Reading Notes #705

This week’s collection features a mix of critical .NET lifecycle updates and practical strategies for optimizing your database interactions. These selected articles offer helpful insights into everything from edge computing deployments to the evolving landscape of AI in modern workflows.

AI

• AI Raised the Bar (And Now We're All Tired) (Golnaz) - It's so true! So much can be done quickly today. An interesting question is: how do we avoid burning out resources and tokens? How, as human we stay smart? After all, life is a marathon, not a sprint!

Cloud

• How to Deploy Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) – Bringing Azure to the Edge (Thomas Maurer) - This post shares many information about what is possible to deploy on edge devices. It's not a how-to, however.

Databases

• EF Core LINQ Querying: Filtering, Projections, and Performance (Nick Cosentino) - This is a great post to quickly learn key principles and immediately improve the performance of our interactions with the database when using EF Core.

• EF Core vs Dapper in .NET: When to Use Each (Nick Cosentino) - Great post for developers or architects planning a future project. Both tools are great, so the decision factor depends on the context.

• Optimizing PostgreSQL on Azure directly in Visual Studio Code (Jesse Sullivan) - Interesting new tools in VS Code and Azure for PostgreSQL users. Curious to learn more about that Azure HorizonDB.

DevOps

• WSL container is now available for public preview (Craig Loewen) - This is great news; this will help improve deployment as now people can have an environmental test in WSL.

Programming

• Creating Dual Use Windows GUI and Console Applications (Rick Strahl) - I never thought about that complexity, and you would think that in 2026 it would be much simpler. Good to know!

• SkiaSharp 4.0 is here: announcing the first stable release - .NET Blog (Matthew Leibowitz) - Learn more about SkiaSharp that run under things like .NET MAUI and UNO platform. This new release should improve performance a lot.

• .NET 8 and .NET 9 will reach End of Support on November 10, 2026 - .NET Blog (Rahul Bhandari) - Time flies; it's good to have a reminder. This post includes a helpful timetable and references to help you migrate.

Miscellaneous

• Evaluating performance and efficiency of the GitHub Copilot agentic harness across models and tasks (Shibani Basava & Carlos Castro) - This is a nice post to learn a little about benchmarks.

~frank

Reading Notes #497

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. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• How to Upload a File to Azure Blob Storage (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice tutorial that builds using .NET a little application to interact with Azure blob storage. And there is also a video.

• New Azure for Operators solutions and services built for the future of telecommunications (Jason Zander) - Good news in the network spheres...That's good for all of us.

• Serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps (Michael Ridland) - Now I understand not only how to create a container App but where does it fit in all the container services available in Azure. Very nice post.

Programming

• .NET GitHub Actions: Intro to GitHub Actions for .NET (David Pine) - This is a great post to get started with GitHub action. Thus one is about .Net o but of course, many other languages are supported. Right now the only thing I want is to add more workflow and improve the existing ones...

• Differences Between != And Is Not Operators in C# (Code Maze) - My first thought when I saw the title was well they are the same... And then I remember the differences. Great post the really take the time the explain the similarities and the differences.

• GitHub Previews Faster Codespaces Creation with Prebuilds -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - This is awesome! I started to use containers for my development recently and the initial spark was codespace. You must try it.

• A Practical Guide to Dapper (Camilo Reyes) - A nice tour of the functionalities of the tool. It's clear how it can be useful in a Data Access Layer pattern. Not to be confused with Dapr.

Podcast

• Twenty Years of ASP.NET with Scott Guthrie (.NET Rocks!) - So nice to hear Scott Guthrie talk about those years and share a few stories.

• 568: How to Attract Attention, with Michael F. Schein (Coaching for Leaders) - An interesting conversation about our strengths and weaknesses with the author of the book: The Hype Handbook.

• Testcontainers: Using Code to Control Docker for Testing (DevOps and Docker Talk) - When, How, Why test the code running in containers... Nice episode.

• Jennie Allen On Finding Your People And Building Your Community (What's Essential) - A interesting discussion about what does it means to find your people, and how to do that.

Miscellaneous

• Why DevOps needs a change from a ‘me’ to a ‘we’ mindset (Chris Yates) - An interesting post about the required DevOps mindset.

~frank