Reading Notes #701

Modern infrastructure and AI agent development move fast, requiring a sharp eye on both backend stability and frontend polish. This week’s curated notes highlight critical shifts in observability, security best practices for autonomous agents, and practical updates for .NET MAUI apps. Check out these essential reads to stay ahead of the curve.

AI

• Build 2026: From observability to ROI for AI agents on any framework | Microsoft Foundry Blog (Sebastian Kohlmeier) - Foundry offers observability features and has many other whistles. There were a few sessions about that during Build. This post provides an overview and session names for demos.

Programming

• Give Your .NET MAUI Android Apps a Material 3 Makeover - .NET Blog ( Gerald Versluis) - So simple that it's hard not to try it

DevOps

• Why Choose Pulumi Over Terraform? (Pablo Seibelt) - I have never tried Pulumi or terraform, but they look great, and after reading this post, I'm very interested in learning more about ballooning

Data

• AI observability vs monitoring: What's the difference? (Jesse Sumrak) - Do you know the difference? You understand both, but where one ends and the other starts? Good post to clarify that.

MS Build

• How to Secure AI Agents: A Practical Overview (Srini Sekaran) - This post suggests grounded practices and explains the reasons behind them.

• Microsoft Agent Framework at BUILD 2026 | Microsoft Agent Framework (Shawn Henry) - List of Microsoft Build event sessions about the Agent framework.

~frank

Reading Notes #454

Cloud

• .NET 5 support on Azure Functions (Anthony Chu ) - Great news we cant start playing with the preview today

• Remote Debugging for Azure Functions Can Be a Breeze (Simon Timms) - A nice post that gives a little bit of history and architecture information, before showing how to use the product named Ozcode for debugging.

Programming

• Best 5 Tools for Node.js Monitoring (Olivia Diaz) - As a new Node.js developer I am pretty pleased to see all these tools. All bookmarked.

• How to MongoDB in C# - Part 1 (Rami Honig) - A really great tutorial with tons of code and examples to learn how to use MongoDB.

• New from Universe 2020: Dark mode, GitHub Sponsors for companies, and more (Shanku Niyogi) - Don't miss the keynote (it's available on demand), it's 15 mins highlighting some pretty cool new features... Or this post.

• You should be customizing your PowerShell Prompt with PSReadLine (Scott Hanselman) - Wanna customized your prompt? This post contains references to all previous tweaking posts and goes into detail about PsReadline.

Podcast

• PI 450: Entrepreneur Growth, Self-Discovery, and Pivoting in Tough Times (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Very inspiring women that definitely knows how to "bounce" when things don't go how planned.

• Optimizing for Happiness with Alfonso Cabrera (Screaming in the Cloud) - Great episode all DevOps related

Books

Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It 

(Adam Savage) 

- I really liked this book. In fact, As I was reading the first chapter I was "earing" Adam's voice. So instead of creating that voice in my head I bought the audiobook and let Adam himself tells me his story. This is the best book I listen to this year. It was inspiring and empowering.

Reading Notes #438

Cloud

• Azure Durable Functions Monitoring and Diagnostics (Damien Bod) - A nice tutorial to help us get more visibility on our Durable Functions.

• Authenticate Blazor WebAssembly with Azure Static Web Apps (Anthony Chu) - A great 

• tutorial that explains how to uses the socials account to authenticate our users in a Blazor app.

• Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – July 2020 (Michael Flanakin) - We all have a budget, this post helps us to stay up to date with the tool.

• Azure Durable Functions Monitoring and Diagnostics (Damien Bod) - If you are using (or planning to) the durable function this post is a must as it will ease your debugging / monitoring.

Programming

• Learn about the latest .NET Productivity features (Mika) - Nice post that describes in detail how to use the new feature of Roslyn.

• Sign Up for the Private Preview of Visual Studio support for Codespaces! (Nick) - Nice more codespace possibilities!

Miscellaneous

• .NET Foundation Board of Directors Election 2020: Results! (null) - After earing about this board on a .Net Rocks episode, I'm happy to see the result.

• THE EASY WAY how to SSH into Bash and WSL2 on Windows 10 from an external machine (Scott Hanselman) - Read 1 post and get 1 for free... Awesome and easy tips.

Reading Notes #351

Cloud

• Azure Functions Labs – Information and setup instructions (Bbenjamin Perkins) - Excellent post that explains how works Azure functions and why they works like that.
• Azure Functions: Choosing between queues and event hubs (Jeff Hollan) - Very interesting post that describes very well different possibilities of architecture.
• Deploying and Managing Containers on Azure (Mark Heath) - This post lists the topics covered in the tons of incredible course available on Plurasing... For free.
• How I built a dashboard in Azure Portal to track Gitflow feature branches (Utkarsh Shigihalli) - Pretty clever way to create dashboard in the Azure Portal.

Programming

• When and why to clean up your code: now, later, never (Itamar Turner-Trauring) - This is an interesting post that shares rules to improve or code management. Or at lease feel better with it.
• You might not need Kubernetes (Jessie Frazelle) - Nice quick post. Yep Kubernetes are great tool but not the tool for everything.

Data

• Best practices for alerting on metrics with Azure Database for PostgreSQL monitoring (Harini Gupta) - Nice post that covers the most important point to cover when monitoring a database (not only PostgreSQL).

~

Reading Notes #340

Cloud

• Run Azure Functions in a Docker Container (Mark Heath) - This is a great and simple tutorial, perfect to do a quick test.
• Announcing the public preview of Windows Container Support in Azure App Service | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Andrew Westgarth) - Free for all August, it's time to try stuff...
• Improving the Security of Azure App Service Websites > Mitchel Sellers (Mitchel Sellers) - Nice post that lists low hanging fruits to make our App Services more secure.
• Improving the development experience worldwide with Event Grid (Bahram Banisadr) - List of all the novelties on event grid.
• Learn how to orchestrate serverless functions by scraping APIs in 8 minutes (Maxime Rouiller) - A nice article that shows with a real use case how Azure Durable Function could be used.
• Why does my Azure Function sometimes stop being triggered (Benjamin Perkins) - Great tip, I wish I knew that before.

Programming

• How To Do Microservices Integration Testing in the Cloud (Alex Handy) - Interesting article that describes the current situation of test environment or what it should look like.
• Top Docker Monitoring Tools (Emna Trabelsi) - So many different tools, this is fantastic!
• dotnet new templates for serverless functions (Shayne Boyer) - This post explains how to add new templates for our .Net Core and shows how to build Azure function.

Integration

• Our Integration Product Roadmap (Jon Fancey) - VNext, the next version of BizTalk, is making its way.

Miscellaneous

• 11 essential characteristics for being a good technical advocate or interviewer (Scott Hanselman) - Read, think, improve, repeat. An excellent list to read and get better.

Reading Notes #316

Suggestion of the week

• Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration? (Scott Hanselman) - I really like how this post brings why containers are great.

Cloud

• Azure ARM Template Deployment with Duo Authentication (Eric Leonard) - Nice quick tutorial using the best practices with Azure resources manager.
• Gain better control over your Microsoft Azure costs and governance using Overcast (Stephane Lapointe) - This new product definitely looks interesting.

Programming

• 3 key insights that make D3.js easy to learn - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - I love Power Bi and since I start using it, I would like to try to do some custom visuals. If you think the same thing, then this post is a got pre-learning reading.

Miscellaneous

• How to Coach: A Programmers Cheat Sheet (Lou Bichard) - Very interesting post that shares really good advices, and even suggests a book to go deeper.
• The POC Problem (William Vorhies) - Very interning thoughts about a frequent scenario in our business.
• Why You Must Have an Online Presence as a Programmer NOW (Antonio Cucciniello) - An inspiring post about how to start/ continue/ improve our career as developers/ data scientist/ devops/ architect...

Reading Notes #64

Cloud

• Drunk on Cloud Kool-Aid? Time To Sober Up (Justin Moore) - It's never all white or all black. This post put some gray in the picture of what will be the cloud in five years.
• Book Review: Cloudonomics–The Business Value of Cloud Computing - If after reading this review you don't download the sample or read at least the table of content, it mean you are the author.
• Windows Azure Interactive Feature Map - An amazing interactive picture or the ultimate Windows Azure features Map!
• BizTalk Virtual Machine in Windows Azure using Quick Create (Steef-Jan Wiggers) - Simple and efficient tutorial that show all steps to create a VM in Windows Azure with BizTalk.
• Comparison: SkyDrive vs Apple vs Google vs Dropbox - Nice one shot overview.
• How to Remove an Orphaned Windows Azure Virtual Machine Disk and Remove a Lease Conflict on a VHD Blob (Stephen W. Thomas) - Again PowerShell is showing us who’s the king. I'm looking forward to see this tool. Since Azure is supposed to be really user friendly (not like scripts) then this tool should be great.
• Announcing Updates to Windows Azure SQL Database (Gregory Leake) - Great new. It's a long time since we saw a Sql Azure database update.
• Cloudy Thoughts by SyntaxC4 - Nice recap of many (if it is not all) possible database that you can use when using Windows Azure.
• #CloudFail: Six pitfalls to avoid with enterprise cloud deployment (Bart Copeland) - Excellent post! Even if the cloud is not for everyone, it have good chance that it could for you...
• Hybrid cloud model: update on Microsoft IT application migration (Tony Scott) - Overview of the Microsoft IT application migration, and Show case.

[…]Microsoft IT Showcase recently published an article with details of our experience [download Using Windows Azure to Create a Multi-Platform Application][…]

• Keeping your options open in a cloud solution (Buck Woody) - One thing that is great about Windows Azure is that you can use anything with it. Not only Microsoft language or application, not event only Azure services.
• Moving a website to Azure while adding Continuous Deployment from Git (Scott Hanselman) - Nice walkthrough of moving a website to Azure using new features.
• Guest Post: What’s the Big Deal with AppDynamics Windows Azure Monitoring? (Himanshu Singh) – Nice post that introduced AppDynamics and explained what it can do for our Azure application.
• Why Can't I Always Change the Region when Creating a Windows Azure Virtual Machine? (Stephen W. Thomas) - Nice catch! Be aware of this little difference between the different create VM methods.
• Azure Store XRay - Amazing tool to monitor easily your Windows Azure storage.
• Cloning Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Nice post. Very well explain through the Azure portal.
• Cloud Cover Show Episode 90 - Windows Azure Web Sites Update - Great show about the new feature in Windows Azure SQL Database: Link db.[video]

Programming

• Agile path ways into the Azure Universe – Access Control Service [ACS] - Great tutorial that explain step by step how to test ACS in a Behaviour Driven Development (bdd) way using QStory and Selinum.
• Avoid shooting yourself in the foot with Tasks and Async - Nice post that explain some "particularities" of some new feature in the .Net framework 4.5 related to asynchronous tasks.
• Migrating a Database to SQL Azure using SSDT - Great tutorial of an amazing tool. The SSDT is a must!
• 5 mistakes that make you look like a Rails n00b - Nice tips that will make your code better, and not only in Ruby, for all language.
• A First Look at SQL Server Data Tools - Include in the new visual studio 2012, and downloadable for 2008 and 2010, this amazing tool is a must for all developer. And it's free! .[video]
• Visual Studio 2012 Takes “Ease” Up a Notch (Jonathan Rozenblit) - Oh what a great a time saver.

Miscellaneous

• Windows 8 Shortcut Keys (John Evdemon) - Since I'm just starting to use Windows 8 this post is clearly useful.
• 3 Easy Exercises to Boost Your Creativity (2012| Comment Nadia Goodman| September 26) - I will not go that far, but the main goal is there. If you want be create the next Instagram, you must train your creativity.
• This Is The Biggest Reason Talented Young Employees Quit Their Jobs (The Brilliant Blog Annie Murphy Paul) - I wish my old bosses had the chance to read this nice post.

Reading Notes #60

Cloud

• Windows Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Networks (Neil Mackenzie) - Good tips about how to manage your Windows Azure Network.
• Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing (Quentin Hardy) - Nice post that recap how Amazon Web Service evolve in time and is changing today’s business.
• Autoscaling Azure with WASABi – Part 2 (Paul Bouwer) - Quick demo with Windows Azure Autoscaling Block - Wasabi.
• ScottGu's Blog - Great! This new service is awesome. Learn more in this post or follow the references to go dipper.

[…]Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Or watch this video of me showing how to do it step by step. […]

• Announcing BizTalk Server 2010 R2 CTP Availability in Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Himanshu Singh) - That a good news. Since BizTalk is not a two clicks install, having it in an image, will save a lot of time.
• Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 (David Pallmann) - Nice simple tutorial to build quickly an application with the brand new Windows Azure Mobile Services.
• What is Windows Azure Media Services (Ming Feiy) - Lear more about this unrecognized Windows Azure service that is the Azure Media Services
• Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services: A Backend for Your Connected Client Apps (Kirill Gavrylyuk) - Another great quick tutorial to get started with the Windows Azure Mobile Services.
• Amazon AWS is the Cloud (for now anyway) - It is true that Amazon web services is a strong well establish cloud provider. And big players like Google and Microsoft will force them to always improve the quality of their services.
• IaaS provider comparison reveals market trends for the cloud (Thoran Rodrigues) - It' s not an easy task to compare so many IaaS providers, and this post provide a different angle that we are used to see.
• How to add custom MIME mappings to non .NET Windows Azure Websites (Marc) - Nice tips and good catch! Now go update your website...
• Cloud Cover Show  Episode 88 - Tips and Tricks for Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks – A lot of good tips in this web cast and also a nice demo about how to setup a web farm using Windows Azure vm and web deploy.

Programming

• 15 things we learned about interface design as developers - Nice post with great tips to improve your interface... yes even if it's only a demo.

[…] 9% of all men are color blind. Use vischeck.com to check how your site or web app looks to those people. […]

• Bullet-proof your web service with the right monitoring setup (Nick Hardiman) - In this post learn why monitoring correctly your web services is a must. A lot of references to tools that can help you to achieve this goal are also present.
• Azure Node.js developer center homepage redesign - This post explain all steps to get to the new design and the reason why some change were made.
• Pinning Useful and Obscure Stuff to the Windows 8 Start Menu (Scott Hanselman) - Nice quick tips to setup your Windows 8 environment the way you like it.

Miscellaneous

• PCPlus 312: Dynamic exposures - This nice effect is really easy to do but remember that a tripod is a must and a fix subject too.
• Why is Windows 8 “a catastrophe for anyone in the PC space”? (pcgamesn.com) - Euh, I'm very surprised of this virulent critic of Windows 8. I didn't spend a lot of time on it but, wow that the very opposite of everything I heard before.
• Intelligence vs. Effort | Arronsw - Nice quick post about the good mindset to have versus effort and unknown.
• How to become a great software developer - Great posts that suggest 10 good brain push-ups to become, or stay, a great software developer.
• How to Write Like Your Teacher Told You Not To (Karol K) - Interesting post about how you should write a blog post. Its kind the opposite of writing "the good way" at school.
• Should Your Company Just Say "No" To Dropbox? (Brian Proffitt) - Good question. Like any powerful tools files sharing in some un-informed hands could be problematic.
• The Power of Personal (Darren Rowse) - Interesting topics, it's true that all the post that I had found great was personal.