Reading Notes #211

Cloud

• Azure Mobile Apps November 2015 Update (Matthew Henderson) - Great news features are all explains in this post.
  
• Microsoft at Supercomputing Yes, we support Linux (Alex Sutton) - Azure is a very good place to do your supercomputing whatever is your targeted OS, this post explains why.
  
• Announcing API Management and Event Hubs integration (Steve Danielson) - Great new features announced.
  
• On & Off - Done Right on Azure - This post shows how to manage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Where we preserve networking, security and state while temporarily removing compute. When the time comes, we restore the compute resources and operate normally.

Programming

• Visual Studio Code - NEW RELEASE: v0.10.2 (6 bug fixes) (Ed Price - MSFT) - You saw the notification, but wonder what was inside this update, then this quick post is for you.

Miscellaneous

• I’m sorry, but your email address is not as valuable as you think it is - Interesting thoughts about sharing our email address or not.
  
• The piracy paradox at Udemy - Very interesting post about security and the Internet.

Reading Notes #208

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Azure--the Big Picture (Tony Meleg) - Very complete summary of the Azure platform.

Cloud

• What Are All of Microsoft Azure’s Application Integration Services? (Richard Seroter) - Very interesting post that answers two questions: What's it? and What's new? For all the features in the Azure Integration "branch."
  
• What Developers Need to Know About Docker (Paul Ballard) - Nice post that gives pros and cons about Docker, how it works and even how to create one.
  
• The Walking Dead: No Man's Land game soars to #1 supported by Azure DocumentDB (Aravind Ramachandran) - Cool post. Games are serious business, and databases are fun!

Programming

• Visual Studio - Bower: Modern Tools for Web Development - Fantastic post that demystify bower and an excellent tutorial.
  
• How to simulate a low bandwidth connection for testing web sites and applications - I plead guilty. I thought it was more complicated to do... really cool post.
  
• NuGet Package of the Week: Microphone registers and discovers Web APIs and REST services with Consul - Another useful NuGet Package, I love this "thread" of post.

Miscellaneous

• How To Deliver a Great Technical Presentation - Interesting tips and tricks to know.
  
• The Five Knows of Programming - Nice post to calm the student among us... And Remember us also that learning is fun!
  
• A Simple Formula for Changing Our Behavior (Peter Bregman) - Interesting article that expresses a nice and simple solution to walk through difficult situations... at work or at home.
  
• Using the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover with Fingerprint Reader on a Surface Pro 3 - Cool post ... it's nice to have a real user review.

Reading Notes #205

Cloud

• Introduction to Azure Search (Gunnar Peipman) - This post clarifies things about what Azure Search is and what is not.
  
• New capabilities for Logic Apps in Azure portal - Great new features that will facilitate the edition.
  
• Why the Azure Cloud? (Nicole Herskowitz) - Wonderful post that explains all the news announced in AzureCon, but with very simple words.
  
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Your web app doesn't need 64-bit (Scott Hanselman) - The devil is in the details, well this post explains one of them.
  
• Azure Redis Cache: Public preview of premium tier (Pranav Rastogi) - This is really a good summary about Redis cache; road map, documentation, etc.
  
• Getting started with Azure Data Factory and Azure Machine Learning (Wee Hyong Tok) - It really the post to get started with Azure Data factory.
  
• Automating Azure Resource Group deployment using a Service Principal in Visual Studio Online: Build/Release Management (Roopesh Nair) - Great tutorial that step by step explains how to setup a continous deployment in Azure.

Programming

• Case Study: Adding Application Insights to a website (Beckylin Orooji) - Really interesting post that explains all the steps done by Glimpse's team to optimize their website.

Miscellaneous

• Savoir-faire Linux and Microsoft Canada announce a close partnership in the open source field - That an impressive news, a Linux open source shop partner with Microsoft... I like it.
  
• Presentation Tips – It’s all about timing (marc) - Interesting post that gives essential tips to prepare our next presentation.

~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

Reading Notes #163

Suggestion of the week

• Save the date! Connect(“November 12 & 13”); is almost here - If you missed this incredible event, don't cry because all the presentations were recorded. We can watch them on demand on Channel 9.

Cloud

• Azure API Management Part One: An Introduction - Really nice post to get started with the brand-new API manager of Windows Azure.

• Building a Text Adventure with Azure and Orleans (Chris Risner) - While the game is not a triple A, I find the idea quite interesting.

• Opening up Visual Studio and .NET to Every Developer, Any Application: .NET Server Core open source and cross platform, Visual Studio Community 2013 and preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 (S.Somasegar) - This article explains all the new things that came out this week.

• Success by a thousand cuts: Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and SQL Azure - Ha Ha, I will quote the author: “Oh man, there is so much stuff I don’t know”.

Programming

• .NET Core is Open Source - Get a better understanding of what is .net Core and the meaning / purpose of the open source announce.

• Visual Studio Community 2013 - Now that all developers can have their Visual Studio, learn what's in this community version.

• The Roadmap for WPF - This post gives all the details about what is coming next for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

• Announcing Open Source of .NET Core Framework, .NET Core Distribution for Linux/OSX, and Free Visual Studio Community Edition - Another good summary of all the great things that was released this week in the Microsoft world.

• Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 (2013.4) RTM - Learn all about the new features in this update... Codelens, webjobs, Intelisense and so much more!
  
• Visual Studio Community 2013 - Now that all developers can have their Visual Studio learn what 's in the free version called community.

Miscellaneous

• Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 - Interesting. Agile is more than scrum...

• Why Citi Got Rid of Assigned Desks - Nice post that explains how a re-organized floor can help the productivity and the team spirit.

• Visual Studio 2015 Preview, Visual Studio Community 2013, Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, and More - Learn more about all the amazing releases that happened this week during the Connect event.

• Announcing .NET 2015 - .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux, and Visual Studio Community (Scott Hanselman) - This post lists some post that cover all the new stuff that just came up this week. Happy reading.

~Frank

Reading Notes #159

Suggestion of the week

• Azure: Redis Cache, Disaster Recovery to Azure, Tagging Support, Elastic Scale for SQLDB, DocDB (asp.net) - Great news features. One of my favorites is not to optimize the production but the ability to attribute tags to resources.

 

Cloud

• Ghost, Node.js, and Azure Websites: Not a Pretty Picture (Shawn Wildermuth) - Interesting... I though it was because I mess something that I got issue last time I update my blog.

• Cloud usage flavors for Development and Test teams - Quick post that enum how a team could use the cloud.

• Comparing Clouds: IaaS Provisioning Experience (Richard Seroter) - Great review of different cloud eco-systems.

• Azure BizTalk Services Introduction for BizTalk Devs (Matt Milner) - Great article that explains how BizTalk works in Zure as PaaS or IaaS.

• What is Azure DocumentDB (Dhananjay Kumar) - This post presents Windows Azure DocumentDB with a lot of screenshots.

 

Programming

• Exciting Things About ASP.NET vNext Series: MVC View Components - This post explores Asp.Net vNext and his View components.

• Raygun.io and ignoring specific Web API exception types (Troy Hunt) - Since web APIs are very common, this post explains how to fix what could be a very common problem.

• Running ASP.NET MVC 6 on Linux - It not as simple as double-click, then next..next...next but it looks like not that hard.

 

Database

• DocumentDB Studio first (beta) release (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Wonderful idea! I can't wait to see the next version with querying capability.

 

Miscellaneous

• Using a Surface Pro 3 full time for two months (Scott Hanselman) - Great post that gives us the pros and cons of the surface pro 3.

~Frank Boucher

Reading Notes #51

The Cloud Storage

Cloud

• Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Maarten Balliauw) - Nice post that explains how to build a web farm with a free load balancer using the brand new Windows Azure. This post pass-through all steps putting the emphasis on important notion to have a nice web farm up and running.

[…]Sysprep ensures the machine can be cloned into a new machine, getting its own settings like a hostname and IP address. A non-sysprepped machine can thus never be cloned.[…]

• GitHub for Windows Azure Websites (Maarten Balliauw) - This tutorial is very easy to follow and will help to to setup a Windows Azure Website that will use Git as sources instead of regular package.
• Windows Azure Service Management API Cheat Sheet with PowerShell (Michael Washam) - Nice PowerShell script sample that show how easy it is to manage the new Azure capabilities thru the API.
• Reintroducing Windows Azure, Part 1: The New Management Portal (David Pallmann) - Nice first post of a series of four this one introduce the new Azure portal with also a quick recap of the "stuff".
• Reintroducing Windows Azure, Part 2: Windows Azure Web Sites (David Pallmann) - This second post of the nice series presents all the new features around the Windows Azure Websites. Enjoy!
• Microsoft Gives Windows Azure Amazonian Facelift (Cade Metz) - After June 7, Windows Azure is definitely a cloud platform or cloud infrastructure or cloud... something that must be considerate if you planning to go in the cloud.
• Episode 83 - Windows Azure June 2012 Release - This is the longest episode of the Cloud Cover Show, but a great one! It talks about so many things... Find the time, it's a must.
• Updates to Windows Azure Storage – Reduced Transaction Pricing and Geo Replication (Gaurav) - Everything you need to know on Azure Storage and is geo replication feature (this post as been updated).
• 10x Price Reduction for Windows Azure Storage Transactions - Nice recap of all the novelties about Azure Storage.
• Thoughts on AWS (Arthur) - Nice post. A real AWS environment is break down to expose every part and the author gives is opinion about it.
• Can you use BizTalk in Azure Virtual machine for production use? (saravana) - Nice post that explain the details that you must know before using the cloud for your production environment. This is following this one.
• The cloud will cost you, but you’ll be happy to pay (Service Mesh Dave Roberts) - Very interesting post that explain the Jevons paradox and is application the cloud computing.
• Loading data to SQL Azure the fast way - Incredibly complete post. The perfect post to before you get started with massive data import into SqlAzure.
• Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Michael Washam) - Amazing post that wrap-up everything about the brand new Azure virtual machine and virtual network. All the features are deeply explains. A must for all it peoples.
• Reintroducing Windows Azure, Part 3: Virtual Machines (David Pallmann) - Third post in the series this one focus on windows VM. How to create, configure, connect and use them.
• Reintroducing Windows Azure, Part 4: Linux Virtual Machines (David Pallmann) - Same thing as the previous one except this one is about Linux VM.
• Windows Azure SQL Reporting is now available - That great news a good reporting tool is always important. More to come.

Programming

• Marked As Pertinent - The perfect post to read when looking for a NoSql (or a key/value store), because this post compare a lot of them.
• Nuno Filipe Godinho - Very nice feature. You don’t need any more to uninstall Azure SDK to install a new one! Even more you have a new dropdownlist that will act as a filter in visual studio when creating your new project.
• DFW Ajax Users Group - Nice post that presents the characteristics of the two main architecture of site (with sample) and explains why most actual sites are in fact hybrid.
• Using the Windows Azure Cache Preview with SDK 1.7 - Nice demo of Azure Cache preview and a quick fix on a potential problem you could have trying it with the emulator.

Miscellaneous

• 4 Things Great Leaders Do Better Than You (Les McKeown) - Inspiring post.
• What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast (Laura Vanderkam) - Nice post. I'm a morning guy since I was a teenager and I kept this morning habit. It’s incredible how many things we can do!

[…]Come up with a plan and assemble what you need, but whatever you do, don’t label this vision as impossible[…]

• How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead (Jeff Atwood) - Seriously not serious. download the slides...Awesome.

~Frank