Reading Notes #545

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

• Azure portal January 2023 updates (Allison Cordle) - Noce quick update from the portal.A few new features related to VMs.

• Creating a Configuration Module for your Infrastructure as Code (Sam Cogan) - This is a great post to help us be more efficient in our DevOps practices when writing IaC.

• Fetching Credentials with the Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - Awesome post that shares very useful commands. Add this on your cheatsheet or bookmark that post.

• Host WordPress in Microsoft Azure with App Service (PaaS hosting) (Chris Pietschmann ) - When we are interested in WordPress, we are looking for a key in-hand experience. We don't want to manage code and connections and too much technical stuff. Having it hosted in PaaS Azure simplifies even more this.

Programming

• Docker Desktop 4.17: New development functionality (Alyssa Shames) - Learn more about how this new release helps us to be more secure and track the details of our containers in the post.

• Dapr 1.10 - More steps in the right direction (Mark Heath) - This is great! I'm happy to see the multi-app functionality as I was totally waiting for it. And the workflow is definitely something that interests me.

• What To Be Wary of With Iterators and Collections in C# (Nick Cosentino) - An interesting deep comparison between different ways to fetch and manipulate data in C#.

~ frank

Reading Notes #482

Another Monday, a new reading notes; a list of all the articles, blog posts, 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.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – August 2021 | Azure blog and updates (Michael Flanakin) - Pretty nice updates this month to better see the info from inside the portal or outside with new downloadable options, and Power Bi.

• Deconstructing Azure PowerShell APIs with Fiddler (Developer Support) - I love seeing those behind the scenes, and this one explains how we can do it ourselves.

Programming

• How WebAssembly Could Streamline Cloud Native Computing (Mary Branscombe) - Interesting post. I didn't play a lot of work kubernetes yet, so I will say the idea seems brilliant.

• My Ultimate PowerShell prompt with Oh My Posh and the Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - This is the perfect post to get started. You have everything to build a pretty decent customized prompt and from there you just tweak it for your preferences... Don't be scare everything is very well documented.

• Boost your productivity with Productivity Power Tools Extensions in Visual Studio 2022! (Leslie Richardson) - This next VisualStudio is looking so promising....very excited

Podcast

• How to Earn More Keynote Speaking Opportunities From Your Podcast (Feed Your Brand) - Interesting discussion on this episode. We could also summarize it by saying just be good to your host.

• SPI 502: All Things Live Video (the Best Way to Connect to Your Audience) with Luria Petrucci (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - That's a hot topic: live! Yep, it is indeed different from recorded content, so what do we need to do to be better at it? Very nice episode.

~frank

Reading Notes #477

Every Monday, I share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all 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.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• Tips and Tricks and Best Practices for Hybrid Meetings with Microsoft Teams and more (Scott Hanselman) - I love that post. We learned so much in the last months. Now that all have experienced the remote, let's keep that in mind and build best practices on top of it.

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – July 2021 (Michael Flanakin) - Many updates are introduced in this post, and there are also videos if you prefer.

• Bring Your Own Storage in Azure Web App (Kevin Li) - Interesting post that explains how the details about how to do it. I wish there were more details about some good scenarios of when to use that.

Programming

• PowerShell: Download script or file from GitHub (Thomas Maurer) - That cool! I wish it was as simple as the bash curl, but it's a start.

• ASP.NET Core updates in .NET 6 Preview 6 (Daniel Roth) - Nice post that explains the new features, how to get started, and also how to migrate.

• Blazor Debugging Improvements in Rider 2021.2 (Rachel Appel) - That's super cool debugging wasm...

• Welcome to the Community Toolkit! (Michael Hawker) - A new name, more friends so much news for this group.

Miscellaneous

• Should you attend yet another meeting? (Luise Freese) - Think about it... We all do it. Nice and funny diagram.

~Frank

Reading Notes #440

Cloud

• Azure portal August 2020 update (Angie Doyle) - Wonderful Updates better search, better productivity.Very nice.

• Path based routing in Azure Application Gateway with Azure WebApps (Dominique St-Amand) - Great post that explains how to get the most of our domain name and workaround a little limitation of the portal.

Programming

• How to Develop an ASP.NET Core Application Using Visual Studio Code (Mathankumar Rajendran) - The perfect post to get started without impacting too much (installing heavy software) your computer.

• Configuring Codespaces for .NET Core Development (Justin Yoo ) - This post goes deeper than the usual hello word type of post about Codespace. It really shows an example of configuration.

• Have you built your GitHub Profile README yet? (Mayank Choudhary) - What?! This is super cool, and I didn't know about it.

• How to Work With Client-Side Blazor (Jon Hilton ) - This is a great simple post to get started with Blazor web assembly. Simple enough so all can understand what it is and what's nice about it.

• Introducing Blazor Automatic Kingdom (null) - Interesting of the popular blocky UI/UX with Blazor.

• Introduction to SVELTE (Sohaib Nehal) - As I rediscover JavaScript, it's fascinating to see how much this language as evolve and now have so many great frameworks.

• WSL 2 Support is coming to Windows 10 Versions 1903 and 1909 | Windows Command Line (Tyler) - Yeah! One of my computers is not in the insider program and was still with WSL1... But not anymore.

Podcasts

• 087: Learning Azure with Gwyneth Pena (CloudSkills.fm) - In this episode, you will discover a freshly awarded MVP, a brilliant content creator, and super energetic women. Wonderful.

• Why you should double down on intergration testing with Kent C. Dodds (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Tests are important we all know that (well we should), but there is a shift about the type of tests that are the best one recently... Interesting.

• Working in Public: Open Source Software with Nadia Eghbal (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A very interesting conversation about the open-source work today. She is the author of the book Working in Public, which looks fascinating.

• #169 – Thinking One Step Ahead to Grow Your Business through PR with Dmitry Dragilev of JustReachOut.io (The Indie Hackers Podcast) - I think this quote used summarize perfectly: Just because you built it doesn't mean people will come. Great discussion.

• The Shorts -- Twindom (The Dirtbag Diaries) - A really touching story of two sisters and a hiking trip that changed her lives.

~

How to Manage Azure Resources

What ever you are on running on Linux, Mac or Windows that you are on the road or in the comfort of your office there is many different ways to manage your Azure resources. In this video I will show you five ways to do it and explain the pros and cons of each:

1. Azure Portal
2. Azure PowerShell
3. Azure CLI
4. Azure Mobile App
5. Azure Cloud Shell

There is also an excellent Microsoft Learn module that will teach you how to use the Azure portal efficiently.

References

• Azure Portal: https://portal.azure.com
• Learn Module: https://c5m.ca/azFun-portal
• Azure PowerShell: https://c5m.ca/azPS
• Azure CLI: https://c5m.ca/azCLI
• Azure Mobile App: https://c5m.ca/azMobileApp
• Azure Cloud Shell: https://shell..azure.com

Reading Notes #400

Cloud

• 10 user experience updates to the Azure portal | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Leon Welicki) - I'm very pleased with this portal update. Seriously I spent the last two weeks doing tons of demo and all those improvements... Wonderful!

• Improving observability of your Kubernetes deployments with Azure Monitor for containers | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Keiko Harada) - Great post about monitoring within Kubernetes.

Programming

• Cool WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) tips and tricks you (or I) didn't know were possible (Scott Hanselman) - Tons of awesome tips with WSL.

• ASP.NET Core updates in .NET Core 3.1 Preview 3 (Sourabh) - Preview 3... The final version is coming pretty soon!

• Getting feedback from EntityFramework Core through diagnostics (Dominique St-Amand) - This is a great tutorial that explains how to use the Application Insight SDK with EF.

• Trying out Visual Studio Online - Using the cloud to manage and compile your code is amazing (Scott Hanselman) - VSOnline is so cool! I personally just briefly tried it (busy with Ignite and Ignite The Tour) but it was working great. Looking forward to testing the VSCode extension...

~

Reading Notes #365

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management now general availability for enterprise agreements and more! (Raphael Chacko) - Great news for the PAYG and enterprise subscriptions.
• Configure resource group control for your Azure DevTest Lab (Tanmayee Kamath) - This is a fantastic news. The DevTestLabs were real little resources groups generator, so now we will be able to keep it cleaner.
• Make the most of your monthly Azure Credits (Angelos Petropoulos) - Yes, that true you can run a lot of things for free!
• Step-By-Step: Getting Started with Azure Machine Learning (Anthony Bartolo) - This is a fantastic post to get started with machine learning.
• Remove a directory from your Azure account (Dominique St-Amand) - Awesome quick tips. It's time to clean up these accounts!

Miscellaneous

• How Satya Nadella Uses Learn-It-All to Beat Know-It-All (Terence Mauri) - Interesting thoughts, it totally makes sense.
• Microsoft Build 2019 Developer Conference May 6-8 Seattle, WA (build) - Great! Registration starts end of February .
• Why you don't have time to advance your career - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - An excellent post as I was reading it I couldn't stop thinking yep so true!

Books

I Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling In Love with Your Fears Can Change the World (Kyle Cease)

I was definitely not expecting that, when I picked up this book, but I am happy I did.

This "self-help" book is filled with a ton of comedy and I appreciated it. I felt like my best friend was talking about a serious topic but because he was in a crazy good mood was just having a good time telling me his story. Simple and real. It leaves you with a lot to think about.

Reading Notes #356

Suggestion of the week

• Security Headers (Tanya Janca) - Interesting post that shows the code/configuration we need to add, in order to get a more secure website.

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure portal December 2018 update (Peri Rocha) - Nice new update.. The last one of the year.
• Serverless Google App Engine Flex Custom Docker Runtime & Cloud SQL Backend with Swift & Vapor Web API (Alfian Losari) - Great tutorial that explains how to build a web backend.
• Créez vos Logic Apps via des templates ARM (Wilfried Woivré) - An excellent post in French that explains step by step how to build our ARM template to deploy an Azure Logic Apps.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 2.2 Parameter Transformers for clean URL generation and slugs in Razor Pages or MVC (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains a new feature of the new core release.
• How to become a Git expert (Aditya Sridhar) - A very nice post that explains how to fix common mistake users does and also explains how to keep our history clean.
• Web Architecture 101 (Jonathan Fulton) - This is a very complete article that does a tour of every piece of a web solution.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Books That Will Help You Become a Better Writer (Glenn Leibowitz) - A nice little list of books for the holiday...
• Becoming a better supporter of women in tech (Tom) - Great post. Share it.
• Leadership Mode Activate (Allen Pike) - Don't be affray to move forward and smash!
• Write more compact SQL Server code using new features (Sergey Gigoyan) - This is a nice way to learn how to be more efficent with SQL.

Books

Fast Focus: A Quick-Start Guide To Mastering Your Attention, Ignoring Distractions, And Getting More Done In Less Time! (Damon Zahariades) - Great book well organized. Simple strike to the point. It is divided into three parts: understanding focus, creating an environment for focus, and employing tactics to focus. It lists the top 10 obstacles to staying focused and gives you a great idea on how to get start your journey.











~

Reading Notes #347

Cloud

• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 162 - ARM Templates Demystified (Michael Crump) - Nice little intro to know what is ARM at a very high level. Seriously every introduction talk about ARM should start like that.
• Azure Portal October update (Peri Rocha) - I'm sure you noticed... The portal is always evolving getting better every day. This post list all the changes, what have you missed?

Programming

• How to get HTTPS working on your local development environment in 5 minutes (Daksh Shah) - Tired to get the unsecured notification when working locally? This tutorial will explain all the steps to fix that.
• Introduction to Vue.js with a Single Page Application (SPA) in Visual Studio - Simple Talk (Damon Armstrong) - Very complete and detailed article, the perfect one to get started with vue.js
• Update on .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8 (Scott H) - Great update and a glimpse of the Frameworks roadmap.

Data

• Fun with SQL Server Containers (Donovan Brown) - Interesting post. Perfect to get ready in 5 minutes.

Miscellaneous

• An Introduction to AI at LinkedIn (Deepak Agarwal) - Interesting reel life case where AI is used... Not crazy sci-fi, very day to day improvement.

Reading Notes #294

Suggestion of the week

• 15 Lessons Learned while Converting from ASP.NET to .NET Core (Matt Watson) - What a great post! You must put it in your to-read list before starting your next .Net Core session.

Cloud

• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 1 - Use Keyboard Shortcuts in the Azure Portal (Michael Crump) - This post is the first of a series that will show tons of little gems hidden in the Azure portal.
• What is Azure Event Grid? (Chris Pietschmann) - Great post that introduces the new kid on the block (in the cloud).
• Microsoft builds Raspberry Pi Simulator - All cool is that!

Programming

• Visual Studio Code on Raspbian - Pretty cool that VSCode is now available on RaspberryPi!

Miscellaneous

• A New Real-Time AI Platform from Microsoft, and a Speech Recognition Milestone (Cortana Intelligence and ML Blog Team) - This post is a good summary of the recent news from Microsoft in AI.
• Dressing Better Than... Your Boss? (John Sonmez) - Interesting thoughts about the dress code in enterprises.
• The Best Books All Software Developers Should Read (John Sonmez) - Definitely worth it. Y next book to read is probably in this best-of list
• Write It Down! (Victor Savkin) - Interesting suggestion to get better.

Reading Notes #266

Suggestion of the week

• 22 tips to lower Azure pricing and optimize hosting costs (Matt Watson) - Fantastic list that overviews a lot of opportunities to lower the total of our Azure receipt.

Cloud

• Announcing the new Azure Marketplace experience (Shankar Sivadasan) - Another proof that Microsoft is really listening to his customers and partners, nice improvement.
  
• Azure Application Insights – An essential part of Microsoft DevOps Strategy (Subodh Sohoni) - Excellent post that explains why Application Insights is a must for all DevOps.
  
• Calling a Logic App from an HTML form (Jeff Hollan) - Nice usage of the HTTP trigger.
  
• Now available: Azure invoices emailed direct to your inbox (Adam Pickersgill) - Sweet! Now we talk.
  
• Understanding the Azure App Service Editor (Ken Cenerelli) - My first reaction was: No way, this is awesome! And it is. E was in place to implement this cool tool. However, remember that this is only to do some quick fix, because, at the next deployment, these changes will be lost.

Programming

• If You Automate Your Tests, Automate Your Code Review (Erik Dietrich) - Interesting post that explains the idea about automating our code reviews. It gives a book as suggestions to learn more about it.

Databases

• SQL Database Query Editor available in Azure Portal (Ninar Nuemah) - I was looking for this since the old query tool was removed. I will probably continue to use SQL studio management or VsCode, put what a time saving, and you are investigating a problem... Open a blade right from the Azure portal and voila!

Miscellaneous

• MVP API Intro (Daron Yöndem) - I love it! I already have few ideas in mind, and I'm curious to see what you will do guys.

Reading Notes #253

Suggestion of the week

• Why Can’t I View My Power BI Content Pack?  - This post is a big slice of answers, spiced with experience and a touch of wisdom.

Cloud

• Azure Managed Cache and In-Role Cache Service shutdown reminder (Ye Gu) - In less than two weeks your solution could be in big trouble if you didn't change the cache type...
  
• Top 4 reasons for using Azure Security Center for partner security solutions (Yair Tor) - Seriously, it worth try it.

Programming

• Is jQuery Still Relevant? (TJ VanToll) - Very interesting and instructive conversation about THE JavaScript framework that everyone knows:JQuery .
  
• Localization & Routing in ASP.NET Core 1.0 - Hisham - Nice post ,right to the point.

Databases

• Temporal Tables are generally available in Azure SQL Database (Borko Novakovic) - Useful new feature to track changes across time.
  
• SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 (Luis Vargas) - Woohoo the server is now available.

Everything we Should Know About the new Azure Usage And Billing (AUBI) Portal

(Ce billet en aussi disponible en français.)

If one image is worth a thousand words, then it's incredible the amount of information you have in Azure Usage And Billing (AUBI). This portal is a open-source project that has been announced a few weeks ago. In this post, I will share my first impressions about it.



The project is still young, but every alive. When I installed it, I had one or two minor issues, but by the time I wrote this post all of them were already fixed.

Where it is?

The Azure Usage And Billing site is not a website like portal.azure.com; it consists of a solution you need to deploy in an Azure subscription. It doesn't require to be the subscription you wish to monitor, just a subscription you have access. The solution contains: two web sides with both Application Insights and one also with webjobs, an SQL Database, a storage account and you will also need to deploy a Power BI report.



All of it can be easily deployed using the PowerShell script and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template included. Only a few manual steps will be required. Hopefully, a very clear and completed documentation is available in video or written. Both present on the Github project page.

What can I do with it?

Once fully deployed, you will need to navigate to your instance of the Registration portal (ex: http://frankregistrationv12.azurewebsites.net) and register all the subscriptions you want. After the webjobs are finished bringing all the data, they will all be available in the Power BI Reports.
Power BI does an incredible work by showing all the information about your subscription(s). A very useful point here is that all information present in the dashboard is interactive! Whatever you select simply one or many subscriptions or only a specific category of Azure service, all the other tiles will be automatically adjusted.

What's Next?

If it's not already done, I highly recommend installing the AUBI portal and start enjoying the detail of all that information available to you without any effort, and presented in such a beautiful way. For all the details about the prerequisites or the install procedure got to the Github project page.

Reference:

• Announcing the release of the Azure Usage and Billing Portal
• Git AzureUsageAndBillingPortal

Reading Notes #237

Cloud

• Azure Redis Cache May 2016 update (Pranav Rastogi) - Quick overview o this update.
  
• Release of Service Fabric SDK 2.1.150 and Runtime 5.1.150 - Have you played with Azure Fabric yet? Here is your chance with new SDK that provides more features and fixes some bugs.
  
• Application Insights is a Business Tool (Alexandre Brisebois) - Indeed, Application Insights is a business tool and a good one. Even more since it's available Azure services.
  
• Azure Media Services is now available in the new Azure portal (Mingfei Yan) - Fantastic another big piece that joined all the other services in the new portal.
  
• Power BI - Microsoft Azure Media Services and Power BI - Great tutorial that explains how to setup a cool dashboard and help you to get more about your media consumers.

Programming

• How to Debug and Run .NET CORE RC2 direct from within Visual Studio Code (Luís Henrique Demetrio) - Wow. I try on Windows, and it takes least than 5 minutes to get setup. Really cool.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn - This is a really big move ... even more at the and of the fiscal year.

What's your plan B when the Azure Portal is not responding

(Ce billet en aussi disponible en français.)

You are about to test the last version of your solution. You just need to change some configuration in the Micosoft Azure Portal, and you are good to go. To do it, you log in the portal at http://portal.azure.com and navigate to your component and... Error! What you see is a little sad cloud.

The Problem

This just happened to the team I'm working with. They needed to change the traffic manager's endpoint to do a traffic test. Unfortunately, the grid that contains the Endpoint was in a bad status and was not available. It looked like a deadened!



But it is really? Of course not. Here what you can do.

The Solution

Remember Microsoft is sharing the same API the Azure portal is using. That the beauty of the Azure Portal, you can use it has a convivial way to do your what you need, or you can access it via many different SDKs that are available today: .Net, Java, Node.js, Php, Python, Ruby and more! You also have command line tools that could help to manage your Azure services and apps using scripts.
To know more about all the SDK available or the command-line refer to the Azure SDKs documentation pages online.



This time we were in a Windows environment, and we needed to modify one Endpoint of a Taffic Manager. Here what we did using Azure PowerShell Cmdlets:

# Login to our account
Login-AzureRmAccount

# Set the context we will work in. Use Get-AzureRmSubscription to list all your subscriptions. 
Set-AzureRmContext -SubscriptionName "MySubscriptionName"

# List All Traffic Manager Profile 
Azure Get-AzureTrafficManagerProfile 

# Load our endpoint in a variable, change the value we need and put it back.
$endpoint = Get-AzureRmTrafficManagerEndpoint -Name myendpoint -ProfileName myprofile -ResourceGroupName "MyResourceGroupName" -Type ExternalEndpoints
$endpoint.Weight = 50
Set-AzureRmTrafficManagerEndpoint -TrafficManagerEndpoint $endpoint

In this case, we used the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) commands, but all the commands are also available in the service mode. To know more about how to deploy with ARM you can read my previous post. To see all the command available supported with ARM to configure your solution, go see the documentation online.
Happy testing!

References:

• Azure SDKs
• Azure Resource Manager support for Azure Traffic Manager

Reading Notes #213

Cloud

• Announcing the Azure SDK 2.8.1 for .NET (Brady Gaster) - Great new feature and improvement in this last SDK release..
  
• General availability of Premium tier (Pranav Rastogi) - Great announcement, plus details about the difference between the regular and the premium version.
  
• Azure Resource Manager Authentication In PowerShell (Scott) - Interesting sharing... It doesn't work always on the first try.
  
• Azure Container Service preview (Ross Gardler) - Get ready to play with Linux container... And soon Windows one.
  
• Continuous Delivery of Azure WebJobs via Git (Jan Hentschel) - Great tutorial that gets us started with Webjobs and continuous deployment.
  
• Partner Incentives – the move to Active Usage - Very interesting post that explains why Microsoft has changes their way to look at their Azure metrics.
  
• Announcing Azure Portal general availability (Leon Welicki) - The portal finally gets to the quality level that was targeted by Microsoft... well, long time ago. The portal will still continue to evolve, but it's now a full fledge product.
  
• Things to remember when you work with Azure and the new Team Build (Matteo Emili) - Nice post that gives us a little more depth about get ready to use build in the cloud.

Programming

• Application contracts with Swagger powered APIs for .NET or Why SwaggerProvider - This post explains how swagger can simplify our Api coding time.
  
• Glimpse at Application Insights Telemetry (Beckylin Orooji) - Awesome news, the great tools that or now integrated together. I'm really looking forward to trying that.
  
• PowerShell Tests released on GitHub (Karol Kaczmarek, Steve Lee, David Wilson) - Nice announcement from the powershell team that shared on github their tests' strategy... Expect some Pester!

Databases

• Transactional Replication to Azure SQL DB now in public preview (Jean-Yves Devant) - Since most of the time the first project is a migration, this new tool, will be very useful.