Reading Notes #600

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! 

by: Microsoft Designer

Suggestion of the week

• Streamline your container build and publish with .NET 8 - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - As containers takes more and more space in our development life, it's great to see the tools evolving too. This post is a must for all .Net developers.

Cloud

• Announcing a new login experience with Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI (Damien Caro) - This is a great news. Have a look before you update.

Programming

• Build & test resilient apps in .NET with Dev Proxy - .NET Blog (Waldek Mastykarz) - Every web developers needs that tool. Dev Proxy is just pure gold.

• C#: What is the difference between 'string' and System.String? (Chris Pietschmann) - Memory check passed .... Did you knew?

• Blazor Basics: Handling Images Dynamically (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice simple tutorial playing with images within Blazor.

Miscellaneous

• What is an RDP Browser? (And How To Get One) (Peter) - A great alternative when you want to test on different browser or version of a browser, for gaming, And also for cyber security when investigating.

~Frank

How to Deploy a .NET isolated Azure Function using Zip Deploy in One-Click

In this post, I will share a few things that we need our attention when deploying a .NET isolated Azure Function from GitHub to Azure using the Zip Deploy method. This method is great for fast deployment and when your artefacts are zipped in a package.

Note The complete code for this post is available on GitHub

Understanding Zip Push/Zip Deploy

Zip Push allows us to deploy a compressed package, such as a zip file, directly to Azure. It could be part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI-CD) or like in this example it could replace it. This approach is particularly useful when you want to ensure your artifacts remain unchanged across different environments or when aiming for the fastest deployment experience for users.

While CI-CD is excellent for keeping your code up-to-date, zip deployment offers the advantage of speed and consistency. It eliminates the need for compilation, leading to quicker uploads and deployments.

Preparing Your Package

It’s crucial to package with all necessary dependencies the code required. There is no operation to fetch any external packages during the deployment, the zip file will be decompressed and that's it. The best way to ensure you have everything you need is to publish your code, to a folder and then go in that folder and zip all the files.

dotnet publish -c Release -o ./out

Don't zip the folder, it won't work as expected.

You need to go inside the folder and select all the files and zip them to create your deployment artefact.

The next step is to make your artefact available online. There are many ways, but for this post we are using GitHub Realease. From the GitHub repository, create a new release, upload the zipped file created earlier and publish it. Note the URL of zipped files from the release.

Preparing The ARM Template

For this one-click deployment, we need an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. This is a document that describes the resources that we want to deploy to Azure. To deploy the zipped file into the Azure Function there are two particularities that required our attention.

Here the sections of the template.

[...]
"resources": [
    {
        "apiVersion": "2022-03-01",
        "name": "[variables('funcAppName')]",
        "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites",
        "kind": "functionapp",
        "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
        "properties": {
            "name": "[variables('funcAppName')]",
            "siteConfig": {
                "appSettings": [
                    {
                        "name": "FUNCTIONS_WORKER_RUNTIME",
                        "value": "dotnet-isolated"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE",
                        "value": "1"
                    },
                    [...]

Here we define an Windows Azure Function and the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE needs to be set to 1. The WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE is the key that tells Azure to use the zip file as the deployment artefact.

Then to specify where the zip file is located we need to add an extension to the Azure Function.

    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites/extensions",
      "apiVersion": "2021-02-01",
      "name": "[format('{0}/ZipDeploy', variables('funcAppName'))]",
      "properties": {
        "packageUri": "https://github.com/FBoucher/ZipDeploy-AzFunc/releases/download/v1/ZipDeploy-package-v1.zip",
        "appOffline": true
      },
      "dependsOn": [
        "[concat('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName'))]"
      ]
    }

The packageUri property is the URL of the zipped file from the GitHub release. Note the dependsOn property that ensures the Azure Function is created before the extension is added. The complete ARM template is available in the GitHub repository.

One-click Deployment

When you have your artefact and the ARM template uploaded to your GitHub repository, you can create a one-click deployment button. This button will take the user to the Azure portal and pre-fill the deployment form with the information from the ARM template. Here is an example of the button for markdown.

[![Deploy to Azure](https://aka.ms/deploytoazurebutton)](https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.Template/uri/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2FFBoucher%2FZipDeploy-AzFunc%2Fmain%2Fdeployment%2Fazuredeploy.json)

The has three parts, the first is the image that will be displayed on the button, the second is the link to the Azure portal and the third is the URL of the ARM template. The URL of the ARM template is the raw URL of the file in the GitHub repository, and it needs to be URL encoded. The URL encoding can be done using a tool like URL Encode/Decode.

Final Thoughts

Zip deployment is a powerful tool in your Azure arsenal by itself of part of a more complex CI-CD pipeline. It's a great way to make it easier for people to deploy your solution in their Azure subscription without having to clone/ fork the repository.

Video version

If you prefer, there is also have a video version of this post.

References

• Zip deployment for Azure Functions
• MSDeploy VS. ZipDeploy
• Use a deployment button to deploy remote templates

Reading Notes #598

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, 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

• What is cloud native and how can it generate business value? (George Fitzmaurice) - Interesting thoughts about cloud native, how to see it, how to se it's value.

• Using Kudu in Azure to Debug an Azure Function (Paul Michaels) - Kudu is a fantastic tools that not enough people know about.

Programming

• Is Your Container Image Really Distroless? (Laurent Goderre) - Nice post that explains a new way to improve security and more while building our container by going distroless.

• Blazor Basics: Improved Performance with Component Virtualization (Claudio Bernasconi) - When applicable the lazy loading makes a huge difference. This simple tutorial explains how things works and has all the code to back it up.

• Azure PowerShell Tips and Tricks (Paul Harrison) - PowerShell is a very interesting and useful script language.All those tips are pure wisdom!

DevOps

• Beautiful .NET Test Reports Using GitHub Actions (Sean Killeen) - It's true that the unit test result in Azure DevOps looks amazing. Pretty nice adaptation in GitHub Action, could/ should it be native?

Open Source

• Linus Torvalds announces Linux 6.8 (Brian Fagioli) - Nice post.I feel we see more often distro new release making "the e news".

• Debian’s Dedication to Security: A Robust Foundation for Docker Developers (David Dooling) - Happy to see such a fundamental distribution take seriously security as core idea.

AI

• Building a Video Analysis and Transcription Chatbot with the GenAI Stack (David Cardozo) - This post explains a very cool project with generative AI and docker in different technology, very inspiring!

~Frank

Reading Notes #597

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

• Building Interactive Blazor Apps with WebAssembly (Ed Charbeneau) - Wow! A very well crafted tutorial that guides us, while explaining why we need to do what we're are doing at each steps.

Cloud

• Azure Spring Clean: Leveraging Azure Copilot To Better Manage Your Tenant (Sam Cogan) - It's always a good idea to do a tour of our resources in the cloud to see what's there. With that new AI assistant it will be easier to ask questions when we are not sure how to search.

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly Virtual File System Access (Michael Washington) - A nice tutorial the show us how to keep file (aka data) in the browser of the visitor. All the code is available.

• ASP.NET Core Basics: Organize Projects—Architectural Patterns (Assis Zang) - Architecture helps us to have clear and easy to maintain code. And this is what is ready important. Besides that the code need to do what we want, obviously.

• Automate Your GitHub Workflow with Bash Scripting (arjun) - Remember, everything is scriptable...

• Blazor Render Mode – How To Avoid Dependency Injection Woes (Nick Cosentino) - Failing is learning. In this post the author shares why is Blazor app wasn't behaving as he expect and what he did to fix it.

Open Source

• My new open-source repository to schedule all your content! (Nevo David) - This post shares what look like a fantastic scheduling tool, I'll have to try this project definitely useful

Miscellaneous

• Starting CockroachDB in Single User Mode with a Dockerfile (Bryan Hogan) - I really believe that database in a container is the best option for many developers. Here a simple example with cockroachDB.

~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

Problem in my local paradise: Func CLI doesn't upgrade

Last Friday, I encountered an issue while trying to run my Azure Function locally using VS Code. Despite having installed the Azure Function extension and the Azure Functions Core Tools, I was unable to execute the func start command without encountering an error saying that no functions could be found. 

In this post, I will share the various troubleshooting steps I took, what didn’t work, and how I ultimately resolved the issue. Spoiler alert: everything is now working correctly.

The Problem

My Azure Function is a .NET 8 Isolated HTTP trigger. When I attempted to execute the func start command, it failed to find any functions. A quick look at the documentation, I discovered that version 4 of the Core Tools was required for type Isolated process. However, I had already installed version 4 via the update popup in VS Code.

Something was wrong. I tried func --version and it returned 3.x.xx, weird... And this is how I knew there was a problem.

Failed attempts

Following the Azure Functions Core Tools documentation I found that there were multiple methods to install the Core Tools. Because that laptop was on Windows 11, I started by downloading the func-cli-x64.msi installer and run it. It didn't work, the version 3 was still there.

I tried to install the Core Tools v4 using NPM: npm install -g azure-functions-core-tools@4. It didn't work.

I tried to uninstall the version 3 with npm uninstall -g azure-functions-core-tools. I tried using the command palette in VSCode

Still nothing was changing anything, the version 3 was still there.

The Solution

What works, was using Chocolatey command choco uninstall azure-functions-core-tools to uninstall the version 3. Some how, it must have been install at the different location or some "config" got lost at some point (it's a developer laptop after all), and the other methods (npm, msi, vscode) couldn't see that version 3 was installed.

After that, I installed the version 4 using NPM npm install -g azure-functions-core-tools@4. And it worked! The func --version returned 4.0.5571 and the func start command found my function.

I wrote this quick post hoping that it can help someone else, as I cannot be the only one with this problem.

~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 #594

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 Resources with Deployment Stacks (John Kilmister) - That's a very useful tool, and nicely documented.

Programming

• Extract Method Refactoring Technique in C# – What You Need To Know (Nick Cosentino) - Great post that go over one of the most powerful method that every developers will be using all along their career. Simple and so useful, it's a must!

• Dapr v1.13 is now available (Dapr project maintainers) - I really like those post that goes over the news and also named all the contributors. This is when you see how many people are involved.

• Are Containers Only for Microservices? Myth Debunked (Zubair Aslam, Jay Schmidt) - Interesting post that demystify the myth about container by in only for micro services.

• Marten 7.0 is Released! (Jeremy D. Miller) - Nice update. Version 7 already...

• How to Fix CORS Error With AnyOrigin and AllowCredentials (Code Maze) - Anyone who work or build API go that error message about CORS. Here is a nice post to learn more about it and understand who we can fix it in an API.

AI

• RAG is Dead. Long Live RAG! (David Myriel) - Nice post that explains the differences between two type of AI RAG and LLM.

Databases

• Get Started with Milvus Vector DB in .NET - .NET Blog (Luis Quintanilla) - This post starts by explaining what's a vector databases and than show a nice example with movies.

~Frank

Reading Notes #593

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

• Azure Functions Extensibility - Runtime Scaling (Tomasz Pęczek) - A well written post that goes in the details.Perfect to really understand how things works.

Programming

• 5 Powerful HTML Attributes That Don't Require JavaScript (Ashish Patel) - Wow! I didn't even known that most of those attributes existed..

• Docker Init for ASP.NET Core Compared to VS or VS Code Extensions (Julie Lerman) - awesome comparison! I've been thinking about doing it for a little while. Another great post from Julie.

• Blazor and .NET 8: How I Built a Fast and Flexible Website (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - optimisation is often a step that people forgets, but it's one that is extremely rewarding.This series seams very interesting, we will s| more of those in the notes...

• Warp, the modern terminal, is now available for Linux (Aloke Desai, David Stern) - I didn't heard of that terminal before. It looks interesting! Looking forward to try it.

• Using Visual Studio Code for .NET MAUI Development (Vijay Anand) - it's incredible the progress that was done in such little time I'm looking forward to try it.

• The FAST and the Fluent: A Blazor story - .NET Blog (Vincent Baaij) - Nice post that teach us a bit of history. I'm fan of Fluent UI and Blazor...and more recently of the Fluent UI Blazor library. I think it's a must for all Blazor developers.

• GraphQL vs. REST—Which is Better for API Design? (Hassan Djirdeh) - Pretty cool comparison of different type/design of APIs.

Miscellaneous

• Windows AI Studio : Getting Started ( Shreyan Fernandes) - Nice tools the works locally. I'm installing it, will you?

~Frank

Reading Notes #591

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

• Make demo typing easy with DemoType in ZoomIt v8.0 (John Stephens) - This is such a game changer! Of course live demo are the best but losing precious secondes because of a typo is a real nightmare.

Cloud

• Planning for Resiliency with Azure OpenAI (Matthew Anderson) - Like everything else in the cloud we need to think about resiliency. This nice post get us started and explains 2 different architectures for our system.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - February 2024 Release (Grace Kulin) - Cool feature now supported in this new release with helm support for kubernetes and many other features.

Programming

• The Difference Between RESTful APIs and Web APIs Using ASP.NET Core (Januarius Njoku) - A very complete post about APIs their definition and differences.

• Scaling Docker Compose Up (Milas Bowman) - Interesting post that do a deep dive into docker compose file.

• Our Vision for .NET 9 - .NET Blog (.NET Team) - Inspiring plan for the future release of .Net.

• My Top 10 NEW Visual Studio Features of 2023 for .NET Developers - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - I don't code everyday and when I do it's on all kind of device and OS so I end up more often using VS Code. But, when I can use Visual Studio it's always a treat. In this post, James shares his favorite new features part of that great IDE. Those are only the recent ones, there are so much more!

• Scaling Docker Compose Up (Milas Bowman) - Interesting post that do a deep dive into docker compose file.

• 8 ways to set the URLs for an ASP.NET Core app (Andrew Lock) - What!? So many different ways to assign the url.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #590

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

• Observability on Azure Container Apps (Abdullah Abu-Hassan) - Great post to get started. We can download all the code required to try it ourself.

• WTH is Azure Copilot? (Sam Cogan) - I believe this copilot will be extremely useful for so many people... including me.

Programming

• Solved! Visual Studio .http File Not Sending Authorization Header (Steve Smith) - The devil is in the details as they say. Great post that shares the investigation of an issues. A time saver.

• Should I put my Blazor components in the server project, or the client project? (Jon Hilton) - Short and clear explanation of the blazor structure, very helpful post.

• How to Make Your Web Sites Accessible (Beau Carnes) - Accessibility is a must and now there a course available on camp to help us making our website accessible.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor components 4.4 (Vincent Baaij) - Nice new components. Its going fast!

• Dev Tunnels: A Game Changer for Mobile Developers - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - Dev Tunnel is definitely a incredible tool.I used it for debugging connector in Power Platform and there is no doubts it will help with mobile app...No more guesses debug with the real thing.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Sudo for Windows! (Jordi Adoumie) - Wow! This is a really good new feature. How many time a forgot to start my terminal as admin and needed to starry over again...Looking forward to try it.

~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 #587

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

• Backing up files to Azure blob storage with azcopy (Andrew Lock) - A very interesting solution to a situation we are all facing. Nice to see the OSS project (I didn't know that one) and smart way to use Azure.

Low Code

• Building your own copilot – yes, but how? (Part 1 of 2) (Carlotta Castelluccio) - This is a cool tutorial to build a Copilot codeless style.If you prefer code style watch for part two coming soon.

Programming

• Structuring a Clean Architecture Folder (Adrián Bailador Panero) - Nice quick overview of the folder structure.

• Git Lesson: How to Use .gitignore and .gitkeep? (Rita Lyczywek) - Two important files indeed when using Git.

• Cookies vs Session Storage vs Local Storage (Royal Jain) - Clear post that explains the purpose and differences between 3 useful tools.

• 14 Things To Check Before Deploying a Website 👨‍💻🔥 (Arjun Vijay Prakash) - Quick sanity check before publishing.... It is always a good idea.

• Difference between CultureInfo.Get and new CultureInfo - Gérald Barré (Gérald Barré) - Short post how performance tip with cultureInfo.

• Simpler auth for Blazor Web Apps with Auth0? (Jon Hilton) - A wonderful tutorial very well detailed that explains how to use Auth0 with Blazor server app and search some gotchas so our experience goes smoother.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Communication Services January 2024 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Improved management and a new data channel, great updates to start the year with a bang!

~Frank

Reading Notes #586

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

• Serverless Architecture Patterns and Best Practices (Faith Oyama) - Nice overview of different patterns in the serverless world. Here AWS lamda are used but it's true for all serverless situation.

• Azure Static Web App - Authentication using pre-configured providers (Bart Wullems) - A quick intro to authentication and authorization for SWA, agnostics of any programmatic languages.

Programming

• FluentUI.Blazor v4.3 (Denis Voituron) - I recently migrate one of my website to use FlunentUI Blazor, and the experience is amazing. It looks great and required less code from me.

• WebAssembly: 4 Predictions for 2024 (Matt Butcher) - Nice post that review 2023 predictions and sets 2024 ones explaining why it could happened.

• Creating an ASP.NET Core Web App with Docker Support and GitHub Packages (Bjoern Meyer) - A nice quick but details tutorial with a step by step approach.

Podcasts

• Dockerfiles have versions? (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - Interesting episode about a little thing that could have a big impact in our CICD and I'm sure is overlooked.

• Playing the YouTube game with Nick Chapsas (Coding After Work Podcast) - Great interview with a successful technical content creator that do things "the good way".

• Teammateship with NBA champion Shane Battier (A Bit of Optimism) - reat conversation about team work, what it really means and what to achieve it.

• How to Focus When the World Feels on Fire (Modern Mentor) - Quick thoughts and tips to stay focus. Sometimes it's harder and other times and having a fews tricks his always a good idea.

Miscellaneous

• Twitter Ruined Your Link Previews: Here's How Cloudinary Can Help (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Wow! This looks like an amazing tool.I need to look dipper into this.

• A Job at Microsoft: Getting and Passing the Interview (Rod Trent ) - Interesting post that will certainly be very helpful for many.

~Frank

Reading Notes #585

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

• Announcing the Azure Migrate application and code assessment tool for .NET - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - Neat tools that can be added via CLI (cross platform) or as Visual Studio extension.

Programming

• Using the CLI to Build and Run .NET Applications (Dusko Mirkovic) - This is a short tutorial that shows the basics functionalities of the command dotnet... Its very useful and it works on al platforms.

• Docker whale-comes AtomicJar, maker of Testcontainers (Scott Johnston) - Great news! Anythings to facilitate testing.

• Development slowness in big and legacy applications [and how to hurry it up] (Michael Shpilt) - Great post. Feels like years of experience in many different places.... Worth your time reading it for sure.

• What User Interface Framework Should You Choose for .NET Desktop Applications? (Claudio Bernasconi) - I didn't know all the frameworks, it is always good to be aware of the options we have.

• Building a Critter Stack Application: Asynchronous Processing with Wolverine (Jeremy D. Miller) - This post show a cool implementation using wolverine.

• Functional Programming With C# - Scan and FindIndex (Simon Painter) - Nice post that explains three C# function.

• Scanning Uploaded Files for Malware in C# (Vladan Petrovic) - This post shows how to use a pretty neat tools to improve security in our C# app. And there is a free version.

~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 #583

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

• Getting Started with Blazor’s New Render Modes in .NET 8 (Jon Hilton) - Amazing post that covers the four rendering mode for Blazor in .NET 8.There just enough code to understand the concept and see the trade-offs and advantages of each options.

  

  ai generated: melting snowman who love to read

  
  

Cloud

• A Decade of Have I Been Pwned (Troy Hunt) - Congrats for this anniversary and what a journey it was.I remember reading with passion your tech blog describing the tech decision taken for the site.

• Making Azure the Best Place to Observe Your Apps with OpenTelemetry (Matthew McCleary) - Looking back, tracking, monitoring, tracing are such important action when we think about application life cycle.I'm very happy to see Azure offers a great sets of tools to do it.

• Azure Arc Setup on Windows Server (Thomas Maurer) - Nice super easy wizard experience on our Windows servers.

• How to delete an Azure storage account with an unlocked Immutability policy (Stephane Lapointe) - It's great to have those security feature and to understand how they work.This post explains very clearly one of them the option we have to remove that security, and even have script snippets.

Programming

• Podman vs Docker: What are the differences? (Alex Gamela, Rute Figueiredo) - Nice post that help understanding the differences between these two tool.

• How to Switch Between .NET SDK Versions (Lennart Pries) - Quick tips for new .NET developers .

• 🤖 Does Functional Programming Matter To You? (Rob Conery) - Interesting and intriguing post about functional programming. Wanna share your thoughts? Rob is waiting for your comments...

Miscellaneous

• Terminal Chat in Windows Terminal Canary (Christopher Nguyen) - Wait, What?

• How to Become a T-Shaped Developer and Boost Your Career (sadukie) - The lesson here is embrace who you are. Very nice post about the type of people we are.

~ 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

Reading Notes #581

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

• ASP.NET Core Basics: Essential NuGet Packages (Part 1) (Assis Zang) - Great idea this post! Those five packages are definitely very useful, and I like that they are not just mentioned but also explained and implemented in the demo solution.

Programming

• Announcing .NET 8 - .NET Blog (Gaurav Seth) - Tons of update with as many videos. Enough to satiate everyone.

• Entity Framework Core 8 (EF8) is available today - .NET Blog (Arthur Vickers) - Of course the Entity framework update to follow .NET of course.

• Get ready for .NET Conf, Microsoft Ignite, and GitHub Universe (Matt Graven) - So many events and news packed in a single month. This post helps to do an overview so help us make an ideas.

• Connect to localhost from inside a dev container (Jim Bennett) - Interesting... I thought Dapr was the easiest but the solution presented in this post could be a easier workaround, at lease while coding/ testing it.

• Fake It Til You Make It...To Production - .NET Blog (Martin Taillefer) - This post shows 3 pretty useful fake/mock included in .NET 8: Logger, Clock, and Metric.

• Building debugging context for Copilot Chat (Mark Downie) - Cool extension for Visual Studio.

• Announcing .NET Chiseled Containers - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - The new image are available.Yay

Databases

• Importing Flat Files into Azure SQL DB (Josephine Bush) - Omg! That makes Azure Data Studio the easiest and low friction tool to import data from a flat file into a Ms SQL database

Miscellaneous

• OpenAI drama is over. (Kim Menikh) - Well.I was curious.I didn't follow all of it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #580

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

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - November 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - So many feature in this CLI, I really need to look into it!
  
  
  

Programming

• Unlocking Git’s Power with GitLens: A Visual Studio Code Extension Guide (Sarah Lean) - Great quick intro and nice video about GitLens. It's one of those tool that you didn't know it but once you do, you can't imagine how you could live without it before.

• Introducing v1.0.0 Beta6 for the .NET Semantic Kernel SDK (Matthew Bolanos) - Sementic Kernel is a pretty cool tool.

• Explaining Kubernetes To My Uber Driver (Jessica Wang) - Pretty cool story that explains in a comprehensible way what is Kubernetes and why it is useful.

• Where fetch data in your Blazor components (Jon Hilton) - Having a optimization strategy is important.This post is a good place to start when using Blazor.

• .NET MAUI on Linux with Visual Studio Code (Bruno Capuano) - This is pretty interesting! Instead of having a Windows vm on my Linux laptop I could run natively ...I'll need to try that!

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Microsoft Copilot Studio (Jared Spataro, C) - Copilot Studio was for sure one of the big announcement during Microsoft Ignite. Learn more about what it is, what it does, and how you can get it in this post.

~frank