Reading Notes #406

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.

My Numbers for 2019

• This marks the 46 Reading Notes blog post.
• 20 blog posts in French or English. 
• 69 live stream on Twitch
• 33 Cloud 5 Minutes episode in French or English.
• Many talks in different communities
• 881 contributions in open-source projects

Looking forward to seeing you all in two days to start 2020 together!

Cloud

• How to Learn Microsoft Azure in 2020 (Thomas Maurer) - Another great list of learning starting points.

Programming

• How to Build a Test Automation Strategy? (Hiren Dhaduk) - Nice post that lists all types of tests and explains their purpose.
• How to Implement Sorting in ASP.NET Core Web API (Vladimir Pecanac) - If you are building an API this post is definitely a must to give the best experience to your users.

DevOps

• Top 10 DevOps Training Courses for Programmers and Software Developers (javinpaul) - A question that I've been asked often is where to start. My favorite answer is a
  lot of time at Learn.microsoft.com. However, here some different sources that all look delicious.

Podcasts

• SPI 403: 2 Time Management Strategies to Practice in 2020 (Pat Flynn) - Great quick episode. I'm always interested to optimized my time and to track it to help me to improve painlessly.
• SPI 402: Everyone Needs to Have a Podcast (Pat Flynn) - Very interesting episode that explains why... with numbers and examples... Guess what just popped on my project list...
• 19 Lessons for Streamers About Growth and Business in 2019 (Ashnichrist) - Nice episode different from the usual. It's also very different from the classic year review.

Miscellaneous

• Visualizing Your Work Schedule (Valentin Sawadski) - Interesting project.I'm always looking forward to the best way to track my time and see where I put my effort (aka time).

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Reading Notes #404

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 Mystery Mansion - Microsoft in Business Blogs (Em Lazer-Walker) - Very interesting post. As I'm writing myself a text-based adventure game(just for fun) it's interesting to see the different approaches and tools available.

• Azure DevOps Hidden Gems #8 - Turn Azure Board Queries into Dashboard Chart Items (Graham Smith) - Useful and simple tutorial to build great dashboards in Azure Devops.

Programming

• Updating an ASP.NET Core 2.2 Web Site to .NET Core 3.1 LTS (Scott Hanselman) - Great tutorial that shows us a few things to check when migrating... Because of its time.

Podcasts

• Stream Coach - How hard should you HUSTLE with Sara Dietschy - Twitch Tips and Advice (Ashnichrist) - Two very smart women Sara and Ashnichrist discuss about that "luck"... that is is in fact hard work. An excellent episode, very motivating. Looking forward to your the next episode on both podcasts.

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Reading Notes #399

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2019 Q4 (Gloridel Morales) - Since the multi-stage pipeline launch in May, the team as been listening to his community. In this post learn more about what they have been working on and what is their roadmap.

Programming

• Azure DevOps - Docker Release Pipeline (Jeffrey Chilberto ) - A nice and simple tutorial that shows the best practices. Fantastic!

• Code Comments (Donn Felker) - Very smart idea! I'm staring using that rule right away.
• Microservices Fundamentals (Mark Heath) - New course on Pluralsight about an indeed challenging topic. This post shares the plan of that Microservices course.
• Stop Waiting! Start using Async and Await! (Simon Hawe) - Learn the power of async in this excellent post. The example may be in Python the idea is the same however language we are using.

Miscellaneous

• How to Authorize Users in Blazor Declaratively -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - Great article that explains how authentication could by manage with Blazor.
• What’s in my bag for Microsoft Ignite 2019 (Thomas Maurer) - As I'm packing my own bag, going to Ignite for the first time it's interesting to see what others bring... (Note to myself next time don't leave at home your network cable adapter)

Books

Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, And Build a Successful Business

Author: Pat Flynn

I really like this book, and planning to read it again soon. I like the way things are simply explained. Like if you deconstructed a situation and then re-building it. It felt authentic and true. It's nothing transcending, but the way it is explained is great.




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Reading Notes #398

Cloud

• Developing your first Azure Durable Function (Saturnino Pimentel) - An excellent tutorial that explains the durable function. Very well done.

Programming

• Setting expectations for open source participation (Brett Cannon) - Excellent post (also available in video) about open source, where based on his experience the author share with us great advice. Thanks, Aaron for that reading suggestion.

Miscellaneous

• Be a Technology Tourist (Scott Hanselman) - A very nice and inspirational post.

• Interactive tabletop RPG table — The MagPi magazine (Rob Zwetsloot. ) - Simple yet sooooo cool! I always wanted to play does games.

Books

10-Minute Focus: 25 Habits for Mastering Your Concentration and Eliminating Distractions 

(Daniel Walter)

Nothing new here but it's clear and very well explained. Honestly it good to revisit those productivity/ focus habits... It helps to stay on our toes...

Reading Notes #393

Suggestion of the week

• GitHub stars won’t pay your rent (Kitze) - What a great story! This is an awesome journey of a developers who worked hard, took some risk and... Got result. All developer should read this.

Cloud

• 5 Minute Serverless Functions in Azure without an IDE (Heather Downing) - This post and videos are a fantastic way to get started with Azure Function the good way... With security.
• A quick introduction to Azure function proxies (Nadeem Ahamed) - A nice quick intro... That remind's me I should definitely use proxies in one of my project!
• Using KeyVault References to Read Key Vault Secrets (Scott Allen) - Excellent News!

Programming

• Blazor – on the server or on the client (Christian Nagel) - A great post about blazor that explains very well the current status of this very promising tool.
• What Are gRPC Web Services and When Should I Use Them? -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - A very good post that clarifies things. I'm looking forward to see the example with .Net Core.

Miscellaneous

• Role Based Security in an ASP.NET Core Application (Mahesh Sabnis) - A great tutorial that gets you started with identity and asp.net core.

Reading Notes #375

Cloud

• 5 Developer Tools you need to check out! (Tomek Poniatowicz) - Really cool (and useful, obviously) tools to work with AWS.
• The Most Minimal Serverless Function (Ryan Levick) - A nice introduction post to Azure function.
• 
  

Programming

• Dependencies and Git branches (Felix Rieseberg) - Git never stops to amaze me. This short post explains a nice trick.
• How developers can release custom newsletters for $0.00 (Geoff Stevens) - This post explains a great solution that requires only node.js and a free account ... Pretty slick.
• Particle Workbench: supercharge your IoT development with professional tools (David Scheltema) - Nice! I didn't know some extensions were available for IoT in VSCode.
• Top 15 Visual Studio Code Extensions in 2019 (Gift Egwuenu) - Nice list of extension that targets primarily JavaScript developers but there's definitely a few gems for all of us.

Podcast

• Anthos Migrate, with Issy Ben-Shaul (Kubernetes Podcast from Google) - Nice update. I like the talk about Anthos it look like a great migration tool. I need to find that GitHub repo...

Reading Notes #351

Cloud

• Azure Functions Labs – Information and setup instructions (Bbenjamin Perkins) - Excellent post that explains how works Azure functions and why they works like that.
• Azure Functions: Choosing between queues and event hubs (Jeff Hollan) - Very interesting post that describes very well different possibilities of architecture.
• Deploying and Managing Containers on Azure (Mark Heath) - This post lists the topics covered in the tons of incredible course available on Plurasing... For free.
• How I built a dashboard in Azure Portal to track Gitflow feature branches (Utkarsh Shigihalli) - Pretty clever way to create dashboard in the Azure Portal.

Programming

• When and why to clean up your code: now, later, never (Itamar Turner-Trauring) - This is an interesting post that shares rules to improve or code management. Or at lease feel better with it.
• You might not need Kubernetes (Jessie Frazelle) - Nice quick post. Yep Kubernetes are great tool but not the tool for everything.

Data

• Best practices for alerting on metrics with Azure Database for PostgreSQL monitoring (Harini Gupta) - Nice post that covers the most important point to cover when monitoring a database (not only PostgreSQL).

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Reading Notes #295

Cloud

• Announcing Default Encryption for Azure Blobs, Files, Table and Queue Storage (Lavanya Kasarabada) - Awesome, now more secured without any efforts for our part, I like it that way.
• Azure Functions Visual Studio 2017 Tooling (Mark Heath) - One cool video lesson about the tooling.
• Creating distributed workflows with Azure Durable Functions (Tamir Dresherl) - A perfect post to get started and learn more about the new Durable Azure Functions.

Programming

• 4 Benefits of Migrating to ASP.NET Core 2.0 (Jonathan Danylko) - This post clarifies some ambiguities about the migration to Asp.Net Core.
• How to cook Azure Mobile Apps (node.js): Xamarin and .NET Standard (Sergiy Baydachnyy) - This great tutorial shows a few gotchas that could happen when developing a Xamarin App.

Databases

• Using PostgreSQL Document Databases with Azure Functions and Marten (Jason Roberts) - Quick in simple, I like it.

Reading Notes #294

Suggestion of the week

• 15 Lessons Learned while Converting from ASP.NET to .NET Core (Matt Watson) - What a great post! You must put it in your to-read list before starting your next .Net Core session.

Cloud

• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 1 - Use Keyboard Shortcuts in the Azure Portal (Michael Crump) - This post is the first of a series that will show tons of little gems hidden in the Azure portal.
• What is Azure Event Grid? (Chris Pietschmann) - Great post that introduces the new kid on the block (in the cloud).
• Microsoft builds Raspberry Pi Simulator - All cool is that!

Programming

• Visual Studio Code on Raspbian - Pretty cool that VSCode is now available on RaspberryPi!

Miscellaneous

• A New Real-Time AI Platform from Microsoft, and a Speech Recognition Milestone (Cortana Intelligence and ML Blog Team) - This post is a good summary of the recent news from Microsoft in AI.
• Dressing Better Than... Your Boss? (John Sonmez) - Interesting thoughts about the dress code in enterprises.
• The Best Books All Software Developers Should Read (John Sonmez) - Definitely worth it. Y next book to read is probably in this best-of list
• Write It Down! (Victor Savkin) - Interesting suggestion to get better.

Reading Notes #274

Suggestion of the week

• Web Scraping In Power BI And Excel Power Query (Gil Raviv) - Just recently I've learned about Power BI web scrapping capability, then this! I didn't think it could be that great! Great post.

Cloud

• Azure Backup’s cloud-first approach and why it matters (Shreesh Dubey) - Nice post that explains the complete backup service in Azure.
• Azure functions - Just the CLI, hold the GUI, add some git (Shayne Boyer) - Nice tutorial that explains how to deploy an ARM template using Azure CLI simple commands.
• Interesting facts about Azure BizTalk Hybrid Connections! (Alexander Laysha) - Nice post that explains how works the hybrid connections.
• Trying ASP.NET Core on the Google Cloud Platform "App Engine Flexible Environment" (hanselman.com) - Interesting share that inspires to try .Net Core... outside of the happy path. Awesome.

Programming

• Model Binding in ASP.NET Core - Simple Talk (Dino Esposito) - Great tutorial that introduces the auto bindings and shows how to implement it.
• What’s New in Visual Basic 2017 (The Visual Basic Team) - It's been a while since I coded in VB but reading this post brought back all those souvenirs... Great work.
• 6 Reasons Why JavaScript’s Async/Await Blows Promises Away (Mostafa Gaafar) - Nice update. For a .Net developer, this is perfect!

Reading Notes #248

Programming

• Building Your First Bot using Microsoft Bot Framework - Nice tutorial to get started with the bot framework... An yes, you should care, because bots are the new apps.
  
• How to use Power BI Embedded with AspNetCore - Oh yeah! Quick and simple.
  
• StrathWeb. A free flowing web tech monologue. - Nice post that explains different paths (good and bad) to declare a controller in Asp.Net Core and explains why.

Databases

• Connect to Azure SQL Database V12 via Redirection (Kun Cheng) - Very interesting post about how to achieve great performance with our Azure solution.
  
• Improved Automatic Tuning boosts your Azure SQL Database performance (Vladimir Ivanovic) - Definitely something to try at the minimum... It looks fantastic.

Miscellaneous

• Who am I really logged in as on Visual Studio Team Services? (Willy-P. Schaub) - Nice tips... That will solve so many questions.
  
• You might be a creative if … (docjamesw@gmail.com) - A post to read in the morning. It's like a little pill of energy.
  
• You’re doing it wrong: Demos (Gil Zilberfeld) - Nice quick post that helps us to definitely pick a side when the question "Should we demo that?" popped.

Reading Notes #215

Cloud

• Azure Learning Paths (Laurent Duveau) - Did you know that the Azure documentation site has a set of 25 learning paths? I didn't, and it's awesome.
  
• Using Azure Storage Queues from .NET - Nice post that explores the Azure queues through .net, and feature th very useful cloud config...
  
• Advanced Use of Azure Virtual Machine DSC Extensions - Very nice tutorial about how to troubleshooting.

Programming

• Exploring the new .NET (Scott Hanselman) - This is the first post I read about the "dotnet compile" since the MVP Summit, and it looks at as much interesting as before.
  
• Why build scripts? (Amir Barylko) - This post changed my mind about F#, now I'm looking forward to try it.
  
• Signing into Windows 10 with your Face - Using an Xbox One Kinect with Windows Hello (Scott Hanselman) - I didn't think it was that easy to setup a XBox Kinect to a Pc...
  
• Visual Studio Shortcuts: Comment Selection / Uncomment Selection (Jeremy) - Time to learn some little time saving tips with this short post.
  
• Visual Studio Shortcuts: Format Document (Jeremy) - Recently, I have been surprised to learn that some people are still not aware of that very powerful feature o VisualStudio.

Data

• More Power BI Feature Updates: Power BI Desktop December Update and new Power BI service features - This post detailed the features of th December update.

Miscellaneous

• 12 Most Influential Books Every Software Engineer Needs to Read (roelljr) - Fantastic list of essential books to read. A must.
  
• Google Spotlight Story Special Delivery is a nice YouTube gift for the holidays (Jeff Causey) - Really interesting little animation movie in a 360 degree environment.
  
• First Update Released for Open Live Writer (Richard Hay) - Awesome new, and it works!
  
• Announcing Programmer Tools! (Henry Spencer) - We all need some little tools from time to time. This post lists many useful tools, and what's nice about them is that they are available from everywhere because they are online tools.

Reading Notes #212

Cloud

• Announcing PowerApps with Azure App Service - Really happy about this announcement, it means a lot of opportunities to no-programmer people who want to do something.
  
• Announcing the Azure SDK 2.8.1 for .NET (Brady Gaster) - Great new feature and improvement in this last SDK release.

Programming

• Brainstorming development workflows with Docker, Kitematic, VirtualBox, Azure, ASP.NET, and Visual Studio - Really interesting story / brainstorm even for people who are not familiar with Docker.

How Windows Azure Simplified my Development

(This post was originaly published on Matricis Blog)

Usually my posts are a lot more technical, but this time I decided to share an experience with Windows Azure that saved me a lot of headaches while saving my boss a bunch of money ;)

The Context

Here at Matricis, we often set up our development environments on virtual machines (VMs) witch we host on our internal infrastructure. We have several different development VM configurations, based on the technologies and versions needed. A big advantage to doing so is that if the required environment changes, we simply choose the corresponding VM template. For the project I'm about to talk about, we needed quite a powerful development system, especially since every developer required Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint Foundation 2013, SQL Server, ADFS, and a handful of other tools (fiddler, notepad++, different browsers, etc.)

The Problem

To be able to develop with SharePoint, it is strongly recommended to have at least 8 gigabytes of RAM (I first tried with just 6 gigs, but it was still a nightmare). My laptop only has 8 gigs of memory, so I couldn't run the VM locally. I asked our IT guys if it was possible to host the VM on a local on-premise server. They answered that they didn't have enough space for the environment. They were very sorry, but I was actually quite happy about it; I now had a perfect use-case to work in Windows Azure!

The Solution

I went to see my boss and explained the situation: instead of buying a brand new server for development and test environment purposes, we should simply use Windows Azure’s IaaS! We could start setting up the VM in less than 10 minutes. In an hour we would be ready to code! The development VM would only be up while it was in use, meaning that it wouldn’t cost a cent while nobody was working on it. On project completion… we would delete all the VMs we were using, and no more fees! My boss loved the idea!

The core team for this project involved four full-time developers, and here is a high level look at our development environment: The Active Directory is shared but every developer has their own SharePoint, Sql Server, and ADFS making them autonomous.

As you can see, it's a hybrid environment since the Team Foundation Server (TFS) is on one our local servers. In the morning, I start my VM and within a few minutes, I'm connected remotely and I’m ready to work on a great machine. With a little PowerShell script that I wrote, I don't even need to log in to the Azure Portal to start and stop my VM. Another great joy to this scenario is that I can now work from anywhere and on any kind of machine: from home on the family computer without VPN or from a Hotel on my laptop or my Surface Pro! Happiness often comes from simple things.

In general, I would say that the experience was very positive, but on the road we did encounter some issues that we had to resolve. Since all IPs on Azure are dynamic, we discovered that the domain controller that is hosted in Azure, must be started before the other VMs. This way its IP will always be the first one, therefore the other VMs will find it without any issues. Furthermore, in our architecture, the source-control (TFS) is on-premise. When you check-out or check-in your code, you are passing through the firewall. However, since these actions are intensive, the firewall may interpret the activity as attacks.

Because the job of a firewall is to protect your network, you can imagine what happened... the connection was lost. Once we identified this and created Firewall exceptions for the Azure VMs, everything was good.

In Conclution

I hope this post will encourage you to try Windows Azure as a development and test environment, because it's a really effective and cost-beneficial way to execute on different projects. For more information about the Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service go to the Windows Azure Web Site.

~Frank