Reading Notes #679

Exploring the intersection of AI and code this week, I stumbled on a treasure trove of practical insights, from building AI agents in n8n to Meta’s groundbreaking SAM Audio model. The blend of low-code tools, IDE integrations, and deep dives into .NET profiling shows how innovation is bridging creativity and technical rigor. Whether you’re automating workflows or decoding audio separation, there’s something here to spark curiosity and curiosity-driven coding.

AI

• 15 Practical AI Agent Examples to Scale Your Business in 2025 - This post contains many very good ideas of low-code agents that can really help you go through many different types of data

• Introducing SAM Audio: The First Unified Multimodal Model for Audio Separation - An insightful post about how AI could be used in audio

• How to Build an AI Agent in n8n for Beginners: Complete 2025 Guide (Snaplama) - I'm a fan of integration tools, and n8n is obviously part of those great tools. That AI node is very useful, and there are numerous ideas and applications you can explore with it. This post shares how you can do it as an agent, and I think a lot of people should try it

• When AI Amplifies Your Bad (and Good) Habits | The JetBrains AI Blog (Kris Kang) - Another post that helps us picture AI, giving us references to better understand how to use it to achieve the desired result.

• Bring your own AI agent to JetBrains IDEs (Sergey Ignatov) - This post shares many news, yes, you can bring your agent into writer, but also a collaboration with Zed and many new features related to those agents, looking forward to dig into those novelties

Programming

• Aspire 13.1 - Our holiday gift to you (David Fowler) - Nice update for Aspire!

• Creating a .NET CLR profiler using C# and NativeAOT with Silhouette (Andrew Lock) - A deep and very interesting post that plays with the unmanaged function.

• Aspire—Your Stack, Streamlined - Great release. There are breaking changes with Redis, so totally worth the 2 minutes of reading.

~frank

Reading Notes #620

It's Reading Notes time and this week we learn how to improve our experience and security while using AI and containers

 a zip line spider?

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.

Cloud

• Securely Connecting Azure Container Apps to Azure OpenAI Using User Managed Identity (Yoshio Terada) - This is a nice and detailed guide that explains step by step how to leverage manage identity in Azure Container App and stay secure.

AI

• Avoid These 5 Common AI Project Mistakes for Success (Narcosa Admin) - AI is a great tool and with it's new easy accessibility more are integrating it into there services, This post shares tips to give you more chance of success.

• 7 Best Practices for Using GitHub Copilot (Visual Studio Code team) - AI is a great tool, but to enjoy it as much as possible there are a few things we can do, This post shares those tips that could make the differences.

Programming

• Docker for Web Developers: Getting Started with the Basics (Todd R, Weiss) - This is a very well written introduction to container and Docker, From the why should we care to running our first container,

• Building a GraphQL Client in ,NET with JetBrains Rider and StrawberryShake (Maarten Balliauw) - This is a nice post to get started with GraphQL, There is example an many references.

• Improving GitHub Copilot Completions in Visual Studio for C# Developers (Mika Dumont) - Great news! The Semantic Kernel files are now part of the context for Copilot, This improves the experience for the C# developers.

~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 #402

Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

Cloud

• Azure Functions with QueueTriggers and .NET Core – Configuration and Troubleshooting (Jeff) - Poor Jeff, I was there on his stream and he struggles so much to understand what was happening. And honestly me too! Despite the fact that I know and use Azure Function regularly I completely missed the missing instruction... The good news is since the documentation is open-source we can improve it...

Programming

• A quick overview of ASP.NET Core with Rider (Rachel Appel) - I never used Rider in a real project. However, the quality of this code IDE is not in question. It looks awesome and this post shows how it supports the latest version of .Net Core.
• An Introduction to Blazor and Web Assembly (Jeremy Likness) - The perfect post to get started with Blazor and also learn where it comes from.
• Visual Studio Extensions: 8 You Should Check Out (Carlos Schults) - A nice post that shares useful extensions for developers. I also like the fact that in the title it's 8 and in the url it's 7 LOL...

Miscellaneous

• How Serverless is Working in Azure SQL Database – SQLServerCentral (Steve Jones) - Interesting post where the author shares his experience with serverless database version.

Books

The Art of Thinking Clearly

by Rolf Dobelli

I'm still balanced about this book. It was a good book, even if I found some chapters that were too long. I also got lost by moments. I had the impression that some thoughts or ideas were not developed correctly and more quickly wrapped. In counterpart, some were very well served and clear.

Reading Notes #380

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Pipeline YAML Templates and Parameters | LINQ to Fail (Aaron Powell) - An awesome post that will save you hours (or days) of trials and errors. A must.

Cloud

• AZIdentity | Getting It Right: Key Vault Access Policies (Matt Small) - Great post that explans how to use keyvault and sets security correctly.
• 
  Creating a Free Web Site with Elixir and Redis using Docker Compose (Rob Conery) - Great videos continuing our journey in the linux/ azure / docker aventure.
• 
  Which of the 295,680 platform combinations will you create on Microsoft Azure? (Richard Seroter) - Interesting post that explains why enterprises see the cloud differently and what they are looking at.

Programming

• Containers? Images? An introduction to Docker in Rider (Rachel Appel) - This post shows how well-integrated Rider is to Docker and demo how easy and powerful it is to do side with that setup.
• Visual Studio Code Remote Development may change everything (Scott Hanselman) - So many aaahs and oohs while reading this post. I don't have the insider version installed ... But this might be the reason I needed for.

Miscellaneous

• The Pomodoro Technique and other methods to get more done (with tools to help) (Geoff Stevens) - For new developers or older ones, it is always good to revisit the time tracking or tools to help us get better and more productive... There is almost always something new.

~

Reading Notes #312

Suggestion of the week

• Serverless Twitter Analytics with CosmosDB and Logic Apps (Jeremy Likness) - This great post explains the how Azure Logic App is so powerful by giving some examples.

Cloud

• Uploading Nest camera video to Azure Storage (Den Delimarsky) - Cool update that set more cloud-ready an open source project.

Programming

• Azure Table Storage in ASP.NET Core 2.0 (Tahir Naushad) - Cool "code-dump" post that shows how to get everything we need to manage simply our Azure storage.
• How to Scale Your API Design Process with OpenAPI (Ryan Pinkham) - This post introduces SwaggerHubs. I didn't know about this tool, it looks really good. As a heavy Azure user cannot miss some similitude with Api Managment. I will definitely give it a try.
• Simultaneous debugging of JavaScript and .NET code with Rider (Maarten Balliauw) - Rider is packed with great features and is becoming a really incredible tool.

Miscellaneous

• Did you know – Now you can duplicate Line of Code without losing your clipboard content within Visual Studio? (Abhijit Jana) - Nice tips that for me was an "Ah-ah" moment for me.

Reading Notes #307

Cloud

• Azure WebJobs vs. Azure Functions (Simon Timms) - This post answer a question that is often asked... What's The difference...
• How to Create a Logic App Connector in an ARM Template | Vincent-Philippe Lauzon's on WordPress.com (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Here it is guys, the definition of the CosmoDb connector for ARM.

Programming

• DevOps for Data Science – DevOps Maturity (Buck Woody) - This post is the fist of an interesting series.
• Different code styles for different code blocks in ReSharper and Rider (Maarten Balliauw) - Pretty cool comparison.

Miscellaneous

• Extreme Remote Work: The Pros And Cons Of Teamwork Beyond Borders (Tanya Accone) - Are you working in has remote or does your team has remote member? If yes, you should read this post.
• The Value of Continuous Delivery (DAVE NICOLETTE) - This is a really good post that talk/ question why cd.