Reading Notes #539

Good Monday! 

It's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. 

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

 

Programming

• Making an Asynchronous Breakfast in .NET (Assis Zang ) - This post explains so well using a task that we all did the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code. It's in .NET, but valid for all languages (that support async code of course).

• A first look behind the scenes of minimal API endpoints: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First, of a series, this post digs into the code to understand why minimal APIs are so performant. There is a lot in there, looking forward to reading the next one.

• December Extensions Roundup: Improving Visibility for Your APIs and Images (Amy Bass) - I use more than I create docker images these days but I can see how this extension would be useful.Very cool!

• Exploring the model-binding logic of minimal APIs: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 3 (Andrew Lock) - The third post in a series where we dig into how Minimal APIs do their magic.

• Extracting metadata from a minimal API handler: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 2 (Andrew Lock) - Another deep technical post of the series where Andrew shows us are things works under the hood of minimal APIs.

• How To Use GitLens To Figure Out Who Introduced A Change In Your Code (Mohd S.) - Great post that shows how to use a tool with a real case. Nicely done!

• Reducing Blazor WASM size by providing custom ICU data - Gérald Barré (Gérald Barré) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to help us understand and get started.

Podcasts

• Best of DevOps 2022 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Nice review of 2022, DevOps style, by 3 Docker captains.

• Source Open vs Open Source and IdentityServer with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen (.NET Rocks!) - I used in the past IdentityServer and didn't know the story. Very interesting post about Open source.

~Frank

Reading Notes #535

Good Monday,
it's the last ReadingNotes of 2022! So many great articles, podcasts, and blog posts. More than 350 of those catch my interest this year...

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

Cloud

• Azure App Configuration, Key Vault and Managed Identity Implementation (Kevin Logan) - Security is essential and yes it adds complexity at first, but not that much. Have a look.

• Microsoft Azure CLX: A personalized program to learn Azure | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Priyanka Rawat) - More options to learn, and this one has a practice test in it, something that so many are looking for.

Programming

• 11 Ways of Making Your C# Harder to Use (Brendan Enrick) - A refreshing topmost post that shows the best practices. Well done!

• Containerized Blazor: Microsoft Ponders New Client-Side Hosting (David Ramel) - Looking forward to this feature being out.

• How Wolverine allows for easier testing (Jeremy Miller) - This looks like a great tool for testing.

• Introducing Wolverine for Effective Server Side .NET Development (Jeremy Miller) - The first time I read about that tool looks very interesting.

• WebAssembly vs. Kubernetes (Cameron Gain) - Very interesting thoughts. Only time will show if it's true.

Miscellaneous

• Can the Kindle Scribe replace the yellow notepad? Notes on taking notes with Amazon’s new device (Todd Bishop) - Didn't Know Remarcable 2 had a competitor. I like the idea of reducing paper usage but right now the solutions seem too expensive, at least for my usage. I will continue to use a digital keyboard or tablet pen notes app.

~Frank

Reading Notes #532

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

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

Cloud

• Setup the Auto-shutdown on VM using Bicep template (Massimo Bonanni) - VMs are so useful. One of the best ways to save money is to turn them off when you are not using them. Part 6 about Bicep explains how to do it in your IaC script.

• What is Azure Container Registry? (MakendranG) - A quick intro on Azure Registry and how to create one.

Programming

• Authorization and Authentication in Minimal APIs (Assis Zang) - This is a great tutorial...Time to secure our APIs

• Converting Markdown to DOCX and PDF in C# (Bjoern Meyer|) - Interesting post with all the code required to do this project.Shorter than I thought.

• How to publish .NET 7 apps directly to Docker (Dennis Frühauff) - Pretty cool stuff. I need to try it.

• Make a Web Reporting App Using a Blazor Reporting Tool & Microservices | ActiveReports.NET (Sergey Abakumoff) - Report services... That brings memories! I like the idea of using Blazor as the container to display the reports.

• The dangers and gotchas of using scoped services in OptionsBuilder (Andrew Lock) - A very complete post that shares all you need to know about scopes.

Miscellaneous

• My IoT problem: the garage door opener : Algorithms for the masses - julian m bucknall (Julian M Bucknall) - Technology! Marvelous, when it works...

~frank

Reading Notes #530

Good Monday!

It's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. Are you done watching all the videos from .NET Conf and GitHub Universe? I know I don't...

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

Cloud

• The cloud isn't the issue, you're just using it wrong (Jeremy Daly) - Great post about, unfortunately still, a controversial topic: the cloud!

Programming

• Fundamental ASP.Net Minimal API Integration Tests (Peter Ritchie) - This post is the perfect high overview to get started with testing.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit v8.1.0 Preview 1 (Sergio Pedri) - So many updates. Have an overview in this post.

• Welcome to C# 11 (Mads Torgersen) - This blog is the perfect appetizer to get us excited to learn more. C# 11 seems to be a great new version.

• What's New for ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 7 (David Ramel) - So many goodies in this update from both .Net 7 sides and Blazor. This post overview most of them.

• What's new in Orleans 7.0 (Brady Gaster) - Simplified, faster, and so much more learn all the news about Orleans 7 in this post, and join them on Discord.

• What’s new with Codespaces from GitHub Universe 2022 (Nik Molnar) - I'm a big fan of codespace and DevContainer. I was delighted to learn about the global availability and the free monthly hours. This makes it a must for many open-source projects.

Miscellaneous

• How Link Building Can Help You Grow Your Blog (Sam Bowman) - Are links and backlinks still a good practice in the world of SEO? This post answer this question in detail.

• Why You Should Make Time for a Seasonal Cleanup (Suzanne Scacca ) - It takes a little bit of time, but I guess it is worth it since we and our devices will run more efficiently.

~frank

Reading Notes #527

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

Programming

• Blazor WASM Custom 404 Page on GH Pages (Justin Yoo) - This is a lovely double tutorial. Learn first how to write a 404 not found page in Blazor then learn how to use custom 404 when using GitHub as a hosting platform.

• 9 Tips for Containerizing Your Node.js Application - Docker (Ajeet Singh Raina, Johan Giraldo) - A nice list of smart tips.

• Cake - Cake v2.3.0 released (Mattias Karlsson) - Nice to see more features available in Cake. You can do complex and advanced stuff now.

• Docker and WebAssembly together at Wasm Day NA 2022 (Chris Crone) - Wasm + Docker...That seems promising...

• I changed my mind about writing new JavaScript frameworks (Salma Alam-Naylor) - JavaScript is its own universe with so many options and variations. Looking forward to seeing the WTF tool and learning more about how she builds it.

• Introducing Spectre.Console (Steve Smith) - It's for sure a library that I will try. Console applications are a very useful tool so anything that can speed up the creation process is a must.

• Learn how to improve your ASP.NET Core controllers with these principles - dateo-software (Dennis Frühauff) - A very interesting post to learn more about how to improve our code.

• Make The First Letter of a String Upper Case in C# - Code Maze (Code Maze) - I didn't even know the aspan method...Do you? Nice performance / fine-tuning post.

Podcasts

• HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal (Screaming in the Cloud) - MySQL database as a service on Oracle cloud, this sounds interesting and looks like the price is too.

• Developing .NET on AWS with Isaac Levin (.NET Rocks!) - Yes!! Of course, .NET is everywhere but now we hear about it! A captivating episode where Isaac makes a quick tour of all the possibilities for .Net developers on ASW.

• 137. Anti-Time Management with Richie Norton (Part 1)-id2920271-id538368995) (The Greg McKeown Podcast) - I was not sure what to expect from "Anti-Time Management" and I like what I heard. looking forward to listening to part two.
• Rob Richardson: Web Services in .NET 6 - Episode 213 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - What a great episode covering so much! Expect to learn more about how things work like the authentification and authorization.

~Frank

Reading Notes #523

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

Suggestion of the week

• Teaching ‘Digital Native’ College Students Who Understand TikTok — But Not Microsoft Excel (Lilah Burke) - This great post makes the distinction between social tech awareness and technophile.

Cloud

• .NET 7 comes to Azure Functions & Visual Studio 2022 (Melony Qin) - This is one of the reasons why isolated functions were so cool, now we can select our version as we please.

• .NET on Azure Functions Roadmap Update (Matthew Henderson) - The future looks very promising... :) And that also reminded me that I really need to upgrade one of my older functions.

• Journey to the Cloud With ACA (Anthony Chu) - A perfect little tutorial showing how to build a one container App from nothing and end with a complete CICD workflow to deploy it into Azure.

• Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Introduction (Jonathan George) - Great post about the reason behind a migration from Azure Function to Azure Container App. I really like reading all the questioning, going into the detail, planning the pricing, and the POC, this reflects the real life.

DevOps

• 9 DevOps Best Practices - What You Should Do and NOT Do (Ioannis Moustakis) - A nice high-level post that shares best practices, perfect to get inspired and start learning more.

Programming

• .NET now on Windows Package Manager (Ashita Nagar) - That's fantastic! I often have multiple versions of the framework installed because I try previews and so. With Winget I will be able to do some cleanup very easily.

• Micro Frontends in Action With ASP.NET Core - Communication Patterns for Blazor WebAssembly Based Web Components (Tomasz Pęczek) - A wonderful post that shares knowledge and code snippets to explain so much. I will need all of that. Love it!

Miscellaneous

• Test the Fall Insider Preview Build for HoloLens today! (Shona Bang) - Oh, nice! Please share as I'm sure so many would love to try that game asap and be part of that program.

~Frank

Reading Notes #522

Yep! It's Monday again :) 

 Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - DevSecOps is a real thing and it's accessible for all. This post explains what it is and provides examples of how it could be implemented at a high level.

• Using Azure CLI Authentication within Local Containers (James Dawson) - This post provides two very useful workarounds with WSL and docker to a difficulty we might encounter while using a different platform.

Programming

• #RaspberryPi – Install raspi-config on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Bruno Capuano) - A short post that shows how to get Unbuntu 22.02 on your Pi.

• Adding color to bracket pairs (Mads Kristensen) - A call for feedback on an up common feature of Visual Studio. Rainbow Brackets yes it will colorize the brackets but what should be the options?

• Browser Extension with Blazor WASM - Cross-Browser Compatibility (Justin Yoo) - Nice post in a series that really shows in the details and explains how to use the extension.

• DevOps monitoring: The Why, What, and How of DevOps monitoring (Hiren Dhaduk) - This is an excellent post to get us to think about our first step. It explains the reason why we should care and briefly lists a few tools available today on the market to help.

• Get started with NDepend: Uncle Bob and the Zone of Pain (Dennis) - A nice article that explains how to get started with NDepends.

• Rewrite your git history in 4 friendly commands (Salma Alam-Naylor) - The git trick of the week for when you want to do a major cleaning.

• Working with System.Random and threads safely in .NET Core and .NET Framework (Andrew Lock) - Interesting post about Random numbers in .NET.

Podcasts

• 38. Open source framework MVVM Light, Azure Static Web Apps & timekeeper.cloud with Laurent Bugnion (Betatalks the podcast) - Cool episode about, well my friend! :)
• How to be a great (new!) leader (Modern Mentor) - Really interesting episode for new leaders/ influencers.

~frank

Reading Notes #520

Good Monday, Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

 

Suggestion of the week

• How Cloudflare Broke My Build and How I Fixed It (Giorgi Dalakishvili) - Wow! That was a hard one. Like searching for a needle in a haystack. Those stories are incredibly useful as they teach how to investigate issues. Thank you so much for sharing it.

Cloud

• Create an App Service for Containers with Bicep (Sam Cogan) - This is a nice tutorial that shares the minimum requirements and the commands to create your next app.

• Securely connect to your Azure Linux Virtual Machine with Tailscale SSH (Paul Yu) - A very complete post that follows one of the many tutorials available in the Microsoft opensource repo. Very well detailed and explained.

Programming

• 18 Useful GitHub Repositories Every Developer Should Bookmark (Madza) - Nice list of great repositories indeed.

• Blazor Binding, Events and Parameters (Michael Washington) - A very complete tutorial that explains it all. The complexity of the example is incremental, meaning that if it's your first contact with Blazor the bites will be just the right size all along.

• Fluent UI Insights EP2: Styling (Paul Gildea) - Really interesting second episode of Fluent UI Insights. A series of video that explains the design decisions.

• Visual Studio Code's New Editor Sticky Scroll Feature - Never Get Lost In The Code Again! (Dotnetsafer) - At first, I thought this feature was like feeze pane and didn't understand the hype about it. But it is not! It is some kind of smart pane auto-scrolling. The frozen section display when the current scope is opened. It looks very useful

• Windows Package Manager 1.3 (Demitrius Nelon) - Very happy to see Winget getting more apps and new features.

Podcasts

• 316: Hosting Websites & Web Apps for Free (Merge Conflict) - Who doesn't like getting a free website? Learn more about the option available for you in this episode. And also, why you shouldn't operate your drone on water.
• Why the buddy system works... at work (Modern Mentor) - Love the idea of a buddy system. Simple and effective.
• Épisode 19 - Les Olympiques d'Hitler (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - (In French) I love this podcast you learn stuff and for sure you will at least smile if not laugh.
• Daniel Roth: Blazor Futures - Episode 204 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Perfect episode to learn what is currently in trial, plan to be and what will stay for sure in the next release.

Miscellaneous

• You will not do it later (most likely) - I'm a procrastinator, I know (Keff) - So true! The do-it-now approach seems too simplistic to be true but is a real change to accomplish on a regular basis. Any tips?

~frank

Reading Notes #505

Good Monday, Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

• Application Insights telemetry in Azure Functions (Orestis Meikopoulos) - Application Insights is so powerful and just one click away! Learn more about it in this post.

• Azure Function with PowerShell and the Power BI REST API – SQLServerCentral (Koen Verbeeck) - This is a nice step-by-step tutorial to write an azure function. All important points to do and avoid are present just like the code.

• Just Give Me an Access Token (Phil Jirsa) - Nice video tutorial and code snippet to get all the access your API needs.

• Update Your Azure Functions Table Storage Bindings (Mark Heath) - Nice post. Upgrading can be frightening sometimes, even more, when you know there are breaking changes.

Programming

• Auto publish your data using Travis (Montana Mendy) - A super quick example of ci-cd with Travis.

• Build configuration for Azure Static Web Apps (craigshoemaker, anthonychu, Reshmi-Sriram, changeworld) - Continuous deployment is so powerful it is very useful to understand the options and how you can set your things together.

• Introduction to Testing Blazor WebAssembly With bUnit (Code Maze) - Wow! An incredibly complete tutorial about bUnit. It is the best lace to get started.

• Multiple Directories for Static Files in ASP.NET Core (Shawn Wildermuth) - Nice journey of an issue that in the end wasn't one. It's time to learn.

• Why isn't my ASP.NET Core app in Docker working? (Andrew Lock) - A very interesting post that describes the learning process while building and fixing a container.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric) - Nice excerpt from a book about communication, this part is couple focus.

~frank

Reading Notes #501

Another Monday, another Reading Notes. 😀

It's been five hundred weeks, this is more than nine years! Who knew I will keep doing that for so long... 

If you are new around here, welcome, The Reading Notes 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.

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

Cloud

• Bicep Access policies and Managed Identity (Gregor Suttie) - This is a nice post that connects docs pages and different blog posts and information so we have the big picture.

• Cloud-Native Application Security (Samir Behara) - This post is listing so many best practices, patterns, and anti-patterns, it is a must for any "cloud-native people".

Programming

• Get started faster with the new 5-minute Quickstarts (Hannah Hunter & Nick Greenfield) - A short post that shares a few quickstart tips and examples.

• Compare Arrays in C# (Code Maze) - Great post that explains some subtleties in the comparison operators.

• Connecting a .NET Application with MongoDB Atlas (Assis Zang) - Great tutorial to setup a .NET 6 web app to connect to an existing MongoDB database.

• Microsoft Won't Do Drag-and-Drop for Blazor (David Ramel) - A very interesting post about the reasons that leaned Blazor developers team to let go of that feature.

• Run Custom Scripts In Docker With Arguments - ENTRYPOINT Vs CMD (devopscube) - A nice post. Did you know the difference? I didn't.

• Visual Studio Code March 2022 (VS Code team) - New commands, new features, new experiences everything is explained in this one post.

Miscellaneous

• Missing Insights from the Virtual Water Cooler (Modern Mentor) - There are smarts way to get the human interaction that we crave these days.
• Greg on The Genius of Routine (What's Essential) - Habits are very powerful tools in our toolbox for so many things... It's worth learning more about it.
• Short-Season Podcast: Is It Worth Your Time And Effort? (Feed Your Brand) - Seasons are everywhere, but does it applies to everything? This episode discusses the pros and cons.

Miscellaneous

• "New Boards Hub" Public Preview - Azure DevOps Blog (Dan Hellem) - Boards are so useful to visualize information quickly. Flip that preview switches on to give it a try.

~Frank

Reading Notes #500

It's Monday,

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!

Cloud

• Automate your work day with workflows in Teams (Harysh Menon) - I’m a big fan (and user) of automation with Power Automate or Logic Apps there is so much we can do! This short post will give you a few ideas for sure.

• How to rollback a Container App revision using the Azure CLI (Jason Haley) - A very nice and detailed tutorial that continues to explain how to use Azure container App using real-life scenarios.

• How to set environment variables in a Container App using the Azure CLI (Jason Haley) - What a great post! I love that it came from a question during a talk, it shows that when we say" let me get back to you", we really want to. Good work.

Programming

• Conditional Blazor Styles (without the if statements) (Jason Hilton) - Nice little tips for Blazor developers.

• How to Deserialize a Complex JSON Object in C# .NET (Code Maze) - New way, old way this post covers them c both compares them and provides a lot of information to get good and consistent results.

• How to Remove the Start Text from PowerShell (Md. Fahim Bin Amin) - So simple! Of course, there are arguments, but didn’t I think about it?!

• How to delete all merged git branches with one terminal command (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Love that little script so simple.

• Improving your GitHub feed (Bruce Williams) - Great! A nice new feature on our GitHub page.

• Start working on GitHub Issues faster (Daniel Adams) - Oh, I love it! Looking forward to trying it.

• Why you should ship your silly side projects (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Refreshing post…And go see that website if Geocities means something to you. Totally agree with the shipping project; it is an excellent source of joy and you always learn new stuff.

Miscellaneous

• New data: What makes developers happy at work (David Gibson) - Interesting post. So many details…are developers are that different compared to other workers? I feel most people want the same…

~frank

Reading Notes #499

Good Monday, 

Monday means it's reading notes times. 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

• How to Separate Production, Test and Development Resources in Azure (John Kilmister) - Great post. It is an extremely frequent question, and I am happy to have now documentation to support the best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Apps Autopilot (Justin Yoo) - A great DevOps post that great an automatic deployment process. Very inspiring, I think I may is some of it for my AzUrlShortener.

Programming

• Automate code metrics and class diagrams with GitHub Actions (David Pine) - Very cool post and GitHub action. Will it come next weekend's little project to give it a try? I'll let you know.

• Blazor&Dragons! How to consume gRPC-web from Blazor – part 1: the client (David Guida) - A pretty cool first part of the tutorial. Who said learning cannot be fun.

• Windows Package Manager 1.2 (Demitrius Nelon) - I just try it and it works so well. This is good news and there are already so many packages available.

Podcasts

• Adam Shoalts On The Importance Of Solo Adventures In Life (What's Essential) - As I was listening to this episode I was thinking what an interesting guest. Adam Shoalts, explains a few anecdotes of his numerous expeditions, and how the essential it most of the time in the middle of them. Then at the end, I connected the dots! Adam Shoalts author of the book Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic, I read that book :) and it's was part of the Reading Notes #460

• Headphones Vs. Earbuds Vs. AirPods: Which Is The Best Podcasting Audio Equipement? - (Feed Your Brand) - Really interesting episode about gears... And excellent timing, because yes I need some new ones.

• Entrepreneurship as a developer - (Software Engineering Unlocked) - WHat does it means to think at scale. I am not quite sure I would enjoy doing it his way, but it's definitely working.

~frank

Reading Notes #496

Good Monday, 

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!

Cloud

• Is Serverless Just a Stopover for Event-Driven Architecture? (Mark Hinkle) - An interesting post. I'm still using many serverless services as one year ago... Am I marginal? Is there a trend that I did see (that more like it)?

Programming

• A Full-Stack Web App Using Blazor WebAssembly and GraphQL: Part 2 (Ankit Sharma) - This second post is in a series where there build a real-life type of application. Really interesting to see all pieces go together (have you ever noticed are package names are funny?). Nice work.

• Blazor Custom Components (John Peters) - Nice series to learn how to write reusable code.

• Testing ASP.NET Core 6 Apps (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice quick tutorial on how to do unit tests. Wonderful.

• Upgrading an ASP.NET Core Web API Project to .NET 6 (Christian Nagel) - This post is not about changing the version of the package, but how to use all those features to make you more productive with fewer lines of code.

Podcasts

• Modern Code Generation with Jordan Adler (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting discussion about code generation, the different pattern, difficulties, and so much more.

• SPI 551: Why Lying to Yourself Helps You Become More Successful with Marisa Peer (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Without falling into the magic thinking, this shows how strong our mind can be. Great episode.

• Make money with open source software (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Open source software is another world: Unknow, different, scary. This week guest shares his experience and story, while transitioning into Open-Source.

• Happiness with Arthur Brooks (A Bit of Optimism) - It's important to love what we do, as in has an huge impact on our level of happiness.

• Greg and Anna McKeown on The Power Of Small Wins (What's Essential) - Lovely episode where Greg's wife Anna joins him to share examples of small wins impact.

~Frank

Reading Notes #493

Good Monday, Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

Just for the of it, I did a little funny video to answer the question: Where really is cloud computing? 

Watch it on your favorite platform ;) YouTube - TikTok

Cloud

• Migrating from GitHub Pages to Azure Static Web Apps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is a good tutorial that leverages the GitHub deployment to Azure.

• Tip 352 - How to trigger an Azure Function from Azure Cosmos DB | Azure Tips and Tricks - This is a clear tutorial about how to use an Azure function trigger connected to Azure Cosmo DB. Simple but very powerful.

Programming

• Minimal APIs, Blazor Improvements, and Tools Updates in ASP.NET Core 6 (Antonio Liccardi) - So many goodies in the last few days.

• Azure Static Web Apps, Blazor, Authentication and Visual Studio 2022 (Scott Kuhl) - There is a little bit more work than I would like but there is also a lot to interact with and monitor locally. Thanks to this clear tutorial we have all the steps to reproduce.

• Comparison of Dependency Injection in .NET (Nickolas Fisher) - A very complete tutorial, with all the required code even the GitHub reference. The perfect example to get started.

• VS Code Gets New Side Panel in v1.64 Update (David Ramel) - Nice! I like this new menu functionality.

Podcasts

• 291: GitHub Actions All The Things (Merge Conflict) - Sometimes building a CI-CD feels too cumbersome, but it's probably worth it. In this episode Frank and James share and they found their balance.
• Greg on The Power Of The Graceful No (What's Essential) - It's so hard some time to say this simple word... But it is an important, nice episode.
• Shaun Walker on Blazor and Oqtane - Episode 179 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Nice discussion with the creator of DotNetNuke and more recently Oqtane, about .Net and Blazor for today's solution.
• 564: Make Your Reading More Meaningful, with Sönke Ahrens (Coaching for Leaders) - As far as I can remember, I always struggled with taking "good" notes. Interesting topic, a few good tips, and tricks.
• Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History with Evan Amos (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Really interesting interview about... yes, photography. Scott is chatting with the photographer of those amazing images of the game consoles.

~Frank

Reading Notes #492

Good Monday, 

Already 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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• General availability: Azure API Management updates in January 2022 (Azure API Management team) - Nice new update coming up our way.

• Rightsize to maximize your cloud investment with Microsoft Azure (Diana Gao) - A very nice post to help us save money when deploying our resources in Azure.

Programming

• 7 Features of Blazor That Make It an Outstanding Framework for Web Development (Nishani Dissanayake) - I already liked Blazor, but the more I learn about it the more I love it.

• Authentication in ASP .NET Core (Chris Noring) - This is a nice tutorial with code and very clear explanations.

• CRUD operations on PostgreSQL using C# and Npgsql (Davide Bellone) - This post is a very good tutorial about how to make a simple query with all the code and explanation required for a great start.

• How to get the optimal image size for web (Joel Hans) - So many options are possible. This post explains the impacts of different contexts and provides guidance on how we could improve, or what we should look at.

Podcasts

• Ximena Vengoechea On How To Hear What Really Matters (What's Essential) - Very interesting conversation. Ximena is the author of the book Listen Like You Mean It. Well... It's just get added to my to-read list.
• L'intuition... pas juste une affaire d'alimentation! (Grand écart) - It's in French but really interesting. I think now I understand the intuitive idea about nutrition and exercise... Now it makes sense.
• Languishing? Here’s How to Turn it Around (Modern Mentor) - There is a name for feeling "meh"! And there are also things we can do to feel better. Very captivating, and now I want to learn more about it.
• My True Crime Episode with David Mittelman (A Bit of Optimism) - When I saw the title of the episode I was a bit confused... True Crime? WHat's the connection? But it was fascinating, so much passion!
• 139: Cloud Strategy, Tactics, and Leadership with Andrew Wertkin (CloudSkills.fm) - So much information and great ideas about leadership and mentoring, I love it.

Miscellaneous

• Dual-screen gaming on Microsoft Surface Duo - Surface Duo Blog (Nguyen Thanh Tung) - This is an interesting post from an established game developer who shares how they thoughts adapting their games for a dual-screen.
• Microsoft PowerToys 0.55.0 gets three new utilities ( Kunal Chowdhury) - This new release is packed with so many fixes and improvements. And the thing that is even better is that community works!
• Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 Release - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Amazing post, yes we learn about the new features, but we also read about the learning and experimentation of this team and collaborators involvement. Great work.

~frank

Reading Notes #478

It's Monday, 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!

Cloud

• Comparing Azure Static Web Apps vs Azure WebApps vs Azure Blob Storage Static Sites (April Edwards) - Excellent post that lists all the features of the latest flavor and compares it to the previous one. Tons of references to get started.

Programming

• 9 Vital Reasons to Use Docker With ASP.NET (Arjun S.) - Nice post that lists, at a high level, the reasons why Docker should be worth your time to learn.

• Blazor and Cancelling Asynchronous Calls With CancellationTokenSource (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - Nice post that clarifies some details. And the code is available.

• Install WSL with a single command now available in Windows 10 version 2004 and higher (Craig Loewen) - This is very interesting and will certainly ease the install process. I mean it's hard to beat a single command of only a few characters.

• Stringly Typed vs Strongly Typed (Scott Hanselman) - I love it! That's totally the questions I will ask myself next time I use magic strings.

Books

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & flow

Author: Dominica Degrandis, Tonianne DeMaria

This book helps define and explains how to really do and use tools like Kanban. It's not a story like in The Phoenix Project. There is a lot in this book and it is worth taking your time to read it.

A book to share.

~Frank

Reading Notes #476

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

• Using App Roles with Azure Active Directory and Blazor WebAssembly Hosted Apps (Marinko Spasojevic) - A nice tutorial that explains step by step the configuration to use AAD with your App.

• Create and link a custom domain to an Azure App Service (pcmichaels) - A very complete post and video that guides us in our custom domain journey.

• Tutorial: Blob backup and restore using Azure Backup via Azure CLI (Srinath Vasireddy) - Cool post that helps to create a script that could automatically backup things on a regular basis for us...

Programming

• Markdown Monster 2.0 is here (Rick Strahl) - Very interesting behind the scene post. It's not because the changes are not really visible that they aren't important. Great work!

• Sure, you could write all those Blazor HTTP calls yourself... (Jon Hilton) - Perfect timing I was looking for something like this for my project.

Podcasts

• Episode 265 (rerun of 216): One-on-ones and inter-team power struggles (Soft Skills Engineering) - Very happy to see tha I'm totally normal! And that I have a good manager. One-on-ones are one of a kind, very interesting episode where both sides are mentionned.

• Azure APIs with Jeff Richter (.NET Rocks!) - A very. I mean VERY interesting episode. Have you ever wonder how updates in Azure are approuved? Then this episode is for you.

• Mental health, music and the wild with Joseph Mulherin (Wild Ideas Worth Living) - Very interesting talk about nature and how it can helps to manage emotions.

• Épisode 98 - La musique qui nous entraîne (Grand écart) - Very cool episode, in French, that could give you pretty interesting sugestions to add to your workout/ run playlist.

Miscellaneous

• 5 learnings as a Product Manager | Humble Bits (Kitty Bhasin) - I really liked this post, and honestly, I think it's useful at any moment of our career.

~Frank

Learning how to Build, Secure, and Deploy your Azure Static Web App in C#

Recently I participated in a series of videos about Azure Static Web Apps: Azure Tips and Tricks: Static Web Apps on Microsoft Channel 9. The series is perfect to get started and cover multiple different scenarios in different Javascript frameworks and C#. In this post, I wanted to regroup the four videos related to .Net Blazor. I also added the GitHub links part of the references at to end.

How to create a web app in C# with Blazor & Azure Static Web Apps

In this video, we start from scratch. We will build and deploy a brand new static website with .Net Blazor.

How to add a C# API to your Blazor web app

Now that you built your web app with C# and Blazor, what about adding a serverless C# API to it? Have a look!

How to secure your C# API with Azure Static Web Apps

Prevent unwanted users to access your C# API by configuring authentication and authorization in your Blazor Azure Static Web Apps.

I hope those videos will help you to get started. If you have questions and/or comments don't hesitate to reach out (comments, DM, GitHub issues), it's always a pleasure.

How CI/CD and preview branches work with Azure Static Web Apps

In this video, I wanted to show one of the great features of Azure Static Web App Learn: the creation of pre-production environments. Using the CI/CD workflow, you can preview your pull requests changes before it's in production leveraging the automatic creation of pre-production environments!

References:

• Watch the full series: https://aka.ms/StaticWebAppsTipsC9
• GitHub Sample: https://github.com/FBoucher/AzureStaticWebApp-CSharp-SimpleDemo
• Interactive tutorials on Microsoft Learn: https://aka.ms/Learn/StaticWebApps

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 #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