Reading Notes #695

A mix of thoughtful perspectives and practical updates this week. From evolving AI tools and model selection guidance to changes in developer workflows and tooling, there’s plenty to reflect on. Add in insights on streaming and a strong push toward more secure environments, and you get a well-rounded set of reads worth your time.

Suggestion of the week

• Why MicroVMs: The Architecture Behind Docker Sandboxes (Srini Sekaran, Craig Gumbley) - Yes! Officially launched, so we can finally include some security in our processes!

AI

• Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs - Looking forward to try the new interface that that seams to allow a more artistic interaction.

• The importance of people who care – Rachel Andrew - Interesting post about people who care in the world, where doing a lot of stuff fast is seen as a goal

• Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans (Joe Binder) - Big changes for Copilot that will probably affect your workflow. This post shares the details and reasons of this disturbance; it's all for a good reason

• GPT-5 vs GPT-4.1 - choosing the right model for your use case - Microsoft Foundry - Yes, this post is about two specific models in Foundry, but it's still true that it can definitely help to understand when to pick one model over the other in general

Programming

• It's Time for a Visual Studio Upgrade - This post does a comparison between the old and the new versions of the Visual Studio IDE and shares details about the most impactful changes.
  
  

Miscellaneous

• Livestreaming Before It Was Cool (Golnaz) - Curious to learn more about the streaming options from the different platforms to the tools, and the pro and cons of each? This post is for you, and on top of that, you get the Microsoft story.

~frank

Reading Notes #418

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are 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. Enjoy!

Cloud

• How to live-stream meetups on Twitch without any special equipment (Alex Casalboni) - Really cool experimentation and ideas using AWS cloud.

• Run Azure PowerShell in a Docker Container (Thomas Maurer) - Really useful tips to use different versions of PowerShell without having to install them.

Programming

• How to migrate an ASP.NET MVC app from .NET Core 2.2 to .NET Core 3.1 (Claudio Bernasconi) - This is a good step by step tutorial for a migration.

• EF Core 5.0: Using ToQueryString() method to translate LINQ query to SQL (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice little and cool feature coming up in the next version.

• How to create better code using Domain-Driven Design - Software House Altkom Software & Consulting (null) - A really interesting and complete article that explains it all.

• Introducing the New Pull Request Experience for Azure Repos | Azure DevOps Blog (Apeksha Awasthi) - Wonderful PR used to be a GitHub only feature... Really happy to see that it is now also present on Azure DevOps Repos.

• WSL2 will be generally available in Windows 10, version 2004 | Windows Command Line (Craig Loewen) - WSL2 is the next best thing I install on my PC since Win10 and used with the new Docker for Windows... It's fantastic

Shameless plug

• How to know how much your application is consuming on Azure (Frank Boucher) - Great post and video in both French and English that explains how to plan, visualize and monitor the cost of your applications in the cloud. And there is also a great MS Learn Azure Cost Management module.

Podcasts

• Des fonctions courtes, qui font une chose (Les Semi-Colons) - First time for me listening to this podcast, third time for them. A very interesting podcast in "Canadian French". They are passing through the book Clean Code of Robert C. Martin. This episode was about chapter 3.

• vygl - Le balado Ep.17 (vygl) - Great podcast in French. It was my first try and I really liked it. We can ear the experience of the speaker in their voice but also by the quality of this audio.

• Episode 14: What developers should know about security with Troy Hunt (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Okay, I know I've been a big fan of Troy for years, but this podcast is an incredibly interesting interview.

Miscellaneous

• An Update on the MSDN and TechNet Migration to docs.microsoft.com (Jeff Sandquist) - It was looking mostly like an impossible mission, but with a lot of work, it is really incredible the things that can be achieved. This post shares the status of the migration of each section.

~

Reading Notes #367

Suggestion of the week

• Eight things your existing ASP.NET apps should get for “free” from a good platform (Richard Seroter) - If you have a solution that runs on-premises, this is why you should at lest consider doing a lift & shift... Seriously, this post is a must.

Cloud

• Accessing Azure Key Vault using Managed Service Identity Logic Apps (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - An awesome tutorial that hit two targets with one demo.
• Migrating Azure Functions from v1 (.NET) to v2 (Jeremy Likness) - A great story and an migration walkthrough. It's most likely that by following these steps we can only be successful with our migration.
• Announcing launch of Azure Pipelines app for Slack (Atin Bansal) - Great integration on a tool that so many of us used.
• Update to Azure DevOps Projects support for Azure Kubernetes Service | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Atul Malaviya) - It's now easier to use these two great tools together.

Programming

• Everything You Need for Coding with Node and Cosmos DB in 60 Seconds-ish (John Papa) - Get started quickly. Excellent tips.
• Introducing the Cake.VsCode.Recipe Package (Gary Ewan Park) - Great set of tools to help us build awesome VSCode extension.
• Introducing draft pull requests (Luke) - That look like a very useful feature! Looking forward to try it.
• Keep Calm, and Keep Coding with Cosmos and Node.js (John Papa) - An excellent first-time tutorial.

Miscellaneous

• Exploring nopCommerce - open source e-commerce shopping cart platform in .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - This open source project looks very interesting.
• Applied AI in Software Development (Afsana Atar) - This post is an excellent overview of whats AI at ten thousand feet in the air. Perfect if you are not a data scientist and would like to learn more about that trend.
• My Twitch Live Coding Setup (Suz Hinton) - A great post from Suz (aka Noopkat) a long time technical streamer, who his both very smart and generous. Definitely, a post to read.
• Using the Basic Process Template in Azure DevOps to make support management easier (Matteo Emili) - I love it. Start simple to learn fast. Then if you need it, grow, but smartly.

Reading Notes #362

Suggestion of the week

• ARM Templates vs Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - What a great post that answer (well..explains) the pros and cons of each method. Great post Mark!

Cloud

• Creating a Massively Scalable Blog with Ghost, MySQL and Azure (Rob Conery) - Nice script, neat explication and tweak.
• Deploying a personal blog with GitHub Actions (Den Delimarsky) - Very cool tutorial... Nice to see a static generator in Go.
• Moving your ASP.NET applications to the Microsoft Cloud (Premier Developer) - If you are thinking to migrate to the cloud, it's important to plan your migration. This post is the perfect point to get started, it contains references to deeper books and documents.

Programming

• Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server in NodeJS Applications (Michael Szul) - Nice tutorial that shows how to write some test in Typescript.
• What are all the Chocolatey repositories for? (Gary Ewan Park) - Woooh.I didn't know Chocolatey had so many repos! Awesome and very instructive post.
• Kubernetes Ingress Controllers and Certificates: The Walkthrough (Jessica Deen) - Awesome video!
• The Life of a GitHub Action (Jessie Frazelle) - A nice quick post that clarifies things around those actions.
• The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code (Lyn Levenick) - Cool statistics about editor usage. Not sure of the real correlation with the editor used and the skill level, but it's still an interesting coincidence.

Miscellaneous

• How to Forget About Work When You’re Not Working (Art Markman) - Interesting post that treats an important topic.
• Stream Deck Tricks for Streamers… and Muggles too! (Jeff) - Fantastic post that explains so much why that little thing can save you so much pain. As THE day when I'm starting to stream get closer and closer... This is gold.

~

Reading Notes #342

Cloud

• Logic Apps, Flow connectors will make Automating Video Indexer simpler than ever (Uri Greenberg) - This post explains how to extract a lot of insights from a video in a codeless solution. I did something similar with the v1 here.
• .NET Rocks! vNext (Carl and Richard, John Papa) - How could you not try to do some node on Azure after listening to that episode?

Programming

• Writing a Blazor App (David Pine) - This tutorial shows how to build a simple blazor app...and it's NOT the hello-word or todo.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Ghost 2.0 (John O'Nolan) - Woo that a big change! If you don't know Ghost already, it worth a try.
• Azure Block Blob Storage Backup (Hemant Kathuria) - A very cool tutorial that explains all steps to build a full incremental back-up between azure blob storages (in two different subscription)]
• How do you even know this crap? (Scott Hanselman) - An interesting post that successfully connects developers, dungeon & dragon, and poop~?
• OBS for Twitch (John Papa) - A quick post about the OBS that everybody is talking about.
• TPZ160: Bikepacking Iceland and Sri Lanka with George Maurer (Paul Schmid, George Maurer) - An incredible trip story.

Reading Notes #272

Cloud

• Cloud Messaging – Amazon or Azure? (Steve Smith) - Great post that suggests an answer to the eternal question.
  
• Connect Tableau to an Azure Analysis Services server (Josh Caplan) - Nice integration.
  
• Visual Studio Talk Show - Les données et Azure (Guy Barrette) - It was really pleasant to record that podcast. I hope it is also to listen.
  
• Leverage the Azure CLI with these examples (Brian Benz) - If you would like to help Azure CLI to get better, this post explains how you could help.
  
• Using templates to customize restored VMs from Azure Backup (Trinadh Kotturu) - This post shares nice tips to get the maximum of our VMs backup.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core Error Management with elmah.io (Damien Bod) - Elmah is a fantastic tool. This tutorial explains how to use it with .NetCore.
  
• Options for CSS and JS Bundling and Minification with ASP.NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Nice tutorial that shows the how to find our sweet spot with the minification in VS2017.
  
• ZEIT now deployments of open source ASP.NET Core web apps with Docker - Scott Hanselman (hanselman.com) - Interesting new tools. I'm looking forward to trying it myself.

Databases

• Planet scale aggregates with Azure DocumentDB (Aravind Ramachandran Program Manager) - Fantastic news that was requested a lot by all the users. Get all the details in this post about all these new capabilities.

Reading Notes #263

Cloud

• Announcing: New Auto-Scaling Standard Streaming Endpoint and Enhanced Azure CDN Integration (Cenk Dingiloglu) - Great, now integrated.
  
• Azure Storage Queues New Feature: Pop-Receipt on Add Message (Sercan Guler) - This post shows how to use the new queue feature in a great demo.
  
• SoftNAS Cloud® on Azure - Cloud NAS Storage made easy (Lutful Khandker) - Interesting product that clearly fill-up a need in the online storage. Let's talk about it after the 30-day trial.

Programming

• Two-Factor authentication in ASP.NET Identity 3 using TOTP authenticator (Dominique St-Armand) - Excellent post, perfect to get started on 2 factor authentication.
  
• What .NET Developers ought to know to start in 2017 (Scott Hanselman) - Nice work from John and Scott... Sweet checklist for beginners and all the other too.

Databases

• Azure SQL Database is increasing read and write performance (Jan Engelsberg) - Perfect timing! Better performance for the same price.