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 #539

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!

 

Programming

• Making an Asynchronous Breakfast in .NET (Assis Zang ) - This post explains so well using a task that we all did the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code. It's in .NET, but valid for all languages (that support async code of course).

• A first look behind the scenes of minimal API endpoints: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First, of a series, this post digs into the code to understand why minimal APIs are so performant. There is a lot in there, looking forward to reading the next one.

• December Extensions Roundup: Improving Visibility for Your APIs and Images (Amy Bass) - I use more than I create docker images these days but I can see how this extension would be useful.Very cool!

• Exploring the model-binding logic of minimal APIs: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 3 (Andrew Lock) - The third post in a series where we dig into how Minimal APIs do their magic.

• Extracting metadata from a minimal API handler: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 2 (Andrew Lock) - Another deep technical post of the series where Andrew shows us are things works under the hood of minimal APIs.

• How To Use GitLens To Figure Out Who Introduced A Change In Your Code (Mohd S.) - Great post that shows how to use a tool with a real case. Nicely done!

• Reducing Blazor WASM size by providing custom ICU data - Gérald Barré (Gérald Barré) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to help us understand and get started.

Podcasts

• Best of DevOps 2022 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Nice review of 2022, DevOps style, by 3 Docker captains.

• Source Open vs Open Source and IdentityServer with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen (.NET Rocks!) - I used in the past IdentityServer and didn't know the story. Very interesting post about Open source.

~Frank

Reading Notes #535

Good Monday,
it's the last ReadingNotes of 2022! So many great articles, podcasts, and blog posts. More than 350 of those catch my interest this year...

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

Cloud

• Azure App Configuration, Key Vault and Managed Identity Implementation (Kevin Logan) - Security is essential and yes it adds complexity at first, but not that much. Have a look.

• Microsoft Azure CLX: A personalized program to learn Azure | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Priyanka Rawat) - More options to learn, and this one has a practice test in it, something that so many are looking for.

Programming

• 11 Ways of Making Your C# Harder to Use (Brendan Enrick) - A refreshing topmost post that shows the best practices. Well done!

• Containerized Blazor: Microsoft Ponders New Client-Side Hosting (David Ramel) - Looking forward to this feature being out.

• How Wolverine allows for easier testing (Jeremy Miller) - This looks like a great tool for testing.

• Introducing Wolverine for Effective Server Side .NET Development (Jeremy Miller) - The first time I read about that tool looks very interesting.

• WebAssembly vs. Kubernetes (Cameron Gain) - Very interesting thoughts. Only time will show if it's true.

Miscellaneous

• Can the Kindle Scribe replace the yellow notepad? Notes on taking notes with Amazon’s new device (Todd Bishop) - Didn't Know Remarcable 2 had a competitor. I like the idea of reducing paper usage but right now the solutions seem too expensive, at least for my usage. I will continue to use a digital keyboard or tablet pen notes app.

~Frank

Reading Notes #532

Good Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that caught 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

• Setup the Auto-shutdown on VM using Bicep template (Massimo Bonanni) - VMs are so useful. One of the best ways to save money is to turn them off when you are not using them. Part 6 about Bicep explains how to do it in your IaC script.

• What is Azure Container Registry? (MakendranG) - A quick intro on Azure Registry and how to create one.

Programming

• Authorization and Authentication in Minimal APIs (Assis Zang) - This is a great tutorial...Time to secure our APIs

• Converting Markdown to DOCX and PDF in C# (Bjoern Meyer|) - Interesting post with all the code required to do this project.Shorter than I thought.

• How to publish .NET 7 apps directly to Docker (Dennis Frühauff) - Pretty cool stuff. I need to try it.

• Make a Web Reporting App Using a Blazor Reporting Tool & Microservices | ActiveReports.NET (Sergey Abakumoff) - Report services... That brings memories! I like the idea of using Blazor as the container to display the reports.

• The dangers and gotchas of using scoped services in OptionsBuilder (Andrew Lock) - A very complete post that shares all you need to know about scopes.

Miscellaneous

• My IoT problem: the garage door opener : Algorithms for the masses - julian m bucknall (Julian M Bucknall) - Technology! Marvelous, when it works...

~frank

Reading Notes #529

Good Monday (standard time for many :) ),

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!

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) – November 2022 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - New beta version released with java and bicep updates...Great work.

• Azure SQL Database Overview (Daniel Calbimonte ) - This post is a great one to get started on Azure SQL Database. It answers many of the initial questions and provides the answers.

• Build a globally resilient architecture with Azure Load Balancer | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Mahip Deora) - An azure load balancer is definitely a powerful tool when your customers aren't centralized. This post provides a nice overview.

Programming

• Create your .NET portfolio in the .NET Conf student zone (Katie Savage) - The .NET Conf conference is next Tuesday (Nov. 8) and students have a very special place. Have a look!

• How to Implement Decentralized Storage Using Docker Extensions - Docker (Marton Elek) - Second and last part of a series discussing about the storage with docker.

• Performance improvements in ASP.NET Core 7 (Brennan Conroy) - It's both impressive and inspiring to see so much improvement in performance in that next version.

• [Improving Your Desktop Applications—ToolTips in .NET MAUI](Leomaris Reyes ) (https://www.telerik.com/blogs/improving-desktop-applications-tooltips-dotnet-maui?utm_source=readingnotes) - Tooltips are now here!

• Personalize a static site based on a previous site referral (Salma Alam-Naylor) - This is a cool tutorial that explains how to leverage Netlify edge code to change a static website page base on where the visitor came from.

Miscellaneous

• Bicep for Real Site Launched (Sam Cogan) - Wonderful! The tutorial a was waiting for and it will be good because it's done by Sam.

~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

Reading Notes #527

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!

Programming

• Blazor WASM Custom 404 Page on GH Pages (Justin Yoo) - This is a lovely double tutorial. Learn first how to write a 404 not found page in Blazor then learn how to use custom 404 when using GitHub as a hosting platform.

• 9 Tips for Containerizing Your Node.js Application - Docker (Ajeet Singh Raina, Johan Giraldo) - A nice list of smart tips.

• Cake - Cake v2.3.0 released (Mattias Karlsson) - Nice to see more features available in Cake. You can do complex and advanced stuff now.

• Docker and WebAssembly together at Wasm Day NA 2022 (Chris Crone) - Wasm + Docker...That seems promising...

• I changed my mind about writing new JavaScript frameworks (Salma Alam-Naylor) - JavaScript is its own universe with so many options and variations. Looking forward to seeing the WTF tool and learning more about how she builds it.

• Introducing Spectre.Console (Steve Smith) - It's for sure a library that I will try. Console applications are a very useful tool so anything that can speed up the creation process is a must.

• Learn how to improve your ASP.NET Core controllers with these principles - dateo-software (Dennis Frühauff) - A very interesting post to learn more about how to improve our code.

• Make The First Letter of a String Upper Case in C# - Code Maze (Code Maze) - I didn't even know the aspan method...Do you? Nice performance / fine-tuning post.

Podcasts

• HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal (Screaming in the Cloud) - MySQL database as a service on Oracle cloud, this sounds interesting and looks like the price is too.

• Developing .NET on AWS with Isaac Levin (.NET Rocks!) - Yes!! Of course, .NET is everywhere but now we hear about it! A captivating episode where Isaac makes a quick tour of all the possibilities for .Net developers on ASW.

• 137. Anti-Time Management with Richie Norton (Part 1)-id2920271-id538368995) (The Greg McKeown Podcast) - I was not sure what to expect from "Anti-Time Management" and I like what I heard. looking forward to listening to part two.
• Rob Richardson: Web Services in .NET 6 - Episode 213 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - What a great episode covering so much! Expect to learn more about how things work like the authentification and authorization.

~Frank

Reading Notes #525

Usually, it's on Monday, I know, but a technical issue prevented me to publish faster this week... 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Cost Management updates—September 2022 (Michael Flanakin) - Nice update about the mobile app and the docs.

Programming

• Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions (By Liam Mooney) - A nice tutorial that helps getting started building your first GitHub actions.

• Improve your pipeline maintainability with test categories in xUnit (Dennis Frühauff) - A nice post that describes two strategies about unit tests in our CI-CD.

• Bring Continuous Integration to Your Laptop With the Drone CI Docker Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Kamesh Sampath) - This CI-CD container looks very interesting. I will keep an eye on it but may wait until it shows up in the marketplace, or that I need it.

• How to Use the Alpine Docker Official Image (Tyler Charboneau) - Alpine is a must to know for all dev and DevOps people (and probably many more}. This post is perfect for getting you started.

Podcast

• 40. The future of Azure services & the benefits of being bilingual in Tech - with Frank Boucher (Betatalks the podcast) - Shameless plug for a podcast episode where I was the guest. We talk about why content in other languages than English is important and so much more.

• Mark Miller: The Science of Great UI in Software - Episode 212 (Azure DevOps Podcast) -

• Why the C64 Demoscene matters with Clay Token's Bilgem Çakır (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Scott has been sharing content about the Commodore 64 these days and that make me wanna jump back as it was my first computer... But this time I would understand English without having to search for each word in a dictionary.

Miscellaneous

• Systemd support is now available in WSL! - Windows Command Line (Craig Loewen) - Nice WSL is getting better.

~Frank

Reading Notes #524

Good Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that caught 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

• How to run Bash scripts in WordPress on Azure App Service (Abhishek Reddy) - This post explains two ways to achieve that.

• Azure Virtual Machines vs App Services (Michael Shpilt) - The pros and cons of both are listed in this post with some advice. Everything you need to help you to make your choice.

• How to use Azurite for testing Azure Storage in dotnet? (Max Hamulyák) - This very helpful post shows how to use Azirite to test our application.

Programming

• 5 tips for prioritizing Dependabot alerts (Brittany O'Shea) - Nice tips to help us with all these alerts.

• Build skills that open doors—with Microsoft Learn (Erin Rifkin) - This post summarizes it very well. Learn.mocrosoft.com is a great destination.

• Dockerize your SQL Server and use it in ASP.NET Core with Entity Framework Core (Bryan Hogan) - A very complete tutorial that explains all the steps to build an API from nothing.

~frank

Reading Notes #522

Yep! It's Monday again :) 

 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

• Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - DevSecOps is a real thing and it's accessible for all. This post explains what it is and provides examples of how it could be implemented at a high level.

• Using Azure CLI Authentication within Local Containers (James Dawson) - This post provides two very useful workarounds with WSL and docker to a difficulty we might encounter while using a different platform.

Programming

• #RaspberryPi – Install raspi-config on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Bruno Capuano) - A short post that shows how to get Unbuntu 22.02 on your Pi.

• Adding color to bracket pairs (Mads Kristensen) - A call for feedback on an up common feature of Visual Studio. Rainbow Brackets yes it will colorize the brackets but what should be the options?

• Browser Extension with Blazor WASM - Cross-Browser Compatibility (Justin Yoo) - Nice post in a series that really shows in the details and explains how to use the extension.

• DevOps monitoring: The Why, What, and How of DevOps monitoring (Hiren Dhaduk) - This is an excellent post to get us to think about our first step. It explains the reason why we should care and briefly lists a few tools available today on the market to help.

• Get started with NDepend: Uncle Bob and the Zone of Pain (Dennis) - A nice article that explains how to get started with NDepends.

• Rewrite your git history in 4 friendly commands (Salma Alam-Naylor) - The git trick of the week for when you want to do a major cleaning.

• Working with System.Random and threads safely in .NET Core and .NET Framework (Andrew Lock) - Interesting post about Random numbers in .NET.

Podcasts

• 38. Open source framework MVVM Light, Azure Static Web Apps & timekeeper.cloud with Laurent Bugnion (Betatalks the podcast) - Cool episode about, well my friend! :)
• How to be a great (new!) leader (Modern Mentor) - Really interesting episode for new leaders/ influencers.

~frank

Reading Notes #521

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

• No-code Automation for Azure Boards Using Azure Logic Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents (Jason Hand) - You have so many options to watch this workshop. The bite-sized videos will teach you how to be more efficient with Azure DevOps without any code.

• Extending Docker’s Integration with containerd (Djordje Lukic) - Docker team shares the roadmap for their adoption of containers as basic components in image management. Learn more about it and how you can try it today in this post.

• How to Change an Azure Function Written in .NET from In-Process to Isolated Process (Nick) - Great post that from scratch create a regular Azure Function into Visual Studio publish it and then quickly migrate it to an Isolated one.

Programming

• .NET MAUI Cloud Skills Challenge - Learn .NET MAUI, Get Stickers! (Matt Soucoup) - This is a really interesting cloud challenge. With .NET MAUI I could build apps for mobile and desktop...

• 3 ways every company can get started with an open-source software strategy (Ashley Wolf) - Open source can be so much and it is normal to not understand all of it at the beginning. This nice post answer a few questions for enterprises who would like to start.

• Announcing built-in container support for the .NET SDK (Chet Husk) - After the .NET included in Ubuntu a few days ago, now simplistic containerization has so many great new tools and opportunities.

• Getting Started With TypeScript and React (Ifeoma Imoh) - This is a nice tutorial to get started.

• How I made an ai to watch my cats poop for me (Estefannie) - Great project using Raspberry Pi, node, C, and a lot of creativity. The video is a must, it provides a better overview of the journey, and the story is gold.

• Merging two GitHub repositories without losing commit history (Schalk Neethling) - Nice work documenting this flow. Keeping as much information as possible is often very important. A post to bookmark for later use.

• No more Dockerfiles with the help of .NET CLI (Christian Nagel) - Interesting stuff coming up in .NET 7 that we can experiment today.

Podcasts

• 588: How to Help Your Manager Shine, with David Gergen (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion about how to help your manager with a very special guest. David Gergen is the author of Hearts Touched With Fire, and talks about the importance of the relationship between a manager and a direct report.

Miscellaneous

• How to Colorize Pictures With OpenVINO™ on Ubuntu Containers (Valentin Viennot) - This very complete post shares the realization of a kubernetes and docker project with all the required details so we could give it a try.

~frank

Reading Notes #519

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!

Suggestion of the week

• .NET 6 is now in Ubuntu 22.04 (Richard Lander) - So many amazing news in this post, all .NET dev must read it.

Cloud

• Announcing Microsoft Dev Box Preview (Anthony Cangialosi) - That seems very interesting! Developers don't need powerful machines all the time.

• Deploying Logic App Standard resource through DevOps pipeline (Shree Divya) - This is an excellent example of deployment, that includes all requirements.

Programming

• Thoughts on Copilot (Dave Rupert) - Interesting opinion about copilot after a few months.

~Frank

Reading Notes #518

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

• MySQL and PostgreSQL… in Azure! (Sarah Dutkiewicz) - This short post shares information about our different SQL options in Azure.

• Public preview: Update management center in Azure - If you are using VMs you need to look at this management tool.

Programming

• 4 Ways to Optimize Your Workflows with Docker Extensions (Felipe Cruz) - Nice! There are so many great extensions that can simplify our lives. I'm downloading two of those right now.

• GitHub Pages now uses Actions by default (Chris Patterson, Yoann Chaud) - That's excellent news! I have a few GitHub pages and Jekyll too. Look like fun little projects are coming up.

• Heap Sort in C# (Code Maze) - It was nice to refresh my memory about this sort of algorithm. Remembering the details and performance; nice post.

• Prompting Developers to Install Recommended Azure Tools (John Kilmister) - I started to do this to make it easier when working on that project from a different machine and to ease the onboarding experience. It is simple and it makes a difference.

Podcast

• Measuring DevSecOps with Victoria Almazova (.NET Rocks!) - DevSecOps, what's that? Security, yes, but to what limit, so many great questions are discussed in this nice episode.

• Photographing Home with Mylo Fowler (Wild Ideas Worth Living) - This post is a great example that there are so many completely different journeys to reach your destination. Follow yours and enjoy it as much as you can.

~frank

Reading Notes #515

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. 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 App Containers (Kevin Logan) - An interesting post that shares the first contact and spets with Azure container Apps. Where to learn, how to build what is included.

• Introducing the Azure Developer CLI: A faster way to build apps for the cloud (Savannah Ostrowski) - Exciting new preview looking forward to try and see the future of this tool.

Programming

• Making production diagnostics easier with Source Link (Mark Downie) - This post shares a pretty neat trick to make investigation (debugging) easier.

• How to build & publish NuGet packages with Azure Pipelines (James Croft) - All the steps are clearly explained in this tutorial for us to be ready.

• Using the Microsoft Docker Extension for Visual Studio Code (David Giard) - This post is a quick tour of the Docker extension. A very simple and powerful one.

~Frank

Reading Notes #511

Good Monday, it's 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

• Visual Studio Code Tools for Azure Revamped (David Ramel) - Time flies! Five years already... And probably the first extension I personally ever installed.

Programming

• Who should mark PR comments as resolved? (Dan Clarke) - In your team who is doing it?

• 14 Containerization Use Cases: Hit a Home Run with Containers (Hiren Dhaduk) - Nice list of real-life story and situation where docker shines and empower.

• Adding a CLA Bot to Your GitHub Repository (Calvin) - This seems simple to do... I assumed adding a bot in GitHub was more complicated than that. Nice post.

• Keep your experiments separate (Jessica Joy Kerr) - This post shares good practices when adding features to our app... Because we never know the full impact when we start.

• Static code analysis with NDepend (Andreas Nesheim) - I'm always curious about those tools. I think they could also be useful when connected to your CICD and automation processes.

• When WebAssembly Replaces Docker (B. Cameron Gain) - Interesting post that explains why WASM is indeed more interesting than docker in some scenarios.

Miscellaneous

• 5 great books for the summer (Bill Gates) - There are a few books that I put on my to-read list. There you go.

~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 #507

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

• #11: Share Content with Docusaurus & Azure Static Web Apps ( Nitya Narasimhan) - Another great example of a static web app this time for documentation perfect match!

• Azure Static Web Apps: named preview environments with Azure DevOps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is pretty cool, a unique URL for the staging/ qa environment...I like that

• Blazor WebAssembly for Headless CMS on Azure Static Web Apps (Justin Yoo ) - Woo! Amazing idea, you get the comfort of WordPress for writing and the lightweight of a static webapp.

• Create and connect to an Azure SQL DB in 6 easy steps (Davide Mauri) - Learn how to build an excellent Azure CLI script in this post. Sort and useful.

• Deploying Blazor WebAssembly applications to Azure Static Web Apps (Damir Arh) - Nice overview of the static webapp double with a tutorial to build a CI-CD using GitHub Action.

Programming

• The Magic of Docker Desktop is Now Available on Linux (Chris McLellan) - Wonderful, I believe that offering the same experience to your users independently of the platform is a sign of maturity.

• Configuring the Diagnostics Port for dotnet monitor (Mark Downie) - This post shares news about this monitoring tool that is as cross-plaforn as .NET is.

• Docker Extensions: Discover, Build & Integrate New Tools into Docker Desktop (Amy Bass) - This is really good. Now the entire community can add functionalities to the environment.

• DockerCon 2022: Community-powered, Developer-obsessed (Scott Johnston) - I watch the keynote and it was very interesting. Looking forward to see those demos

• How to run Kubernetes clusters locally on Windows - Simple Talk (Boemo Mmopelwa) - This tutorial goes over the functionalities of Kind. One of the two tools available to help us use Kubernetes locally. It looks simple and fun!

~frank

How to re-open a repository cloned in a volume, from Visual Studio Code

I love Dev Containers, I use them a lot for most of my development. One of my favorite options is to clone a repository directly in a docker volume.

It takes a few seconds and you can work on your code without installing any SDKs or language that your current machine doesn't have. Marvelous!

Ideally, at the end of your session, you push your code to another repository (ex: GitHub). However, sometimes I forget or am interrupted I start working on something else, and my changes are not pushed.

How do you re-open that environment?! In this post, I want to share two ways that I use.

Open Recent

The first method is to use the history of the editor! For example, here in Visual Studio Code, select the File menu and Open Recent.

If you didn't open too many files since you used that dev container, it should be present as displayed in the image. It should look like: <Name of the repository> in a unique [Dev Container].

Make sure docker is already running and select it. Voila, in a snap you are back into the dev environment with your last changes waiting for you.

Open the Container

There are a few different options to do the next solution, I will share the one I consider the easiest for the people who are not Docker experts.

First, if not already present to your VSCode, add the Docker extension identifier: ms-azuretools.vscode-docker. Then from this new extension in the top section named containers search for your container. It should start with "vsc", for Visual Studio Code, then hyphen the name of the repository you cloned. Right-click on it and select start. After a few seconds, the container should have a little green triangle on its side and be ready to continue.

The next step consists of attaching the container to VSCode. Once more, from the Docker extension, right-click on the container and select Attach Visual Studio Code.

This will open a new VSCode window, we are mostly done but there is one last step to do. You will notice that the file explorer is empty. No worries we will fix everything with this last step. The terminal should be open in the home folder of the root user. Let's open our project folder by executing the command:

cd /workspaces/<repository-name>

Then the final command is to re-open VSCode in this folder and let the Dev Container do his magic. Execute the command:

code . -r

(the -r is to re-use the same VSCode windows. It's optional, if not provided it will open a new VSCode instance.)

And voila! The Dev Container is just as it was before.

If you know other ways to achieve this, leave a comment or reach out, I'm always happy to learn more.

~ frank

Reading Notes #505

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

• Application Insights telemetry in Azure Functions (Orestis Meikopoulos) - Application Insights is so powerful and just one click away! Learn more about it in this post.

• Azure Function with PowerShell and the Power BI REST API – SQLServerCentral (Koen Verbeeck) - This is a nice step-by-step tutorial to write an azure function. All important points to do and avoid are present just like the code.

• Just Give Me an Access Token (Phil Jirsa) - Nice video tutorial and code snippet to get all the access your API needs.

• Update Your Azure Functions Table Storage Bindings (Mark Heath) - Nice post. Upgrading can be frightening sometimes, even more, when you know there are breaking changes.

Programming

• Auto publish your data using Travis (Montana Mendy) - A super quick example of ci-cd with Travis.

• Build configuration for Azure Static Web Apps (craigshoemaker, anthonychu, Reshmi-Sriram, changeworld) - Continuous deployment is so powerful it is very useful to understand the options and how you can set your things together.

• Introduction to Testing Blazor WebAssembly With bUnit (Code Maze) - Wow! An incredibly complete tutorial about bUnit. It is the best lace to get started.

• Multiple Directories for Static Files in ASP.NET Core (Shawn Wildermuth) - Nice journey of an issue that in the end wasn't one. It's time to learn.

• Why isn't my ASP.NET Core app in Docker working? (Andrew Lock) - A very interesting post that describes the learning process while building and fixing a container.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric) - Nice excerpt from a book about communication, this part is couple focus.

~frank

Reading Notes #503

It's Monday, 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

• Quickstart: Container Apps using Bicep (Jason Haley) - Nice tutorial to get started with bicep and Azure Container Apps.

• Azure SDK Release (April 2022) - Always good to know what is updated. Did you know the team also maintains slides for you?

• Configure Azure Cosmos DB Continuous Backups (Rajendra Gupta) - Backup can be so powerful! You could return in time just before an error to understand what happens... Or so many other scenarios.

• Quickstart: Deploy an existing container image to Container Apps using Bicep (Jason Haley) - Great tutorial

• Unlock cloud savings on the fly with autoscale on Azure | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Diana Gao) - This is the perfect post to get started with autoscaling. Witch services what can you expect and more.

Programming

• Announcing Docker SBOM: A step towards more visibility into Docker images (Justin Cormack) - Oh, that's pretty cool! Easy to try. Give it a shot!

• How To Run PowerShell Scripts (Brien Posey) - A script can be frightening at first, but this nice post will help you to understand them better. Perfect for less technical people.

• Introducing Qodana for Azure Pipelines (Anastasia Khramushina) - Qodana is can analyze your code in CICD on many platforms, and now also in the Azure DevOps.

• Uploading Files with HttpClient in .NET 6 (Calvin) - Nice tutorial to upload a file all the code is there.

~Frank