Reading Notes #145

Suggestion of the week

• Thinking About Strings, Quotes, Tokens, And Tildes In Less CSS - Less CSS seams really interesting. Next web projects, I seriously think use it.

Cloud

• Lessons Learned – On #Azure, Log Everything!s (Alexandre Briseboi) - Great post about how we should use the Event Trace Windows (ETW) to do our logs.
• Using Time-based Partition Keys in #Azure Table Storage (Alexandre Briseboi) - Nice tips about how saving our logs in Azure.
• How to get notifications from a Windows Azure website - Wow, this is truly amazing and really easy to do.

Programming

• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.
• PowerShell Tools - v0.8.0 - Now with REPL! - Time to get or update this great add-ons in our Visual Studio.
• Thinktecture.IdentityManager as a replacement for the ASP.NET WebSite Administration tool (Scott Hanselman) - This post introduces a great project to manage our memberships in our Asp.Net projects through a nice interface.

Mobile

• Windows First: A New Strategy for Mobile Development and Beyond - Programming multi platform application is becoming much easier. This post explains some of your options.

Architecture

• The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ Starts to Take Shape (The Open Group Blog) - This post talks about an interesting white paper. What’s good in it and why we should read it. This new 3.0 platform look very promising.

Miscellaneous

• How to use an Xbox One controller on your Windows PC (Scott Hanselman) - Really.?! That simple? That’s great!
• Windows Live Writer going Open Source? - This post explains why our help is needed in order to give a future to Windows Live Writer.

Reading Notes #139

Suggestion of the week

• Refactoring your CSS with LESS in Visual Studio Web Essentials (David Paquette) - Web essentials is really essential! This post explains how easy it is to manage our CSS files with LESS.

Cloud

• Simple Web Site Backup retention policy with WebJobs (Eduardo Laureano) - That’s a really nice tutorial that explains how to use Azure webjobs.
• Basic Tier Virtual Machines (Kenai Kwa) - It’s time to save money. We need to change the type of our VM to be basic for all Azure VMs that don’t need load balancer or scalability.
• IIS Reset on Windows Azure Web Role (Value Maker) - Safe yourself sometimes and gray hair by reading this post before you got to do IISReset on an Azure VM…
• Cloud Power: How to scale Azure Websites globally with Traffic Manager (Scott Hanselman) - Great example of scaling a website with Azure.
• Managing your Azure Storage account with Zudio - This post introduces a very intuitive tool for when we want a quick and simple view of our stuff.

Programming

• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone - Part 1 (Lori Lalonde) - This post lists the prerequisites required to do a UI unit test that will be explains in a future post.
• What should I be looking for during Code Reviews? - Very interesting post that gives us a good idea of what we should think about when doing a code review.
• ASP.NET MVC Helper - MoreLessText (James Curran) - That’s a nice HTML helper simple and efficient, like all the best are.

Mobile

• Build Some Ears on Your App and then Listen! (Mark B Schramm) - This post lists the best practices about how we should take care of our apps once they are live.

Miscellaneous

• SonicAgile Now with Dropbox Integration - Nice new add-on to this great management tool.
• FREE Pluralsight video: “Get Involved” in community! (Scott Hanselman) - Excellent video that will help you to get started. You don’t have any excuse anymore since it’s free!
• VM Image PowerShell ‘How To’ Blog Post (Christine Avanessians) - Really useful post that gives a lot of code snipets with the explication on what they do. A must.

~Frank