Reading Notes #613

Good Monday! This week Reading Notes are more listening notes 😅 and we go from .NET Aspire and  containers, passing by communication with AI to camping!

Sharing my Reading Notes 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.

Cloud

• Creating an Azure Static Web app (moving from WordPress, part 2) (Michael Eaton) - Yes indeed it is simple to get started with Azure Static WebApp.This post shares a user journey while migrating.

• Windows ARM installing Azure CLI (Jani Nevalainen) - Cool tips to make CLI works on ARM processor device,until the real version comes out.

Programming

• Docker Best Practices: Choosing Between RUN, CMD, and ENTRYPOINT (Jay Schmidt) - Nice post that explains really clearly the differences between those three and provides cheat sheet and examples.

Podcasts

• Introducing .NET Aspire with Damian Edwards (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Nice episode where .NET Aspire is really well explained, but yes it's kind of hard to say in a few words what it is.

• 687: Getting Better at Internal Communication, with Roy Schwartz (Coaching for Leaders) - Nice episode that talk how AI can help or harm a good communication. Used smartly it can definitely help...

• Camping Tips for Your Next Adventure with Lestarya Molloy (Wild Ideas Worth Living) - I grow up camping every summer, but for many they didn't have that chance and it's hard to start... But there an App for that!

• CosmosDB and AI with Mark Brown (.NET Rocks!) - AI and data! AI and data! AI and data! It's not a typo, I wrote it 3 times... It's everywhere, evolving fast and you must look at it.

• 86. Power Platform, Blazor and beyond: Maintaining internal apps - with Sophie van den Akker (Betatalks the podcast) - Nice episode about how and where use Blazor, the limits of Power Platform and more.

~Frank

Reading Notes #612

In this week’s Reading Notes, we explore cloud debugging, .NET Aspire, and more. Join us for insights, workshops, and podcasts covering a range of exciting topics! 🚀

 
Sharing my Reading Notes 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.

 

Cloud

• GalaSoft Laurent Bugnion (Laurent Bugnion) - Nice post debugging investigating a bug, that cannot be reproduce locally only in the cloud.... But with the right tools it's much easier.

Programming

• Let's Learn .NET Aspire - Start your cloud-native journey live! - .NET Blog (James Montemagno) - The .NET Aspire workshop is been deliver in many languages and available online. To learn what it is, when should we use it and how it works, join a live session or watch it on demand.

• Exploring docker compose watch in Visual Studio Code (Julie Lerman) - That looks fantastic! And thanks to Julia we will avoid a few gotchas.

• Simplify Your .NET Aspire Caching With Metalama (Metalama Team) - 2 great tools in synergy make the result so much better. This nice post is good to get us started on caching.

• Join Us for .NET Aspire Developers Day – Elevate Your Cloud Native Skills! - .NET Blog (Mehul Harry) - July 23 - Check the date there will be a .NET Aspire event with more advanced stuff like building custom components and more.

• Why and How to Execute GraphQL Queries in .NET (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug... Did you know GraphQL could improve the performance of your application by avoiding over fetching?

• Apprendre .NET Aspire en français (Frank Boucher) - Another shameless plug for French content this time. I did a 1h45 long video where I explain the basic of .NET Aspire by doing a workshop and providing details.

Podcasts

• Martin Hinshelwood: Migration Azure DevOps Server to the Cloud - Episode 302 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Interesting episode about migrations and how to approach them. Because so many stories start by a migration.
• GitHub Evolving with Damian Brady (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode to learn all things GitHub... and these days that mean a lot.
• 416: Going Light + How Spatial Video Really Works (Merge Conflict) - Great episode. Is going with two phone is going light however? Hhmmmm...
• Episode 287: Why You As A Developer Must Care About Managing Your APIs (Web Rush) - The 1M questions episode! Answers are optional because the fun is about being curious... right?
• Mitch Denny: .NET Aspire Architecture - Episode 304 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Learn more about .NET Aspire what it is, because yes it's hard to explain, and what's the road map.
• How to finally have that dreaded conversation (Modern Mentor) - Yes it's hard, but pause, and do those talks.

Miscellaneous

• What is platform engineering? (Julia Kulla-Mader, Chuck Lantz) - Platform engineering is gaining in popularity, but what ibis really. This article gives a good explanation to start our learning journey.

Reading Notes #611

Welcome to this week’s edition of Reading Notes! In this roundup, we explore a variety of topics across cloud, programming, databases, and AI. From understanding Docker’s USER instruction to styling Blazor components with CSS, I’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in!

Suggestion of the week

• Understanding the Docker USER Instruction (Jay Schmidt) - A great post to that explains really clearly the basic usage of user when building our container. After reading this post you should feel confident to follow this best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Static Web Apps–SWA CLI behind the scenes (Bart Wullems) - Cool post to that quickly explains how the CLIworks and a few different tools.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: Styling Blazor Components with CSS (Claudio Bernasconi) - That will solve an issue I was having... Blazor for the win!

• Is Your ASP.NET Core Application Running In A Container? (Adam Storr) - Very neat tip to know when the App is or not in a container.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

Databases

• Automating SQL Deployments using GitHub Actions - Part 2 (Eduardo Pivaral) - That's pretty neat. Of course, there is a SQL option but I never thought about it. Excellent idea to keep everything in one place with versions.

AI

• Updated Documentation for Semantic Kernel (Sophia Lagerkrans-Pandey) - Nice update in the documentation, new content new look.

~frank

Reading Notes #609

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

   

Cloud

• It's Finally Possible To Hibernate Azure VMs (Sam Cogan) - This new feature must be such a relief for all the VM users. Make sure to read this post to know the requirements of the VM tone able to hibernate it.

• Enhancing Performance in Azure Container Apps (Cary Chai) - This post gives us an history of the different algorithm used in ACA but also explains briefly how does one works.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2022 - 17.10 Performance Enhancements - Visual Studio Blog (Ashok Kamath) - Impressive improvement going up to 50% in specific cases! Congratulations to the team,event the smaller speed improvement will be feel.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.8 (Vincent Baaij) - awesome update just before summer! (well, in the north hemisphere).

AI

• Using Phi-3 & C# with ONNX for text and vision samples - .NET Blog (Bruno Capuano) - Nice post that shows that when using great tools it can be really simple todo amazing things.

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity - ChatGPT and other tools have an impact and it disturb the flow. Some embraces the change other don't like the change. Interesting post where the author shares his concerns.

~frank

Reading Notes #608

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Running a Playwright scheduled job with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - A very nice post about recording test session using azure container app. Good idea!

Programming

• The .NET MAUI Extension for Visual Studio Code is now Generally Available - .NET Blog (Maddy Montaquila) - Wow,already GA! Looking forward to try it on my Linux PC. This post shares all the features packed in this release, and there videos too.

• Introducing collection expressions in C#12: Behind the scenes of collection expressions - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First post of a series that goes deeper into c# comparing expressions, initialization, and what the compiler does.

• Making C# Simple with Fluent Techniques (Niraj Ranasinghe) - Nice post. I didn't realise that Fluent path was used in so many places. It makes it so cleaner when we can use it.

AI

• Visual Studio Code AI Toolkit: Run LLMs locally (Shreyan Fernandes) - It goes so fast! It used to be complicated to get AI and now we can get one locally directly from vs code... Quick post to get us started.

• Announcing the official OpenAI library for .NET - .NET Blog (.NET Team) - Yay! New version of the SDK.

Podcast

• 84. Comparing Terraform, Pulumi and Bicep: Infrastructure as code - with Sam Cogan (Betatalks the podcast) - Create episode with Sam. Really interesting to listen about those three IaC.

• Dan Garfield: GitOps with Kubernetes - Episode 298 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Interesting episode about containers and deploying platforms, tools and so much more.

• Episode 1900 with Scott Hanselman! (.NET Rocks!) - Three of my favorite people in the word in a single episode! It was such a pleasure to listen pleasure to listen talk about all those little stories. Long live to .NET Rocks (and HanselMinutes)

Miscellaneous

• What's new in the Windows Subsystem for Linux in May 2024 (Craig Loewen) - Tons of experimental features are being move to regular ones, and more are coming up to manage our distro, improve security and more.

• 8 Learning Paths for Beginners on GitHub (Cynthia Zanoni) - Wow! so many very cool learning Path to get started with anything you can think about it. I may do one or two just to refresh my knowledge.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #606

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

Azure Developer CLI (azd) – Build 2024 Recap (Grace Kulin) - All developers should look at how it can really speedup and simplify your Azure deployment and ease the creation of your infrastructure as code file (bicep and terraform).

Programming

Catch Up on Microsoft Build 2024: Essential Sessions for .NET Developers (James Montemagno) - Perfect for . NET developers who would like to know what's new and what's coming

Avoiding interactivity with Blazor? (Jon Hilton) - Nice post that examines how some fancy checkbox or button interactivity works in Blazor.

Must-have resources for new .NET Aspire developers (Anthony Simmon) - This post contains a list of other posts and videos about aspired really interesting if you want to get started.

Microsoft Dev Box introduces new ready-to-code and enterprise management capabilities - Wonderful powerful device where and when you need it. This post shares the most recent new features.

Developing cloud-native apps with .NET Aspire and Visual Studio (Mark Downie) - Nice post that celebrates the general availability of .NET Aspire and shares many advantages of using it with Visual Studio.

It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files (Frank Boucher) - We all did it. Hardcoding password in code, because it's "just" a quick thing, or it's just for us, and we think it's okay... but is it? This post shares my learning while removing passwords from docker-compose file.

AI

Announcing the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (John Lam) - Nice! The favorite editor of so many now have an AI extension! I missed the Microsoft Build sessions with the demos. Lucky me they are available on demand!

~frank

It turns out, it's not difficult to remove all passwords from our Docker Compose files

I used to hardcode my password in my demos and code samples. I know it's not a good practice, but it's just for demo purposes, it cannot be that dramatic, right? I know there are proper ways to manage sensitive information, but this is only temporary! And it must be complicated to remove all the passwords from a deployment... It turns out, IT IS NOT difficult at all, and that will prevent serious threats.

In this post, I will share how to remove all passwords from a docker-compose file using environment variables. It's quick to setup and easy to remember. For production deployment, it's better to use secrets, because environment variables will be visible in logs. That said, for demos and debugging and testing, it's nice to see those values. The code will be available on GitHub. This deployment was used for my talks during Azure Developers .NET Days: Auto-Generate and Host Data API Builder on Azure Static Web Apps and The most minimal API code of all... none

The Before Picture

For this deployment, I used a docker-compose file to deploy an SQL Server in a first container and Data API Builder (DAB) in a second one. When the database container starts, I run a script to create the database tables and populate them.

services:

  dab:
    image: "mcr.microsoft.com/azure-databases/data-api-builder:latest"
    container_name: trekapi
    restart: on-failure
    volumes:
      - "./startrek.json:/App/dab-config.json"
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    depends_on:
      - sqlDatabase

  sqlDatabase:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server
    container_name: trekdb
    hostname: sqltrek
    environment:
      ACCEPT_EULA: "Y"
      MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD: "1rootP@ssword"
    ports:
      - "1433:1433"
    volumes:
      - ./startrek.sql:/startrek.sql
    entrypoint:
      - /bin/bash
      - -c
      - |
        /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr & sleep 30
        /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P "1rootP@ssword" -d master -i /startrek.sql
        sleep infinity

As we can see, the password is in clear text twice, in the configuration of the database container and in the parameter for sqlcmd when populating the database. Same thing for the DAB configuration file. Here the data-source node where the password is in clear text in the connection string.

"data-source": {
 	"database-type": "mssql",
	"connection-string": "Server=localhost;Database=trek;User ID=sa;Password=myPassword!;",
	"options": {
		"set-session-context": false
	}
}

First Pass: Environment Variables

The easiest password instance to remove was in the sqlcmd command. When defining the container, an environment variable was used... Why not use it! To refer to an environment variable in a docker-compose file, you use the syntax $$VAR_NAME. I used the name of the environment variable MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD to replace the hardcoded password.

/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P $$MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD -d master -i /startrek.sql

Second Pass: .env File

That's great but the value is still hardcoded when we assign the environment variable. Here comes the environment file. They are text files that holds the values in key-value paired style. The file is not committed to the repository, and it's used to store sensitive information. The file is read by the docker-compose and the values are injected. Here is the final docker-compose file:

services:

  dab:
    image: "mcr.microsoft.com/azure-databases/data-api-builder:latest"
    container_name: trekapi
    restart: on-failure
    env_file:
      - .env
    environment:
      MY_CONN_STRING: "Server=host.docker.internal;Initial Catalog=trek;User ID=sa;Password=${SA_PWD};TrustServerCertificate=True"
    volumes:
      - "./startrek.json:/App/dab-config.json"
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    depends_on:
      - sqlDatabase

  sqlDatabase:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server
    container_name: trekdb
    hostname: sqltrek
    environment:
      ACCEPT_EULA: "Y"
      MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD: ${SA_PWD}
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - "1433:1433"
    volumes:
      - ./startrek.sql:/startrek.sql
    entrypoint:
      - /bin/bash
      - -c
      - |
        /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr & sleep 30
        /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U sa -P $$MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD -d master -i /startrek.sql
        sleep infinity

Note the env_file directive in the services definition. The file .env is the name of the file used. The ${SA_PWD} tells docker compose to look for SA_PWD in the .env file. Here is what the file looks like:

SA_PWD=This!s@very$trongP@ssw0rd

Conclusion

Simple and quick. There are no reasons to still have the password in clear text in the docker compose files anymore. Even for a quick demo! Of course for a production deployment there are stronger ways to manage sensitive information, but for a demo it's perfect and it's secure.

During Microsoft Build Keynote on day 2, Julia Liuson and John Lambert talked about how trade actors are not only looking for the big fishes, but also looking at simple demos and old pieces of code, looking for passwords, keys and sensitive information.

Reading Notes #605

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problem.

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Programming

• Reimagining Pong Wars with C# and MVUX (Uno Team) - This is a very interesting post that details all the architecture and code of this game.

• How to Check Your Docker Installation: Docker Desktop vs. Docker Engine (Jay Schmidt) - A very instructive and useful post that list all details related to Docker Desktop and Docker Engine for Mac, Linux, and Windows platform.

• Empowering Developers at Microsoft Build: Docker Unveils Integrations and Sessions (Vanessa Fournier) - Nice post. You should definitely watched the Build session where they show how to target multiple platforms, and many new features

• Docker Compose Profiles, one the most useful and underrated features (Oskar Dudycz) - Woah! For now on, I shall have a profile in all my docker compose file. We'll probably not all, but I'm definitely using them. This post is the perfect place to get started and understand what are profile and how to use it.

• General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development (Damian Edwards) - Fantastic news! It an amazing tools that simplify local development and give us the opportunity to see what is happening.

• 5 easy tips to improve your personal website performance ( Salma Alam-Naylor) - I accept the challenge, I will review my websites to see how I can improve the performance. Interesting post that shares many great ideas.

AI

• A Quick Guide to Containerizing Llamafile with Docker for AI Applications (Sophia Parafina, Marc Sherwood) - Great post tht goes over how to put our favorite AI model in a container to work locally.

~Frank

Reading Notes #604

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

 

Cloud

• Azure Communication Services May 2024 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Wow many great new features in this update.

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 – SANDRO PEREIRA BIZTALK BLOG (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problems.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: 9 Best Practices for Building Blazor Web Apps (Claudio Bernasconi) - This post shares best practices. They are simple to follow but very impactful.

• Performant, Secure, and Versatile Containers (Savannah Ostrowski,Sohan Maheshwar) - Cool! It's time to try it, only one switch to flip..

• An introduction to primary constructors in C#12 (Andrew Lock) - Wow! This post dig into what can and cannot do the new constructors in C#. Example by example trying more complex scenarios, fascinating!

DevOps

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Plans on Microsoft Learn (Kaberi Bell) - Would it be to be a data engineer, AI specialist, app builder there's a plan for you and that's a very cool new feature on learn have a look this blog post explain all of it

• How Do You Measure Developer Experience? (Jennifer Riggins) - An interesting article about what and how measure performance. I didn't know so many system and details concepts were that detailed.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.21 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of new features again and I love| seeing all those community contributions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #603

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it!

Cloud

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real life problem.

• Using keyless authentication with Azure OpenAI (Pamela Fox) - Great post to improve the security and best practices in our code.

Programming

• Refactor your code with C# collection expressions (David Pine) - Nice post about best practices but also to really understand how things works.

• Secure your container build and publish with .NET 8 (Richard Lander) - Nice post that shows that it's easier than you probably think to improve the security in your containers.

• 🚨 7 Most Common Mistakes in C# Programming 🙅‍♂️ (Konstantin Fedorov) - Good tips to keep our code efficient and stable.

Podcasts

• Glenn Condron: .NET Web Development - Episode 293 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Nice episode about evolution of .NET, it's open source side today, Azure Developer CLI, the new Aspire and so much more.
• Think Faster, Talk Smarter with Matt Abrahams (Modern Mentor) - Interesting episode about how to become a better communicators in both formal and informal situations. Matt is the author a book on that topic.
• Portainer for Kubernetes, Docker, Swarm, Edge, and IoT (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - Great episode about Portainer a tool that most (if not all) of us should use.

Miscellaneous

• DevOps Adoption for IT Managers (Chris Pietschmann) - Interesting post that shares the benefits of DevOps for your enterprise and how to approach it as a manager.

• Cascadia Code 2404.23 (Christopher Nguyen) - I used to do ASCII art back on my C=64... Now that all those new fonts and symbols are added should I start again? Nice to have all the options available to be able to display everything we need|the console.

~Frank

Reading Notes #600

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

Having interesting content? Share it! 

by: Microsoft Designer

Suggestion of the week

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #597

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Suggestion of the week

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

Open Source

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

Miscellaneous

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

~frank

Reading Notes #595

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

 

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

Programming

• .NET Aspire preview 4 - .NET Aspire - So much in this new release! So many possibilities.

• Generate Local .NET Secrets from Azure Deployments (Frank Boucher) - Nice new simple to get started.

• Unity extension for Visual Studio Code - Now Generally Available (Jb Evain) - That's an interesting idea! I'm not a Unity developer, but I'm curious to see the response from the community.

• Blazor Basics: Advanced Blazor Form Validation (Claudio Bernasconi) - Having control on the validation and how we guide our users is a must. This post does a great job at explaining how to to it within Blazor with clear and simple code sample.

• An introduction to the heap data structure and .NET's priority queue (Andrew Lock) - Great post that the explains how to understand the heap. This source of information could be so useful when investigating something that doesn't work as expected in our code.

• Lightweight In-Memory Message Bus Using .NET Channels (Milan Jovanović) - Messages queues are such a powerful tool when our solution work asynchronously. This nice tutorial shows us how to do it and stay local.

AI

• An Introduction to Mistral AI (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/an-introduction-to-mistral-ai/) - An interesting alternative to GPT when text is involved.

• Get started with .NET 8 and AI using new quickstart tutorials (Jordan Matthiesen) - Five extremely simple example application to explain different AI scenarios in .NET and an opportunity to give your feedback.

Databases

• RavenDB and Two Factor Authentication (Oren Eini) - Good news! Always use the two factor authentication when available.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Easiest Way To Make Your Life More Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric Barker) - Love it! Don't be stuff buy time.... Nice post

~Frank

Reading Notes #594

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

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

AI

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

Databases

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #593

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #592

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, that catch my interest during the week. This week it's definitely more code focus.

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

Cloud

• Open at Microsoft - FluentUI.Blazor (Denis Voituron) - This post summarized the new series of videos about FluentUI Blazor done on Open at Microsoft, including the videos.

Programming

• An Introduction to the World of Containers with .NET 8 (James Montemagno) - A lots of information to get started with containers in this post.And the best of it is its most likely easier that you think!

• Developing Optimized GitHub Actions with .NET and Native AOT (David Pine) - There is so many good and great ideas in this post! Now I just need time to implement them.

• Using named pipes with ASP.NET Core and HttpClient (Andrew Lock) - I didn't known about these pipes, did you? Interesting tool that could simplify the communication between services.

• Introducing ASP.NET Core metrics and Grafana dashboards in .NET 8 (James Newton-King) - tons of metric and not a lot of work to get them just like we like it.

• Using dependency injection with Azure .NET SDK (Alexandre Nédélec) - Great post to learn how the Microsoft.Extensions.Azure package can really help us with our code.

• How To Use AI Assistant to Generate Test Data For .NET Applications (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - I like that! I can see myself using AI to scaffold the big part of my test and then finish them. It's like the classic 80-20. Nice post to get inspired.

~Frank

Reading Notes #590

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

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

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #589

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

• Using Azure Load Testing to test Multi-Tenant services (Frédéric Le Coquil) - Nice post that explains in details how to test a scale and cost efficiently our API.

• WASI 0.2 Preview: A New Dawn for WebAssembly (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ) - Looking forward how WASI will impact our web. Nice little post to quickly understand what it is.

• How to deploy .NET Aspire apps to Azure Container Apps - .NET Blog (Jiachen Jiang) - It looks simple enough don't you think? I'm trying it today!

• Build your Web Apps faster with the Azure Cache for Redis: Quick Start Template ( Ricky Diep) - This is definitely a simple and quick way to deploy all your assets at once. There is a video with a demo.

Programming

• Understanding C# 8 default interface methods (Andrew Lock) - Very clear post about the new feature available in interfaces, with great examples that make us understand why and when it is useful and how to implement it.

Open Source

• Celebrating One Year of Open at Microsoft (Japhlet Nwamu) - It was surely a nice first year.

Podcasts

• Code Visualization with CodeSee's Shanea Leven (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Another very interesting episode. CodeSee definitely catches my attention, I'm planning to try it with my OSS project to get started.

~Frank

Reading Notes #588

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Programming

• Developing & Working with .NET Containers on Windows ARM Devices (James Montemagno) - I'm a big fan and user of dev containers.But I didn't know it was hard for Arm device owner.Love the idea.If you never heard of Podman here a nice teaser.

• Overview over Microsoft's developer tools for Windows (Aaron Junker)) - So many great tools to make the dev experience even better on Windows.Did you see so many are oss projects.

• How to deal with API rate limits (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Perfect post to learn why rate limit exists (its easier to manage them if we understand them), and a few suggestions on how to deal with them.

• Persisting Data Volumes With .NET Aspire | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Great tips to be more efficient with .NET Aspire preview 2

~Frank

Reading Notes #585

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~Frank