Reading Notes #670

Dives into the intersection of AI and development, exploring tools like GitHub Copilot’s AGENTS.md and the MCP Toolkit for automations, alongside .NET 10.0’s performance gains and OpenAI’s recent updates. Whether you’re optimizing serverless APIs with AWS Lambda or mastering the Web Animation API, this post highlights breakthroughs in code efficiency, model customization, and cloud innovation. Dive into these thought-provoking reads to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world.

Have a nice week!

Suggestion of the week

• OpenAI - 2 Updates That Might Change How You Build Software - Many new things from OpenAI. It's definitely a post to read. A lot of new things and changes that will impact our way of building stuff.

Cloud

• Building Fast Serverless APIs With Minimal APIs on AWS Lambda (Milan) - Nice post to get started with the serverless cloud AWS offering aka: lambda

AI

• Developer and AI Code Reviewer: Reviewing AI-Generated Code in .NET - .NET Blog (Wendy Breiding) - Interesting post that suggests a little twist on how to use AI to make code review with a little bit more focus.

• GitHub Copilot's starts supporting AGENTS.md: A step toward unified AI Instructions (Bart Wullems) - Nice move from GitHub to share a common instruction set across all different AI services

• Add MCP Servers to Claude Code with MCP Toolkit (Ajeet Singh Raina) - Very cool way to create automations. I have used a lot of low-code and different alternatives to create automation workflows in the past, but this mCP server interactivity is pretty awesome.

• Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) Explained (Ignasi Lopez Luna) - Nice post that shows how we can specialize a model ourselves for a very narrow, specific topic

Programming

• How .NET 10.0 boosted JSON Schema performance by 18% (Matthew Adams) - Another example of the gain in performance just by upgrading to the latest .NET version.

• The Web Animation API (Christian Nwamba) - It's the first time I've read about this web animation API, pretty cool even if we need to be careful, I think that precision offers could be very interesting for some animations.

Sharing my Reading Notes 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 have interesting content, share it!

~frank

Reading Notes #608

It's reading notes time! 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. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Running a Playwright scheduled job with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - A very nice post about recording test session using azure container app. Good idea!

Programming

• The .NET MAUI Extension for Visual Studio Code is now Generally Available - .NET Blog (Maddy Montaquila) - Wow,already GA! Looking forward to try it on my Linux PC. This post shares all the features packed in this release, and there videos too.

• Introducing collection expressions in C#12: Behind the scenes of collection expressions - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First post of a series that goes deeper into c# comparing expressions, initialization, and what the compiler does.

• Making C# Simple with Fluent Techniques (Niraj Ranasinghe) - Nice post. I didn't realise that Fluent path was used in so many places. It makes it so cleaner when we can use it.

AI

• Visual Studio Code AI Toolkit: Run LLMs locally (Shreyan Fernandes) - It goes so fast! It used to be complicated to get AI and now we can get one locally directly from vs code... Quick post to get us started.

• Announcing the official OpenAI library for .NET - .NET Blog (.NET Team) - Yay! New version of the SDK.

Podcast

• 84. Comparing Terraform, Pulumi and Bicep: Infrastructure as code - with Sam Cogan (Betatalks the podcast) - Create episode with Sam. Really interesting to listen about those three IaC.

• Dan Garfield: GitOps with Kubernetes - Episode 298 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Interesting episode about containers and deploying platforms, tools and so much more.

• Episode 1900 with Scott Hanselman! (.NET Rocks!) - Three of my favorite people in the word in a single episode! It was such a pleasure to listen pleasure to listen talk about all those little stories. Long live to .NET Rocks (and HanselMinutes)

Miscellaneous

• What's new in the Windows Subsystem for Linux in May 2024 (Craig Loewen) - Tons of experimental features are being move to regular ones, and more are coming up to manage our distro, improve security and more.

• 8 Learning Paths for Beginners on GitHub (Cynthia Zanoni) - Wow! so many very cool learning Path to get started with anything you can think about it. I may do one or two just to refresh my knowledge.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #571

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!

Cloud

• Serverless Playwright the easy way with Azure Container Apps (Anthony Chu) - I didn't think about that scenario but wow! Thats very efficient ant much easier.

Programming

• 6 Best Practices for Documenting APIs (Nduka John) - Documentation is often what makes the difference. Bad docs may cause users to not use correctly the APIs.

• New .NET Upgrade Assistant version with feature updates and .NET MAUI improvements! - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - Wow that a pretty cool and powerful tool! I really like the mixed upgrade with project file and version.

• Generative AI and .NET - Part 2 SDK | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - Nice series where we explore the SDK building a .NET poroject.

Open Source

• Walkthroughs in the Windows Terminal Repository (Mike Griese) - Contributing to big oss project is challenging.The Windows Terminal team had a cool idea to make it easier.There is a video version of this blog is you prefer.

• Microsoft PowerToys v0.73.0: A Comprehensive Overview (Kunal Chowdhury) - Cool post that shares new utilities in PowerToys and explains the optimization of the others.

Miscellaneous

• Navigating Developer Burnout: Causes, Impacts, and Strategies for a Ba (Christopher Johnson) - A truthful and realistic post. If you never been exposed to burnout, take 2 minutes to read this.

~Frank

Reading Notes #569

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!

Cloud

• Stream videos from Azure Blob storage with ASP.NET Core (Mark Heath) - A great end-to-end tutorial leveraging cost-efficient Azure resources.

• Using ETags and Patching Rows in Azure Table Storage (Mark Heath) - Nice post that shows us simply and quickly how to manage conflicts when using Azure Table Storage.

Programming

• Speed up Visual Studio load times with Microsoft Dev Box (Greg Denton) - Woooo! Speed... From our Visual Studio that runs locally or remote via DevBox, awesome.

• Adding a “share to mastodon” link to any web site – and here (Christian Heilmann) - I didn't think about it but it's true that there are many different URLs with Mastodon... This post shares the code for one of the solutions to solve this issue.

Miscellaneous

• Unleash Your Inner Entrepreneur with MS FounderHub: AI-Based Startups with Azure OpenAI Services (Lee Stott) - Motivating post to do something. So many have great ideas and just sit on it... With today's technology, many blockers can be removed...

~ Frank

Reading Notes #542

Cloud

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 1 - Azure Service Bus (James Dawson) - In this post the author switch the pub sub service and it looks so simple. Interesting.

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 0 - Introduction (James Dawson) - This first post of the series provides us details about the plans and why Dapr seams interesting as a resource for this project.

• Azure Communication Services February 2023 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Happy to see the new release coming up packed with useful features and capability.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - February 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Wow! The Dev CLI is kicking the new year with a big release. New templates on many languages and new features.

• General availability: Mount Azure Storage as a local share in App Service Windows Code (Unknown) - Important milestone reached. Congrats!

Programming

• A Fancy Hover Effect For Your Avatar (Temani Afif) - Wow! From my point of views this look loke magic. With only one HTML element and a few lines of CSS... Bravo!

• Blazor and Azure OpenAI (Michael Washington) - Cool demo using OpenAI API. Because yes ChatGPT is fun but there are APIs to build real apps.

• How to use Entity Framework Core in ASP.NET Core (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - This is a very nice tutorial that guides us each steps along the way. Clear detailed, very nice.

• Merging Git repositories without losing history (Dennis Doomen) - Great tutorial that not only provides the solution but explains step by steps why we do each of them.

Podcasts

• 341: Frank Masters In-App Subscriptions (Merge Conflict) - A big thank you to Frank and James for sharing that journey. We too often only ear about the happy path, and it's great to listen to all those challenges you incountered and how you managed to move forward.
• Embracing The Fall with Carla Hall (A Bit of Optimism) - YES! So true! Falling instead of failling. Like a very wise man told me long time ago, the important is to bounce; get back on your feet and standup.
• Alice and Bob Learn App Security with Tanya Janca (.NET Rocks!) - Great great episode with the amazing Tanya. Looking forward for that next book!
• 49. Using Azure Container Apps, KEDA, Infrastructure as Code and ARM - with Eduard Keilholz (Betatalks the podcast) - From the MVP stories, to the infrastructure as code with the detour around the bulletproof demo or candies... This episode is indeed like a delicious candy.

~Frank

Reading Notes #510

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!

The Suggestion of the week

• Incremental ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core Migration (Taylor Southwick) - Migrating an application is not an easy task. This post shares the new GitHub repos that the .NET team puts in place with guidance, pattern, and toolings to help us. Really interesting, bookmark that one for future references.

Cloud

• Azure Logic Apps team is interested in your feedback – BizTalk Business Rules Engine Survey (Sandro Pereira) - Integration technologies are so useful, help the teams to plan their priorities.

Programming

• Introducing Project Volterra (Mark Downie) - This little beast really caught my attention during Build. I'm impatient to learn more about it.

• GitHub Copilot AI Programming Assistant to Hit GA This Summer (Rabia Noureen) - The demos are really impressive, and the comments are all positive. I'll try it for sure!

Data

• Introducing the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Rohan Kumar) - This post is an excellent summary of the data and AI news from Microsoft Build.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft's metaverse rival Meta chooses Azure as strategic cloud provider (Arif Bacchus) - Meta, a new world to explore...

~frank