Reading Notes #659

This week's reading notes cover a variety of insightful topics, from enhancing your development environment with dev containers on Windows to prioritizing open-source bugs effectively. You'll also find helpful posts on integrating MFA into your login process, exploring RavenDB's vector search capabilities, and understanding the differences between Ask Mode and Agent Mode in Visual Studio.

Happy reading!

A wild turkey in my driveway!?

Suggestion of the week

• Supercharge Your Dev Containers on Windows (Mike Evans-Larah) - A great simple tip that can improve your experience while developing.

Databases

• Using Vector Search for Posts Recommendations (Oren Eini) - Cool demo using Raven DB

Programming

• Why You Should Incorporate MFA into Your Login Process (Suzanne Scacca) - You think the answer is simple, think again. Nice post that explains the difference between 2FA and MFA and why you should or should not implement one of those

• Aspire Dashboard (Joseph Guadagno) - Great deep dive about the Aspire dashboard, learn all the features packed inside it

Open Source

• How I Prioritize OSS Bugs (jeremydmiller) - A very instructive post on a real-life issue. It's harder than people think to prioritize. And it may help you write better bug reports...

AI

• Ask Mode vs Agent Mode - Choosing the Right Copilot Experience for .NET ( Wendy Breiding) - Still not sure what mode to pick in VSCode? Here is a quick post to clarify the options.

• MCP server integration in Visual Studio (Mark Downie) - Great update! That security stuff is very important and a good example using get up to store your tokens love it

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. 

If you have interesting content, share it! 

~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 #579

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

• Startups to access high-performance Azure infrastructure, accelerating AI breakthroughs (Charlotte Yarkoni) - Great news for startups! Planning to use cloud or/ and AI don't miss the startup program ...

Programming

• Fix missing tokens when using downstream APIs and Microsoft Identity in ASP.NET Core (Damien Bowden)- Interesting post that shared solutions (with code snipets) for this situation.

• The convenience of System.IO (Richard Lander) - An interesting exercise. I like doing these when for a project you need to determine what is the best solution to implement in your context.

• Join us for the Great .NET 8 Hack (Aaron Powell) - That looks fantastic!

DevOps

• PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code Fall 2023 Update - PowerShell Team (Sydney Smith) - Nice update for that extension! The experience is so great now.

Databases

• Azure Data Studio 1.47 is now available (David Levy) - Nice new update on an already very useful tool.

~Frank

Reading Notes #559

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

• The Git repository that vanished by Mark Seemann (Mark Seemann) - I love it! I really enjoy those investigation posts, I think we learn more in those. Thank you for sharing it!

• Creating RESTful APIs with Minimal APIs and Entity Framework Core in ASP.NET (Bruno Sonnino) - Fast way to build an API meet efficiency to talk to the database!

• Demystifying WebAssembly: What Beginners Need to Know (Robert Kimani) - Wasm is a great addition to your toolbox. This post explains what makes it different and goes over the pros and cons.

• How to use plugins with Semantic Kernel | Semantic Kernel (Nilesh Acharya) - Short tutorial that helps us with a ready-to-try sample.

Databases

• Kusto Emulator on Linux (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Great announcement! Faster and smaller perfect for us!

Miscellaneous

• Power Apps is empowering coders with next-generation AI capabilities (Ryan Cunningham) - Looking forward to using that AI to do the little repetitive thing in Power platforms.

~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 #538

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!

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - January 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Easier to install and more secure. A nice update.

• Develop Your Cloud App Locally with the LocalStack Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Harsh Mishra) - Interesting tools that can emulate your AWS environment locally, perfect to develop and not stress about the cloud cost busting your budget.

Programming

• 6 Command Line (PowerShell & CLI) Tips & Tricks for Microsoft Azure you should know about! (Thomas Maurer) - Great tips that really enable us to be more productive and efficient.

• Get Started with GitHub Actions (Mandy Hubbard) - This is a great post to get started with CICD. GitHub is free and accessible, give it a try and then automate some tests or a deployment.

• Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - New Pluralsight course announcement.

• The Problem With Dependency Injection Frameworks (James Shore) - A very interesting post that continues to explain why DI frameworks are bad even though they help us.

• Public Preview: Azure Automation Visual Studio Code Extension - Nice I like Azure automation. An extension to manage those cloud cron jobs, I say yes.

• Release notes for Microsoft Q&A - Love that new look!

• Why tuples in C# are not always a code smell (Dennis Frühauff) - I didn't use Turple yet but it's not hard to see the potential and how it could become ugly. This post shows and explains a few simple rules to stay clear.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Cosmos DB to Azure Data Explorer Synapse Link (public preview) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Two worlds touched. This new connection looks super cool.

• Lazy and once-only C# async initialization (Ian Griffiths) - An amazing post that explains so much and that has all the code snippets to be clear about it. I will have to copy-paste those into some test applications to really try them, but it is clear what I should expect.

~frank

Reading Notes #508

It's... Tuesday! 

Yes I know one day later, but it's still time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

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

Cloud

• 50 shades of .NET on AWS (François Bouteruche) - A nice, like-real, story that helps understand how decisions are taken when planning in cloud architecture (here AWS).

• Deploy ASP.NET Core websites to Azure App Service with Azure Pipelines (Mark Heath) - Very interesting tutorial about azure DevOps pipeline.

• Introducing the Azure Static Web Apps CLI (Anthony Chu) - Amazing tools this swa CLI is very interesting and useful.

Programming

• Light and dark mode in just 14 lines of CSS (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Lovely there is no real reason to not do it.

• A New Architecture for APIs (Anant Jhingran) - A very interesting paper that highlights the strengths of GraphQL.

• Add an Admin Tab to Windows Terminal with gsudo (Sam Cogan) - That's a pretty a neet tool!

• Development Container CLI (Brigit Murtaugh) - Oh! This is fantastique, I need to try that, I'm assuming we will be able to give a name to the instance and that it will make reopening a container easier.

• Docker Host network alternatives for Windows containers (Vinicius Apolinario) - Networks are hard, at least for me, and this post shows nice alternatives and explains many things.

Podcast

• Studio 2022 Extensions with Mads Kristensen (.NET Rocks!) - Whenever I listen Mads Kristensen talking about Visual Studio, my brain goes 🤯 Awesome, awesome episode.

Miscellaneous

• The Azure Cosmos DB Journey to .NET 6 - .NET Blog (Vinod Sridharan) - Learn how Azure Cosmo DB API gateway is low latency and use .Net in many different scenarios to achieve great performance, in this post.

~frank

Reading Notes #504

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

• Azure Automation Run Books – Setup (Paul Michaels) - Automation is so powerful... Think about it as a Cron job in the cloud...

Programming

• 4 ways we use GitHub Actions to build GitHub (Brian Douglas) - I love it. Dog fooding your products or services will always improve them. Nice post.

• ASP.NET Core CRUD with NoSQL: Part 2 (Matthew Groves) - In this second post of the series, we learn how to set an index and how to prepare our select to read our data.

• An Introduction to JSON (Jack Wallen) - I thought it was a bit older than that. Nice post th o learn more about something we all use.

• Building a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform (Colin Eberhardt) - Very interesting post about different web assembly possibilities and a cool tutorial in Rush.

• How to prevent Email HTML injection in C# and .NET (Niels Swimberghe) - An accessible solution to a very important and frequent problems in web development. Very instructive post.

• 10 Things I (Still) Love About Programming (Al Tenhundfeld) - I love it. All those things are so true!

Miscellaneous

• MySQL Query Optimization + Forgetting To Run EXPLAIN = Full Table Scan (Ben Nadel) - Optimization is one of the most satisfying tasks to do, particularly when it's a query. Great post that explains how to search and see what needs to be changed.

• The Importance of Scheduling Nothing (Jeff Weiner) - So simple and powerful, I do the same but often fail at defending those zones.

~Frank

Reading Notes #491

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

• 7 reasons to attend Azure Open Source Day (David Dennis) - Free training/ learning session coming up.
• Reading and Parsing Inbound Emails with SendGrid and Azure Logic Apps (John Kilmister) - I didn't know about the strong grid library pretty cool demo to check incoming emails.
• Welcome new employee in Teams using Adaptive card. (Shrusti Shah) - Welcome aboard! Automation is very useful and it is simple to get started. This post is the perfect example of this.
• Azure Container Apps: dapr, devcontainer, debug and deploy | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - Wow! There is a lot in this post. All the code for the development environment, 2 apps, and deployment are there with explanations. Really well done

Programming

• Add an admin CRUD web page to your ASP.NET Core web app in 5 minutes using EF Core Power Tools and CoreAdmin (Erik Ejlskov Jensen) - This is a nice quick tutorial that shows us how to use simple tools to secure part of a website.
• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit v8.0.0 Preview 1 (Sergio Pedri) - A new release, now faster, better, cleaner. Good job!
• File Sharing with Docker Desktop - Docker Blog (Stephen Turner) - A really instructive and clear post. Super clear.

Databases

• Azure Cosmos DB SQL API – Document Analytics (Modhana) - Finding a good partition for our data is crucial to get the best performance. This post explains how with Celebrata we can visualize them and make smarter choices.

Miscellaneous

• No one cares that you’re right (George Stocker) - Interesting post. the comparison of a compiler to humans made me smile, but it works...

~frank

Reading Notes #489

Suggestion of the week

• How to Use Git and GitHub in a Team like a Pro – Featuring Harry and Hermione (Damian Demasi) - Really good post (story style) to get started with GitHub. There is a little something that makes me think of Project Phenix... And crave Harry Poter.

Cloud

• 5 reasons to attend the Azure Virtual Desktop Master Class (Sue Hartford) - That could be so useful for many now that we are working more from home... A more secure and powerful machine could be easy to reach and maintain.

Programming

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 1 (James Dawson) - First post of a promising series on Dapr.This one dressed the table, shares the links.....waiting for the next one.

• Compiling sqlcipher (sqlite encrypted) for Windows using Visual Studio 2022 (Dominique St-Amand) - Wow. This post was a big reminder for me of two things: how far we come, and some souvenirs of homework from when I was in school.

• Docker’s Top 10 Most Popular Blogs in 2021 (David Oro) - Nice quick list of great resources.

• Windows, WSL, Docker, and Free Starters (Sm0ke) - Nice quick start tutorial to set up your Django tools on Windows.

Miscellaneous

• Helping team members deal with Imposter Syndrome (Mark Downie) - Interesting post. I think it is really important to talk about it, as it affects us all.

• Tips & Tricks for Query Pagination in Azure Cosmos DB - Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Tim Sander) - This important concept, not only used with Azure Cosmo DB but any database, is very well explained in this post.

• Why Are More Companies Trying Four-Day Workweeks? (David Cassel) - Interesting. I didn't suspect that it was growing so much in popularity.

~frank

Reading Notes #452

Cloud

• Announcing Azure Mobile Apps v4.2.0 for .NET | Xamarin Blog (Adrian) - Nice update, more platforms.

Programming

• .Net 5 is PERFECT for DevOps (Davide Benvegnù) - I said it many times but allow me to say it one more time... It a great time to be a .Net developer.

• Azure Functions via GitHub Actions with No Publish Profile (Justin Yoo) - Nice post. We can do so much with those GitHub actions it's so cool.

• Spectre.Console lets you make beautiful console apps with .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Looks totally cool and could definitely be useful for some API I have... Could I just add params for pretty results?? Hmmm.

Miscellaneous

• Understanding the difference between null and undefined in Azure Cosmos DB | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Tim Sander) - Super interesting post that shares a nice tip about how to work with null and undefined values in your NoSQL queries.

• Preventing Developer Burnout in the Age of Rapid Software Delivery (James Brotsos) - This post is definitely interesting as it talks about a real health problem. at the same time there that mix with DevOps and security thing... Could be just me, interesting nevertheless.

Reading Notes #431

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

• 5 Things to Know about Serverless in 2020 (Andrew Tunall) - Interesting post about Lambda services.

• Hosting Blazor Web Assembly App on Azure Static Web App (Justin Yoo) - Very interesting post with a lot of information and great code examples.

• Hosting Blazor WebAssembly in Azure Static Web Apps (Preview) (Tim Heuer) - Another great post that explores the possibilities of using Blazor web assembly with some C# Azure functions inside the new Azure Static Web App.

Programming

• Getting Value from appsettings.json in .NET Core (Jeetendra Gund ) - Nice little quick tutorial the read values in an MVC structured app.

• Building a notifications client with Xamarin and Azure (Laurent Bugnion) - A very nice post that describe how Laurent started to build his cross platforms tools. Sharing the gotchas and a few tips along this first post of the series.

Databases

• Which Database should I use in my Azure Serverless App? (Mark Heath) - Nice overview of the type of data storage in Azure.

Miscellaneous

• 7 principles for modern tech leaders (William Peachey) - Nice post about the evolution of roles in our field of expertise and what could/ should be a a leader roles.

• Do I need to code in my free time to be a good developer? (Maxim Chechenev) - Interesting point of view about a trend. I personally think the answer is not yes or no... But its depends or it required more details.

Reading Notes #422

Cloud

• Azure Functions: Extend Execution Timeout Past 5 Minutes (Chris Pietschmann) - Very cool post that explains how to take advantages of this new feature.
• Create, Build, Deploy and Configure an Azure Function with Azure DevOps and Azure CLI (Damien Bowden) - The perfect tutorial to get started with Azure DevOps.It contains all the code we need and a ton of references
• Introducing the Azure Key Vault Credentials Provider for Jenkins (Tim Jacomb) - Great news for all the Jenkins users and nice extension for Keyvault.
• Making an Interactive Cognitive Portrait Exhibit using some Creativity, .NET, Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Magic (Dmitry Soshnikov) - Very cool project mixing art and techno.

Programming

• GitHub is now free for teams (Nat Friedman) - That was definitely a piece of good news this week.
• Bring your own machine to Visual Studio Online | Visual Studio Blog (Allison) - Fantastic news! Before it was possible to access a powerful developer environment from our poor local devices. Now we can also access our own powerful machine from elsewhere! That's very very nice!
• Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Jason Etcovitch ( Jason Etcovich) - An incredible post there is so many awesome tools and references in it.

Podcasts

• 195: The Hanselman Machine Learning Model (Merge Conflict) - Great episode where Frank and James discuss how James could build a sentiment analysis of Hanselman tweets, is it possible or not and what would be the cost (effort, and money).
• GitHub Actions with Enrico Campidoglio (.NET Rocks!) - I think it's my first .Net Show since the Pandemie. Well with was a create show that dig deeper in the GitHub Action. Loved it.
• 068: How to Build Your Personal Brand (CloudSkills.fm) - I really liked this episode as I did "created" my personal brand (without really realizing it ) a few years ago.
• 455: How to Create Great Relationships, with Colleen Bordeaux (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion with the author of the book: Am I Doing This Right?: A Philosophical Guide to Life in the Age of Overwhelm, that is now in my to read list/

Miscellaneous

• Backing up SQL Server databases to Blob Storage using Impersonation (Dominique St-Amand) - Nice post that not only shows us and to do backups, but how to do it in a very secured and structure way.Excellent!
• Free SSL vs. Paid SSL Certificates: Why Pay for SSL? (Chip Securis) - Before reading this post I assumed what could be the differences. NOW I know.
• How viewers can be actors in streams on Twitch (null) - Interesting post about streaming and how to leverage the channel points
• Microsoft Learning Blog (Alex Payne) - This is nice.

~

Reading Notes #417

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
Enjoy!

Cloud

• Making a cleaner and more intentional azure-pipelines.yml for an ASP.NET Core Web App - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - This post provides explanations about the steps of an Azure Pipeline file. If you are new to azure DevOps it helps a lot with the comprehension.

• Azure Free Account? Is it really free? ( Michael Crump) - Ooh yeah! I still remember that moment where I created my first service.... Get started free is free.

• Build apps for free with Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Deborah) - A free NoSQL database with the specs of Cosmo...thatts really cool. This post gives you an idea of what it means and a few ideas of what you could do with it.

• Cloud migration: 5 common traps and how to avoid them (Rael Winters) - A great post that can really help you to avoid losing time and money...Once you know the traps, it's easier.

• Tip 254 - Use WAF to protect your web applications with Azure Front Door (Michael Crump) - Nice and easy tip to live more secure in the cloud.

• Tips for keeping your Azure Subscriptions Clean (Michael Crump) - Great post that explains how to keep your money in your pocket.

Programming

• Postman: The Easy Way to Work with APIs - Postman Blog (The Postman Team) - A wonderful tool, a most if you work with API.

• Upgrade Your .NET Console App Experience (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice list of cool libraries to help to add color, table, and menus to our apps.

Podcast

• Making a Living on Instagram with J.N. Silva and Dave Krugman (That Creative Life) - Nice episode... Honestly, they got me with their history when they start doing photography.

• 192: Getting Started with Live Streaming (Merge Conflict) - Nice episode about what you need, or in fact what you don't need to start streaming.

Miscellaneous

• Recovering from Burnout and Depression (null) - An important topic. This post was recommended during a talk about remote working. Very interesting.

~

Reading Notes #402

Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

Cloud

• Azure Functions with QueueTriggers and .NET Core – Configuration and Troubleshooting (Jeff) - Poor Jeff, I was there on his stream and he struggles so much to understand what was happening. And honestly me too! Despite the fact that I know and use Azure Function regularly I completely missed the missing instruction... The good news is since the documentation is open-source we can improve it...

Programming

• A quick overview of ASP.NET Core with Rider (Rachel Appel) - I never used Rider in a real project. However, the quality of this code IDE is not in question. It looks awesome and this post shows how it supports the latest version of .Net Core.
• An Introduction to Blazor and Web Assembly (Jeremy Likness) - The perfect post to get started with Blazor and also learn where it comes from.
• Visual Studio Extensions: 8 You Should Check Out (Carlos Schults) - A nice post that shares useful extensions for developers. I also like the fact that in the title it's 8 and in the url it's 7 LOL...

Miscellaneous

• How Serverless is Working in Azure SQL Database – SQLServerCentral (Steve Jones) - Interesting post where the author shares his experience with serverless database version.

Books

The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

I'm still balanced about this book. It was a good book, even if I found some chapters that were too long. I also got lost by moments. I had the impression that some thoughts or ideas were not developed correctly and more quickly wrapped. In counterpart, some were very well served and clear.

Reading Notes #386

Cloud

• Delete your resource groups in parallel using the az group command (Wes MacDonald) - What!? So cool, and efficient.

• Demystifying Azure App Services Plan (Scott Allen) - Very clear and so well explained. I love it.
• Understanding Azure Durable Functions - Part 1: Overview (Jason Roberts) - A nice quick introduction to the durable functions. A series to watched.
• Managing Azure Functions Keys (using the new ARM APIs!) (Mark Heath) - This post shares all the required code to get, list, or change our keys using the new API and some PowerShell.

Programming

• Git is case-sensitive and your filesystem may not be - Weird folder merging on Windows (Scott Hanselman) - A nice tip to know when creating a multi-platform application.
• How YOU can use Nest to build a GraphQL API (Chris Noring) - A pretty cool tutorial that gives us all the code to get started with GraphQL.
• The Top 5 DevOps Automation Tools .NET Developers Should Know (Heather Downing) - So many great tools! Could it be the opportunity to try something new that you were waiting for?
• Azure DevOps Hidden Gems #3 - Pull Request Validation Builds AND Releases (Graham Smith) - Amazing features that I didn't know even existed! A very promising series indeed!

Databases

• Using SQL Server in Docker containers for basic tasks (Michael Jolley) - Stop installing SQL server on your dev machine!? After reading this post you may consider that as a really good idea.

Miscellaneous

• A better way to sell your skills as a developer than just "hire me!" or mass applying (Corey Cleary) - Interesting post that shows the proper way to do things.
• How I Started Existing on the Internet (Ryland G) - An awesome story. Hopefully, it will help those who didn't start yet...
• The Best Book to Read as a Developer (Ryland G) - Looking for something technical to read this summer? Well, this one look interesting.

~

Reading Notes #372

Suggestion of the week

• How Azure Resource Graph is gonna change the way you search and script (Stephane Lapointe) - Whaat?! 15x faster! If you are not using Azure graph yet... This post is for you. If you do use graph, still read that you may learn a few tricks. In short, it's a mandatory read for anyone using Azure.

Cloud

• Azure Blueprints: ISO27001 Shared Services (Eric Leonard) - This excellent second post of a series goes dipper and shares details about one specific blueprint template. And explains some pitfall to avoid.
• Azure Blueprints: Intro (Eric Leonard) - If you don't know Blueprint this post is an excellent first contact.
• Connecting to Azure Redis Cache with Docker (Dominique St-Amand) - Great tutorial that explains every step to build a safe environment leveraging Docker.
• Different Ways to Parse Http Request Data in Http-triggered Azure Functions ( Jason Roberts ) - How many ways do you think we can get our values from inside an Azure Function? This post passes them all in a review.

Programming

• Getting Started with .NET Core and Docker and the Microsoft Container Registry (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that shows a few examples of how containers could be used with .Net Core at different stages of your application development.
• Building a Visual Studio Code Extension (Brian Clark) - Great post that explains in details the different type of extension and how to build them.
• Securing ASP.NET Core in Docker (Muhammad Rehan Saeed) - A nice little trick to get more secure with our containers.

Miscellaneous

• Continuous database deployments with Azure DevOps (John Miner) - This nice tutorial explains what's in Azure DevOps and how to use it to maintain a database with it. Very complete article.
• F7 is the greatest PowerShell hotkey that no one uses any more. We must fix this. (Scott Hanselman) - A Funny, and true little story about one Key.How to convert an IMG file to an standard ISO easily with Linux on Windows 10 (null) - Del
• Was MongoDB Ever the Right Choice? (Justin Etheredge) - Nice post that put in perspective what's NoSql and why MondoDB could or not be a good solution for our project.

Reading Notes #370

Cloud

• 
  Deploying Blazor Apps Using Azure Pipelines (Chris Sainty) - Nice introduction tutorial to deploy easily in Azure blob storage.
• 
  Run your code and leave build to us | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Josh Gavant) - Great news! It's now super simple to deploy a webapp in more different languages.

Programming

• 
  ARMing a Hybrid Docker Swarm: Part 1 - Hardware and OS (Elton Stoneman) - Interesting post of a promising series. This one gives us more details on the setup.
• 
  Get Started With Node: An Introduction To APIs, HTTP And ES6+ JavaScript — Smashing Magazine (Jamie Corknill) - A very complete introduction to Node.js and a few of is ES versions.
• 
  How to parse string dates with a two digit year and split on the right century in C# (Scott Hanselman) - Oh damn... I really don't like when I see a system like that. Unfortunately, It still happens in 2019...

Databases

• 
  Invoke-Sqlcmd is Now Available Supporting Cross-Platform (Steve Lee) - Great post that really explains the power of Invoke-Sqlcmd command.
• 
  Who logged into my #Azure SQL Database? (Bill Wilder) - A perfect little tutorial; straight to the point.

Miscellaneous

• The Best Digital Transformers Choose When to Choose (Richard Seroter) - So true. This post explains what the paradox is and how to avoid it.

Reading Notes #366

Cloud

• Using Environment Variables in Azure DevOps Pipelines (K. Scott Allen) - A great little tutorial that explains how to use configure our variables.

Programming

• An open source parser for GitHub Actions (Patrick Reynolds) - Looking forward to try those GitHub Actions.
• Code coverage reports for ASP.NET Core (Gunnar Peipman) - Very interesting post to learn more about how to get a useful report about our tests.
• Dependency injection in .NET Core console applications (Gunnar Peipman) - Fantastic and concise post that introduces a way to do simple dependency injection with .Net Core using Autofact.
• Rust Governance: Scaling Empathy (Manish Goregaokar) - A friend recently introduced me to Rust. This post assumed we all already familiar to it, and talk about the current problems of this new language and potential solutions.

Databases

• Migrating your existing on-prem SQL Server database to Azure SQL DB (Angelos Petropoulos) - Are you planning to migrate your app to Azure? If the database is also part of the migration here three different way to migrate it including one that doesn't require downtime!

Miscellaneous

• Benefits of using Azure API Management with microservices (Mike Budzynski) - Nice post that explains how to structure Azure Functions (microservices) with Apim and explains why it's a good practice.
• Designing for Dark Mode (kirupa) - Interesting topic indeed. As I'm migrating one of my blog the timing is excellent.

Reading Notes #364

Cloud

• Azure Automation of A-to-Z, Part I (dbakevlar)
  - This is a great post very instructive, that explains how and why we should structure our scripts.
• Azure Policies (Gregor Suttie) - One of the best tools to he
  lp us with the governance in Azure is the policies. This post is a nice introduction to how it could help.
• Setting Up Azure Key Vault w
  ith an Azure Website (Web API) (Luis Valencia) - This is the second post of a very instructive series, and this time it focuses on Keyvault.

Programming

• Debug your live apps running in Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes (Visual Studio Blog) - Nice addition to the rem
  ote debugger experience
• How to set up Gatsby and Auth0 for easy authentication on your next project -
  A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller ) - Cool post that shows how to implement an auth authentification within a static website.
• Top 5 Open Source Features i
  n Azure Pipelines (Edward Thomson) - Learn why the Azure DevOps Pipelines are so great in this post about the evolution of an opensource
  project.

Miscellaneous

• A Few Coding Patterns with the MongoDB C# API (Julie Lerman
  ) - An instructive post about how to use MongoDB.
• If You Think “Digital Transformation” is About Kubernet
  es, You’re Wrong (Richard Seroter,) - Interesting thoughts, looking forward to read what's next.
• Why Containers are a Game Changer for Software Development (Mike Hadlow) - Very interesting
  post about containers and the raise of gitOps.

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