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 #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 #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

How to Deploy a .NET isolated Azure Function using Zip Deploy in One-Click

In this post, I will share a few things that we need our attention when deploying a .NET isolated Azure Function from GitHub to Azure using the Zip Deploy method. This method is great for fast deployment and when your artefacts are zipped in a package.

Note The complete code for this post is available on GitHub

Understanding Zip Push/Zip Deploy

Zip Push allows us to deploy a compressed package, such as a zip file, directly to Azure. It could be part of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI-CD) or like in this example it could replace it. This approach is particularly useful when you want to ensure your artifacts remain unchanged across different environments or when aiming for the fastest deployment experience for users.

While CI-CD is excellent for keeping your code up-to-date, zip deployment offers the advantage of speed and consistency. It eliminates the need for compilation, leading to quicker uploads and deployments.

Preparing Your Package

It’s crucial to package with all necessary dependencies the code required. There is no operation to fetch any external packages during the deployment, the zip file will be decompressed and that's it. The best way to ensure you have everything you need is to publish your code, to a folder and then go in that folder and zip all the files.

dotnet publish -c Release -o ./out

Don't zip the folder, it won't work as expected.

You need to go inside the folder and select all the files and zip them to create your deployment artefact.

The next step is to make your artefact available online. There are many ways, but for this post we are using GitHub Realease. From the GitHub repository, create a new release, upload the zipped file created earlier and publish it. Note the URL of zipped files from the release.

Preparing The ARM Template

For this one-click deployment, we need an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template. This is a document that describes the resources that we want to deploy to Azure. To deploy the zipped file into the Azure Function there are two particularities that required our attention.

Here the sections of the template.

[...]
"resources": [
    {
        "apiVersion": "2022-03-01",
        "name": "[variables('funcAppName')]",
        "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites",
        "kind": "functionapp",
        "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
        "properties": {
            "name": "[variables('funcAppName')]",
            "siteConfig": {
                "appSettings": [
                    {
                        "name": "FUNCTIONS_WORKER_RUNTIME",
                        "value": "dotnet-isolated"
                    },
                    {
                        "name": "WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE",
                        "value": "1"
                    },
                    [...]

Here we define an Windows Azure Function and the WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE needs to be set to 1. The WEBSITE_RUN_FROM_PACKAGE is the key that tells Azure to use the zip file as the deployment artefact.

Then to specify where the zip file is located we need to add an extension to the Azure Function.

    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Web/sites/extensions",
      "apiVersion": "2021-02-01",
      "name": "[format('{0}/ZipDeploy', variables('funcAppName'))]",
      "properties": {
        "packageUri": "https://github.com/FBoucher/ZipDeploy-AzFunc/releases/download/v1/ZipDeploy-package-v1.zip",
        "appOffline": true
      },
      "dependsOn": [
        "[concat('Microsoft.Web/sites/', variables('funcAppName'))]"
      ]
    }

The packageUri property is the URL of the zipped file from the GitHub release. Note the dependsOn property that ensures the Azure Function is created before the extension is added. The complete ARM template is available in the GitHub repository.

One-click Deployment

When you have your artefact and the ARM template uploaded to your GitHub repository, you can create a one-click deployment button. This button will take the user to the Azure portal and pre-fill the deployment form with the information from the ARM template. Here is an example of the button for markdown.

[![Deploy to Azure](https://aka.ms/deploytoazurebutton)](https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.Template/uri/https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2FFBoucher%2FZipDeploy-AzFunc%2Fmain%2Fdeployment%2Fazuredeploy.json)

The has three parts, the first is the image that will be displayed on the button, the second is the link to the Azure portal and the third is the URL of the ARM template. The URL of the ARM template is the raw URL of the file in the GitHub repository, and it needs to be URL encoded. The URL encoding can be done using a tool like URL Encode/Decode.

Final Thoughts

Zip deployment is a powerful tool in your Azure arsenal by itself of part of a more complex CI-CD pipeline. It's a great way to make it easier for people to deploy your solution in their Azure subscription without having to clone/ fork the repository.

Video version

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

References

• Zip deployment for Azure Functions
• MSDeploy VS. ZipDeploy
• Use a deployment button to deploy remote templates

Reading Notes #598

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, close to 600 weeks ago in fact, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• What is cloud native and how can it generate business value? (George Fitzmaurice) - Interesting thoughts about cloud native, how to see it, how to se it's value.

• Using Kudu in Azure to Debug an Azure Function (Paul Michaels) - Kudu is a fantastic tools that not enough people know about.

Programming

• Is Your Container Image Really Distroless? (Laurent Goderre) - Nice post that explains a new way to improve security and more while building our container by going distroless.

• Blazor Basics: Improved Performance with Component Virtualization (Claudio Bernasconi) - When applicable the lazy loading makes a huge difference. This simple tutorial explains how things works and has all the code to back it up.

• Azure PowerShell Tips and Tricks (Paul Harrison) - PowerShell is a very interesting and useful script language.All those tips are pure wisdom!

DevOps

• Beautiful .NET Test Reports Using GitHub Actions (Sean Killeen) - It's true that the unit test result in Azure DevOps looks amazing. Pretty nice adaptation in GitHub Action, could/ should it be native?

Open Source

• Linus Torvalds announces Linux 6.8 (Brian Fagioli) - Nice post.I feel we see more often distro new release making "the e news".

• Debian’s Dedication to Security: A Robust Foundation for Docker Developers (David Dooling) - Happy to see such a fundamental distribution take seriously security as core idea.

AI

• Building a Video Analysis and Transcription Chatbot with the GenAI Stack (David Cardozo) - This post explains a very cool project with generative AI and docker in different technology, very inspiring!

~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 #575

Happy Thanksgiving to all Canadian🍁! 

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

• New experiences designed to make every developer more productive on Windows 11 (Mike Harsh) - Damn! I'm very tented to go right away and reinstall Windows on my dev PC, it looks so great.

Programming

• Get Started with the Microcks Docker Extension for API Mocking and Testing (Ajeet Singh Raina, Yacine Kheddache, Hugo Guerrero) - This looks like an amazing and simple to use tool to test all our API.How doesn't need it.

• Windows Subsystem for Linux September 2023 update (Craig Loewen) - Wow! So many new improvement. Its time for an update which one will it be for you WSL -update or -pre-release update ?

• New Azure DevOps scopes now available for Microsoft Identity OAuth delegated flow apps - Azure DevOps Blog (Angel Wong) - Security is the job of everyone , right? Nice update for Azure DevOps.

• Hugo + VSCode + Docker = ❤️ (Aaryn Smith) - After an upgrade of Hugo or the theme, one of my site wasn't being generated anymore. Happy to to find a that devContainer, I will be able to investigate quickly.

Open Source

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.19 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Cool updates! I love that right-click web search! You know... when there is an error it will be so much efficient! An that was a community contribution! Fantastic!

• Unlocking DevOps Magic: Dive into the Azure Kubernetes Service Wonderland in Visual Studio Code! (Japhlet Nwamu, Tatsat Mishra) - Great tools that really simplify the life of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). It was the topic of an episode of open at Microsoft.

Podcasts

• Introducing TypeChat with Anders Hejlsberg (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - It's the second time I hear about TypeChat, remember Reading Notes #565, it seams extremely interesting.
• How to rally support for your big idea (Modern Mentor) - Listening to winning strategies to make sure our biggest ideas have good start... It's always a good idea.
• Community and Empowerment with Sharmadean Reid (A Bit of Optimism) - See ideas and challenges as a way to learn more, to learn maybe something different, to climb higher as Simon says, love it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #567

Programming

• Debugging .NET Containers with Visual Studio Code Docker Tools - .NET Blog (Chet Husk) - This new version of the tools looks brillannt! Definitely a must try asap.

• Docker for Developers: Understanding the Core Concepts (Dan Wahlin) - This is a very nice and detailled article that explains what is Docker where it comes from and how it works.

• .NET Conf 2023 (Mehul Harry) - Net cof is coming reverse the dates! And for those if you who knows .NET there is a call for paper here is your chance the share your knowledge!

• Power Platform as Connected Service for Visual Studio is Generally Available | Power Platform Developer Blog (Marcel Ferreira) - Its now GA! This is an excellent news.Using this its now easier thann ever to transform our APIs to power platform connector and empower everyone not fust the developers.

DevOps

• How to deploy Azure Container Apps (Shawn Sesna) - This is a grewt tutorial to get your container Apps deploy without having to care about to much infrastructure aka.kubernetes.

Podcasts

• Beyond the Hype: WebAssembly – from the browser to beyond (Colin Eberhardt) - Episode of a new podcast for me! They got me with WebAssembly and I will defenetly listen to more episodes.

• Kevin LaBranche: Leading teams through DevOps - Episode 251 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Yes! DevOps is not a thing you implement in 2-3 weeks, it takes time. Great episode that highlight even more that it's not about the tech but the way you do things...

Frank

Reading Notes #564

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

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

 

Cloud

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

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

DevOps

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

Programming

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

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

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

Data

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #552

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

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

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

DevOps

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

Miscellaneous

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #551

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

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

Cloud

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

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

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

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

Programming

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

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

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

Podcast

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

Miscellaneous

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

~frank

Reading Notes #550

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

• Improving multi-platform container support - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - I really enjoy those optimization posts. The explanation of why things as been decided, and how it was made. This is a very interesting post.

• Creating a ToolTip Component in Blazor (Steven Giesel) - What a nice little gem! This is a fantastic tutorial that explains how to create custom components.

• GitHub Copilot for the Command Line is amazing! (Christian Heilmann) - Wow! Those explanations are a huuuuge plus. Not only Copilote helps us at that time but then it also helps us to learn and improve. I like that. Looking forward to use it.

Miscellaneous

• Managing Workflows with the GitHub Actions Extension for VS Code (Anthony Bartolo) - This is a great extension! With highlights and all definitely useful when trying to understand a workflow.

~Frank

Reading Notes #546

Cloud

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

Programming

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

Podcasts

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

Books

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

Reading Notes #544

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, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.

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

Programming

• Web3 DevOps: The Series (Donovan Brown) - I'm just getting started with web3 there are so many tools.

• 5 Developer Workstation Security Best Practices | Docker (Briana Swift) - This is an interesting post that shares guidance to secure our development as early as possible in the development chain.

• How to Compare Two Json Objects Using C# (Code Maze) - Data is the core of most if not all applications and a common way to define the data is JSON. This post helps to understand how to compare a piece of information. Very useful.

• Keys To An Accessibility Mindset — Smashing Magazine (Daniel Yuschick) - Accessibility is important and the POUR Principles make them clearer and easier to consider when developing a new project.

• Upgrading your .NET projects with Visual Studio - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - That's pretty cool! Often when people (and I'm part of them) need to upgrade their projects they don't know exactly where to start and what exactly changes.

Podcasts

• Taking Comfortable Risks with Scott Galloway (A Bit of Optimism) - One thing he said that will stick with me I think, and that I need to now transform into my words: "There is nothing that will happen to you if you don't take some uncomfortable risks and talk to some people".
• Colin Bowern: Deployments and Ops using Octopus Deploy - Episode 231 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Never had the chance to play much with Octopus, but it always seems very interesting, now more than ever.
• How to manage through a season of layoffs (Modern Mentor) - A season like those required more effort from everyone. It's hard and we all need to say nice and as much human as possible.

~Frank

Reading Notes #543

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

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

The Suggestion of the week

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

Cloud

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

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

Programming

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

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

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

Podcasts

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

Miscellaneous

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

~Frank

Reading Notes #541

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

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

Cloud

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

Programming

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books

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

Author: Erica Dhawan 

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

~frank

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 #537

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

The suggestion of the week

• Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Conclusions (Jonathan George) - Last post of an excellent series. It's a must-read for anyone planning building and API. Azure Container App is not the answer to everything, but it must be considered.

Cloud

• Azure Storage Caching and Compression – The Missing Piece (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - This post shares all the gotchas learned along the way in developing and trying to optimize an application. The result is a faster application, a better experience for the client, and more money that stays in your pocket.

Programming

• Build Containers Without a Dockerfile (Rockford Lhotka) - An interesting thing to be able to create a container without a dockerfile. This post explains why it can be useful and of course how to do it.

• How do I get started in web development? (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Exactly. So true.

• PowerShell IntelliSense completion (Mark Downie) - I noticed that a few days while being active in the prompt to do a bunch of installation and configuration. Super happy that prediction is finally part of the release.

Databases

• The Best C# .NET Web Application Tech Stack: Choosing a Database (Michael Shpilt) - A nice post that goes through all the questions we should ask ourselves when selecting a database and go over many Azure solutions.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Boards – Organize and Plan All of Your Work (April Edwards) - Amazing post that not only go over a few great features of azure DevOps board but also explains the why.... why should we use them.

• Finally a clean and easy way to add Table of Contents to dev.to articles 🤩 (Lucy Linder) - Anice tools to help us generate a table of content (TOC) while publishing to the platform DevTo.

~Frank

Reading Notes #528

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 DevOps Roadmap update (Gloridel Morales) - Nice update for Azure DevOps, and more details for us.

• Azure Service Bus Performance - Azure SDK Blog (Paul Michaels) - A nice post that explores the edge of the service Bus services in terms of speed and size of the messages. It could have a big impact on your design, depending on your business scenarios.

• Use Power Automate to Retrieve Data from an Azure Function for Reporting – Code with Dan Blog (Dan Wahlin) - This post teaches how to build a cool tool without code.

Podcast

• 42. Programming languages; from .NET and C# to JavaScript, from Python to Rust, and even Rockstar - with Dylan Beattie (Betatalks the podcast) - Another great episode of Betatalks the podcast about that passion burning inside that make people do so many wonderful things.
• Celebrating the Second Edition of Code with Charles Petzold (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - What an amazing interview with the author of the book Code. I heard so much about this book, and now with this new edition++, I think I should put it on my reading list.
• Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara (A Bit of Optimism) - Whaaat?! This is such a great idea! I need to read that book and go to that restaurant. I love the idea.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing the Docker+Wasm Technical Preview (Michael Irwin) - It seems like a good mix. I really need to try it out.

• Windows Terminal is now the Default in Windows 11 - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Woot Woot! Great work for all these people. Windows terminal is a great project well though. Learn more about its journey in this post.

~frank