Every Monday, I 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. You think you may have interesting content, share it!
070: Securing DevOps in the Cloud (CloudSkills.fm) - Great episode talking about security yes but also best practices and to change mindsets. Love it.
Running a successful dev shop with Martin Gratzer (Software Engineering Unlocked) - This show is one of my new favorites. Always interesting and very dynamic. This time it was about the hard reality of "dev shop". Very interesting, so true!
The Overreaction Paradox (Developer Tea) - I never thought about it that way... But it's so true. Are we celebrating the wrong things?
197: I Need a Website (Merge Conflict) - They got me 50% of the time... I think they are talking to me: 'Frank we are ....'. Nice episode sharing some dreams about a perfect tool (aka website) for apps developers.
Visual Studio Codespaces (Nik Molnar) - I really like the new name I think it says more about what it is. And seriously how can I not like the new price! Less than 2$/day for a machine!
Bring your own machine to Visual Studio Online | Visual Studio Blog (Allison) - Fantastic news! Before it was possible to access a powerful developer environment from our poor local devices. Now we can also access our own powerful machine from elsewhere! That's very very nice!
195: The Hanselman Machine Learning Model (Merge Conflict) - Great episode where Frank and James discuss how James could build a sentiment analysis of Hanselman tweets, is it possible or not and what would be the cost (effort, and money).
GitHub Actions with Enrico Campidoglio (.NET Rocks!) - I think it's my first .Net Show since the Pandemie. Well with was a create show that dig deeper in the GitHub Action. Loved it.
068: How to Build Your Personal Brand (CloudSkills.fm) - I really liked this episode as I did "created" my personal brand (without really realizing it ) a few years ago.
455: How to Create Great Relationships, with Colleen Bordeaux (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion with the author of the book: Am I Doing This Right?: A Philosophical Guide to Life in the Age of Overwhelm, that is now in my to read list/
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are 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. Enjoy!
Add Discord Notifications to ASP.NET Core Apps (Steve Smith) - Really nice post that shows us how to use GitHub actions and Csharp to push info into Discord. I need to try something like that someday....
Try gh, GitHub's new CLI (John Papa) - Oh, that's really nice I like that. I find it funny that t should like you just got a hit in the chest. However, it looks powerful enough to cut your breath... so it probably deserves it.
How to Succeed In Building Developer Tooling with Peter Pezaris (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Don't blink, don't even blink. Not sure if it really apply when you listen to podcast, but this episode was so packed of great content. I really like the open discussion. An awesome show.
0241 - Etienne Tremblay - GitHub Actions (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Great episode that compare, discuss, and speculate with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. It's in French. I miss you guys it's been too long... Great show.
How I Manage and Plan Tasks as a Remote Worker (Thomas Maurer) - It's very interesting to see how others are doing, and the kind of tools they are using..Even better when it's your colleague.
Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are 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. Enjoy!
Suggestion of the week
Approval Workflows With GitHub Actions (Aaron Powell) - Wow! That's a very clever and impressive way to have step flow in GitHub. All the details are in the post if you would like to create your own.
GitHub with Azure DevOps | Premier Developer (GitHub with Azure DevOps) - Very interesting post that explains al the benefits of using this mixt, and why an enterprise would be interested to do that.
193: UI Is Messy (Merge Conflict) - I, once more, had a nice moment listening to that discussion/ argumentation about different patterns pros and cons.
It's time for you to install Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - Definitely an incredible tool this Windows Terminal. Try it you will see. And the thing I like is it never stops to amaze me with new features.
Reading RSS Feeds With .NET Core (Nong Vang) - I don't know why I always thought it was complicated to parse an RSS feed. A very nice quick tutorial.
VS Code Integration with GitHub and Azure (Robert Green, Aaron Powell) - A fantastic 10 minutes video that shows the most frequent scenarios of developers using GitHub and how easy it is with VSCode.
Every Monday, I share my reading notes. Those are 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.
How to Prepare for a Successful Cloud Migration (Aaron Woods) - This post list the questions we should ask ourselves before migrating. This will definitely help to reduce the bumps of a migration.
Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for. This one is the last of 2019!
Upgrading the Blazor HTML Table with FlexGrid ( Alvaro Rivoir) - This is a great tutorial that explains very clearly step by step how to replace the grid in the default Asp.Net Core project.
Miscellaneous
Advice to my 20 year old self (Scott Hanselman) - An Interesting post. But to be honest, the more I think about it the less I would spoil things. So as good or bad as it sounds, my advice would probably just be something like thrust yourself, you'll be fine.
Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.
Cloud
Azure Mystery Mansion - Microsoft in Business Blogs (Em Lazer-Walker) - Very interesting post. As I'm writing myself a text-based adventure game(just for fun) it's interesting to see the different approaches and tools available.
Serverless Deployment Best Practices (Fernando Medina Corey) - A nice post that shows some of the best practices for serverless and how AWS implements them.
Why jQuery is Obsolete and Time to Stop Using It (Chris Love) - Great post. I was a big user of jQuery, and these days I do less front end stuff, so it is nice to see how things have evolved and to understand the impact jQuery had.
New workflow editor for GitHub Actions (Chris Patterson) - Have you tested the new GitHub action? If yes you will be pleased with this new editor...Ending the research of that missing space somewhere.
Single Page Applications and ASP.NET Core 3.0 (Shawn Wildermuth) - A very interesting post that explains all the little configurations or twists required to have a great SPA experience with .Net Core.
Miscellaneous
What You Need for Effective Remote Work (William Gant) - This is a full chapter of an up coming book about remote workers... If you are new to this adventure and even more if you are fulltime remote, this read is a must.
I really enjoyed this book. I found very interesting the categorization of all those habits and comportment grouping. I like also the habits association to help to break some or creating new ones. It's obvious, but I didn't think about it before.
We all do it. We create resources in the cloud for a demo, or a presentation and forget about them. Then at the end of the month, we receive a bigger invoice then expected and it's the panic.
This is why I thought about AzSubscriptionCleaner. It's an open-source project that could be deployed in your subscription very easily. The goal is to have it deployed by one click directly from GitHub.
The tool can be deployed in two versions, using Azure Automation, or Azure Functions. Based on a schedule it will execute a query to search all resources with a tag expireOn with the value is older than now(), and delete them.
I wrote two blog posts, paired with a YouTube video that explain how to tools where built.
This is an open-source project github.com/FBoucher/AzSubcriptionCleaner, you are welcome to see the code, clone the repository, ask for more feature or do a pull request to add a new one!
How to Use Github Professionally (Aaron Stannard) - This post is great! Tons of information and best practices (with an explanation of why its a best practice).
I really enjoyed this book. Yes it's light and funny, but don't get fool, there is a deeper message here. I think Jessy wins his challenge by going into a monastery so we don't have to. We all have what it takes to live a more purposeful life, we just need to pause. Showdown, to go faster, do less to do more... Embrace the silence.
How To Develop Apps Like PUBG (Apoorv Gehlot) - An interesting article that gives us an idea of how a game like pugs got that success, and who they manage that rapid growth.
It's so nice to be able to add some serverless components in our solution to make them better in a snap. But how do we manage them? In this post, I will explain how to create an Azure resource manager (ARM) template to deploy any Azure Function and show how I used this structure to deploy an open-source project I've been working on these days.
Part 1 - The ARM template
An ARM template is a JSON file that describes our architecture. To deploy an Azure Function we need at least three recourses: a functionApp, a service plan, and a storage account.
The FunctionApp is, of course, our function. The service plan could be set as dynamic or describe the type of resource that will be used by your function. The storage account is where is our code.
In the previous image, you can see how those components interact more with each other. Inside the Function, we will have a list of properties. One of those properties will be the Runtime, for example, in the AZUnzipEverything demo, it will be dotnet. Another property will be the connection string to our storage account that is also part of our ARM template. Since that resource doesn't exist yet, we will need to use the dynamic code.
The Function node will contain a sub-resource of type storageAccount. This is where we will specify where is our code, so it cant be clone to Azure.
Building ARM for a Simple Function
Let's see a template for a simple Azure Function that doesn't require any dependency, and we will examine it after.
The first resources listed in the template is the Account Storage. There nothing specific about it.
The Service Plan
The service plan is the second resource in the list. It's important to notice that to be able to use the SKU Dynamic you will need at least the API version of apiVersion to be "2018-02-01". Then you specify the SKU.
"sku": {
"name": "Y1",
"tier": "Dynamic"
}
Of course, you can use the other SKU if you prefer.
The Function App
Final resources added to the mixt, and this is where all the pieces are getting together. It's important to notice that the other in which the resources are listed are not considered by Azure while deploying (it's only for us ;) ). To let Azure knows you need to add dependencies.
This way the Azure Function will be created after the service plan and the storage account are available. Then in the properties we will be able to build the ConnectionString to the blob storage using a reference.
The last piece of the puzzle is the sub-resource sourcecontrol inside the FunctionApp. This will define where Azure should clone the code from and in which branch.
To be sure that everything is fully automatic the properties publishRunbook and IsManualIntegration must be set as true. Otherwise, you will need to do a synchronization between your Git (in this case on GitHub), and the Git in Azure.
Of course, all the source code of both the Azure Function and the ARM template are available on GitHub, but let me highlight how the containers are defined from an ARM template.
Just like with sourcecontrol, we will need to add a list of sub-resources to our storage account. The name MUST start by 'default/'.
Part 2 - Four Deployment Options
Now that we have a template that describes our needs we just need to deploy it. There are multiple ways it could be done, but let's see four of them.
Deploy from the Azure Portal
Navigate to the Azure Portal (https://azure.portal.com), from your favorite browser and search for "deploy a custom template" directly in the search bar located at the top of the screen (in the middle). Or go at https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.Template. One in the Custom deployment page, click on the link Build your own template in the editor. From there, you can copy-paste or upload your ARM template. You need to save it to see the real deployment form.
Deploy with a script
Would it be in PowerShell or in Azure CLI you can easily deploy your template with these two commands.
In Azure CLI
# create resource group
az group create -n AzUnzipEverything -l eastus
# deploy it
az group deployment create -n cloud5mins -g AzUnzipEverything --template-file "deployment\deployAzure.json" --parameters "deployment\deployAzure.parameters.json"
In PowerShell
# create resource group
New-AzResourceGroup -Name AzUnzipEverything -Location eastus
# deploy it
New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -ResourceGroupName AzUnzipEverything -TemplateFile deployment\deployAzure.json
Deploy to Azure Button
One of the best way to help people to deploy your solution in their Azure subscription is the Deploy to Azure Button.
You need to create an image link (in HTML or Markdown) to this to a special destination build in two-part.
However, this URL needs to be encoded. There is plenty of encoders online, but you can also do it from the terminal with the following command (A big thanks to @BrettMiller_IT who showed me this trick during one of my live streams).
Clicking the button will bring the user at the same page on the Azure Portal but in the user subscription.
Azure DevOps Pipeline
From the Azure DevOps portal (https://dev.azure.com), select your project and create a new Release Pipeline. Click on the + Add an artifact button to connect your Git repository.
Once it's added, you need to add a task the current job. Click on the link 1 job, 0 task (4). Now you just need to specify your Azure subscription, the name of the resource group and select the location of your ARM template inside your repository. To make the deployment automatic with each push in the repository, click that little lightning bolt and enable the Continuous deployment trigger.
Wrapping-up
Voila, you know have four different ways to deploy your Azure Function automatically. But don't take my word for it, try it yourself! If you need more details you can visit the project on GitHub or watch this video where I demo the content of this post.
I recently presented, a workshop at the TOHack to get started with Azure. The goal was to try different Azure services, and see how we could augment an existing website using serverless function and artificial intelligence. (Aussi disponible en français)
During this workshop, a website is deployed automatically from GitHub. Then by adding an Azure Function and using the Vision API of Azure Cognitive Services, the final solution is able to detect when uploaded pictures are or not dogs and keep our image folder "clean". We call that application: The automatic Not a Dog application.
The step by step instruction with the code can be found on GitHub - Not-a-Dog-Workshop. The workshop can be done in about 45-60 minutes.
I also did a video that is available on my YouTube channel:
You have questions, you are blocked, it will be a pleasure to help you.
Docker from the beginning — part III (Chris Noring) - Third of this docker series. I like how it is not only a happy path but the learning path with the fails and victories.
Improve your Dockerfile, best practices (Chris Noring) - A nice quick post about some really easy best practices. It's so simple why would you not follow them.
Introducing Windows Terminal (Kayla Cinnamon) - The awesome new terminal with a kickass look. Even more, it's an open source project!
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (James Clear) - An excellent book that is very pleasant to read. I really appreciated the way things are broken in tiny pieces. I don't think this book re-invented the molecular physic, but by cutting, dissecting our habits that way it's hard to think that you can fail. It's easier to get started right now; even starting new habits before finishing the book!
