Reading Notes #611

Welcome to this week’s edition of Reading Notes! In this roundup, we explore a variety of topics across cloud, programming, databases, and AI. From understanding Docker’s USER instruction to styling Blazor components with CSS, I’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in!

Suggestion of the week

• Understanding the Docker USER Instruction (Jay Schmidt) - A great post to that explains really clearly the basic usage of user when building our container. After reading this post you should feel confident to follow this best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Static Web Apps–SWA CLI behind the scenes (Bart Wullems) - Cool post to that quickly explains how the CLIworks and a few different tools.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: Styling Blazor Components with CSS (Claudio Bernasconi) - That will solve an issue I was having... Blazor for the win!

• Is Your ASP.NET Core Application Running In A Container? (Adam Storr) - Very neat tip to know when the App is or not in a container.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

Databases

• Automating SQL Deployments using GitHub Actions - Part 2 (Eduardo Pivaral) - That's pretty neat. Of course, there is a SQL option but I never thought about it. Excellent idea to keep everything in one place with versions.

AI

• Updated Documentation for Semantic Kernel (Sophia Lagerkrans-Pandey) - Nice update in the documentation, new content new look.

~frank

Reading Notes #609

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

• It's Finally Possible To Hibernate Azure VMs (Sam Cogan) - This new feature must be such a relief for all the VM users. Make sure to read this post to know the requirements of the VM tone able to hibernate it.

• Enhancing Performance in Azure Container Apps (Cary Chai) - This post gives us an history of the different algorithm used in ACA but also explains briefly how does one works.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2022 - 17.10 Performance Enhancements - Visual Studio Blog (Ashok Kamath) - Impressive improvement going up to 50% in specific cases! Congratulations to the team,event the smaller speed improvement will be feel.

• Setting up NGINX load balancer for .NET WebApi (Oskar Dudycz) - Very well done tutorial to set a reverse proxy.

• What's new for the Microsoft Fluent UI Blazor library 4.8 (Vincent Baaij) - awesome update just before summer! (well, in the north hemisphere).

AI

• Using Phi-3 & C# with ONNX for text and vision samples - .NET Blog (Bruno Capuano) - Nice post that shows that when using great tools it can be really simple todo amazing things.

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity - ChatGPT and other tools have an impact and it disturb the flow. Some embraces the change other don't like the change. Interesting post where the author shares his concerns.

~frank

Reading Notes #393

Suggestion of the week

• GitHub stars won’t pay your rent (Kitze) - What a great story! This is an awesome journey of a developers who worked hard, took some risk and... Got result. All developer should read this.

Cloud

• 5 Minute Serverless Functions in Azure without an IDE (Heather Downing) - This post and videos are a fantastic way to get started with Azure Function the good way... With security.
• A quick introduction to Azure function proxies (Nadeem Ahamed) - A nice quick intro... That remind's me I should definitely use proxies in one of my project!
• Using KeyVault References to Read Key Vault Secrets (Scott Allen) - Excellent News!

Programming

• Blazor – on the server or on the client (Christian Nagel) - A great post about blazor that explains very well the current status of this very promising tool.
• What Are gRPC Web Services and When Should I Use Them? -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - A very good post that clarifies things. I'm looking forward to see the example with .Net Core.

Miscellaneous

• Role Based Security in an ASP.NET Core Application (Mahesh Sabnis) - A great tutorial that gets you started with identity and asp.net core.

Reading Notes #334

Suggestion of the week

• HTTPS Is Easy! (Troy Hunt) - A wonderful series of 4 videos that explains how to get secure with https. A must!

Cloud

• Function Proxies now Available in Functions Version 2.x! (Alex Karcher) - Yeah! I love it. Function proxies are awesome, if you don't know about them check out my post or videos.
• Static website hosting for Azure Storage now in public preview (Michael Hauss) - Great! Have been waiting for this feature for so long!

Programming

• Ghost in A shell - Part I : localhost (Manu) - A pretty cool little tutorial explains how to use different tools together.
• Detecting that a .NET Core app is running in a Docker Container and SkippableFacts in XUnit (Scott Hanselman) - Really cool way to continue doing unit tests within Docker containers.
• Injecting services to ASP.NET Core controller actions (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice tutorial, step by step, very clear.
• Top Visual Studio Code Extensions from Individual Contributors -- Visual Studio Magazine ( David Ramel) - Congrats to these badass developers.
• Working with T4 templates in Visual Studio - The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard (David Giard) - T4 are a really powerful tool. I used them a while back to avoid magic strings... Nice post to get started.

Miscellaneous

• Why Sunday Is the Most Important Day of the Week for Your Wellbeing (Ryan Coisson) - The secret has always been right in the middle... Well, a middle ;)
• Write That First Blog: Blogging for Programmers (Sander Rossel) - Excellent post that answers a question that is so frequently asked.

Reading Notes #314

Suggestion of the week

• The Modern Dev Team (Rob Conery) - What a great post. Maybe it's only me getting old ;) but I think we all have these thoughts one day or the other.

Cloud

• A great developer experience for Ansible (Corey Sanders) - This post announces the integration of Austin in the cloud shell and visual studio. It somewhere we can learn more about it. I didn't know about it, but I really want t use in my next DevOps tasks.
• Announcing IoT extension for Azure CLI 2.0 (Chrissie Chi) - This post gives you everything you need to know: what it does, how to install it, and even some sample!
• Announcing integration of Azure Backup into VM create experience (Trinadh Kotturu) - Fantastic news, better be prepared then sorry.
• Azure Cosmos DB + Functions Cookbook— static client (Matías Quaranta) - Nice first post of a promising series that shares recipes, gotchas, and examples about two very powerful tools.
• Azure Functions Proxies (Eric Williams) - Azure Functions are a very useful thing to have in your toolbox. With the addition of Proxies, it becomes a must read a few ways to use them in this post.
• Jenkins on Azure: from zero to hero (Pui Chee Chan) - Jenkins is an extremely popular build server. This post list all the features pre-package for you when you deploy it in Azure in a few click.Pretty awesome.
• Migrate your classic storage account to Azure Resource Manager using PowerShell Azure v5.0.x (Stephane Lapointe) - Nice tutorial that shows how to move all (except vhd) your storage in the new format.

Programming

• How I use VSCode, VSTS and GitHub to develop Azure ARM Templates (Eric Leonard) - From A to Z, this post explains all steps in an application life circle; using only three simple tools.
• Dockerizing .NET Apps with Microsoft's Build Images on Docker Hub (Elton Stoneman) - This post explains how to package your .Net app, so the only dependency is... well Docker.
• Scalable and Performant ASP.NET Core Web APIs: Load Testing (Carl Rippon) - A great post that introduces multiple tools to load-test our API with ease BEFORE going to production. A must to all developers.

Databases

• My Favorite SQL Prompt Features (MarlonRibunal) - If you never try SqlPrompt and you write SQL in your day to day, stop read this, and go downloading it, or at least read this post that gives you a glimpse of it's feature.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Essential Trello Boards Every Remote Team Needs (Leah Ryder ) - This is a nice little post packed with good advice for remote workers.
• My Blog Now Has a Content Security Policy - Here's How I've Done It (Troy Hunt) - Interesting post again from Troy, who once more makes us think.

Reading Notes #277

Cloud

• Azure Functions Tools Roadmap (Andrew B Hall) - Interesting post that explains why we should prefer the Azure function template over the VS2015 tooling.
• Monitoring errors in Azure WebJobs with the ErrorTrigger extension (Vivien Chevallier) - Nice tutorial, with the full solution available on Github, that explains how to catch the error in our Azure webjobs.
• Unmasking your swagger with proxies in Azure Functions (Shayne Boyer) - This post explains how to use Azure functions Proxy to improve the developers' experience.
• Use a container to show your function swagger (Shayne Boyer) - Nice quick tutorial to get a more professional structure easily.

Programming

• Dockerizing Nerd Dinner: Part 1, Running a Legacy ASP.NET App in a Windows Container (Elton Stoneman) - Interesting walkthrough where a legacy application is packaged in a Docker container.
• Dockerizing Nerd Dinner: Part 2, Connecting ASP.NET to SQL Server (Elton Stoneman) - Second step in a great tutorial that goes further than the usual hello word, showing how to migrate an application into a multi-container solution.
• Easy data generation with Faker.Data (Guy Barrette) - A quick introduction to a nice little gem that saves us a lot of time.
• Getting Started With Chart.js: Line and Bar Charts (Monty Shokeen) - I've use Chart.js in a project recently, and should I had this great tutorial would have saved me a lot of time.
• Using memory cache in ASP.NET Core (Gunnar Peipman) - Great quick tutorial to know how to setup cache and distributed cache (required in cloud solution).

Miscellaneous

• Bots are the new Apps – Part 2 (Alexandre Brisebois) - This post asks a lot of questions. .Bots are could be very powerful but are they easy to build? Iterate, test, fail, learn, and try again.