Reading Notes #220

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Azure IoT Reference Architecture - Great post that explains part in IoT and micro-services with their respective roles.

Cloud

• Azure Search .NET SDK roadmap (Bruce Johnston) - All in one post, the list of new features and the ones coming next.
  
• What is Azure Stack? - Usually, we refer to the stack as a group of products from the same provider. Azure stack is a little of that, but with a little twist... it's on-premises! This post explains it all.
  
• Azure welcomes Parse developers (Glenn Gailey) - Interesting server who is now well supported in Azure.
  
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – January 2016 (Sriram Hariharan) - Nice summary of the Logic App team's January video updates.

Programming

• Application Insights announces availability of Release Annotations (Mike Gresley) - A useful feature that is explained in this post.
  
• Why I No Longer Use MVC Frameworks - Very complete and moreover, very interesting article about strengths and weaknesses of different patterns and frameworks.
  
• Introducing Insiders Builds (Chris Dias [MSFT]) - The Insider's previews are back in a more convivial structure.

Data

• General availability: Azure SQL Database Query Performance Insight - What an awesome tool that gives us the ability to get the biggest resources consumer over a long period... and that, without redeploying.
  
• Queries To Debug SQL Server Replication Issues (Tim Smith) - If you are using database synchronization in your system, you should definitely bookmark this post that provides nice tools to us to diagnose problems.

Book

• Software Development Book Giveaway! - Cool! A great opportunity, 3 free books are given: Building Microservices, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, and Javascript: The Good Parts.

Miscellaneous

• GitHub Pages now faster and simpler with Jekyll 3.0 - Important changes announced for github and Jerkel users. And alternatively an important note to al Markdown users.

Reading Notes #196

Suggestion of the week

• Push-to-succeed: a look into Azure Notification Hubs for business (Alexander Laysha) - Interesting post that explains how Azure and his Notification Hubs could be really useful in marketing.
  
• Getting Started with Windows 10 - This week it's the Windows 10 week. And this post regroups many useful tutorial to get started.

Cloud

• July update for Web apps and App Service environments in the Azure preview portal (Ron Tardif) - This post is a great summary of the new July features.

Programming

• One of My Favorite PowerShell Functions - Nice and useful little piece of code.
  
• Describe Your PowerShell Variables - Nice quick tips to help us remember what we thought when we created those variables.
  
• Installing EF Power Tools into VS2015 (Julie) - Interesting tutorial that shows how to "upgrade" an extension to use it in VS...
  
• Five Common Daylight Saving Time Antipatterns of .NET Developers - Ah the "time"... The more you play with it, the more confuse you can be. Interesting post to avoid common mistakes.

Miscellaneous

• The Secret (and Oh So Simple) Way to Get People to Pay Attention to You (Betty Liu) - Interesting post about business relationship.
  
• How to stay productive while working from home (Xavier Nayrac) - Being myself a remote worker a found this post very close to the reality and inspiring.

~Frank

Reading Notes #190

Suggestion of the week

• Cloud Success Comes in Completing the Cloud Handshake (James Staten) - Great post that places different tools or services in context one to the other, that helps to get a better view of the big picture.

Cloud

• Testing Visual Studio on Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - If you need to deploy a dev environment, this post explains how to leverage the AMR to do the quick and smart way.
  
• Locking a Virtual Machine Resource - Azure Resource Manager Template (Alexandre Brisebois) - A post to read, period.
  
• Azure Bits #3– Adding a Message to an Azure Queue (Rik Robinson) - Nice tutorial that shows how to interact with Azure Queues from an Asp.Net MVC web site.

Programming

• Visual Studio Online Wunderlist extension on GitHub (Clemens Reijnen) - Interesting idea of a VSO extension.
  
• Deploying an Azure Web Site using the new build system in Visual Studio Online (Charles Sterling) - This post shows ow easy it is to build & deploy a simple website using VSO.
  
• Visual Studio Web Development Tip - Add Chrome Incognito Mode as a Browser (Scott Hanselman) - The great tips are often the simpler! That should be in by default.
  
• Why to avoid fat controllers (Gunnar Peipman) - Interesting thoughts about different types of architecture and their testability.
  
• Historical Debugging, Profiling, New Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 (Scott Hanselman) - Another good reason to start using VS2015.

Miscellaneous

• Write Once, Publish Anywhere (Jonathan Rozenblit) - An energizing post that shows here to find writting oportunities
  
• How to Build Your Blog’s Audience with Long Form Evergreen Content (Darren Rowse) - Interesting reflection on how the length of our post affects the traffic of our blog.

~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 #178

Suggestion of the week

• Scaling #Azure Cloud Services to Zero - This post is a really important piece of the puzzle that a lot of us don't see clearly.
  
• The Zen of Code Reviews: Pre-Review Comments (Michael Sorens) - Very interesting post that all developers should read. This post is a must.

Cloud

• Application Insights: Moving from Visual Studio Online Portal to Azure Preview Portal (Rahul Bagaria) - This move is a good decision. It will simplify things.
  
• New additions to the Azure VM PowerShell DSC Extension (Kundana Palagiri) - Great news, very powerful command.
  
• Getting admin by adding a new user to sudoers when you're locked out of an Azure Linux VM (Scott Hanselman) - Oh! That a really nice ninja trick!
  
• Pragmatic IoT on Azure Part 1: Introduction - A truly interesting post about a very popular topic, a series to follow...

Programming

• Understanding ASP.NET 5 middleware (Andrei Dzimchuk) - Very nice tutorial about how to implement a middleware in AspNet.
  
• Rapid PowerShell Development with ISESteroids (Tobias Weltner) - An incredible tool that every developer should know and try.
  
• Bitbucket Launches Snippets for Teams (Steffen Opel) - An interesting new feature that a lot of people were waiting for...

Miscellaneous

• Tragedies of the Remote Worker: "Looks like you're the only one on the call" (Scott Hanselman) - As a remote worker myself, I can say that if feel less alone in my loneliness... ;)
  
• Wake Up and Get S#!t Done – A Practice of Awesome (James Chambers) - Wow. Your are I mind reader! I love this post.

~Frank