - Great episode, very inspiring. How as more experienced humans can we help the younger ones to build a better future... And learn in the process.
• Use Storytelling to Get Ahead at Work (Modern Mentor) - Storytelling is important and this episode help to get started. Because the best stories are not improvised.
• Épisode 93 - Quand la santé tourne à l’obsession (Grand écart) - In French, with so many people that run... We need to stay focus and do it for the good reason. It an eye-opening episode.
• Hello World: April 22, 2021 - Special Hello Earth! (Hello World) - Shameless plug... Hello World is now available in Podcast!
• 252: Linux GUI Apps on Windows - WSLg (Merge Conflict) - I was happy when I saw the news about the WSL GUI Apps announcement, but didn't have the time to try anything. In this episode, Frank and James ask all the good questions and provide so many answers. Awesome.
• SPI 482: The 3-Second Rule That You Need to Know (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Getting out of our comfort zone is hard. And introducing ourselves could be so challenging. I love the idea of that tips.
• Leadership, Radical Delegation, And Integrated Problem Solving with Admiral John Richardson (The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution) - Interesting episode. The first thought was if the military can review their approach, everyone can. Great lesson.

Miscellaneous

• 10 Best Visual Studio Code Extensions for Increased Productivity (Dirk Strauss) - This post is so much more than a list of 10extensions...It explains some differences between Visual Studio and VS Code, and shares those extensions, and explains why there are so amazing.

~frank

Reading Notes #471

Cloud

• Lost in Azure cloud identity - part 1 (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - That looks very promising. A series of posts to learn more on Azure Active Directory.

• Building and auto-deploying an ASP.NET Core application (Imar Spaanjaars) - A nice step-by-step tutorial to build your own deployment.

  

• Localize your website with Microsoft Translator (Krishna Doss) - Really interesting services.

Programming

• Converting a 13 year old .NET WPF app called BabySmash to a self-contained .NET 5 app with the .NET Upgrade Assistant (Scott Hanselman) - This is interesting, I remember Babysmash! I need to check that stream to see that tool in action.

• Create a Windows 10 development virtual machine (Thomas Maurer) - Great tutorial to create a dev environment.So useful when we need to create a specific context or use a different version to investigate client issues.

• Visual Studio 2022 (Amanda Silver) - I'm always impressed by how new features are continuously added to VS. Such a great tool.

Miscellaneous

• Why you should never quit too early ... (Donn Felker) - An inspiring post to help us persevere and time is hard. But also to try to step aside and have an open mindset.

~frank

Reading Notes #470

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• How to Display the Current Azure Subscription in your CLI (Sam Cogan) - This is a game-changer for me. Every time I work in the terminal I was checking what was my current subscription (you don't want to deploy things in the wrong one right?) But know it will always be visible. Wonderfull!

Programming

• Devlead.Statiq - Part 2 - Theme from external web resource (Mattias Karlsson) - That's cool and clever. And cleaner than the modules.

• @devlead - Mattias Karlsson's Blog - Devlead.Statiq - Part 1 - Tabs (Mattias Karlsson) - Cool feature from Statiq the static content generator.

• ASP.NET Core in Action, Second Edition is available now! (Andrew Lock) - Nice update, its a lot of work to keep up with .Net. Great work.

• Chocolatey GUI - The Path to 1 million downloads (Gary Ewan Park) - Congratulation! I love Chocolatey and this little historic review is super cool.

• Take your Windows Terminal and PowerShell to the next level with Terminal Icons (Scott Hanselman) - Nice quick tips, super simple, and yeah way prettier.

• Viewing overwritten configuration values in ASP.NET Core (Andrew Lock) - Nice post that goes deep in debugging and shows how to make things more visible.

• Devlead.Statiq - Part 3 - IncludeCode 🤺 (Mattias Karlsson) - An interesting feature that I didn't know about...

Miscellaneous

• Writing, Editing and Formatting a Technical Ebook in 2021 (Rob Conery) - Interesting post. I knew writing a book was a lot of work, of course, but never thought the formatting was such a challenge.

Reading Notes #469

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Deploying an Azure Function App with Bicep (Mark Heath) - A nice example of a bicep script with a few resources. Not too many so it is complicated but enough to cover some particularities.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core User Secrets and Secret Manager Tool (Steve Gordon) - Its hard to explain secret or invisible things, but this post does a really good job.

• Blazor Power BI Paginated Reports (Michael Washington) - Ooooh It's been a moment since I play with my friend PowerBi... This is very interesting. I just needed a project with data... That shouldn't be that hard to find, right?

• Microsoft Graph Fundamentals learning path – Module 1 (Luise Freese) - Wonderful! Does this learning path as been created just for me? Perfect timing.

• Windows Containers on Windows 10 without Docker (using Containerd) · James Sturtevant (James Sturtevant) - Interesting container project.

Books

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know 

Author: Adam M. Grant

- I really like this book. It validates that it's okay to rethink decisions, to change your mind. The goal is to have (and keep) an open mindset. It seems easier than it is, of course. I heard amazing comments about this author, so it's probably not the last one I will read from him.

Miscellaneous

• GraphQL Editor - new release v. 4.5 (Tomek Poniatowicz) - I didn't know that tool, but now I really need to look at it; it seems awesome.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #468

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Bicep - Why do we need yet another way to deploy stuff in Azure? (Mark Heath) - I still didn't play with bicep, but really looking forward to it. This post just made me even more excited about finally trying g it.

• Why won't you load my configuration Azure Functions? (Adam Storr) - Yes, it can definitely be a little confusing at the beginning, but that way is the secure way.

• Common Misconception #2 – Serverless is good for APIs (Jason Farrell) - Interesting post about lamda and serverless in general.

Programming

• How to make Command Prompt, PowerShell, or any Shell launch from the Start Menu directly into Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - This is just what I was looking for amazing... And so simple!

• Monitoring and Observability in Cloud-Native ASP.NET Core apps | ASP.NET Blog (Nish Anil) - Nice post about this misunderstood topic. There are good examples and references to it. Excellent pairing it Scott Hanselman podcast episode with Tori Wieldt.

• The Windows Terminal made better with the Command Palette plus Multiple Actions in one Command (Scott Hanselman) - Wow, okay this is super cool and even more useful... Let's get started!

• Who Is Responsible For Building Tests? - Redgate Software (Grant Fritchey) - That's an excellent question! What's your answer?

Miscellaneous

• Add Developer PowerShell and Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio to Windows Terminal (Luise) - Del

• What shall I use for managing tasks? Email? Outlook Tasks? Planner? To Do or even OneNote? (Luise) - Still, using pen and paper and thinking to move digital? This post is for you.

~Frank

Reading Notes #467

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

This week's image brings us to 2017, back when I was a Microsoft MVP, yes my name is on that wall with so many of my friends! Have I great summit this week!

Cloud

• Azure Functions Support for node.JS 14 and .Net 5 Is Now Generally Available (Steef-Jan Wiggers Follow) - A quick post that detailed what is new and why it's nice.

• Azure Workbooks - Set it to Auto-Refresh (Shikha Jain) - Your mouse will thanks you, because of less clicks.

• Cloud-Native learning resources for .NET developers (Nish Anil) - A nice post that explains the cloud-native idea and lists sooooo many resources to get started.

Programming

• 5 things to include in your project ASAP (Lior Bragilevsky) - This is a very JavaScript focus post, but easily portable to other languages.

• Debugging configuration values in ASP.NET Core (Andrew Lock) - A great tutorial that teaches some great ways to debug and inspect the appSettings.

• Introducing AWS SSO support in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code | Amazon Web Services (Garret Sweetwood) - Another great VS Code extension, this time to help you with your authentification with AWS.

• Scaling Microservices on Kubernetes (Ashley Davis) - Interesting post about scaling. Scaling horizontally, vertically the advantages and complexities of each options.

• Tetris in Blazor WebAssembly (Matthew Jones ) - I keep repeating it, coding is fun and creative! Learn more about this cool open source project in this post.

• The common misconception about TypeScript (Narasimha Prasanna HN) - This is a great post that shares simple best practices in TypeScript.

Miscellaneous

• Get better at programming by learning how things work (Julia Evans) - Inspirational post to stay curious and keep learning.

~Frank

Reading Notes #466

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• How do I Navigate GitHub Code? (Brian Lagunas) - Two very simple tricks that make a huge difference when you browse a GitHub repo.Wow.

Cloud

• Prevent exceeding Azure budget with forecasted cost alerts (Adam Wise) - Clients are worry to spend more than plan. But they could avoid many surprises by using this tool.

Programming

• Highlights from Git 2.31 (Taylor Blau) - There definitely new features that I will use. And some that I didn't even know was possible that become better and faster.

• Implement Unit Testing in ASP.NET Core 5 Application – Getting Started (Sanjay) - An extremely complete article with code simple and architecture example.

• Integrating ASP.NET Identity Password Policies with Password Managers (Scott Brady) - A great tutorial that explains how to take control of the strength of the password in our app.

• Learn to build HTTP APIs with .NET (Jon Galloway) - So many great suggestions for blog posts, videos, and even a brand new learning path!

• Use C# to upload files to a GitHub repository (Dave Brock) - This is awesome no need to create a rest wrapper and all those little things.

Miscellaneous

• How to Be Happier Without Really Trying - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric) - Is it tricking your own mind, or is it just taking back control? Well as much as we can take control ...of course. Nevertheless, these are interesting ideas that I will try.

~Frank

Reading Notes #465

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Announcing Az Predictor preview 2 (Damien Caro) - Already preview 2 it looks so great.

• Ask About Azure: Why do resource groups need a location? | Dave Brock (Dave Brock) - Brilliant! This question is asked so many times, and the answer is perfect.

• Azure Communications Voice Calling QuickStart (Dan Wahlin) - Wonderful solution and I know some dev who is now very happy that they now have this tool.

• Azure REST API through Logic App (Brad Watts) - I love Logic Apps I think it's a tool that is overviewed by too many. Great post.

• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Azure Static Web Apps are saving me money (Scott Hanselman) - Azure static web app for the win! Seriously they are amazing I use them a lot. It's still in preview. But all good.

Programming

• Easily nuke secrets from your Git history | Dominique St-Amand (Dominique St-Amand) - Interesting post going deep into Git spelunking artifact from our history.

• Installing Docker Desktop for Windows and WSL 2 (Andrew Lock) - This post guides ys in the installations of WLS2 with Docker on Windows. It is now kind of simple... But a lot of us are still afraid. We shouldn't, give it a try!

• Your Open Source Project Needs a devcontainer - Here's Why | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - The dev container tools are pure madness. BUT on the positive side. It is incredibly useful and easy to use. Pair with Codespace its magic. I'm looking forward to seeing the public release.

Miscellaneous

• How to: Deploy GitHub Pages on a Schedule to Publish Future Posts (Sean Killeen) - Omg! So simple. A wonderful post. Thank you so much for this.

~Frank

Reading Notes #464

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

Cloud

• Azure REST APIs with Insomnia (Jon Gallant) - Awesome post I didn't know that extension and they had never tried the import. Very useful.

• Microsoft Ignite 2021 Book of News (Microsoft) - If you are looking for the complete list of all the news done at Microsoft Ignite here it is.

• Top 5 things to get the most out of Microsoft Ignite (Rick Claus) - Nice tips to get ready.

Programming

• Tip 307 - How to create faster and smarter apps with .NET 5 | Azure Tips and Tricks - A nice quick review of .Net improvements.

• .NET Interactive with SQL!| .NET Notebooks in Visual Studio Code (Maria Naggaga) - A very interesting tool when you want to do a quick exploration of the data or invalidate some queries while in your code.

• Don't forget about the GitHub Command Line (Scott Hanselman) - I forgot about that CLI... That could be useful.

• Generate iCal calendar with .NET using iCAL.NET (Kristoffer Strube) - A nice quick tutorial for that package.Looking forward to seeing in the latest .Net version.

• IntelliSense for appsettings.json | ASP.NET Blog (James Newton-King) - That's a cool feature! How many times I was in the settings and struggling on the format, or name of a properties.No more Internet search!

• What Makes VSCode so Popular?. Visual Studio Code is bae | by Richard So | Feb, 2021 | codeburst (Richard So) - A great post that will put words into your thoughts. And if you don't use vsCode, it will explain why so many people around love it that much.

• You must be insane to be a software developer (Matt Lacey) - Interesting question.

Miscellaneous

• 4 Ways To Balance Under And Over-Communication As A Remote Work Manager (Shitika Anand) - Important and simple tools for our times.

~Frank

Reading Notes #463

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

Cloud

• Add a Pipeline Expression Value to an Azure DevOps Variable (Jason Gaylord) - Nice quick post/ tips about pipeline.

• Secure Azure AD User File Upload with Azure AD Storage and ASP.NET Core (Damien Bowden) - Great tutorial with all the code.

• Using Azure Key Vault to manage your secrets (Chris Noring) - A nice post from Chris. Azure Key Vault is a fantastic tool. Don't miss it.

Programming

• Free Windows 10 development virtual machines for HyperV, Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMWare (Scott Hanselman) - Cool tips to have a nice dev environment.

• Using source generators to generate a menu component in a Blazor app (Andrew Lock) - Nice post.pretty cool way to avoid hard coding routes or "magic string".

• What I wish I had known about single page applications - Stack Overflow Blog (Michael Pratt) - I totally get it. I found myself in similar situations many times ( I like to learn, and the best way is by building something). Great share.

Databases

• Azure SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance Database used data space is much larger than expected (Sabrin Alsahsah) - A very interesting post. I learn a ton reading it.

• Getting Started with Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB (Ron L'Esteve ) - Near real-time analysis without impacting the data source performance... Pretty impressive.

Podcasts

• Game Jam Lessons Learned (Coding Blocks) - Very happy the listen to this follow episode from show 151. I've been tenting to try participating in a Game Jam. Really interesting to learn their experience and how they would do differently.

• Can networking be simple? with Tailscale's Avery Pennarun (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Networking is definitely my strength or passion. Nevertheless this episode was extremely interesting. I learned so much!

• How to Make 30k a Month: The System that Took Her from 5k to 30k with Jessie Harris-Bouton (Influencer Entrepreneurs with Jenny Melrose) - NIce episode cool story, because life is life. Love it.

Miscellaneous

• Fix for Elgato Key Light not found by Control Center (Scott Hanselman) - Sorry, but I feel happy to not be alone with those thoughts, and in that situation. My Keylight is now optional in my setup because when I need a light NOW, I don't have time to figure out issues.

~Frank

How to copy data in Azure using AzCopy

Data is the key to almost all solutions. Obviously, at some point, we will need to move it. And this is when AzCopy  will come to the rescue. In this short post/video I will share how you can securely copy a Zip file (aka. data), from one location (blob storage, AWS) to a blob storage in an Azure subscription (the same subscription or a different one).

What is AzCopy 

AzCopy is a command-line utility that you can use to copy blobs or files to or from a storage account. It can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And... It's already available pre-install inside Cloud Shell!

How it works

AzCopy can do many things but let's focus on the "copy" feature. To copy a file from a location to another one here the command to execute:

azcopy copy https://url-source https://url-destination

It looks simple, right? And it is. To keep it secure AzCopy can use Shared Access Signature (SAS) tokens. To get those in Azure, you can execute a command (ex: az storage container generate-sas) or use the Azure Portal. 

Once you are in the Azure portal open the account storage of your source or destination (you will have to do both).

From the option on the left search for Shared access signature or just sas and click on it. Select the type of options you need. A best practice is to allow the minimum requirements. If you know you are only moving files then unchecked the File, Queue, and Table. Same things for the resources types, permissions, and expiry date/time.  Once you are done click the Generate SAS and connection string button.

Use those URLs with the SAS token in your command, and voila!

Video demo

How about Az CLI and PowerShell

If you prefer copying or moving your files using native commands in Azure PowerShell and Az CLI it's also possible here a previous post about that: How to copy files between Azure subscription from Windows, Linux, OS X, or the cloud. There is also a video for this one https://youtu.be/cE8qwnSk9qs

References:

• AzCopy: https://aka.ms/azcopy 
• Az CLI Generate SAS token

~Frank

Reading Notes #462

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

Cloud

• Azure Functions in C# quick FAQs and tips ( Dominique St-Amand) - Nice post that answers the frequent questions and shares best practices.

• Using Multiple Accounts with Azure (Sam Cogan) - Nice tips a must. So helpful.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core Dependency Injection: What is the IServiceCollection? (Steve Gordon) - A very clear and complete tutorial.Taking us from zero and teaching us what it is, how it works, how to use it, and some best practices.

• Announcing Dapr v1.0 (Dapr project maintainers) - A great new open-source tool just got to v1. This post will tell you all about it.

• Building an Android app with .NET 6 (Nick) - This is so cool. Looking Good.

• DotNet Boxed includes prescriptive templates for .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - This is super cool. I really like and appreciate how the .Net CLI is builded.

• Visual Studio 2019 Docker Tooling (Mark Heath) - A nice post that shows how those two great tools work together.

• What is the difference between a DTO and a POCO (or POJO) (Steve (ardalis) Smith) - A very clear explanation. Straight to the point.

• Blazor on Desktop (Sam Basu ) - This post demonstrates by showing how to build those two flavors that it is possible to build a desktop app. Interesting.

Miscellaneous

• 7 Ways to Improve Your Developer Ads � DeveloperMedia - Marketing is hard. I'm not sure developers are that different than others. those tips felt good, they are probably good with all audiences.

~Frank

Reading Notes #461

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

The suggestions of the week

• Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi (Jim Bennett) - Great post from Jim. You can feel his excitement about this news... It's really motivating.

• Master These Three Skills to Improve Time Management 🚀 (Anastasia) - Wow. This post contains tons of information, references, and good advice. To read.

Cloud

• What Is Azure Functions (Mahesh Chand) - The great simple post that explains what is an Azure Function and how to create/ debug/ deploy one

Programming

• Creating a Running Game in VueJS - Part 3 - Component Files and Installing Vue - The Long Walk (Paul Michaels) - Interesting step by spet tutorial part 3 of a series.

• How to Install Windows Software Remotely Using PowerShell and Chocolatey - Petri (Russell Smith) - A very cool and simple way to solve a common difficulty why all those new people not working in the office.

• Open-source HTTP API packages and tools (Brady Gaster) - Excellent tutorial, second post of a series. It's definitely a great place to get started.

• Save the Date for .NET Conf: Focus on Windows, February 25, 2021 (Katie Akrop DeSantis) - Looking forward to this event. Thursday the 25th.

• Creating Discoverable HTTP APIs with ASP.NET Core 5 Web API | ASP.NET Blog (Brady Gaster) - An extremely complete tutorial to learn more about API.

Podcast

• Épisode 11 - La famine en Ukraine (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - OMG! I have nothing else to say. I knew that part of the history was dark and complex... but I knew nothing. Great episode.

• SPI 457: The Secret to Taking Risks & How to Make It Work - Behind the Scenes with Katie Kimbal (The Smart Passive Income Online Business) - Very motivating episode. When we start a journey we don't know most of the time where our decisions will bring us. Therefore it's always frightening to take risks, but with time and effort... grandiose thing can appends

• Containers on Azure with Tom Kerkhove (.NET Rocks!) - What a great episode! And it's so true there is so many ways "to do your containers" ( like in a recipe )

• Épisode 87 - La sécurité des coureuses (Grand écart) - Sometimes I feel so ashamed to be a man... I know I'm doing it right, but I need to do more... for the others that forgot that we are all equal.

• 633 - How to Use Rejection to Your Advantage (Modern Mentor) - In our lives, we will encounter many nos or rejection. This episode talks about how you could use those detours to learn more, and transform them in opportunities.

• 101: Windows Virtual Desktop with Travis Roberts (CloudSkills.fm) - I remember when "infra" people couldn't see anything positive about the cloud... Times as changed a lot. There are so many opportunities.

• The myth of turning your hobby into a job with writer Aley Arion (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Is it a myth or a reality? I totally think it's possible. But yeah in all the amazing love (or adventure) movies there are always some challenges. But happy 95% of the time.. I take that!

Miscellaneous

• Fun times with batch files : Algorithms for the masses - julian m bucknall (Julian M Bucknall) - Nice journey in the bach world.

• Scheduling Integration with the Azure Health Bot (Gregory Lisiak) - Nice way to use technology, today, to help to educate people.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

~Frank

Reading Notes #460

Cloud

• Let’s compare the cloud shells offered by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (Richard Seroter) - It's always interesting to read those comparison posts...

• ARM Template deployment, the what-if option for your Azure Deployments (Olivier Miossec) - The what-if feature is awesome, this post explains why and shows how to use it.

• State of the Azure SDK 2021 (Azure SDK Team) - So much good news! A ton of updates already done (do you know all of them?) And a very promising roadmap.

• Use Postman with the Microsoft Graph API - Microsoft Graph - Very complete docs about how to do your rest query using a dev tool.

Programming

• How to Add a Serverless Database to your React Projects (Michael Bagley) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to get started and try this type of project.

• If You Code on Windows, You Deserve a Better Windows Terminal (Matthew MacDonald) - Lovely. A nice post about why the new Windows Terminal is awesome.

• The New .NET Multi-platform App UI (David Ortinau) - I'm more and more excited by Maoi. The simple experience that it promises is very appealing.

Podcast

• #188 – Fame, Focus, and Billions of Pageviews with Evan Britton of Famous Birthdays (Indie Hackers) - A nice story where people focus on the users, worked super hard (and continue to do it), and had amazing success.

• How to Stop Being Complacent (Influencer Entrepreneurs with Jenny Melrose) - A nice episode to "kick our butt" and get back on track. Yes, 2020 indeed brought tons of new challenges at all and every level. However. we must try to make this year better.

• Who Owns Open-Source Software? (Coding Blocks) - Great discussion. Most of us, at some point, have to ask ourselves those questions (at least I know I did). It was very interesting listening to this episode and follow their thoughts.

• 631 - How to Explain a Gap in Your Résumé (Modern Mentor) - I have gaps in my resumé and I always been very comfortable about it. When I saw the title of this episode I thought maybe I should be concerned... Happy to know I was right!

Miscellaneous

• Coaching sessions: here’s what I talk about with junior developers (Dominique St-Amand) - An interesting post for all more junior will found answers and more experienced will have ideas about how to help others.

Books

Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic

Author: Adam Shoalts

Nice adventure. I wish I could see all those images, animals, and horizon. I had a good time reading this odyssey. And for the record, as a canoeist/ kayaker I was impressed by the upriver challenge.

~Frank

Reading Notes #459

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• The benefits of Infrastructure as Code (John Downs ) - A great post that lists and explains all the benefices of using infrastructure as Code in our business. This is the perfect post to read to learn all about it.

Cloud

• Learn How To Do Java On Azure (Nikos Vaggalis) - Great news for Java people free learning content and a video channel too.

• Connecting an Azure Logic App to a local Web API (Developer Support) - A short post that explains/ references a cool demo.

• How to choose the right Azure Event Hubs .NET client library type for your application | Azure SDK Blog (Squire) - Very complete post about EventHub. The perfect place to refresh or get started with this tech.

Programming

• Improvements to the new Razor editor in Visual Studio (Daniel Roth) - Looking forward to trying it.

• Integration Tests for ASP.NET Core Web APIs using MSTest (Changhui Xu) - Interesting post that bridges some gaps missing in the doc and explains how to do integration testing.

Miscellaneous

• Hack a TV into a Teams and Zoom Computer with EpocCam and Miracast (Scott Hanselman) - A nice post that proposed a variety of ideas to change/improve your experience f online meetings.

~Frank 

Reading Notes #458

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• Using Azure Key Vault to manage your secrets (Chris Noring) - Wow, this is a very complete post that explains with Azure Key vault is great and it also explains how to build a simple n\Node.js app to read a value from it.

Programming

• Blazor - Getting Started with Localization (Cody Merritt Anhorn) - Nice quick tutorial to get started.

• Generate a GitHub Actions workflow with Visual Studio or the dotnet CLI (Damian Brady) - This is extremely interesting for all .Net developers. We now have a super-easy way to create a workflow from everywhere using the CLI.

• How to fix Blazor WASM base path problems (Kristoffer Strube) - Interesting post that suggests a complete solution for a common issue. Could it be added to the framework and become native?

• Using Environments for Approval Workflows With GitHub Actions (Aaron Powell) - Pretty cool novelty looking forward to testing it.

Miscellaneous

• Looking back on Software Development in 2020 and forward to 2021 (Scott Hanselman) - A very interesting post and excellent follow up on the podcast topic. So after all it looks like 2020 was good at something.

Reading Notes #457

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• 2 Local machines 1 Dev VM (John Friesen) - A nice tutorial that can help us get started and understand how things work.

• An Introduction to Azure Media Services - The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard (David Giard) - Media services is a gem that not enough people know. Nice little introduction post.

• Azure Storage - Zip multiple files using Azure Functions (Josef Ottosson) - Great project. I like the sharing of the thoughts or questions encounter during that build. We are all eventually meet them too.

• How To Calculate Pricing In Azure (Mahesh Chand) - Nice quick refresh or quick start. Cost is such an important topic.

• Integration tests using Azure Storage emulator and .NET Core in Azure DevOps (Dominique St-Amand) - A really interesting tutorial. I'm definitely bookmarking that one for later.

• Introducing Azure Health Bot—an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality (Lili Cheng) - Very inspiring to see the evolution of what bots are able to do.

Programming

• Advanced TypeScript Tips & Tricks - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 (Dino Kacavenda) - Very very interesting tips. As a new TypeScript coder, I found this really reassuring to know there is a way.

• Save the Date for DockerCon Live 2021! - Docker Blog (Matt Carter) - If you are a container user, or just thinking about it... Reserve the date.

• How to Use Query Strings in Blazor WebAssembly (Marinko Spasojevic) - Nice tutorial. Very detailed.

Miscellaneous

• Productive (And Realistic) Ways To Optimize Your Space For Remote Work (Genevieve Michaels) - Nice post that gives a lot of suggestions to make that space at home more comfortable and pleasing.

Reading Notes #456

The suggestion of the week

• Using the latest version of the Azure CLI (Gregor Suttie) - Whaaat! This is a master ninja tricks! Well, at the minimum it is freaking cool and useful. Awesome!

Cloud

• More with Gruut: Use the Microsoft Bot Framework to analyze emotion with the Azure Face API (Dave Brock) - This is a very complete tutorial to build a cool demo. Second in a series.
• 4 common analytics scenarios to build business agility | Azure blog and updates | Microsoft Azure (Kaiser Larsen) - Very interesting post that shares real-life scenarios where businesses used Synapse to create a great solution.

Programming

• Creating a Serverless Docker Image (Jason Robert) - A nice demo/ tutorial using Node.js to help us running things where we want.
• Entity Framework Core 5 free resources (Erik Ejlskov Jensen) - This is wonderful! A curated list of great EF documentation/ tutorials.
• Getting Started with Windows Terminal (Kayla Cinnamon) - Uh! I didn't know the preview version was also that easy to get. Pretty cool.
• Jump Start your Developer Skills with Visual Studio Code Coding Packs (Jen Looper) - So simple and yet so powerful! It's an awesome idea.
• How to Create a Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CI-CD) Solution for a Docker Project (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug. It's a simple solution, but I'm pretty proud of it and it does the job marvelously.

Podcasts

• Épisode 84 - Le bonheur de s’entraîner (Grand écart) - I'm not a runner, but I like (or use to) move and be outside. This francophone podcast is really motivating, and interesting.
• Eating Frogs with Brian Tracy (The Productivityist Podcast) - I just found this podcast. I liked that book when I read it a few years ago. It was nice listening to this episode talking about it. Brought back great ideas.
• Épisode 5 - La Chasse aux Sorcières (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - Okay, THIS IS A MUST. Seriously is yo understand French, it's both educational and funny. Great job!
• 2020 sucked - A year-end wrap-up with Scott's Wife, Mo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm so glad Mo accepted to comes on the show once more. This dynamic is very interesting. I need to make my wife listen to this episode and to my daughter too (she studying to be a nurse).
• 628 - How to Be Confident, Not Arrogant (Modern Mentor) - The line between those two is easy to cross. I appreciated the reflection time about it, that this episode offers.
• The Infinite Game with Dr. James Carse (A Bit of Optimism) - The Infinite Game, a great book that I read last year. It was awesome to listen to Simon talk about those ideas with Dr. Carse.
• #187 – Building a $38k/Month SaaS Business as a Solo Founder with Jorda O'Connor of Closet Tools (Indie Hackers) - When you like learning, and that you are not afraid to work hard, a little idea can bring you really far.
• 0251 – Joel Quimper – Microsoft Graph (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Why Microsoft Graph? It's all in this episode (in French). Great show once more.

Miscellaneous

• Attention Matters More than Time (Josh Duffney) - So true. The balance is hard to find, but let's keep trying to be better at it.
• What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2020 - Wow, a very impressive list of new features. I'm looking forward to testing a few of them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #455

The suggestion of the week

• Scott Hanselman's 2021 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows (Scott Hanselman) - I'm a long-time big fan of that list. On many occasions, I discover tools that since then, are now always on my devices.

Cloud

• Using Azure Slots and GitHub for Personal Projects (Shawn Wildermuth) - A nice post that explains how to use the Azure deployment slots. It is really easy and useful.

• Automating Azure Site Recovery VMs with ARM and some magic (Dominique St-Amand) - The perfect place to get started with site and disaster recovery. This post is the best I read for a long time on this topic, great job.

• Azure Communication Services – Building an experimental messaging solution (Abhijit Jana) - Cool demo. It's the first time I read about communication services.

Programming

• Design patterns in C# - The Proxy Pattern (Carmel Eve) - I really like those little posts about code patterns. There is everything to learn in a consumable bit size.

• How To Install An ASP.NET Core In .NET 5 App On Ubuntu 20.04 (David Grace) - There it is. Simple and it works.

• Should I use self-contained or framework-dependent publishing in Docker images? (Andrew Lock) - Interesting question and answer.

Miscellaneous

• Using multiple APIs in Blazor with Azure AD authentication (Damien Bod) - Nice post with all the code you need to get started.

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.