Reading Notes #487

It's... Tuesday! Yes I know one day later, but it's still time to 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!

Suggestion of the week

• 5 DevOps tips to speed up your developer workflow (Damian Brady) - Great post with event greater tips to be more efficient.

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates (Michael Flanakin) - Tracking our costs is important to stay on top of your business. This short post shares the latest updates.

• WTH are Azure Container Apps? (Sam Cogan) - A nice post that really does a great introduction of the new Azure Containers Apps that was announced recently.

Programming

• 
  GitHub Issues Graph with Netlify and GraphQL (Den Delimarsky) - Whaaaat! Awesome idea and execution. I love it!
  

• A Nightscout Segment for OhMyPosh shows my realtime Blood Sugar readings in my Git Prompt (Scott Hanselman) - It's cool that you can add anything in the prompt, and there is such granularity control of how the information is displayed.

• GitHubs magic files (Rob Bos) - Nice some of them I never saw.

• Windows Authentication with HttpClient (Rick Strahl) - He got me at Retro post lol

Podcasts

• Egil Hansen on Blazor Testing with bUnit - Episode 169 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - It's the second time I hear good things about bUnit. This is an open-source library for testing Blazor components that can be paired with many popular test frameworks. I need to try it.

• Podcast Tags: Are They Still Relevant? (Feed Your Brand) - It all makes sense. I am not 100% sure about YouTube however because all captions are indexed... I think. But if you create content listen to this.

• Family with Ari Emanuel (A Bit of Optimism) - The best way to learn and grow is to try and fail ( aka fall). A great episode very interesting.

☁️ Frank

Reading Notes #482

Another Monday, a new reading notes; a 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!

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – August 2021 | Azure blog and updates (Michael Flanakin) - Pretty nice updates this month to better see the info from inside the portal or outside with new downloadable options, and Power Bi.

• Deconstructing Azure PowerShell APIs with Fiddler (Developer Support) - I love seeing those behind the scenes, and this one explains how we can do it ourselves.

Programming

• How WebAssembly Could Streamline Cloud Native Computing (Mary Branscombe) - Interesting post. I didn't play a lot of work kubernetes yet, so I will say the idea seems brilliant.

• My Ultimate PowerShell prompt with Oh My Posh and the Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - This is the perfect post to get started. You have everything to build a pretty decent customized prompt and from there you just tweak it for your preferences... Don't be scare everything is very well documented.

• Boost your productivity with Productivity Power Tools Extensions in Visual Studio 2022! (Leslie Richardson) - This next VisualStudio is looking so promising....very excited

Podcast

• How to Earn More Keynote Speaking Opportunities From Your Podcast (Feed Your Brand) - Interesting discussion on this episode. We could also summarize it by saying just be good to your host.

• SPI 502: All Things Live Video (the Best Way to Connect to Your Audience) with Luria Petrucci (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - That's a hot topic: live! Yep, it is indeed different from recorded content, so what do we need to do to be better at it? Very nice episode.

~frank

Reading Notes #477

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

• Tips and Tricks and Best Practices for Hybrid Meetings with Microsoft Teams and more (Scott Hanselman) - I love that post. We learned so much in the last months. Now that all have experienced the remote, let's keep that in mind and build best practices on top of it.

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – July 2021 (Michael Flanakin) - Many updates are introduced in this post, and there are also videos if you prefer.

• Bring Your Own Storage in Azure Web App (Kevin Li) - Interesting post that explains how the details about how to do it. I wish there were more details about some good scenarios of when to use that.

Programming

• PowerShell: Download script or file from GitHub (Thomas Maurer) - That cool! I wish it was as simple as the bash curl, but it's a start.

• ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 6 Preview 6 (Daniel Roth) - Nice post that explains the new features, how to get started, and also how to migrate.

• Blazor Debugging Improvements in Rider 2021.2 (Rachel Appel) - That's super cool debugging wasm...

• Welcome to the Community Toolkit! (Michael Hawker) - A new name, more friends so much news for this group.

Miscellaneous

• Should you attend yet another meeting? (Luise Freese) - Think about it... We all do it. Nice and funny diagram.

~Frank

Reading Notes #438

Cloud

• Azure Durable Functions Monitoring and Diagnostics (Damien Bod) - A nice tutorial to help us get more visibility on our Durable Functions.

• Authenticate Blazor WebAssembly with Azure Static Web Apps (Anthony Chu) - A great 

• tutorial that explains how to uses the socials account to authenticate our users in a Blazor app.

• Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – July 2020 (Michael Flanakin) - We all have a budget, this post helps us to stay up to date with the tool.

• Azure Durable Functions Monitoring and Diagnostics (Damien Bod) - If you are using (or planning to) the durable function this post is a must as it will ease your debugging / monitoring.

Programming

• Learn about the latest .NET Productivity features (Mika) - Nice post that describes in detail how to use the new feature of Roslyn.

• Sign Up for the Private Preview of Visual Studio support for Codespaces! (Nick) - Nice more codespace possibilities!

Miscellaneous

• .NET Foundation Board of Directors Election 2020: Results! (null) - After earing about this board on a .Net Rocks episode, I'm happy to see the result.

• THE EASY WAY how to SSH into Bash and WSL2 on Windows 10 from an external machine (Scott Hanselman) - Read 1 post and get 1 for free... Awesome and easy tips.

Reading Notes #416

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are 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. Enjoy!

Cloud

• ASP.NET Core Apps Observability (Francisco) - A great post that shares, and explains how to implement logs, traces, and metrics in modern application.

• Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – February 2020 (Michael Flanakin) - Wow, an incredible update on all front. New features, new PowerBi app, new APIs, and so much more.

• Durable Functions Upgrade Strategies (Mark Heath) - A real gold mine of information about best practices when migrating. Of course great when migrating durable functions, but also true for any services.

Programming

• How to set up a tab profile in Windows Terminal to automatically SSH into a Linux box - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - If you've been hacking or just copy-pasting config without understanding to mutch, this post will explain how to do you own version.

• Announcing PowerShell 7.0 (Joey) - That awesome post will explain what's in PowerShell 7 and why we should care... Because yes... we should.

• Docker Desktop for Windows Home is here! - Docker Blog (Ben De St Paer-Gotch) - Fantastic news! And so easy to install. Lovely.

• How to merge a pull request 🔥🔥🔥 (Steve Belovarich) - Interesting post that shares some best practices when merging.

Podcast

• Starting a profitable business in six weeks with Courtland Allen (Software Engineering Unlocked) - A really interesting discussion about success in tech. All the work that it required, but also the timing, and the people you keep around you in the journey.

• #28: Frank Boucher - Live Stream Coding (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Shameless plug... But a good episode nevertheless.

• #361: The Generosity of Scars with Scott Mann (The EntreLeadership Podcast) - First when I eared the guess was a military I thought it will be full of war references... But no! This episode is all about human. Our self, are we feel alone and strangely the fact that we are not. Great episode and I really liked Scott Mann verbs.

• How to Start and Grow A Podcast That Gets Listeners - Twitch Advice (Stream Coach: Twitch Stream Tips) - I like how Ashley treats her topics. She does it in a different way. In my journey to learn about how to provide great streaming content, this episode was a nice complement.

Book

The Infinite Game 

by: Simon Sinek

 I really enjoyed this book. This book gave me vocabulary. It was putting words on ideas, explaining clearly some feelings that I wasn't able to express. Like when you know something is good or bad, but that you can explain why. It's less impressive than Start with Why, but definitely, something to read.

 

Everything we Should Know About the new Azure Usage And Billing (AUBI) Portal

(Ce billet en aussi disponible en français.)

If one image is worth a thousand words, then it's incredible the amount of information you have in Azure Usage And Billing (AUBI). This portal is a open-source project that has been announced a few weeks ago. In this post, I will share my first impressions about it.



The project is still young, but every alive. When I installed it, I had one or two minor issues, but by the time I wrote this post all of them were already fixed.

Where it is?

The Azure Usage And Billing site is not a website like portal.azure.com; it consists of a solution you need to deploy in an Azure subscription. It doesn't require to be the subscription you wish to monitor, just a subscription you have access. The solution contains: two web sides with both Application Insights and one also with webjobs, an SQL Database, a storage account and you will also need to deploy a Power BI report.



All of it can be easily deployed using the PowerShell script and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template included. Only a few manual steps will be required. Hopefully, a very clear and completed documentation is available in video or written. Both present on the Github project page.

What can I do with it?

Once fully deployed, you will need to navigate to your instance of the Registration portal (ex: http://frankregistrationv12.azurewebsites.net) and register all the subscriptions you want. After the webjobs are finished bringing all the data, they will all be available in the Power BI Reports.
Power BI does an incredible work by showing all the information about your subscription(s). A very useful point here is that all information present in the dashboard is interactive! Whatever you select simply one or many subscriptions or only a specific category of Azure service, all the other tiles will be automatically adjusted.

What's Next?

If it's not already done, I highly recommend installing the AUBI portal and start enjoying the detail of all that information available to you without any effort, and presented in such a beautiful way. For all the details about the prerequisites or the install procedure got to the Github project page.

Reference:

• Announcing the release of the Azure Usage and Billing Portal
• Git AzureUsageAndBillingPortal

Reading Notes #241

Cloud

• Announcing the release of the Azure Usage and Billing Portal (Chris Risner) - I have been waiting long time to get a tool like that. I will definitely clone it this week.
  
• Azure Infographic: Cloud Design Patterns - Wow! A fantastic infographic that shows many different patterns that should be used when developing with Azure.
  
• Azure Search Suggesters: Helping users to find search keywords - Nice demo that shows the power of suggesters and how to implement them.
  
• Create your first botframework bot in Azure! (Robin Osborne) - This post is a nice tutorial that gives a lot of ideas about what you could do with the botfrmework.
  
• Writing simple REST-client for Azure Search (Gunnar Peipman) - Quick demo to show how developing with Azure Search is easy.

Programming

• 5 Impeccable Reasons Node.js is Great for Startups (Keval Padia) - It all makes sense, but I didn't think about it before reading those five reasons.
  
• Visual Studio Code, your new Markdown editor - Another post that affirms how VisualStusio Code is great. It must be true... ;)

Miscellaneous

• 3 Significant Flaws in the Concept of Googliness (Melissa Burns) - Interesting point of view about what look first as good idea that could turn out as bad ideas...
  
• New Microsoft and Open Source Partner Community (Openness Team) - Nice ne community that just begins.
  
• The Anti-Meeting Culture (James Whittaker) - Very interesting thoughs about meetings and an even more interesting ways to make them more productive.

Reading Notes #191

Suggestion of the week

• Free recorded webinar on Pluralsight: Why SQL Injection Remains the #1 Web Security Risk Today - Security is so important. This video helps us to remember and shows us some simple attacks.

Cloud

• Azure DSC Extension v2.0 released (PowerShell Team) - Details about the new version and how to upgrade.
  
• Calling Logic Apps from an HTTP Action (Jeff Hollan) - Very interesting post that shows a powerful and flexible scenario with the Azure Logic Apps.
  
• New Azure Billing APIs Available - Wow very useful API, looking forward to try it.

Programming

• How to use Process Monitor and Process Explorer - Great video that explains a lot. We often learn more than what we expect in a debugging session.
  
• Why TDD for PowerShell? Or why pester? Or why unit test a "scripting" language? - Very interesting thoughts... I wonder what is the opinion of my heavy script coder friends...
  
• Docker and Microsoft announce more innovation to cross platforms and win hearts (Corey Sanders) - This post resumes some key things that happen at DockerCon. Really interesting.
  
• Visual Studio Code and Docker (Chris Dias [MSFT], Mark Rendle, DvdBrink Sean McBreen [MSFT]) - Nice post, I am happy to see that great plugin are coming.

Miscellaneous

• Stop Worrying About How Much You Matter - Interesting thoughts in a world of instant gratification...

Image by FutUndBeidl / Flickr