Microsoft Azure MVP 2015

With April came the MVP nominations, and I'm very happy to receive the 2015 Microsoft Azure MVP award, and to join the great MVP's family.

I would like to thanks everyone who helps me to share my passion, push me to always move forward, stimulate me to get outside my comfort zone to meet other passionate around the globe. Be sure that this is only the beginning!

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs is an award that Microsoft gives to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others. It is part of Microsoft’s commitment to supporting and enriching technical communities.

To know more about the MVP program, or to know how you could become an MVP, visit Microsoft MVP website.


See you soon.

~ Frank B

Reading Notes #175

Cloud

• Running the Ruby Middleman Static Site Generator on Microsoft Azure (Scott Hanselman) - Really nice post. It looks very fun. It's amazing what we can do with git and Azure!

• Lift and Shift of a Windows Service to Microsoft #Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice tutorial with a lot of clear explications for every step.

• Another reason to like azure web sites - free analytics - Nice quick post that summarizes a great Azure Friday episode about statistics.

• Using Stream Analytics with Event Hubs (Kirk Evans) - Great post that plays with both Azure event hub and azure stream analytics.

Programming

• Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck (Scott Hanselman) - Another great post that will help to ask ourselves some better question when it's time to investigate so performance issue.

• Atom-Shell for cross platform desktop apps with Paul Betts (Scott Hanselman, Paul Betts) - Nice episode that clarifies things around Atom-Shell.

• Bad Practices Building Microservices (Jan Stenberg) - Interesting post that talks about what why shouldn't be doing.

Miscellaneous

• Becoming Great Remote Developer - Interesting thoughts and tips about remote work.

• Microsoft or Google? - This post shares some thoughts about a very common question that a lot of people are asking.

~Frank

Reading Notes #170

Suggestion of the week

• Rollup: Microsoft HoloLens, Surface Hub, Windows 10, Xbox One game streaming and more. (Scott Hanselman) - How 2015 could not be a big year for Microsoft with all this?

Cloud

• Scaling #Azure Cloud Services Up and Down Like Clockwork (Alexandre Brisebois) - Really interesting post that explains how scaling up & out and down &in can mean huge saving in our pockets.

• Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure (Corey Sanders) - This post describes what in the new release of Azure.

• Azure Search – How to Add Suggestions (auto-complete) to your Search Applications (Liam Cavanagh) - Interesting example of how Azure Search can improve the user experience on our website.

• Using Windows Azure Service Bus for communication across two ASP.NET MVC Applications - Great tutorial that shows step by step how to use the power of Azure Service Bus in our website.

• Data Pipeline Guidance (patterns & practices) - Interesting project using Azure Eventhub's best practices in an IoT context.

Programming

• Using the Wrapper Pattern (Scott DePouw) - This post explains a useful pattern for testing or other context.

• NuGet Package of the Week: Polly wanna fluently express transient exception handling policies in .NET? (Scott Hanselman) - Wow! Polly looks awesome. Looking forward to trying-it in my next project.

Podcast

• Computer Vision Explained with PyImageSearch's Adrian Rosebrock - While listening this podcast, I'm not sure if I was more scared or exited. However, one thing is sure, this episode is really interesting!

Miscellaneous

• Removing Distractions - Interesting post where the author share is experience while trying to be less connected.

~Frank B.

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