Reading Notes #459

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• The benefits of Infrastructure as Code (John Downs ) - A great post that lists and explains all the benefices of using infrastructure as Code in our business. This is the perfect post to read to learn all about it.

Cloud

• Learn How To Do Java On Azure (Nikos Vaggalis) - Great news for Java people free learning content and a video channel too.

• Connecting an Azure Logic App to a local Web API (Developer Support) - A short post that explains/ references a cool demo.

• How to choose the right Azure Event Hubs .NET client library type for your application | Azure SDK Blog (Squire) - Very complete post about EventHub. The perfect place to refresh or get started with this tech.

Programming

• Improvements to the new Razor editor in Visual Studio (Daniel Roth) - Looking forward to trying it.

• Integration Tests for ASP.NET Core Web APIs using MSTest (Changhui Xu) - Interesting post that bridges some gaps missing in the doc and explains how to do integration testing.

Miscellaneous

• Hack a TV into a Teams and Zoom Computer with EpocCam and Miracast (Scott Hanselman) - A nice post that proposed a variety of ideas to change/improve your experience f online meetings.

~Frank 

Reading Notes #315

Suggestion of the week

• DAX optimization examples (Alberto Ferrari) - An incredible dive into a DAX performance analysis. I loved it.

Cloud

• Bing Speech API extends its text to speech support to 34 languages (Qinying Liao) - Great new languages supported.
• Brand Detection in Microsoft Video Indexer (Dr. Abed Asi) - This is a great addition to this service.
• In order event processing with Azure Functions (Jeff Hollan) - This post explains how to keep our Functions in control to respect the message order.
• Monitoring issues on Stack Overflow with serverless, CosmosDB and Teams (Shayne Boyer) - Awesome post that gives all the detail on how a reel life solution is built.

Programming

• Docker for Windows Desktop... Now With Kubernetes! - Docker Blog (Jim Armstrong) - This post explains all the wonderful things you will have only by checking one simple checkbox.

Databases

• Share reports with your teams and partners | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI (Lukasz Pawlowski) - Perfect, we can now share report directly like we could with dashboard.
• Power BI Desktop February Feature Summary | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI (Amanda Cofsky) - So my great new features!

Miscellaneous

• How Long is Long Enough? Minimum Password Lengths by the World's Top Sites (Troy Hunt) - Do you use good passwords? Because length is not the only thing.

Photo credit: nickpettican on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

Reading Notes #211

Cloud

• Azure Mobile Apps November 2015 Update (Matthew Henderson) - Great news features are all explains in this post.
  
• Microsoft at Supercomputing Yes, we support Linux (Alex Sutton) - Azure is a very good place to do your supercomputing whatever is your targeted OS, this post explains why.
  
• Announcing API Management and Event Hubs integration (Steve Danielson) - Great new features announced.
  
• On & Off - Done Right on Azure - This post shows how to manage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Where we preserve networking, security and state while temporarily removing compute. When the time comes, we restore the compute resources and operate normally.

Programming

• Visual Studio Code - NEW RELEASE: v0.10.2 (6 bug fixes) (Ed Price - MSFT) - You saw the notification, but wonder what was inside this update, then this quick post is for you.

Miscellaneous

• I’m sorry, but your email address is not as valuable as you think it is - Interesting thoughts about sharing our email address or not.
  
• The piracy paradox at Udemy - Very interesting post about security and the Internet.

Reading Notes #208

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Azure--the Big Picture (Tony Meleg) - Very complete summary of the Azure platform.

Cloud

• What Are All of Microsoft Azure’s Application Integration Services? (Richard Seroter) - Very interesting post that answers two questions: What's it? and What's new? For all the features in the Azure Integration "branch."
  
• What Developers Need to Know About Docker (Paul Ballard) - Nice post that gives pros and cons about Docker, how it works and even how to create one.
  
• The Walking Dead: No Man's Land game soars to #1 supported by Azure DocumentDB (Aravind Ramachandran) - Cool post. Games are serious business, and databases are fun!

Programming

• Visual Studio - Bower: Modern Tools for Web Development - Fantastic post that demystify bower and an excellent tutorial.
  
• How to simulate a low bandwidth connection for testing web sites and applications - I plead guilty. I thought it was more complicated to do... really cool post.
  
• NuGet Package of the Week: Microphone registers and discovers Web APIs and REST services with Consul - Another useful NuGet Package, I love this "thread" of post.

Miscellaneous

• How To Deliver a Great Technical Presentation - Interesting tips and tricks to know.
  
• The Five Knows of Programming - Nice post to calm the student among us... And Remember us also that learning is fun!
  
• A Simple Formula for Changing Our Behavior (Peter Bregman) - Interesting article that expresses a nice and simple solution to walk through difficult situations... at work or at home.
  
• Using the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover with Fingerprint Reader on a Surface Pro 3 - Cool post ... it's nice to have a real user review.

Reading Notes #195

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing the Azure SDK 2.7 for .NET (Brady Gaster) - Sooooo many new features, options, and tools in only one release!! This post reviews a lot of them.

Cloud

• Announcing Cortana Analytics Suite and New Partner Investments at WPC 2015 (Takeshi Numoto) - I'm looking forward to trying it out.
  
• How exactly does Event Hubs Throttling Work? (Dan Rosanova) - Thi post shares useful information about a frequent question.
  
• Three big areas of focus for Microsoft’s Canadian channel (Paolo Del Nibletto) - Interesting news about Microsoft's focus.
  
• Importing Data to DocumentDB Just Keeps Getting Better (Stephen Baron) - If you never ear about DocumentDB Migration Tool, this post is for you. It explains how you ca import documents, even from another NoSql database like DynamoDB.
  
• Why I got the MCSD Azure Solutions Architect Certification (Chris Pietschmann) - Really great work, thanks for sharing.
  
• Azure Logic Apps – monthly update July 2015 (Saravana Kumar) - The Azure Logic Apps team did their monthly release this week, this post tells all about the new features.
  
• Azure SQL Database Web and Business edition retirement September 12th, 2015 (Guy Haycock) - Time to upgrade, September is coming pretty fast.
  
• Can’t recover VMs in Azure with volumes greater than 1TB? Use Storage Spaces! (Anoob Backer) - Great tutorial to get super performance.

Database

• Available now – Cross-region Replication, Triggers, and Streams - Nice new feature.
  
• Azure SQL Database with direct connect – Microsoft Power BI Preview - Nice tutorial to explore our Azure database.

Programming

• Performance and Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 (Dan Taylor) - This post is the perfect point to get started about all the great diagnostics tools available in VS2015 for everyone...because it's included in all versions.
  
• The Glimpse Team Joins Microsoft (Visual Studio Blog) - Great new, I really like Glimpse.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #189

Suggestion of the week

• Search enable your applications with Azure Search (Andrei Dzimchuk) - Very interesting introduction, the perfect post to get started with Azure Search.

Cloud

• Moving to Azure DNS (Alexandre Brisebois) - Another awesome post that shows the power of Azure Resource manager and powershell.
  
• Azure : Event Hub A First Look (Sacha Barber) - This post a good introduction to Event Hub. It adds context to the MSDN documentation.
  
• Demystifying Azure Cloud Services – Part 1 (Adarsha Datta) - This post explains very clearly what is an Azure Cloud Services and demystify the common confusion about it.
  
• Auto-update your Azure Site Extension (Zain Rizvi) - Nice tips to simplify the upgrade.

Programming

• How to Compare files in Visual Studio Code ? - Nice tips.
  
• Evolving ASP.NET Apps–Javascript (Simon Timms) - Interesting post that explains how to structure our Javascript code in our solutions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #175

Cloud

• Running the Ruby Middleman Static Site Generator on Microsoft Azure (Scott Hanselman) - Really nice post. It looks very fun. It's amazing what we can do with git and Azure!

• Lift and Shift of a Windows Service to Microsoft #Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice tutorial with a lot of clear explications for every step.

• Another reason to like azure web sites - free analytics - Nice quick post that summarizes a great Azure Friday episode about statistics.

• Using Stream Analytics with Event Hubs (Kirk Evans) - Great post that plays with both Azure event hub and azure stream analytics.

Programming

• Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck (Scott Hanselman) - Another great post that will help to ask ourselves some better question when it's time to investigate so performance issue.

• Atom-Shell for cross platform desktop apps with Paul Betts (Scott Hanselman, Paul Betts) - Nice episode that clarifies things around Atom-Shell.

• Bad Practices Building Microservices (Jan Stenberg) - Interesting post that talks about what why shouldn't be doing.

Miscellaneous

• Becoming Great Remote Developer - Interesting thoughts and tips about remote work.

• Microsoft or Google? - This post shares some thoughts about a very common question that a lot of people are asking.

~Frank

Reading Notes #170

Suggestion of the week

• Rollup: Microsoft HoloLens, Surface Hub, Windows 10, Xbox One game streaming and more. (Scott Hanselman) - How 2015 could not be a big year for Microsoft with all this?

Cloud

• Scaling #Azure Cloud Services Up and Down Like Clockwork (Alexandre Brisebois) - Really interesting post that explains how scaling up & out and down &in can mean huge saving in our pockets.

• Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure (Corey Sanders) - This post describes what in the new release of Azure.

• Azure Search – How to Add Suggestions (auto-complete) to your Search Applications (Liam Cavanagh) - Interesting example of how Azure Search can improve the user experience on our website.

• Using Windows Azure Service Bus for communication across two ASP.NET MVC Applications - Great tutorial that shows step by step how to use the power of Azure Service Bus in our website.

• Data Pipeline Guidance (patterns & practices) - Interesting project using Azure Eventhub's best practices in an IoT context.

Programming

• Using the Wrapper Pattern (Scott DePouw) - This post explains a useful pattern for testing or other context.

• NuGet Package of the Week: Polly wanna fluently express transient exception handling policies in .NET? (Scott Hanselman) - Wow! Polly looks awesome. Looking forward to trying-it in my next project.

Podcast

• Computer Vision Explained with PyImageSearch's Adrian Rosebrock - While listening this podcast, I'm not sure if I was more scared or exited. However, one thing is sure, this episode is really interesting!

Miscellaneous

• Removing Distractions - Interesting post where the author share is experience while trying to be less connected.

~Frank B.

Reading Notes #160

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Blob Storage Uploading Large Blobs - Great post that explains all possible scenarios to upload file in Azure storage and how to do it.

Cloud

• Azure Service Bus – ‘NamespaceType’ default value change (Piyush Joshi) - Better to know before, is time to reviews our scripts.
  
• Microsoft Azure Websites WebJobs is now GA in the Microsoft Azure Platform - This post, besides bringing a fantastic news, is the perfect place to get started with webjob.
  
• La courbe d’adoption de l’infonuagique (André Giroux) - Good analogy that explains how we can start moving to the cloud.

Programming

• A basic Katana application - This tutorial is a nice little dive in the Katana world.

• Don't Frown on CSVs - Nice post that explains why we shouldn't over look the good old CSV format.

Miscellaneous

• Modeling exercise: The grocery store’s checkout model (Ayende Rahien) - Interesting exercises, some kind of brain push-up. I like it.

• Business Benefit from Public Data (The Open Group Blog) - Interesting post that explains how well it would be if more enterprise were sharing some data.

• Put yourself out there and publish that Open Source project today (Scott Hanselman) - Again a really inspiring post.

~Frank Boucher