It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
I've been running Ubuntu on my personal laptop, a Dell Inspiron 13. I love it. It's slim, performant and I can code, play, read, stream without any difficulty. Yet when I try to use my bigger PC monitors by connecting my laptop to a docking station, I've had a lot of trouble. I've tried 2 docking stations, but none of them worked with Ubuntu. Some solutions found online suggest rebuilding my kernel, but I didn't want to do that, it felt too extreme for what should be trivial.
This post is about how I finally got my docking station to work with Ubuntu 22.04.
My current docking station is a Targus USB-C Docking Station and it works perfectly with other Windows devices. While doing some cleaning on my desk a logo catches my attention on the dock; the Displaylink logo. And that was the beginning of the end for the problem with that dock station.
After a quick search (aka Googling with DuckDuckGo) I found exactly what I was looking for on Synaptics web site. A solution for the older Linux versions!
Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Cloud
Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - DevSecOps is a real thing and it's accessible for all. This post explains what it is and provides examples of how it could be implemented at a high level.
Adding color to bracket pairs (Mads Kristensen) - A call for feedback on an up common feature of Visual Studio. Rainbow Brackets yes it will colorize the brackets but what should be the options?
DevOps monitoring: The Why, What, and How of DevOps monitoring (Hiren Dhaduk) - This is an excellent post to get us to think about our first step. It explains the reason why we should care and briefly lists a few tools available today on the market to help.
Good Monday, Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes that catch my interest during the week.
If you think you may have interesting content, share it!
Good Monday, already time to share new reading notes.
It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.
You think you may have interesting content, share it!
Azure Cosmos DB SQL API – Document Analytics (Modhana) - Finding a good partition for our data is crucial to get the best performance. This post explains how with Celebrata we can visualize them and make smarter choices.
Miscellaneous
No one cares that you’re right (George Stocker) - Interesting post. the comparison of a compiler to humans made me smile, but it works...
How to Serve Static Files (CSS, JS, Images) in Express JS?(Digamber Rawat) - I just recently start using Express.js and it's been a joy. A very well done package. This post explains a way to structure your server for static content.
The DevOps Handbook - The Technical Practices of Flow (Coding Blocks) - A very long but funny and interesting episode about DevOps. They will review The DevOps Handbook, sharing some experiences, and explaining why they like dislike agree or disagree.
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. This week I was less in a reading mode...
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.
ASP.NET Core updates in .NET Core 3.1 (Sourabh Shirhatti) - I'm very excited about this 3.1 version.I'm not sure why maybe it's because it is the long-time support (LTS). Nevertheless, I will update all my projects.
Use Google Sheets to translate faster (Robin Kretzschmar) - Woo! That's pretty cool. Automatic translation is never the best but this is very convenient.
7 Dangers of Micromanagement ( Jack Wallen) - Nice post to help you give the best version of yourself. (Note it's now 6, but it was 7 when I read it)
How to write 90% cleaner code with Hooks 5535657251 (Amandeep Singh) - Okay. I don't know React, but it's really nice to see that framework continue to evolve like that with his community. A very interesting post.
Podcasts
Economics of Kubernetes, with Owen Rog (Craig and Adam) - Really interesting episode. Of course all the news about Kubernetes were interesting, but even more the economics of cloud computing with the guess of the week, Owen Rog.
Install WSL 2 on Windows 10 (Thomas Maurer) - Awesome tutorial. If like me you didn't want to wait until the next Windows release or take the time to compile and debug a deployment....this tutorial is for us!
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!
Avoiding Azure Functions Cold Starts (Mark Heath) - Does cold starts are affecting your solutions? Maybe not, but if they are this post lists three scenarios to reduce them as must as possible.
A really interesting book that helps to focus and keep in mind the most important. I didn't read it with a purpose of business really, but it did make me remember past experiences and it was easy to make the relationship between success and when the story was clear. Take the time to read it, do the exercises/ reflections required... it's worth it.
Your Must-Have PowerShell Aliases for Docker (Elton Stoneman) - This post is gold! Seriously, it has a lot of really good code snippet ready to use and if gave me so many ideas...
The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast (Josh Kaufman) - That was a very interesting book. I devoured it much faster than I thought! As I was reading it, I was thinking... hey as a developer/programmer I already do a lot of those things... Things change so fast, technology changes... And a few pages later, the author was saying the same thing. :) It looks like we can adapt to many deferent situations. The author share with us a few journeys as he was learning new stuff. While I may not be interested to learn how to play to Go, I found all part of the book very interesting as those journeys a pact with tons of information.
ISBN: 1591845556 (ISBN13: 9781591845553)
elementary OS 5 Juno is Here – elementary – Medium (Cassidy James Blaede) - ELementary was already one of my favorite Linux distribution. With this new version named Juno it's just... Hmmmm so smooth and beautiful. Try it you will see.
Creating the perfect MVP Summit (Charles Sterling) - The MVP summit is a very special event. However, these suggestions are also applicable to other technical event.
For a project I have, I wanted to validate if containers were easier to use compare to regular code with services in Azure. I needed to refresh myself with Docker, so I decide to do what I thought would be a simple test: Create an Asp.Net Core web site in a container and access it on my machine.
This post is about my journey to finally achieve this goal, as you may guess it didn't work on the first attempt.
The Goal
One reason why I was looking at containers, it's because it's supposed to be working everywhere right? Well yes but sometimes with a little of effort. The goal here is to be able to run the same container on my main PC, my surface, a Linux VM and of course in Azure.
The context
I have a different setup on my main machine and on my surface. On my PC, I'm using VirtualBox for my VMs so I'm not running Docker for windows, but Docker Toolbox. This flavor (older version) of Docker will create a VM in VitualBox instead of Hyper-V. I couldn't use Docker for Windows like on my Surface, because the two virtualization softwares don't run side by side.
I also wanted to use only tools available on each of this platform, so I decided not to use Visual Studio IDE (the big one). Moreover, I wanted to understand what was happening so I didn't want too much magic involve. Visual Studio is a fantastic tool and I love it. :)
Installing Docker
I needed to install Docker on my Surface. I downloaded Docker Community Edition (CE), and because Hyper-V was already installed everything ran smoothly. On Windows, you need to share the "C" drive from the Docker setting. However, I was getting a strange "bug" when trying to share mine. It was asking my to login with AzureAD and was ignoring my request by letting the share drive unchecked.
Thanks to my new friend Tom Chantler, I did search for too long. See the thing is I'm using an AzureAD account to login, and something is not working right at the moment. As explained in Tom's post: Sharing your C drive with Docker for Windows when using Azure Active Directory, to walkaround this situation, I only had to create a new user account with the exact name as my AzureAD account, but without the AzureAD prefix (ex: AzureAD\FBoucher became FBoucher). Once that was done I could share the drive without any issue.
Let's get started with the documentation
The HelloWord container worked like a charm, so I was ready to create my Asp.Net Core website. My reflex was to go on docs.docker.com and follow the instruction from Create a Dockerfile for an ASP.NET Core application. I was probably doing something wrong, because it didn't work. So I decided to start from scratch and do every step manually... I always learn more that way.
Let's start by the beginning
Before moving everything in a container, we need a web application. This can be easily done from the terminal/ command prompt, with the commands:
dotnet new mvc -o dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo
cd dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo
dotnet restore
dotnet publish -c release -o app/ .
Here we create a new folder with a website using the mcv template. I then go in that new folder and restore the Nuget package. To test the we site locally simply use dotnet run. And finally, we build and publish the application into the subfolder app.
Moving to Docker
Now that we have our app it's time to containerize it. We need to add some Docker instruction in a dockerfile. Add a new file name dockerfile (no extension) to the root folder and copy/paste these commandes:
To start Docker with Docker Tool just start the Docker Quickstart Terminal
This instruction will specify how to build our container. First, it will download the image microsoft/aspnetcore or microsoft/dotnet:2.1-aspnetcore-runtime. We specify the work directory, then copy the app folder to app folder inside the container. Finally, we specify the entry point of our application telling it to start with dotnet.
Like Git and it's gitIgnore file docker has the same thing with .dockerignore (no extension). Add that file into your folder to ignore the bin and obj folder.
# .dockerignore
bin\ obj\
Now that the instructions about how to build our container are completed, we can build our container. Execute the following command:
docker build -t dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo .
This will build dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo from the current folder.
Running Docker container locally
Everything is in place, the only thing missing is to run it. If you want to run it locally just go with this command:
docker run -p 8181:80 dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo
On my machine, the port 80 is always used. So I remap the port 80 to 8181, feel free to change it at your convenience. The website will be available at localhost:8181
If you are running Docker Tool (older version of Docker), you need to get the IP of your VM. To get it do
docker-machine ip
Running in the cloud
To run our container into Azure you will need to publish it to the cloud first. It could be on DockerHub or in a private registry on Azure. I decided to go with Azure. First, we need to create a registry, then publish our container.
az group create --name dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo --location eastus
az acr create --resource-group dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo --name frankContainerDemo01 --sku Basic --admin-enabled true
az acr credential show -n frankContainerDemo01
The last command az acr credential show will provides information to tag our container with our repository name and also gives us the credential to be able to push. Of course, you could go to the portal.azure.com and get the information from the Registry's Access Keys blade.
docker tag dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo frankcontainerdemo01.azurecr.io/dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo:v1
Let's connect our docker to our registry, and then push (upload) our container to Azure.
# The https:// is important...
docker login https://frankcontainerdemo01.azurecr.io -u frankContainerDemo01 -p <Password_Retreived>
docker push frankcontainerdemo01.azurecr.io/dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo:v1
Great the container is in Azure. Now let's create a quick webApp to see it. We could also use the Azure Container Instance (ACI) that would be only one command, but because the demo is a website, it won't make sense to use ACI for that.
To get an Application service, we need a Service plan, and then we will create an "empty" webapp. To do that we will specify the runtime without providing any code/binary/container. I wasn't able to create a webapp from a private Azure registry in one command, so this is why I'm doing it in two.
az appservice plan create --name demoplan --resource-group dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo --sku S1 --is-linux
az webapp create -g dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo -p demoplan -n frankdockerdemo --runtime "DOTNETCORE|2.1"
On Windows, I got the following error message: '2.1' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. The PowerShell command line escape "--%" solves the problem: az --% webapp create -g dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo -p demoplan -n frankdockerdemo --runtime "DOTNETCORE|2.1"
If you check the website right now you should have page saying that the site is up but empty. Let's update the container settings with our registry and container settings.
az webapp config container set -n frankdockerdemo -g dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo --docker-custom-image-name frankcontainerdemo01.azurecr.io/dotnetcoredockerappservicedemo:v1 --docker-registry-server-url https://frankcontainerdemo01.azurecr.io --docker-registry-server-user frankContainerDemo01 --docker-registry-server-password <Password_Retreived>
It's works of course!
Conclusion
It's only four steps: create the .Net Core application, package it into a Docker container, publish our container into our Azure Registry, and create an application service base on that container. However, because all this tech are cross-platform, sometimes you get some little tiny differences between the platform, and those could become time-consuming. It was a great little project that turned out to be a lot more than expected, but I learn so much!
I'm very happy with the result... expect more of Docker in the future!
New recommendations in Azure Advisor (Kaitlyn Corazao) - This post provides a few more reasons to start looking at the advisor (but I'm sure you all already doing it.)
How to setup ASP.NET Core 2.1 on Linux in under 10 minutes (Daniel Crabtree) - Nice tutorial that goes further tthan simply the creation of the hello word application by showing some debugging configuration, and executing alternatives.
Suggestion of the week
The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast
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