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 #284

Cloud

• Azure TLS Certificates changes (Rashmi Jha) - Because security is always a big concern, I thought it would be nice sharing this post.
• Deploying Visual Studio 2017 Function Projects with VSTS (Donna Malayeri) - This tutorial explains in simple steps how to configure our build in vsts, a reel time saver.
• Docker for AWS and Azure: Secure By Default Container Platform - Docker Blog (Riyaz Faizullabhoy) - Like they say build it ship it run it.
• Kicking The Tires On This Serverless Thing (Rob Conery) - Very interesting post that introduces many different flavors of serverless.
• New sample model for Azure Analysis Services (Josh Caplan) - Nice little post that gives everything we need to get started.
• What is Azure PowerShell? How It Works, Installation, Best Practices, and More (Angela Stringfellow) - The perfect post to get started. It a really good source of references.

Programming

• .NET and Docker (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting post that clarifies the purpose of all those dotnet container.
• Connecting Power BI to your Visual Studio Team Services Account (Charles Sterling) - It't always cool (and potentially useful to get better) to visualize our data like that.

Miscellaneous

• How to buy and read e-books in Windows 10 Mobile Creators Update (Cale Hunt) - Nice tips. However, I do read from tine to time books on my Surface, but I simply use the App from my e-book reader.
• Pomodoro Technique – the Good, the Bad and the Tomato | Rubik's Code on WordPress.com (Nikola Zivkovic) - Interesting method. Simple and yet efficient.
• The humble checkbox (OneNote Team) - Nice to see how a simple checkbox could change your work.

Reading Notes #281

Cloud

• 5 simple steps to create and test your first Azure Function App (Abhijit Jana) - It couldn't be simpler.
  
• Azure CLI 1.0 vs 2.0 Compared, Installation and Usage (Chris Pietschmann) - This is such a nice post. It compares side by side both versions.
  
• Upgrade classic Backup and Site Recovery vaults to ARM Recovery Services vaults (Aruna Somendra) - Nice post that shares a good overview of all the news related to vault.

Programming

• BUILD 2017 Conference Rollup for .NET Developers - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - I'm sure we'll continue to see more of those MsBuild summaries, but this one is from Scott directly and focuses on .Net.

Databases

• Dear DocumentDB customers, welcome to Azure Cosmos DB! (Rimma Nehme) - This post explains where CosmoDB is coming from.
  
• Introducing Per Minute (RU/m) provisioning to lower your cost, increase your performance (Arnaud Comet) - Great post that explains the relation between RU/m and RU/s two very important notion in CosmoBD.
  
• Migrating to Azure Data Sync 2.0 (Joshua Gnanayutham) - I always found that tool useful, and I'm happy to see it continues to evolve.

Miscellaneous

• Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update, just don't (Troy Hunt) - A very interesting post about a painful situation, and user's obligations.
  
• Is There a Correct Way to Comment Your Code? - NDepend (Erik Dietrich) - Interesting post that tries to find the answer of the eternal question comment or not comment.
  
• Note-taking made easier for everyone—redesigning OneNote (OneNote Team) - Nice new features. To unload your Onenote, simply click on file (or th left arrow), then account, and finally the update button.
  
• Suggestions and Tips for attending your first tech conference - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - I think I will do a copy of that one, and I will share-it with people who come with me on an event. Really nice.

Reading Notes #261

Suggestion of the week

• Pragmatic Web Error Handling in ASP.NET MVC - Simple Talk (Dino Esposito) - Another great article from Dino Esposito that explains his thoughts about exception and error in a pragmatic way.

Cloud

• Advanced Azure Resource Manager template patterns – t-shirt sizing and optional resources | endjin blog (Richard Kerslake) - With ARM gaining in popularity, it's importNt to get some best practices and patterns in mind. T-Shirt size is a must.
  
• Azure Subscription Spending Limit Reached! Now What? (Chris Pietschmann) - A classic mistake. Read this post before being part of the statistic.
  
• Docker for Azure Public Beta - Docker Blog (Michael Friis) - Docker contain now supported on two big cloud provider. They may only support Linux-based container but surely windows bases are coming too.
  
• New Azure Logic Apps innovation – general availability of cloud-based Enterprise Integration Pack (Frank Weigel) - Until the last days of the year, the Logic Apps team have provided multitudes of new features, see the detail of the latest release in this post and important milestone reached.

Programming

• Convert ASP.NET Web Servers to Docker with Image2Docker - Docker Blog (Elton Stoneman) - With the growing desire of containers, this tool looks perfect to do the rough job and get us started.
  
• Exploring Wyam - a .NET Static Site Content Generator (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting project. something to follow on github and keep in mind.
  
• Tips for Troubleshooting Apps in Production with Docker Datacenter - Docker Blog (Andy Clemenko) - Great source of wisdom, because who want to screw something in Prod?!

Miscellaneous

• Slack on the Commodore 64 thanks to Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi (Lucy Hattersley) - Aaah the C= 64.... Cool project.

Need to Nuke an Azure Subscription?

(Ce billet en aussi disponible en français.)


I use very intensely my my.visualstudio (aka MSDN) Azure subscription, to create content for a demo or just to try new feature. So frequently I need to do some cleaning.



Here a little script that will completely delete all resources of every resources group inside a specific subscription. To be able to execute this script you will need Azure PowerShell cmdlets.

The script asks you to login-in then list all the subscriptions that this account has access. Once you specify which one, it will list all the resource grouped by resource group. Then as a final warning, it will require one last validation before nuking everything.

Be careful.

#================================================================
#= Very dangerous interactive script that delete all rescources 
#= from all rescourcegroup in a specific subscription
#================================================================

# How to install and configure Azure PowerShell
# https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azureps-cmdlets-docs/

# Login
Login-AzureRmAccount 

# Get a list of all Azure subscript that the user can access
$allSubs = Get-AzureRmSubscription 

>$allSubs | Sort-Object Name | Format-Table -Property ame, SubscriptionId, State

$theSub = Read-Host "Enter the subscriptionId you want to clean"

Write-Host "You select the following subscription. (it will be display 15 sec.)" -ForegroundColor Cyan
Get-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionId $theSub | Select-AzureRmSubscription 

#Get all the resources groups
$allRG = Get-AzureRmResourceGroup

foreach ( $g in $allRG){
    Write-Host $g.ResourceGroupName -ForegroundColor Yellow 
    Write-Host "------------------------------------------------------`n" -ForegroundColor Yellow 
    $allResources = Find-AzureRmResource -ResourceGroupNameContains $g.ResourceGroupName
    if($allResources){
        $allResources | Format-Table -Property Name, ResourceName
    }else{
        Write-Host "-- empty--`n"
    } 
    Write-Host "`n`n------------------------------------------------------" -ForegroundColor Yellow 
}

$lastValidation = Read-Host "Do you wich to delete ALL the resouces previously listed? (YES/ NO)"
if($lastValidation.ToLower().Equals("yes")){
    foreach ( $g in $allRG){
        Write-Host "Deleting " $g.ResourceGroupName 
        Remove-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $g.ResourceGroupName -Force -WhatIf
    }
}else{
    Write-Host "Aborded. Nothing was deleted." -ForegroundColor Cyan
}

The code is also available on Github: https://github.com/FBoucher/AzurePowerTools

Lessons learn while trying to deploy a Docker container in Azure

(Ce billet en aussi disponible en français.)

Since I saw Donovan Brown do his demo during the Connect(); // 2016 Keynote, I really want to have a taste of that left click to turn a project to Docker containers. So last Sunday I wake up early and armed with a big bowl of cafe latte start prepping my VM to try it. But as you could imagine, it didn't work on the first attempt, and that what I want to share to you.

Let's get started

I build a new VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) using an ISO of Windows 10, then install all the updates to get the anniversary edition. I afterward went to visualstudio.com to get the Visual Studio 2017 RC and install it with a few components: web, azure, etc. And next when looking for Docker for windows. Same here super easy just need to download and install the MSO from docker.com and voila... or not. Like specified in the Docker documentation the installer noticed that Hyper-V was not present in my environment and suggested installing it and reboot the machine. Until then, everything was going fine, but when Docker try to start, after the reboot, I got an error message:

Error creating machine: Error in driver during machine creation: This computer doesn't have VT-X/AMD-v enabled. Enabling it in the BIOS is mandatory

However, the setting was set, as you can see in the screenshot.



After a short investigation, I found that VirtualBox was not supporting nested virtualization, yet. Well, let's try another virtualization platform then.

First Success

I created a new VM under VMware Player this time and repeated all the steps as before. After the reboot, the little white whale in the system didn't prompt any error... Was it working? Let's try to create a Nginx Hello-world container to check. And the answer was YES!

Docker and Azure

Now let's get serious. It's time to do the left click on the project and add Docker Project Support. Then press F5 to try it locally.

ERROR: for mystuff Cannot create container for service mystuff: C: drive is not shared. Please share it in Docker for Windows Settings Encountered errors while bringing up the project..

I got too excited, and I had skipped some reading... It's written black on white in the documentation that you need to share some drive to make it work.



After that it when smoothly and in few minutes, I got my website to run in a Docker container accessible via localhost:32768. Great! Now to get it available on Azure, I need to create a registry where all the images will be saved. To do that simply left click again on the project, and select Publish. The guided dialog will popup and help you to create and deploy your things. An interesting point is before clicking the "Create" button you will have the option to export your template as a json file, very useful. But for now click Create, then Publish.



After a moment you should have a new browser window that will popup with your App now deployed in Azure.



Wow! That was really a great experience. It's definitely a very simple process to get started. I really appreciate the Docker for Windows and Kitematic user interface. Of course, all the command-line are still available, but now I also have another option for the day where I feel more for clicking instead of typing.



Let's build it and ship it, from any platform to the cloud!

Reading Notes #256

Cloud

• What’s this all about? (Alexandre Brisebois) - The cloud broth with him new patterns in the technology world, but knows that the business should also adapt.
• Azure Container Registry preview (Steve Lasker) - Containers, containers, containers, containers.... sound familiar? They are everywhere, learn more about this new service that will be available in preview in mid-November.
• Fluent API Libraries for Azure .NET SDK - These new azure commands definitely look good.
• Simpler Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Asir Selvasingh) - It looks very friendly, looking forward to trying it.
• Ten ways to minimize Azure costs (Iris Classon) - Nice few tips to save money... Time to do your checklist.

Programming

• 10 Tips for Using GitKraken (Sara) - I really like this kind of format for tips. You learn so much in a snap.
• Extensibility in Visual Studio '15': Increasing Reliability and Performance - This post lists few key elements for extension author, don't miss it.
• Mobile DevOps - The Source of Truth: The Role of Repositories in DevOps (Kraig Brockschmidt) - Very interesting article about devops real word.
• Stateless 3.0 - A State Machine library for .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting tutorial that shows how that new lib could be useful.
• Using MongoDB with Web API and ASP.NET Core (Mahesh Sabnis ) - Dotnet core is now considerably more stable and so much more preferment. It worth try it.

Miscellaneous

• How to Make Time for Blogging During Your Lunch Break - Not a idea. However, I think it's more realistic to lower the number of posts produced... at least in my case.
• Introducing Markdown Monster - a new Markdown Editor (Rick Strahl) - Yet a markdown editor.... Will it be your new favorite? This post lists most of the feature and also contains a video if you prefer.
• Microsoft Flow is Now Available - Thurrott.com (Paul Thurrott) - Build on top of the excellent LogicApp platform Flow is free and doesn't require an Azure subscription but benefits from a lot of connectors.

Reading Notes #254

Cloud

• AWS Developer Tool Recap – Recent Enhancements to CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and CodeDeploy - This post is definitely a great list of tools.
  
• Exploring Application Insights for disconnected or connected deep telemetry in ASP.NET Apps - No way!! That's awesome, I'm going right away to test the disconnected mode.
  
• Sending a Regular SMS with Azure Functions and Twilio (Jason) - Nice little tutorial about Azure function App.
  
• What Is: Microsoft Cognitive Services - Wow, brains power as services... imagine plugging that to into your APIs or your bots... oh yeah.

Programming

• Answers to your top TACO questions (Visual Studio Blog) - This post answers many questions asked at Ignite in the mobile deployment world.
  
• Exploring ServiceStack's simple and fast web services on .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - This post is a really nice introduction to an interesting alternative when building services.
  
• Introducing the ASP.Net Async SessionState Module (Matt FJH) - This post explains how session can be managed in Assp.net core,
  
• Yarn vs npm: Everything You Need to Know (Tim Severien) - Interesting new package manager that is trying to solve issues with the already great npm.

Databases

• 9 Things You Should Know About SQL Azure Databases (Victor Moreno) - Nice post that shows some strength of databases as a service.

Miscellaneous

• Follow every Microsoft MVP on Twitter! (Chris ) - Cool script...
  
• Export Power BI report to PowerPoint (Preview) (Tzvi Keisar) - Love it!
  
• Happy #Friday Five! (MVP Award Program) - I know ... I'm guilty, and proud to be in the Friday five.

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.

Reading Notes #252

Cloud

• Azure Subscription Migration to CSP (Kirill Kotlyarenko) - Excellent post that explains the differences between the different types and how to migrate ... with a minimum of pain.
  
• New lower Azure pricing (Takeshi Numoto) - Really good news more VMs types and lower prices.
  
• Storing and using secrets in Azure (Bertrand Le Roy) - This p is great tutorial that explains all h steps to configure use the Azure Vault, when our secrets need more then sits in a config file.

Programming

• Sharing Authorization Cookies between ASP.NET 4.x and ASP.NET Core 1.0 (Scott Hanselman) - Nice tutorial to implement a single sign-on experience with multi part website.
  
• DevOps - Commit to Git: Source Control in Visual Studio 2015 (Jonathan Waldman) - Git is a must for all developers, this post explains all the bells and whistles in Visual Studio to manage it.

Databases

• Avoid ORDER BY in SQL Server views (Aaron Bertrand) - Sometimes we need workarounds to bend some services to our wishes, but we must keep in mind the real best practices.

Reading Notes #249

Suggestion of the week

• Trying out the “standard” and “enterprise” templates in Azure Logic Apps (Richard Seroter) - Another excellent post from Seroter who shows us a quick simple logic app, and also a more "complex" one using the new integration account.

Cloud

• A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Functions Within Azure’s IoT Hub - Great tutorial to build a scalable solution.
  
• Azure Active Directory Labs Series – Creating an AD Forest (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - This post is a step by step lab. You will create everything you need without trouble.
  
• Azure Portal + Azure AD Management in Public Preview - Really happy to see new tools available (finally) to manage Active directory in the Azure portal.
  
• Visual Studio 2015 update for Logic Apps (Jon Fancey) - Nice update to the on-premise tool. Have you tried it yet?

Programming

• Entity Framework Pitfalls: Null Semantics - This post explains important gotchas, in one of the most popular ORM frameworks.
  
• Getting Started with YAML in Node.js using js-yaml (Dave Johnson) - Interesting post, I've been using YAML for few years now. However, it's true that when I did some work with Node.js I switched to json... Next time then...
  
• New book: Begin to Code with C# (Kim Spilker) - C# is a very popular and powerful language, I'm happy to see new books to bring more people aboard.

Databases

• Azure DocumentDB powers the modern marketing intelligence platform (Aravind Ramachandran) - This post is a great story about a real-life scenario where DocumentDB was selected as NoSQL solution and gives an overview of his structure.

Miscellaneous

• Want to know if you've been hacked? Troy Hunt has all the details - Excellent article, security breach, servers hack are not only in movies... Learn more about Troy Hunt who shares them with us.
  
• Why Programmers Should Track Their Time (Even if They Don't Charge Hourly) - It's so painful but so true.

Reading Notes #248

Programming

• Building Your First Bot using Microsoft Bot Framework - Nice tutorial to get started with the bot framework... An yes, you should care, because bots are the new apps.
  
• How to use Power BI Embedded with AspNetCore - Oh yeah! Quick and simple.
  
• StrathWeb. A free flowing web tech monologue. - Nice post that explains different paths (good and bad) to declare a controller in Asp.Net Core and explains why.

Databases

• Connect to Azure SQL Database V12 via Redirection (Kun Cheng) - Very interesting post about how to achieve great performance with our Azure solution.
  
• Improved Automatic Tuning boosts your Azure SQL Database performance (Vladimir Ivanovic) - Definitely something to try at the minimum... It looks fantastic.

Miscellaneous

• Who am I really logged in as on Visual Studio Team Services? (Willy-P. Schaub) - Nice tips... That will solve so many questions.
  
• You might be a creative if … (docjamesw@gmail.com) - A post to read in the morning. It's like a little pill of energy.
  
• You’re doing it wrong: Demos (Gil Zilberfeld) - Nice quick post that helps us to definitely pick a side when the question "Should we demo that?" popped.

Reading Notes #247

Cloud

• AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform – Mobile Services - A very interesting comparison of the major cloud provider with mobile development perspective.
  
• Accelerate your insights with Application Insights Performance Counters (Mackenzie Frackleton) - Get always more with Application Insights...
  
• Fixing Azure Portal Errors - Errors are inevitable, this post explains how to workaround most of them and when nothing works how let the support team knows.
  
• What is Serverless Computing? Exploring Azure Functions (Scott Hanselman) - Great post that demos an Azure Function and also explains more about that new expression: severless.

Programming

• 9 Docker .NET App Templates: A Complete Guide - Fantastic post that shows many different ways to leverage container and also explains why containers are so useful.
  
• 9 Visual Studio Productivity Tools (Dustin Davis) - An incredible video, definitely a must. How could I didn't know so much?!
  
• Exploring HockeyApp data in Application Insights: introducing the Bridge App (Evgeny Ternovsky) - Nice post that explains how to use your metadata in HockeyApp.
  
• Pimp my report with Docker (Gabriel Schenker) - Cool example of how docker could help us.
  
• Publishing an ASP.NET Core website to a cheap Linux VM host (Scott Hanselman) - Great tutorial to learn quickly how to play with dotnetcore on linux VM and not busting our budget.
  
• Why Is .NET Core Important? - Interesting post that explains what been achieved by donet core.

Miscellaneous

• The Dropbox hack is real - It's time to change your password, and do not use the same everywhere...

Reading Notes #246

Cloud

• Accelerate your insights with Application Insights Performance Counters (Mackenzie Frackleton) - We always get more and more with Application Insights...
  
• Announcing Azure App Service MySQL in-app (preview) (Sunitha Muthukrishna) - Wow! Many PHP developers must be waiting for this since so long. It's a very good news, and I'm sure many Wordpress users will be extremely happy too.
  
• Extending Azure Logic Apps Using Azure Functions (MVP Award Program) - Nice post that shows are easy it is to put together Azure logic App and Azure functions.
  
• Portal support for Azure Search blob and table indexers now in preview (Evan Boyle) - Easier than ever, this portal is so powerful. Good job.
  
• New BizTalk Server connector preview rollout complete! (Jon Fancey) - The integrated integration platform....

Programming

• Architecture in code (Sebastien Lambla) - Interesting short post about coding best practice.
  
• Cloud-first, mobile-first: Microsoft moves to a fully wireless network (Mikkel Riis) - Nice interview with a Microsoft IT professional.
  
• PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux (Jeffrey Snover) - Now that bash is available on Windows machine and PowerShell on Linux... everything is possible!
  
• Visual Studio's most useful (and underused) tips (Scott Hanselman) - His post is a must for all VisualStudio users.

Databases

• JSON support is generally available in Azure SQL Database (Jovan Popovic) - Cool. Now you can have both types of data in the same place. Not for every situation but pretty convenient.

Miscellaneous

• How Do I Write Good Code? (Erik Dietrich) - Simple tips that will make our code rocks.

Reading Notes #240

Cloud

• Azure App Services - Using Azure App Services to Convert a Web Page to PDF - Great tutorial and even more because it’s useful.
  
• Connect to your on-premises data sources from Logic Apps (Jeff Hollan) - That’s a really useful connector.
  
• Everything you need to know about loading a free Let’s Encrypt certificate into an Azure website - Nice tutorial on how to create a certificate in Azure.
  
• New Application Insights metric widget for Visual Studio Team Services (Mike Gresley) - Cool another great tile to add in our VSTS project page.
  

Programming

• Simplifying Technical Presentations with Docker - Interesting idea, definitely something to keep in mind when I do my next presentation.

Data

• DocumentDB protocol support for MongoDB (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Woooo. That huge! We can now swap any mongodb for a documentdb and your tooling or app will continue to work.

Miscellaneous

• Automation Showdown: IFTTT vs Zapier vs Microsoft Flow - Interesting comparison of three power tools that don’t exactly target the same users but that are similar.
  
• Evernote is crippling their free service, here’s how to move to OneNote - Interesting to know, and the timing is good me, I was just asking myself he same question…
  
• Is your stuff backed up? Recovering from a hardware failure - A good backup plan is crucial, the drive my old server died recently, and it saved me a lot of pain.
  
• Microsoft shows how bad Chrome is for your laptop’s battery (Tom Warren) - Wow when a friend of mine shared me that post, I didn’t expect Edge to be that good. And with the new release that is bridging back add-ons… Does Microsoft just came back in the race to be the best web browser?!
  

Reading Notes #239

Cloud

• Application Map: Filter and pin to a dashboard (Soubhagya Dash) - Aaah! Great, it's time to update our Azure Portal Dashboard, really cool.
  
• Deploying Azure Marketplace VMs via ARM Templates (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice piece of code to be ready to deploy.
  
• Public preview of the Logic Apps Enteprise Integration Pack (Jon Fancey) - Important release this week from Logic App team they announced many BizTalk functionalities that will now be available in LogicApp and also a great VisualStudio Addon that I'm really looking forward to try.
  
• Use the power and simplicity of containers to tame your IT (James Staten) - Nice post that shares some reason about why containers are so nice.

Programming

• .NET Core 1.0 is now released! (Scott Hanselman) - Wow. Really impress by that new blend... Dotnet core is looking awesome.
  
• VIDEO: How to run Linux and Bash on (Scott Hanselman) - It's really cool, but also very useful ... O scripts will work on Linux and Windows environment...
  
• Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 Available Now (Eric Battalio) - Yep it's time to download and enjoy some great features.
  
• Visual Studio Code vs WebStorm (Radoslaw Rozanski) - Interesting post that compares the new kid in the block with an "older" IDE.
  
• Visual Studio Update 3 - Wahoo! Tons of new awesome features are included in this update.
  
• Why I Built Cycligent Git Tool (Carolyn Sullivan) - Git is a fantastic tool. Great UIs are difficult... Cytriogen is definitely something to look.

Miscellaneous

• How I prepared for the NDC keynote (and other speaker tips) (Troy Hunt) - Interesting post that shows and explains all the great work done to prepare a talk like a key note.
  
• Windows 10 Anniversary Update Available August 2 (Yusuf Mehdi) - Cool, summer is comings and with it the anniversary edition... Learn more about what will be included in this free upgrade for all the Windows 10 users.

Reading Notes #238

Cloud

• Application Map: Filter and pin to a dashboard (Soubhagya Dash) - Aaah... Great, it's time to update our Azure Portal Dashboard, really cool.
  
• Azure Marketplace Free Trials and Subscription Spending Limits (Steve Ross) - We all started or used at one point that great opportunity that is "the trial". This post is a gold mine in little details that will calm you down and let you enjoy the ride. A must.
• Remote Debugging Azure Web Apps from Visual Studio (Chris Pietschmann) - This post is a tutorial that explains step by step. How successfully configure a remote debugging on Azure.

Programming

• 3 ways to spot if your controller is doing too much - Nice post that shares few tricks on how spot if our controllers are doing too much.
  
• DockerCon 2016 - What is new in Docker 1.12 - - Nice summary about all the new features announced at DockerCon.
  
• Forgotten (but Awesome) Windows Command Prompt Features - BBS art..... souvenir souvenir. Refresh your memory or learn some really cool tricks of the command prompt with this post.
  
• Microsoft brings container innovation to the enterprise at DockerCon 2016 (Mark Russinovich) - Microsoft is definitely embracing the container pattern; this post summarizes announcement done during the DockerCon.

Miscellaneous

• Back to my core - In this post, Darrel shares the beginning of a new adventure... Congradulation to you and looking forward to reading again from you. Microsoft gained a really good developer.

Reading Notes #236

Suggestion of the week

• Running .NET Core on Docker (Jurgis Pasukonis) - Really cool tutorial that puts many blocks to work together.

Cloud

• Turning on Windows features using Powershell DSC extension and Azure CLI (Kirpa Singh) - Clever method to activate Windows feature on multiple VM.
  
• Running Docker Container on Azure Batch (Yiding Zhou) - Nice post that explains why and how Azure batch and Docker can really work well together.
  
• Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer preview: June update (Cristy Gonzalez) - A great tool got updated and now supports all four storage services. A must for all Azure developers.
  
• Move Resources via ARM Portal (Edward Dake) - Many tips on how to move stuff around; very handy.
  
• Cloud War: Microsoft vs Amazon – Feature 2 Feature Comparisons - Great tools I wish I had that long time ago.

Programming

• ASP.NET - Writing Clean Code in ASP.NET Core with Dependency Injection - Very interesting post that explains why dependency injection is good and how to do it leveraging the new AspNetCore. I used to all that using Ninject, Moq and many other tools. Today, it's all included.

Miscellaneous

• Happiness is DevOps’ Cornerstone (Alexandre Brisebois) - Interesting post that asks a lot of questions... I would like to see some graph or pie chart about our answers.
  
• 5 Habits that Help Code Quality (View all posts by Erik Dietrich) - Yet another post about how to code better, but this one is refreshing. It explains why the opposite would be harmful and also give us a training plan for better chance of success.
  
• What’s in your highlights folder? (Marc Gagne) - Because life is not only mistakes and bad luck.Here good tips to help you giving some sunshine into your life when needed.

Reading Notes #235

Suggestion of the week

• Is technology killing curiosity? (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting reflections. A post to read.

Cloud

• Diagnose and resolve issues with Azure Troubleshooting (Ritesh Garodia) - Nice post that helps us to know the troubleshooting tools available in Azure portal.
  
• Deploy a Geo-HA Service Fabric Cluster on Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - Fantastic post. It may require a second read to catch all the information contained, but it is worth it.
  
• How to Load Balance Virtual Machines in Azure (Marc Gagne) - Nice tutorial t explains step by step how to create, and configure an environment with a load balancer.
  
• Azure Export Template – Your new best friend (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - True, this relatively new feature is a real benediction.
  
• Turning on Windows features using Powershell DSC extension and Azure CLI (Kirpa Singh) - This post explains a clever method to active Windows features on multiple VMs.

Reading Notes #233

Cloud

• Map storage scenarios to services in Microsoft’s cloud (Joe Davies) - Cool gigantic pdf that contain all the information about cloud storage.
  
• How to turn cloud economics to your advantage (James Staten) - Nice post that asked important questions. Did you ask to yourself these?
  
• Announcing collaboration with the Jenkins project (Corey Sanders) - Great news about Jenkins. Now with the Microsoft's teams involved, we can expect only the best.
  
• Detecting threats with Azure Security Center (Tomer Teller) - Interesting post that explains fundamental difference between servers and individual attack and introduces briefly Azure security center.
  
• Troubleshooting Azure Stream Analytics jobs with SELECT INTO (Ken Wang - MSFT) - Fantastic debug session that explains how, with streamanalitics we can debug a query.
  
• HowTo: Purge an Azure CDN endpoint using Azure PowerShell v1.x (Stéphane Lapointe) - Useful piece of script that will save us time.

Programming

• Upgrading from ASPNET Core RC1 to RC2 Guide (Steve Smith) - Nice tutorial that covers all pieces of the puzzle.

Miscellaneous

• Going dark: online privacy and anonymity for normal people - Wow... And we thought using a strong password was safe enough. Great text.