Reading Notes #571

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 Playwright the easy way with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - I didn't think about that scenario but wow! Thats very efficient ant much easier.

Programming

• 6 Best Practices for Documenting APIs (Nduka John) - Documentation is often what makes the difference. Bad docs may cause users to not use correctly the APIs.

• New .NET Upgrade Assistant version with feature updates and .NET MAUI improvements! - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - Wow that a pretty cool and powerful tool! I really like the mixed upgrade with project file and version.

• Generative AI and .NET - Part 2 SDK | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Nice series where we explore the SDK building a .NET poroject.

Open Source

• Walkthroughs in the Windows Terminal Repository (Mike Griese) - Contributing to big oss project is challenging.The Windows Terminal team had a cool idea to make it easier.There is a video version of this blog is you prefer.

• Microsoft PowerToys v0.73.0: A Comprehensive Overview (Kunal Chowdhury) - Cool post that shares new utilities in PowerToys and explains the optimization of the others.

Miscellaneous

• Navigating Developer Burnout: Causes, Impacts, and Strategies for a Ba (Christopher Johnson) - A truthful and realistic post. If you never been exposed to burnout, take 2 minutes to read this.

~Frank

Reading Notes #569

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

• Stream videos from Azure Blob storage with ASP.NET Core (Mark Heath) - A great end-to-end tutorial leveraging cost-efficient Azure resources.

• Using ETags and Patching Rows in Azure Table Storage (Mark Heath) - Nice post that shows us simply and quickly how to manage conflicts when using Azure Table Storage.

Programming

• Speed up Visual Studio load times with Microsoft Dev Box (Greg Denton) - Woooo! Speed... From our Visual Studio that runs locally or remote via DevBox, awesome.

• Adding a “share to mastodon” link to any web site – and here (Christian Heilmann) - I didn't think about it but it's true that there are many different URLs with Mastodon... This post shares the code for one of the solutions to solve this issue.

Miscellaneous

• Unleash Your Inner Entrepreneur with MS FounderHub: AI-Based Startups with Azure OpenAI Services (Lee Stott) - Motivating post to do something. So many have great ideas and just sit on it... With today's technology, many blockers can be removed...

~ Frank

Reading Notes #566

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

• What is the difference between the Azure Command Line Interface and Azure Developer Command Line Interface? (Liam Conroy Hampton) - I keep telling myself I should give it a try. That new AZD CLI seems pretty sick. No more excuses for my next project.

• Azure OpenAI Landing Zone reference architecture (Freddy Ayala) - Using Open AI or planning to do it this post shares a great list of Azure services that will help you do it effectively and securely.

Low Code

• Power Automate Apply To Each Loops 20X Faster (Matthew Devaney) - Smart way to gain performance, but make sure to do your homework and validate the connector limits and adjust the variables.

Data

• Learn about Microsoft Fabric for Data Analytics (Koen Verbeeck) - Learn more about this new one-stop service that was announced during Microsoft Build.

Miscellaneous

• GitHub Repository Rules are now generally available - The GitHub Blog (Patrick Knight) - Wow! very interesting... Great update!

~Frank

Reading Notes #564

Monday! It is time to share my reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

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

 

Cloud

• How To: Remote Debug a Deployed Azure Function using Visual Studio 2022 (Jamie Maguire) - Because sometimes the only solution is to debug live from the cloud. It's great that it's possible.

• Enabling Azure Application Insights for an App Service (David Giard) - It's one of those tools it's right there and you didn't know you couldn't live without until you try it and you get all that information.

DevOps

• Modifying Docker images during Kubernetes deployments (Matthew Casperson) - This is a very detailed tutorial that helps and explains clearly each step of that deployment pipeline.

Programming

• Tech Notes: Quick hacks on GitHub Pages (Evan Martin) - Nice git tricks.

• Debugging distributed systems is hard! (Dennis Frühauff) - This is a very nice post that explains clearly a situation. How many of us have been in this situation before where you try to debug a system and it's just so hard?

• Healthcare and Life Sciences Blog (Kyle Raymond) - This is a cool tutorial/ example that explains what is and how to use semantic Kernel.

Data

• Speeding up Queries with Materialized Views (Derek Comartin) - Great post that will inspire us on how to get the best performance for our databases.

~Frank

Reading Notes #563

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 WSL and Let's Encrypt to create Azure App Service SSL Wildcard Certificates (Scott Hanselman ) - A nice step-by-step tutorial. And after this, you will have a very useful script.

• Deploy your Blazor app to Azure now for free! (Dennis Frühauff) - This is a simple easy-to-follow tutorial to deploy your Static web app in the cloud.

Programming

• API Architectural Styles: REST vs. SOAP vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC | Postman Blog (Bruno Pedro) - Selecting the best architecture for our needs that a scary decision. This post explains the different architecture and shares a real-life story and tools to help decide.

• Creating a VS Code editor extension (Tim Heuer) - The journey of a dev building an extension for Visual Studio Code.A very interesting post.

Open Source

• Build an Open Source Project: Behind the Scenes (Alexey Yuzhakov) - This post shares a story of a real-life open source project. It's about putting in the effort and doing the extra work to make our project more useful and accessible.

Low Code

• Power Apps Dynamic Forms - Generate Forms From A Questions List (Matthew Devaney) - A tutorial that shows how to build a very useful form using code. But once you build it you can reuse it at many places.

• Power Apps Code Review Tool (Mehdi Slaoui Andaloussi) - That's a really cool tool! I need to test it now!

Podcast

• Podman In Action: Desktop, Machine, and more (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - The perfect episode to get started with Podman. Very interesting.

• Building Apps using OpenAI with Mark Miller (.NET Rocks!) - So much energy in this episode and great topics.

~Frank

Reading Notes #562

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

• Getting Started with API Management: A Beginner's Guide for Developers (Neha Hafeez) - This a very interesting post that explains why and how those tools are useful for us.

Programming

• Top 14 Game-Changing Websites Every Developer Should Know About 🚀🔥 (Arjun Vijay Prakash) - An interesting list indeed of website-tool.

• Comparing MVVM and MVUX for building a Multi-Platform Application using .NET, C# and XAML with the Uno Platform (Nick) - A detailed comparison of those two models with Uno platform.

Open Source

• How to write a perfect README for your GitHub project (Marc Seitz) - This is a nice and simple guide to make sure your readme help visitor to land well on your project.

• 5 Ways OpenTelemetry Can Reduce Costs (Morgan McLean) - Great tools from the open-source community to help save money.

• Open at Microsoft – OmniBOR (Aeva Black) - Did you know there is a tool that can help you see the security flaws or your dependencies? Learn more about this project in this post and video.

• Dapr (AugustaUd) - Learn more about Dapr with this series of 3 videos that each contains short demos. With a very active community, there is no dough that OSS project is healthy.

Low Code

• How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot (Zachary Cavanell) - Learn more about the best practices and how to prepare your enterprise.

Miscellaneous

• Building Your DevRel Resume with Open Source (BekahHW) - A different journey for each of us for the best devRel teams.

• Accountability for Effective Teams (Jessica Joy Kerr) - Interesting thoughts. Measuring and staying trustful is so hard.

~Frank

Reading Notes #560

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!

The suggestion of the week

• GitHub Copilot Fundamentals Learning Path - Your New AI programming friend! (Bruno Capuano ) - A free series of lessons to get to know how to use Copilot ( an AI partner application).

Cloud

• Azure Communication Services June 2023 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - A series of pretty cool new features from Azure communication services.

Low Code

• Power Apps Dataverse Offline Mode For Canvas Apps (Matthew Devaney) - This is a nice step-by-step tutorial that guides us to make our Apps offline capable.

Programming

• Should We Use Records With EF Core as Model Classes? (Code Maze ) - Fantastic post that not only explains how Records could be used with EF but also explains why they aren't always the best choice.

• Best Practices for Building Secure Micro Frontends (Grgur Grisogono) - Nice short post about security best practices.Because it's important everywhere and its the job of everyone.

• How to Start an Open Source Project with VS Code (Bekah) - This is a nice and simple tutorial that overviews how to get started.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Is Betting Everything on AI (Steven Levy) - A great interview with a focus on AI technology.

~Frank

Reading Notes #556

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) - May 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - The Azure Developers CLI just is evolving so fast! New Java early functionalities, improvement with Container Apps... Looking forward to watching Build sessions and seeing all of it!

Programming

• Announcing the new Azure Container Registry libraries (Mario Guerra) - Nice update! And there are more languages supported, which is fantastic.

• How I used GitHub Copilot to build a browser extension (Rizel Scarlett) - Another great story about how Copilot helps the productivity of a developer. And at the same time, great tutorial to build and Chrome extension.

• Choose Your Own Adventure in Open Source: Paths to Success (Bekah) - This is a nice post that provides many excellent reasons why you should start contributing to open source and how it is good for you

• Quick Progress in Software Development (Mike Krop) - Interesting... A Development Sim game?!

LowCode

• Exploring the Power Platform GPT Prompts: Unleashing the Potential of AI in the Power Platform (Lee Stott) - When new tools are coming up with such potential its great to have ideas of how to work with it. This post helps users get started or find new ways, and advance users an opportunity to share.

• Fueling Creativity: Introducing our Power Platform Prompt Samples Repository! | Power Platform Developer Blog (April Dunnam) - A great initiative to get us started when the spark is missing.

Podcasts

• Molly's Game with Molly Bloom (A Bit of Optimism) - What a story! An inspiring journey with so many challenges.
• 357: The Zune UI was the Best UI (Merge Conflict) - Ahhh! Now I understand why so many people are talking about the Zune! Great episode that go over some souvenirs and memories.

Miscellaneous

• Discover Ways to Make Open Source Contributions to Microsoft (Kiran Panjwani) - Great post shows how you, students, can make a huge difference.

• Why Put PostgreSQL in Azure - Grant Fritchey (Grant Fritchey) - Great post that explains why Azure is a great hosting platform. In this case, it's about the database and it is so true. But it's also true with many other services...

~Frank

Reading Notes #554

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

• Migrate ASP.NET Web App to Azure App Service (Justin Yoo) - This great post shows and explains the very few changes suggested to migrate our .NET website into Azure.

Programming

• Minimal API growing with .NET 7 (Christian Nagel) - Ooh! That looks really nice! I will need to play around a little with it to fully appreciate all and I have just the right project for it.

• Visual Studio–Generate C# client for OpenAPI (Bart Wullems) - Interesting post that explains what is happening behind the scene of the OpenAPI client generator.

• Web API development in Visual Studio 2022 - Visual Studio Blog (Sayed Ibrahim) - Wow! You have the choice of that super detailed post with all the new features to help us be fantastic at creating APIs or also included in the post the video with a similar overview.

Podcast

• Episode 172: Maintainer Month 2023 with Sarah Boyce & David Blass (Sustain) - Special double episode for the Maintainer Month.
• Donovan Brown is Retiring - Episode 242 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Whatever Donovan is talking about you can feel his passion. Extremely interesting episode. Enjoy your new challenge sir!
• 356: Sunsetting software, libraries, & APIs (Merge Conflict) - You build stuff? Great, but what do you do after, when do you know when it is time to retire an API or a service? James & Frank might not have all the responses, but they definitely feel the problem.
• 56. Building Drabble.social using Azure PaaS - Bram de Buyser (Betatalks the podcast) - Great episode! What a challenge. It takes only a few seconds to create an account ;)
• Can You Really Convert Podcast Fans Into Active Subscribers? (Feed Your Brand) - So many great tips in this episode. By looking at the type of email I receive... many should listen to it.
• Creating Walkable Cities with Nathan Allebach (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - What do you think when you read walkable? Was it what was discussed in this episode? Strange how something great ideas are derailed without any bad intentions.

LowCode

• Master Power Apps Do Until Loops for Efficient Workflow Management (and Unleash Your Inner Nerd) 🤓 (Shane Young) - Funny and educational tutorial about a very powerful tool indeed.

~frank

Reading Notes #552

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

• Resource Group Location Matters (Sam Cogan) - And voila! Planning is everything... Almost

Programming

• Visual Studio Code Day 2023 (Burke Holland) - An event is coming up for VS Code and you don't want to miss that. During that one day, so much will be shared about this amazing editor.

• Docker Gets up to Speed for WebAssembly (B. Cameron Gain) - Excited to see this wasm + docker story progressing. Should I give it a try or wait a little more... That's the questions

• Create a Custom Connector for your Web API from within Visual Studio (Marcel Ferreira) - Interesting! So the question is not IF I will create a connector, but more by WHAT should I start?!

• Static Methods vs. Non-Static Methods in C# (Matjaz Prtenjak ) - Learn all the differences, pros, and cons between the two. No stone is left unturned.

• Docker Compose Experiment: Sync Files and Automatically Rebuild Services with Watch Mode (Milas Bowman) - This preview command is available for an easier development time.

• Docker Gets up to Speed for WebAssembly (B. Cameron Gain) - take the best advantages of the Wasm ecosystem.

DevOps

• Choosing a container platform (Kit Dergilev) - This is a great post that shares different options for our container environment based on some scenarios.

Miscellaneous

• How to contribute to Microsoft documentation (Luke Murray) - Oh yes! You should give it a try the feeling you get when your changes are merged...

~Frank

Reading Notes #551

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

• Microsoft Cost Management updates—March 2023 (Michael Flanakin) - Because we all need it and or worry about it. Learn the new features that are available for you in the cost management.

• Azure Spring Clean: Compliance for Bicep with Checkov (Sam Cogan) - That's a pretty cool tool to add to our box. I need to get that onto my pipeline...like now!

• Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - April 2023 (Kent Weare) - One of my friends shared this with me, and I loved it! It's packed with information about new features, and upcoming events...

• This Month in Azure Container Apps: March/April 2023 (Anthony Chu) - I caught the live stream by pure chance and they pass through all the news contained in the post. Very happy to see Azure Container App growing so quickly!

Programming

• Run dotnet core projects without opening visual studio (Karthik Chintala) - Yes, it is possible and even fun! I code in VSCode 80% of the time.

• How to Do an Inner Join in LINQ? (Code Maze) - Nice post to get started about relations between tables type of joints and of course how to do it with LINQ.

• Running .NET Console Apps in Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - A neat way to run an application in the cloud. Have a special look at how the secret config is managed to avoid pushing them into the code repository.

Podcast

• Let's Chat About AI (Ep 76) (Community Pulse) - Extremely interesting episode about AI. Should we be worried, what would be the impact? So many great questions asked.
• 54. Cloud native and the Container landscape on Azure - with Daniel Paulus (Betatalks the podcast) - A little bit about the container's history, its present, and potential future.
• Chris Sainty: Blazor in Action - Episode 238 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - I already like Blazor, but I think you will also after listening to this episode.
• Down A Rabbit Hole with Seth Godin (A Bit of Optimism) - Great episode is about many different little things to make life better. You can feel the complicity between Seth and Simon.
• Windows WSL and Containers in 2023 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - WSL what it is and why people say it's so useful. All that and more in this episode.

Miscellaneous

• Technical Writing 101: Working with SMEs - Big Nerd Ranch (Cole Henry) - effectively.

~frank

Reading Notes #549

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!

The suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Teams: Advantages of the new architecture (Sumi Singh) - Nice journey on performance optimization, embracing the open source. Learn more about your new Teams and the details and effort to make it better in this post.

Cloud

• Downloading Files from Azure Container App to your Local Machine via Azure Blob Storage (Nikhil Vetteth) - This is a useful tip to extract our logs or other local files.

Programming

• Manage networking with Docker Compose (Eric Goebelbecker) - Nice post that explains with a sample how communication is possible between containers just by using Docker compose.

• Build custom communication experiences with Azure Communication Services UI Library for Microsoft Teams users (David de Matheu) - Nice new library for the Teams developers. You can now build more with less code by leveraging Azure Communication Services (ACS).

Podcasts

• The Wisdom of Anxiety with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (A Bit of Optimism) - A very interesting episode about mental fitness... I love it!

Miscellaneous

• Welcome to the new era of Microsoft Teams (Jeff Teper) - Get more memory and CPU back! I start using it and it makes a great difference. See you there.

• New Microsoft Loop app is built for co-creation | Microsoft 365 Blog (Wangui McKelvey) - I've been hearing about loop for a while now... I'm excited to finally try it.

~frank

Reading Notes #548

The suggestion of the week

• GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience (Thomas Dohmke) - Wow! Very excited about this news. Copilot is way more than just a buzz. After using it for a while I really appreciate the suggestions it was making. Looking forward to trying that next release.

Cloud

• Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - A nice online event is coming up. I'm honored and excited to be part of the sneakers. Looking forward to it.

• General Availability: ASP. NET web app migration to Azure App Service using PowerShell Scripts - This a nice tool that can help so many with that first step.

Programming

• A first look at Blazor and .NET 8 (Damien Bowden) - The future of Blazor looks very promising and interesting in .NET 8

• Announcing Docker+Wasm Technical Preview 2 (Djordje Lukic) - This wasm+docker is making progress fast! I feel like it was yesterday when they announced the first bits.

• Secure your .NET cloud apps with rootless Linux Containers - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - In this post, the .NET teams explain their decisions ti make the images more secure. Safer containers are always better, right?

• Turn your database into an API in minutes with Data API builder for Azure Databases (Jasmine Greenaway) - A pretty cool open-source project that can definitely help.

Miscellaneous

• What’s different about these layoffs (Eira May) - It is a troubled period. how many of us were affected directly or indirectly.

~frank

Reading Notes #547

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 Cognitive Services Costs (Matt Eland) - Cost management is always a good idea. This post is part of a series of spring cleaning is not an exception.

• Uploading Large Blobs in Parallel with the Azure SDK (Mark Heath) - Wonderful! I tried recently to write a little POC of something like that but it did work as expected. Looking forward to digging into this code as I think I already see my mistake. Great post.

Programming

• Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing (Kin Lane) - This is an interesting post not about code but more about words, ideas, plans, and more.

• Adding Dependency Injection to a Console App in .Net 7 (Paul Michaels) - Short an simple the perfect answer to a how-to question.

• How to write your own cron Job scheduler in ASP.NET Core (like Quartz, Hangfire, ...) (Steven Giesel) - A really cool post that shows and explains how to build a simple background Service. I love those kind of projects as you learn so much doing them by yourself.

• PSReadLine 2.3.0-beta0 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - I'm a big fan of the Predictor, looking forward to trying this upgrade.

Miscellaneous

• How atomic Git commits dramatically increased my productivity - and will increase yours too (Samuel Faure) - A simple best practice to avoid pain later... I like it!

~ Frank

Reading Notes #546

Cloud

• How to build, test and deploy your application using Azure and GitHub - Azure DevOps Blog (Liam Hampton) - A nice DevOps tutorial that requires no installation because it all happens in the browser.
• Introducing the Reliable Web App Pattern for .NET - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup, Nish Anil) - This post explains the best practices build on top of the well architect Azure framework.

Programming

• Run Appwrite on a Raspberry Pi (Jim Bennett ) - This post will make you save money and time while setup your dev environment.
• Can WebAssembly Solve Serverless's Problems? (Cameron Gain) - This is an interesting post that shares why WASM is an excellent idea and how it can help today's businesses.
• How to Read and Parse a JSON File in C# (Januarius NjokuUnknown) - Multiple ways to parse a file. How many did you know?
• How to automate your dev environment with dev containers and GitHub Codespaces (Kedasha Kerr) - Since I discover the devcontainer I use it all the time. Lucky for me my computers are powerful enough to manage my simple project. Codespace provides all that comfort but online...Have a look.
• Write a high-quality README for NuGet packages - The NuGet Blog (Lynn Dai) - Wonderful initiative! I believe that well-written documentation is the missing piece to many great hidden projects.

Podcasts

• 344: Exploring CoreData and CloudKit (Merge Conflict) - Honestly it felt good hearing about those two genius struggling with data. But more than that to see them continue to look for different alternatives, and try new tools and patterns. Great episode, as usual.
• 51. Minimal web API’s and API Management & learning by teaching - with Jonah Andersson (Betatalks the podcast) - Jonah is just amazing! I knew her before listening to the episode, I just love her even more! Brilliant mind mixed with a contagious passion!

Books

• 
  
  Learning Blazor (David Pine) - This book is just perfect! It explains a bit of everything. It is packed with real examples and code variation (because there are so many ways to write something). There was even a full chapter un test with playwright, I didn't expect that and it was great!

Reading Notes #545

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 portal January 2023 updates (Allison Cordle) - Noce quick update from the portal.A few new features related to VMs.

• Creating a Configuration Module for your Infrastructure as Code (Sam Cogan) - This is a great post to help us be more efficient in our DevOps practices when writing IaC.

• Fetching Credentials with the Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - Awesome post that shares very useful commands. Add this on your cheatsheet or bookmark that post.

• Host WordPress in Microsoft Azure with App Service (PaaS hosting) (Chris Pietschmann ) - When we are interested in WordPress, we are looking for a key in-hand experience. We don't want to manage code and connections and too much technical stuff. Having it hosted in PaaS Azure simplifies even more this.

Programming

• Docker Desktop 4.17: New development functionality (Alyssa Shames) - Learn more about how this new release helps us to be more secure and track the details of our containers in the post.

• Dapr 1.10 - More steps in the right direction (Mark Heath) - This is great! I'm happy to see the multi-app functionality as I was totally waiting for it. And the workflow is definitely something that interests me.

• What To Be Wary of With Iterators and Collections in C# (Nick Cosentino) - An interesting deep comparison between different ways to fetch and manipulate data in C#.

~ frank

Reading Notes #543

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. 

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

The Suggestion of the week

• What is .NET, and why should you choose it? (.NET Team) - This is not an ordinary blog post. It makes me think of those deep interesting MSDN articles. A great read for young or older developers that would like to know more about .NET or refresh their memory.

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Pipelines: If Expressions and Conditions (John Folberth) - This nice post in the series on Azure Pipeline focuses on conditions. Avery has efficient tools to customize our pipeline just like we want them.

• What is an Azure Load Balancer? (Cary Roys) - Do you know what an Azure Load Balancer is or you only thing you know? In this nice post not only you will learn what it really is but it the post shares some OSS tools to test your ALB and explains how to use them.

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming Patterns in .NET (Code Maze) - This is a great tutorial that explains 3 asynchronous patterns with code samples and explanation. Perfect to get started and understand legacy code or write new one.

• Coding 102: Writing code other people can read (Max Pekarsky) - This is an excellent post with so much wisdom in it. Writing readable code is extremely important. Whether it's just a few lines in excel, a script, a query for a database, or a full app.

• Use multiple identity providers from a Blazor WASM ASP.NET Core App secured using BFF (Damien Bowden) - An interesting post that explains how to implement authentification.

Podcasts

• Sustainable Open Source with Sarah Novotny (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode with the Microsoft Open Source Lead talking about why truly open source is important and how Microsft really believes in its future.
• Digging Up the Past with Sarah Parcak (A Bit of Optimism) - Using satellite images to do archeology... wait what?! Great episode really interesting from the early second until the last one.

Miscellaneous

• ChatGPT: One million people have joined the waitlist for Microsoft's AI-powered Bing (Liam Tung) - What a first day! This is a little post that shares a little info about the new Bing and its kickoff.

~Frank

Reading Notes #542

Cloud

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 1 - Azure Service Bus (James Dawson) - In this post the author switch the pub sub service and it looks so simple. Interesting.

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 0 - Introduction (James Dawson) - This first post of the series provides us details about the plans and why Dapr seams interesting as a resource for this project.

• Azure Communication Services February 2023 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Happy to see the new release coming up packed with useful features and capability.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - February 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Wow! The Dev CLI is kicking the new year with a big release. New templates on many languages and new features.

• General availability: Mount Azure Storage as a local share in App Service Windows Code (Unknown) - Important milestone reached. Congrats!

Programming

• A Fancy Hover Effect For Your Avatar (Temani Afif) - Wow! From my point of views this look loke magic. With only one HTML element and a few lines of CSS... Bravo!

• Blazor and Azure OpenAI (Michael Washington) - Cool demo using OpenAI API. Because yes ChatGPT is fun but there are APIs to build real apps.

• How to use Entity Framework Core in ASP.NET Core (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - This is a very nice tutorial that guides us each steps along the way. Clear detailed, very nice.

• Merging Git repositories without losing history (Dennis Doomen) - Great tutorial that not only provides the solution but explains step by steps why we do each of them.

Podcasts

• 341: Frank Masters In-App Subscriptions (Merge Conflict) - A big thank you to Frank and James for sharing that journey. We too often only ear about the happy path, and it's great to listen to all those challenges you incountered and how you managed to move forward.
• Embracing The Fall with Carla Hall (A Bit of Optimism) - YES! So true! Falling instead of failling. Like a very wise man told me long time ago, the important is to bounce; get back on your feet and standup.
• Alice and Bob Learn App Security with Tanya Janca (.NET Rocks!) - Great great episode with the amazing Tanya. Looking forward for that next book!
• 49. Using Azure Container Apps, KEDA, Infrastructure as Code and ARM - with Eduard Keilholz (Betatalks the podcast) - From the MVP stories, to the infrastructure as code with the detour around the bulletproof demo or candies... This episode is indeed like a delicious candy.

~Frank

How to edit a JSON object inside an Azure Logic App

I use Azure Logic Apps in many of my solutions, I find them so conviennant to integrate different systemes. Recently one of them was failling and by lookink at the error message: The property value exceeds the maximum allowed size, I knew what was wrong. I was tying to save a JSON object into a Storage table but one property was too long. For this particular case I didn't need the value contain in the property so the plan was to delete it. At first, I thought it wasn't possible to edit a variable of type object in a Logic Apps, but it is!

In this post I will show how to use Compose action and setProperty to perform data operations in Azure Logic Apps.

The Context

First think to know is that the Compose action does not update the the current object but creates a new one. In this demo the JSON object use is quite short to simplyfy the demo.

{
	"firstname":"Frank",
	"lastname":"Boucher",
	"alias":"fboucheros",
	"bio":"With many years of experience in the IT industry, François (Frank) Boucher is a trusted Microsoft Azure professional whose expertise and bilingual service are relied upon in large Canadian markets (Ottawa and Montreal) as well as internationally. Among his many accolades, Francois has been awarded four times Microsoft Azure MVP status, named a Microsoft Azure Advisor, and Microsoft Azure P-Seller. Frank created the “Cloud 5 minutes” show. Where every second week, a new episode that answers a different technical question, is published both in French and English (cloud5mins.com). "
}

The Details

The Logic App recieve a JSON object from the request body. This is transfom as an Person object. To empty the bio property the action Compose will be used.

Inside the Compose action, use the context menu to find setProperty in the Expression section. The expression setProperty takes three parameters: the object, the property name, and the edited value. In this demo the goal was to empty the property therefore and empty string will be assign like this:

  setProperty(variables('Person'),'bio','').

The edited object is accessible from the output of the Compose action and this what will be return in the Response action.

The Result

By adding a single action it's possible to edit JSON object in a Logic App without requiring to use inline code or external tools. A demo wouldn't be complite without a end-to-end run so here the result of a HTTP POST to the Logic App passing the Person JSON and the returned result.

Video version

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

Useful links

• 🔗 Compose Action: https://c5m.ca/Compose
• 🔗 SetProperty: https://c5m.ca/setProperty

~ Frank

Reading Notes #541

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

• Learn Azure DevOps from Zero to Hero (April Edwards) - Nice series of videos to learn Azure DevOps.

Programming

• Jan. Extensions: Deploy Kubernetes and Run Cloud Apps Locally (Amy Bass) - I like those extension of the month post. It makes you discover little gem that you have not be interested at first.

• 5 .NET MAUI Features for Building Great Desktop Apps (James Montemagno) - Nice top five that shows us one more time how .NET MAUI is a great idea when it's time to create an application UI.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1! Better, faster MVVM source generators, .NET 7 support, and more! (Sergio Pedri) - Great new toolkit with many honestly very cool features.

• Generating Sample Data with Bogus (Shawn Wildermuth) - We all need seed data, test data, temp data... Bogus seams sample and efficient. I'm definitely trying it, in my next project.

• How to Get an Enum Member as a String in C# (Code Maze ) - This post provides a nice overview, with code samples, of three different ways to get the text value of an enum.

• Generating argument expressions for minimal APIs (continued): Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 5 (Andrew Lock) - Another nice post in that series that explains how things works under the hood for Minimal API.

Books

Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance 

Author: Erica Dhawan 

It's been a while since I had so many "ah-ah" moment while reading a book. Digital body language is about communication using many different technologies by different culture, generations and individuals... 

It a must if you care about how your message are received.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day (Eric Barker) - A nice post that reminds us of simple things to regain or productivity.

• How I Use Stream Deck (Brian T. Jackett) - Its always interesting to see how others are using some tools. It provides inspiration for our own setup.

~frank