Reading Notes #270

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Command Line 2.0 now generally available (Kamaljit Bath) - Azurecli definitely made a great jump in this version 2.0. With it reaching GA, we should all start using it.

Cloud

• Azure Managed Disk–Overview (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon ) - This post is a nice quick introduction on what are managed disks.
  
• Azure brings 5 new services to Canada (Chelsea Carter) - Good news for our clients that need to stay in Canadian Data centers, they now have a lot more tools in their box.
  
• Deploying ARM Templates using Visual Studio Team Services (Jakob Ehn) - This post shows how to automate Azure deployments. It doesn't do it with the usual happy path, but with a very common situation where we need access Key and other information from the deployed resources to complete the deployment.
  
• Deploying a web app and an Azure SQL database with ARM template without providing any password (Vivien Chevallier) - Great tutorial that gives us a very good opportunity to learn some best practices.
  
• Integrating SharePoint With Other Services Using Azure Logic Apps - Part One (Nakkeeran Natarajan) - Nice quick intro to the SharePoint connector in Logic Apps.
  
• Serverless architecture with Azure - Simple Talk (Christos Matskas) - Good post that does a little tour of the serverless services in Azure.However, I would disagree on the simplistic view of Logic Apps and its limitation. Furthermore, I would have talked more about are extremely powerful these services can become if put together in a solution.

Databases

• Loading files from Azure Blob Storage into Azure SQL Database (Jovan Popovic) - Cool. This bulk command has been so useful on-premises; it's great to have them back.
  
• Deploy Docker Container to Oracle Cloud Service (Arun Gupta) - Great post that explains a lot on how to use databases in dicker containers.

Miscellaneous

• GitKraken vs the CLI (Brett Goldman) - Cool comparison between the Git prompt and GitKranken.
  
• Introducing Raspberry Pi Zero W - Great news from Raspberry Pi this week, this new version is simply gorgeous.

Reading Notes #269

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Functions Proxies public preview (Matthew Henderson) - I think this news is a game changer, in a very positive way, for Azure Functions. I'm really looking forward to trying it.

Cloud

• Service Fabric and Windows Containers sample (Service Fabric Team) - Another perfect repository to get started with Fabric, a little simple solution that shows a multi-container implementation.
  
• Protecting Azure Logic Apps Using Azure API Management - This is a good post. It introduces to backbends Azure services (and also less known), and explains how together get more powerful a d how they can help in our solutions.
  
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Running and Managing LOTS of Web Apps on a single Azure App Service - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - Another great gem from Scott. This post is a must for all developers.

Programming

• Clean up unused git branches (Steve Smith) - Nice quick tutorial to help us cleaning our Git repositories.
  
• Configuring ASP.NET Core Applications in Azure App Service (Adrian Hall) - Fantastic post to get a little deeper with .Net Core and Azure.

Miscellaneous

• Are Manufacturers Taking the Right Precautions to Safeguard Cars Against Hacking Attacks? (Matthew Young) - Interesting post that asks that raises even more interesting questions.

Reading Notes #265

Suggestion of the week

• Dockerizing a real world asp.net core application (Thien Nguyen) - Fantastic post. I really like it when authors are sharing with us their trials and errors because it the best way to really learn something.

Cloud

• How Azure Functions Pricing Works (Chris Pietschmann) - This post cannot explain more clearly and simply the pricing formulas. At least for this service...
  
• How to download a file from Blob Storage using Azure API Management? (Alexander Laysha) - Great post that explains how we can optimize or performance without lowering our security.
  
• Job Handlers and Dependency Injection in Azure WebJobs (Vivien Chevallier) - A very useful tutorial that closes a series on Azure Web jobs.
  
• Manage App Service, SQL Database, and more - Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Asir Selvasingh) - It's time to try the new fluent interface. A good way to build an easy to read a script, that will build our solution.
  
• Single Instance VMs Now With 99.9% SLA - Good news, double with good SLAs.

Programming

• Calling Windows 10 APIs From a Desktop Application (Michael Crump) - Great! Windows IoT for all!
  
• Docker for Devs Part 1: Containerizing Your Application - Lock Me Down (Thien Nguyen) - Amazing post, first of series that explains how to use containers and Docker tools.

Databases

• Loading data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse just got easier (Casey Karst) - Interesting tips that can save us so much time...

Miscellaneous

• VIDEO: How to get started with technical public speaking! (Scott Hanselman) - This one-hour video is a great way to relief yourself a lot of pressure if you are, or want to start giving talks... It's definitely a good investment of your time.

Reading Notes #258

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing the public preview of Azure Advisor (Shankar Sivadasan) - This is definitely the most asked question from clients: how can I optimize my solutions. I was very positively surprised by the quality and precision of the suggestions of the advisor service. It's a must.

Cloud

• Announcing auto-shutdown for VMs using Azure Resource Manager (Xiaoying Guo) - Really awesome feature that is finally available.
• Connect your things with the Azure IoT Gateway SDK (Sam George) - Interesting post that introduces us to the SDK and tells us a bit about how it could help us.

Programming

• Creating a New View Engine in ASP.NET Core (David Paquette) - Interesting post , where the Asp Monsters are sharing their experience building a view engine. Pretty cool.
• Getting to Know Containers (Alexandre Brisebois) - This post answers questions like: why? How? and why now?

Reading Notes #249

Suggestion of the week

• Trying out the “standard” and “enterprise” templates in Azure Logic Apps (Richard Seroter) - Another excellent post from Seroter who shows us a quick simple logic app, and also a more "complex" one using the new integration account.

Cloud

• A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Functions Within Azure’s IoT Hub - Great tutorial to build a scalable solution.
  
• Azure Active Directory Labs Series – Creating an AD Forest (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - This post is a step by step lab. You will create everything you need without trouble.
  
• Azure Portal + Azure AD Management in Public Preview - Really happy to see new tools available (finally) to manage Active directory in the Azure portal.
  
• Visual Studio 2015 update for Logic Apps (Jon Fancey) - Nice update to the on-premise tool. Have you tried it yet?

Programming

• Entity Framework Pitfalls: Null Semantics - This post explains important gotchas, in one of the most popular ORM frameworks.
  
• Getting Started with YAML in Node.js using js-yaml (Dave Johnson) - Interesting post, I've been using YAML for few years now. However, it's true that when I did some work with Node.js I switched to json... Next time then...
  
• New book: Begin to Code with C# (Kim Spilker) - C# is a very popular and powerful language, I'm happy to see new books to bring more people aboard.

Databases

• Azure DocumentDB powers the modern marketing intelligence platform (Aravind Ramachandran) - This post is a great story about a real-life scenario where DocumentDB was selected as NoSQL solution and gives an overview of his structure.

Miscellaneous

• Want to know if you've been hacked? Troy Hunt has all the details - Excellent article, security breach, servers hack are not only in movies... Learn more about Troy Hunt who shares them with us.
  
• Why Programmers Should Track Their Time (Even if They Don't Charge Hourly) - It's so painful but so true.

Reading Notes #225

Cloud

• Reduce Cloud Data Costs and Improve System Performance in Azure (Marc Dugas) - Useful post that shares good tips to save more.
  
• Developer's introduction to Azure IoT (Olivier Bloch) - Great post that explains what is IoT and the strengths o the Azure flavor.
  
• Using PowerShell to manage API Connections (Kevin Lam) - Quick tip to do some clean-up in our connections.

Programming

• Conditional Workflows in Postman (ankit) - First post of a promising series, it sets the table listing the tools required to have a dynamic workflow.
  
• Using Web Deploy in Visual Studio Team Services Release Management (Jakob Ehn) - Nice post that demystifies MSBuild deployment on VSTS.
  
• Almost everyone is doing the API economy wrong (Ed Anuff) - Interesting point of view, if you do API, it's a must.

Databases

• Public preview: JSON in Azure SQL Database - Interesting, we will be able to do json query directly in the Sql Database.
  
• Simple and reliable data movement with Azure Data Factory Copy Wizard (Anand Subbaraj) - Since all cloud projects included data migration, any reliable tool is a good news. I'm looking forward to try this one.

Reading Notes #221

Suggestion of the week

• Why You Should Learn JavaScript in 2016 (Ken Powers) - I eared a lot of people complaining about Javascript, this excellent post explains why you undeniably, we should all know it, an if it's not the case why 2016 is a great time to learn it.

Cloud

• Azure Logic Apps : Orchestrating business processes and systems integration (Carey Payette) - This is a very nice tutorial that shows how to build an Azure Logic App with twitter and Sql Databe's connector.
  
• How to Setup Application Insights in an Azure WebJob (Jon Gallant) - Nice quick post that will make you save a lot of time.
  
• Azure IoT Hub general availability overview (Nayana Singh) - IoT Hub is finally GA, get to know all included components in this nice overview.
  
• Azure Search indexer for Azure Blob Storage now in public preview (Eugene Shvets) - This excellent tutorial explains how we can benefite of all the magic in this azure search preview.

Programming

• VisualStudio Code v0.10.8 (January 2016) - Learn more about what's new in this latest release.
  
• Search now available on Visual Studio Marketplace (Harysh Menon) - Did you know you can add extension to visual studio team services (vsts) and code (vscode)? This is the perfect post to get started.
  
• Chris Pietschmann - Nice post that explains very clearly why we really soundn't be writing none tested code.

Data

• Power BI Service February Update (Amanda Cofsky) - Fantastic! This update will give us the possibility to share outside ou organization... And many other things.

Miscellaneous

• What Does a Petaflop Look Like on Azure? (Alexandre Brisbois) - Interesting dive in the supercomputer universe.
  
• ASP.NET MVC: Keep Private Settings Out of Source Control - Simple an efficient.
  
• Multitasking is Killing Your Brain — Life Tips. (Larry Kim) - Really interesting post that comment on a very popular debate: Can w multitask?

~Frank

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 #187

Cloud

• Publishing an ASP.NET 5 app to Docker on Linux with Visual Studio (Scott Hanselman) - Nice tutorial for a cross-platform Hello word.
  
• Create a CentOS Virtual Machine Using #Azure Resource Manager (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice deep-dive to Azure Resource manager creating a Raid0 Linux VM.
  
• Protect Mission Critial #Azure Virtual Machines from Accidental Deletion - An accident is so fast done...Thanks for the tips!
  
• Is Microsoft Changing Azure Too Much? (Paul Ballard) - Interesting thought. And you what do you think?
  
• Delphi Turns Every Car into a Connected Car with Affordable, Cloud-Based Telematics (microsoft.com) - Interesting use case about Azure, IoT.
  
• Hooking up a scheduler job to a WebJob - Nice post that explains different options when we are using Azure webjob or scheduler.

Programming

• 10 Leading HTML5 Frameworks You'll Find Hard to Miss - Your next mobile project.
  
• Using TypeScript for Visual Studio Online Extensions (Serkan Inci) - Little introduction to a useful extension.

Miscellaneous

• Making the Complex Simple - Interesting article about how to become a true leader.
  
• Atom.io for Markdown editing (Larry Franks) - This post explains how to transform the great editor Atom in an amazing markdown editor.
  
• And the Release Date for Windows 10 Is... (Paul Thurrott) - The official date is finally out!

Reading notes #183

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing Azure Service Fabric: Reducing Complexity in a Hyper-scale World (Mark Russinovich) - A very exiting news. I am looking forward to play with that Azure Service Fabric.

Cloud

• Think #Microservices - Very interesting post that explains why microservices are so promissing.
  
• BizTalk in Azure Infrastructure as a Service - Nice post that shares all kinds of scenario for BizTalk in an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) context.
  
• UPDATED for 2015: How to install the nodejs Ghost blog software on Azure Web Apps (and the Deploy to Azure Button) (Scott Hanselman) - It can be that easy, right? Well, it is!
  
• With Machine Learning, Amazon Wants to Multiply the Power of Big Data (Saroj Kar) - Amazon is joining the machine learning market. the future promise to be interesting.
  
• Tutorial: Using Ant and Jenkins to automate the deployment of Java projects from the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse - MS Open Tech (Martin Sawicki) - Very nice tutorial when java is your thing and Azureyour destination.
  
• Announcing General Availability of Azure Premium Storage - Good news, now we can get more performance from our storage.
  
• Azure PowerShell 101 - Managing the Cloud from the Command Line (Channel 9) (Scott Hanselman) - Great video that shows few tricks to get started with Azure powershell commands.

Programming

• Mobile app privacy insanity – we’re still failing massively at this - Interesting and scaring post about the lack of security in mobile apps.
  
• IoT: Do you really should have knowledge in electronics? (Sergiy Baydachnyy) - Interesting thoughts about how to get started.

Databases

• MongoDB vs. Azure DocumentDB - Interesting post that compares the new kid on the block with an older one.

Miscellaneous

• Windows 10 - The Fast Ring and BUILD 10061 (Scott Hanselman) - Nice video that shows us the evolution of the very processing windows 10.

Reading Notes #180

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Azure dev/test scenario considerations (Graham Smith, Kim Spilker) - Very useful articl0e with a lot of information. Many deferent scenarios are explained.

Cloud

• Microsoft Virtual Academy presents Developing Solutions with Azure DocumentDB (Ryan CrawCour) - A date to mark on our calendar. A free deepdive on DocumentDB.
  
• Azure, Cloud and Enterprise Icon Set - Nice icon pack.
  
• Azure Resource Explorer: a new tool to discover the Azure API (David Ebbo) - Nice post that introduces a nice tool. Azure Ressources Explorer is in preview but looks very promising.
  
• Delphi Automotive - Interesting post about IoT and the cloud.
  
• Microsoft Virtual Academy presents Developing Solutions with Azure DocumentDB (Ryan CrawCour) - Free training about documentDB... on the April 7.
  
• Getting interesting data into Azure Machine Learning (AzureML) (jennmar) - Nice post that explains what we needto get started with AzureML.

Programming

• What’s New in Fiddler 4.5 (Eric Lawrence) - Great news, this fantastic tool has just been updated.
  
• Node.js Tools 1.0 for Visual Studios - Nice post that explains how this new addon to Visual studio is helping us to debug our Node.js code.
  
• Continuous Integration for Node.js Projects with TeamCity - Nice tutorial that explains what are our free options to get started.
  
• Getting to know the new ASP.NET 5 configuration framework (Andrei Dzimchuk)- Great post that explains what are the new configuration options with the new .Net and how it works.
  
• On the importance of OpenSearch (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post. Looking forward to see more sites (and blog) using this feature.

Miscellaneous

• 9 Fundamental Laws of Effective Communication Skills - Interesting post about essentials skills.
  
• Microsoft reveals Surface 3 with Windows 8.1, starting at $499 and on sale May 5 - Nothing more to say...
  
• Deconstruct websites, get hired: hiding recruitment messages in source code (Troy Hunt) - Interesting post, and funny facts about site code.

~Frank B.

Reading Notes #179

Suggestion of the week

• Welcome Azure App Service. Some of my thoughts (Sam Vanhoutte) - Interesting post about the new apps thing that just been announced and the "link" with BizTalk.

Cloud

• Pragmatic IoT on Azure Part 1: Introduction - Interesting post about a very popular topic, a series to follow...
  
• ScottGu's Blog - ScottGu's Blog - Perfect post to have a high level overview about this great Azure update.
  
• Announcing Azure App Service (Bill Staples) - Get all the information about the new Azure App Services.
  
• Introducing Azure App Service - You missed the live announcement? Look the recorded conference here.
  
• A Dev and Test Adventure on (Alexandre Brisebois) - If like Alex, you're one of those who are still not using Azume VM for your dev... Here is your chance, the scripts and the Vm are all done for you.

Programming

• dotnetConf 2015 - If you missed this online event, all videos are available here on demand.
  
• Using Gulp for ASP.NET 5 & Visual Studio 2015 (Shayne Boyer) - Until the new release that will include template using Gulp, here is a great tutorial that will show how to achieve that.
  
• Visual Studio Tools for Windows 10 Technical Preview (S.Somasegar) - Get an idea of what' s coming next... with our favorite tool.
  
• The Dew Review – DevExpress TestCafe - This post introduces an interesting test tool. We can try it 30 days for free.

~Frank B.

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