Reading Notes #428

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!

Cloud

• Azure AD Secured Serverless Cosmos DB from Blazor WebAssembly ( Jeremy Likness) - Great post that really explains how those pieces can work very well together.
• Creating an Azure Function from the Command Line (Jason N. Gaylord) - A nice tutorial that helps us to get started.

Programming

• Multiple Environments in ASP.NET Core (Code Maze) - Nice Asp.Net MVC tutorial.
• ASP.NET Core Series: Blazor (Jeremy Likness, Dan Roth) - Nice video to get started with Blazor.
• Developing on Docker with the new and improved Visual Studio Container Tools (and WSL2) (Scott Hanselman) - A great example that shows how easier it is now to start working with containers on Windows.
• Unit Testing in ASP .NET Core 3.1 (Shahed C) - A nice post that shows how to get started with xUnit the voted most popular test framework.

Miscellaneous

• APIs in the 2020s Panel (.NET Rocks!) - A virtual panel of awesome speakers that talked about API, REST, GraphQL, oData and so more. Lovely episode.
• 471: How to Say No Without Saying No, with Lois Frankel (Coaching for Leaders) - Saying No... being open. Really interesting topic. I put Lois Frankel: Nice Girls Don’t Speak Up or Stand Out in my to read list, that book maybe written for women in mind, but I think it is really interesting.
• Leveraging Our Emotional Goals (Developer Tea) - An interesting episode that talk about goals and what we need to do (or not) to achieved them.
• 203: Updating Open Source Projects (https://castbox.fm/episode/203%3A-Updating-Open-Source-Projects-id2117504-id267802246) - As I just create my first version in one of my open-source project I found the topic more than interesting... Thank you, great show.

Miscellaneous

• 20 productivity tools for the Linux terminal (Alan Smithee) - Cool app to try for our terminal.
• How to Stop Windows 10 Updates (5 Methods) (Mohammed Siddiqui) - I think you should only prevent auto-update when you really know what you are doing. Updates are easy to forget and therefore your PC could be at risk. That said, sometime it could really be a must.5misc.windows.update]
• Mirroring your Presence Status from the Microsoft Graph in Teams to LIFX or Hue bias lighting (Scott Hanselman) - Did this post just created new needs?! And you should check the keynote video linked to this post it was really a good one.

Books

  The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone

  Author: Colin O'Brady

  An incredible adventure yes around the globe, but more important over the personal limits. I found this book very inspiring. I felt following him across the Antarctica... In the blizzard or in those deep moment. Great memoir, great adventure.

~enjoy!

 

Reading Notes #424

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Build 2020 registration is not only open, it's FREE, it's LIVE, it's VIRTUAL, and it is all FOR YOU (Scott Hanselman) - Amazing news right?! Who doesn't needs some good news... I will see you there!

Cloud

• Microsoft’s Making Azure AD SSO “Free” (Brad Sams ) - That's an excellent news Azure Active Directory for everyone!

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Release Candidate now available (Daniel Ruth) - We are getting closer now... I didn't have the time to try the last preview!
• Announcing Entity Framework Core 5.0 Preview 3 | .NET Blog (Jeremy Likness) - Awesome I'm looking forward to trying the final version. But in the meantime... why not try it.
• Blazor - Changing the title without JavaScript (Jimmy Engström) - A nice tutorial that shows how to go over certain boundaries in Blazor.
• Clean Coding in C# - Part I (Calvin A. Allen) - A great little post packed with 200% of wisdom.
• How to Integrate Unit Testing with ASP.NET Core 3.1 (Vijayaraj Angappan) - A very clear tutorial that explains how to use Moq and NUnit 2 great tools.
• Markdown .NET Core Library (Jason N. Gaylord) - That looks nice! And it's in .Net!
• Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Alyson La (Alyson La) - A nice little list of pro tips...perfect to get started, or push forward if you are already a git user.

Podcasts

• 465: How to Lead a Virtual Team, with Susan Gerke (Coaching for Leaders) - Nice show. It doesn't matter if you are a manager or just that you work in a remote team, there nice tips.

Miscellaneous

• Visual Studio Codespaces (Nik Molnar) - I really like the new name I think it says more about what it is. And seriously how can I not like the new price! Less than 2$/day for a machine!

Reading Notes #421

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!

Programming

• Running ASP.NET Core Apps on a Synology NAS with Docker (Jason Roberts) - Cool project to leverage your NAS to his max potential.

• Git Visualized: Forked a Repo, Now The Original Has More Commits (Saqib Ameen) - A nice little gem... Commun scenario that we all at one point struggle with.

• Add Discord Notifications to ASP.NET Core Apps (Steve Smith) - Really nice post that shows us how to use GitHub actions and Csharp to push info into Discord. I need to try something like that someday....

• How I Got My Website to Load in 1 Second (Jeremy Morgan) - An interesting story about a migration and some optimization choices.

• Top 3 Blazor Extensions for Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - Nice extensions that definitely deserve our attention.

• Try gh, GitHub's new CLI (John Papa) - Oh, that's really nice I like that. I find it funny that t should like you just got a hit in the chest. However, it looks powerful enough to cut your breath... so it probably deserves it.

• Use SimpleSQL from Github pages (Simone Mosciatti) - That's kind of really cool. It gives me a few ideas...

• Using Entity Framework in a Blazor Server Application (David Grace) - This post shares two nice solutions for a recurring error with EF Core.

Podcasts

• Internet Legend Hank Green! Founder of VidCon, Vlogbrothers and His Production (That Creative Life) - Strangely I didn't know much about this guest... What a pleasant discovery!

• How to Succeed In Building Developer Tooling with Peter Pezaris (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Don't blink, don't even blink. Not sure if it really apply when you listen to podcast, but this episode was so packed of great content. I really like the open discussion. An awesome show.

• 0241 - Etienne Tremblay - GitHub Actions (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Great episode that compare, discuss, and speculate with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. It's in French. I miss you guys it's been too long... Great show.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19603 (Brandon LeBlanc) - Nice.... Are you on a developer's ring?

• How I Manage and Plan Tasks as a Remote Worker (Thomas Maurer) - It's very interesting to see how others are doing, and the kind of tools they are using..Even better when it's your colleague.

• Using Certificates from Azure Key Vault in ASP.NET Core (Damien Bowden) - An interesting post that leverages keyvault with Identity server.

~

Reading Notes #417

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

• Making a cleaner and more intentional azure-pipelines.yml for an ASP.NET Core Web App - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - This post provides explanations about the steps of an Azure Pipeline file. If you are new to azure DevOps it helps a lot with the comprehension.

• Azure Free Account? Is it really free? ( Michael Crump) - Ooh yeah! I still remember that moment where I created my first service.... Get started free is free.

• Build apps for free with Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Deborah) - A free NoSQL database with the specs of Cosmo...thatts really cool. This post gives you an idea of what it means and a few ideas of what you could do with it.

• Cloud migration: 5 common traps and how to avoid them (Rael Winters) - A great post that can really help you to avoid losing time and money...Once you know the traps, it's easier.

• Tip 254 - Use WAF to protect your web applications with Azure Front Door (Michael Crump) - Nice and easy tip to live more secure in the cloud.

• Tips for keeping your Azure Subscriptions Clean (Michael Crump) - Great post that explains how to keep your money in your pocket.

Programming

• Postman: The Easy Way to Work with APIs - Postman Blog (The Postman Team) - A wonderful tool, a most if you work with API.

• Upgrade Your .NET Console App Experience (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice list of cool libraries to help to add color, table, and menus to our apps.

Podcast

• Making a Living on Instagram with J.N. Silva and Dave Krugman (That Creative Life) - Nice episode... Honestly, they got me with their history when they start doing photography.

• 192: Getting Started with Live Streaming (Merge Conflict) - Nice episode about what you need, or in fact what you don't need to start streaming.

Miscellaneous

• Recovering from Burnout and Depression (null) - An important topic. This post was recommended during a talk about remote working. Very interesting.

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Reading Notes #401

Cloud

• Run Azure Cloud Shell in Windows Admin Center (Thomas Maurer) - Nice tutorial and demo video to enable Cloud Shell.
• Serverless HTTP With Durable Functions ( Jeremy Likness) - Great post that shows, with code examples, the new functionalities for the Durable Functions.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 3.0 MVC Secure Authentication | Okta Developer (Lee Brandt) - Nice tutorial to add authentication to an existing .Net Core App.
• Custom Terminals and User Interface (UI) in Windows Terminal (Jeremy Likness) - Learn how to get and customize your Windows Terminal in this quick post.
• GitHub Actions for Azure is now generally available (Usha Narayanabhatta) - Fantastic news..and perfect timing... At least for me!
• GitHub Learning Path (Premier Developer) - Nice source of info to get started or... Get better.
• What is Blazor? A Tutorial on Building Web Apps with Authentication (Andrea Chiarelli) - Great article that describes in detail how to create a simple blazor app with authentification.

Miscellaneous

• Easily move WSL distributions between Windows 10 machines with import and export! (Scott Hanselman) - First I was Whaaat!? Very simple yet useful feature no need now do redo all your customization on all your computer...just export and import.

Reading Notes #391

Suggestion of the week

• How to Use Github Professionally (Aaron Stannard) - This post is great! Tons of information and best practices (with an explanation of why its a best practice).

• Please, everyone, put your entire development environment in Github (Burke Holland) - OMG! It is sooooo simple! I was already using containers to develop, but didn't know VSCode could manage that for me! And make it easily reproducible!

Cloud

• The Azure Cloud Shell Connector in Windows Terminal | Windows Command Line Tools For Developers (Pankaj Bhojwani) - Pure happiness.

Programming

• 5 Things to Try with Docker Desktop WSL 2 Tech Preview - Docker Blog (Ben De St Paer-Gotch) - So cool...
• 10 Git Tricks to Save Your Time and Sanity (Jacob Herrington) - Really useful (and even cool) git commands. Try them you'll see what I mean.
• ASP.NET Core and Blazor updates in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 8 (Sourabh Shirhatti) - Nice update. Be aware of a few breaking changes...but it's all for the best.
• Build Data-Driven Web Apps Blazing Fast with Blazor and OData ( Jeremy Likness) - This post is a great tutorial that explains how to build a complete todo list use that tech. Really cool.
• Developing Docker-Powered Applications on Windows with WSL 2 - Docker Blog (Antonis Kalipetis) - That new Docker desktop version looks very promising
• GitKraken & Glo Boards Now Support GitHub Actions (Lauren Witte Girard) - Great. Now we only just need the GitHub action...
• Investigating Drag and Drop with Blazor (Chris Sainty) - Interesting share of an experiment.

Books

Living with the Monks: What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me about Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus 

Author: Jesse Itzler

I really enjoyed this book. Yes it's light and funny, but don't get fool, there is a deeper message here. I think Jessy wins his challenge by going into a monastery so we don't have to. We all have what it takes to live a more purposeful life, we just need to pause. Showdown, to go faster, do less to do more... Embrace the silence.



~

Reading Notes #387

Cloud

• Announcing preview of Azure Data Share (Mike Flasko) - Looking forward to use this new feature in my project.

Programming

• Intro Guide to Dockerfile Best Practices - Docker Blog (Tibor Vass) - Would it be for a review because you know your way with Docker or to get started, this post is excellent.
• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET Core MVC (Code Maze) - An interesting article introducing an important patern.
• My Personal Git Tricks Cheatsheet (Antonin Januska) - This is a list of awesome tricks and idea for our Git daily usage.
• Using EasyAuth (AppService Authentication) with ASP.NET Core (Maxime Rouiller) - A cool tutorial that explains a workaround to do an easyAuth in .Net Core.

Podcasts

• Methods to Organize Your Learning Process with Lourdes Montano (Scott Hanselman) - Great episode, a few methods, or ideas of organization resonate with me. Definitely interesting.
• How to Use External Storage in Docker (Brett Fisher) - Nice short episode that explains how to think (or when to think) about storage while working with containers.
• Episode 68: The Rise of the Cloud-First Generation with Christina Warren (Corey Quinn) - A very interesting episode. They is no "best way", all path go somewhere and have advantages. As my journey was not straight forward, I totally agree with that.
• #313: 3 Steps to Finding Freedom to Focus (Ken Coleman and Michael Hyatt) - The work-life balance... not an easy thing to answer... I enjoyed this episode exploring, suggesting a way to improve (get closer) to a balance.
• Ubuntu, with Mark Shuttleworth (Craig and Adam) - It was so nice to learn more about Mark Shuttleworth and his projects. Like always... an awesome episode.
• 418: The Way to Nurture New Ideas, with Safi Bahcall (Dave Stachowiak) - Very interesting episode where we learn that there are always multiple sides to a story... And knowing them will change our perception.
• 403: Transition Well Through Your Day, with Gretchen Rubin (Dave Stachowiak) - Doing a little bit of catching up with this podcast, but I'm glad I did! Not only the episode was good but now I have to books that I'm really looking forward to read!
• Which Online Courses are Worth Investing In? (and how do you decide?) (Meredith Marsh - Great question! I then to try to go the source and try/learn it by my self... what do you do?

Books

Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. (Brené Brown) - A nice book. pack with a lot of information. A lot's of stories to emphasize her points, I always like that. It was maybe a little too much cartesian for me... many steps. Or maybe I was not in a good mindset. Good book however.








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Reading Notes #381

Suggestion of the week

• Running a Minecraft Server in Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - A cool real-life story where Azure Container Instance ACI is very useful.

Cloud

• Automating Azure Container Instances with PowerShell Azure Functions (Mark Heath) - Cool schedule Azure functions demo with PowerShell.
• 
  Deploy a scalable API and Backend with Serverless, Express, and Node.js (Bryan Killian) - A nice tutorial that explains how to build efficient APIs using lambda.

Programming

• Docker - from the beginning, Part IV (Chris Noring) - Part 4 of 5 this series is still a great read. This one shows the transition to docker compose.
• 
  Postman 7.1: Manage your APIs within Postman (Nikita) - So many great features are present in the new version. This post is the perfect quick overview.

Miscellaneous

• 
  Presentation Tips for Technical Talks (Tanya Janca) - This post is filled with great and simple tips that will for sure improve the experience of your attendees and ours.
• 
  Using The Microsoft Face API to Create Mario Kart “Astrology” (Chloe Condon) - Funny project that leverages the Azure cognitive services and python. How cool is that!

Books

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong 

Author: Eric Barker

Nice book. There is always a good story to make a correlation with his current point. Then it could go in a different direction with another story. All the stories are complementary and are adding layer by layer to the more complex message that is delivered to us. Easy to read, enjoyable from the beginning until the last word.

Reading Notes #377

Cloud

• Where do you keep credentials for your Lambda functions? (Davide de Paolis) - Nice post that shows the proper way to store our credentials when deploying lamdas.

Programming

• A crash course to the most important Docker concepts and their commands (Chris Noring) - Oooh. That's the first post of what looks like a very promising series on docker. More to come.
  
• Can’t Attend DockerCon 2019? Here are your Top 5 “To Dos” (Suzanne Panoplos) - Or if you are like me... Watch It after... It's waaay better than nothing!
  
• Did I leave the garage door open? A no-code project with Azure IoT Central and the MXChip DevKit (Scott Hanselman) - Wonderful post that proves that we can do simple IoT projects at home that are useful.
  
• It’s a Wrap - Highlights from the DockerCon 2019 Keynote Sessions - Docker Blog (Jenny Fong) - Great way to grab the essentiall and Dig for more from there.
  
• Undo changes in Git - Cheat sheet for git checkout, stash, reset, clean, revert, rebase -i, amend (Michael) - Awesome post that explains how to fix some mistake while using Git. Because like the author says: Git is one of those things you learn progressively.
  
• When npm tells you you're hosed (John Papa) - Nice little tricks here to save us some keystrokes.
  

Miscellaneous

• Create your own course on GitHub Learning Lab (Hector Alfaro) - Wow! That's something that looks interesting... And I have a few ideas.

Books

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (James Clear) - An excellent book that is very pleasant to read. I really appreciated the way things are broken in tiny pieces. I don't think this book re-invented the molecular physic, but by cutting, dissecting our habits that way it's hard to think that you can fail. It's easier to get started right now; even starting new habits before finishing the book!






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Reading Notes #371

Cloud

• How to query Azure resources using the Azure CLI (Neil Peterson) - Nice post that gives a few tips and tricks about how to query Azure resources with Az.
• Setting up Jenkins X on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (Chee Chan) - A very simple tutorial that explains how to install and get started with JenkinsX with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

Programming

• Using npm's ls command for Fun and Insight (Tierney Cyren) - A useful discovery about a node.js command and how to use it in our different environments.
• Intro to web programming in Rust for NodeJS developers (Bastian Gruber) - Jump aboard this new promising series to learn Rust...

Miscellaneous

• How do You Structure Your Code When Moving Your API from Express to Serverless Functions? (John Papa) - When structured the code is always better. A nice post that explains just that with serverless.

Reading Notes #354

Cloud

• Azure Functions—Key Vault integration   - Nice tight integration that will simplify our lives.
• Azure Functions Continuous Deployment with Azure Pipelines- Part 7 (Jason Roberts) - Excellent series to learn and get started with continuous integration and continuous deployment.
• My first Azure build & deploy pipelines for an Azure Function V2 (Joost van Schaik) - A nice tutorial that shows how easy it is to deploy an Azure function with Azure DevOps Pipeline.
• Running Cognitive Service containers (Henrik Frystyk Nielsen) - This post is the perfect one to get started with those new cognitive containers.
• This resource group will self destruct in 30 minutes (Mark Heath) - Pretty clever way to "not forget" any unused resources... And there so save money!

Programming

• Creating a .NET Global Tool from an existing Console Application (Rick Strahl) - Very interesting post that explains some strategy for global donet core application and how to work share them with nuget.
• Upgrading the DakBoard Family Calendar with Raspberry Pi Zero W and Read Only filesystem (Scott Hanselman) - Not even a week has past and it's already version 2! Excellent!!

Books

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win (Jocko Willink, Leif Babin) - Very interesting book. Yes, it contains a lot of battle details, and first I was not sure, but then things "fall" all in place when you understand what the story was "demonstrating." It also contains more business focus examples. Everything is very clear, well explained in plain English.









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Reading Notes #353

Suggestion of the week

• Your Must-Have PowerShell Aliases for Docker (Elton Stoneman) - This post is gold! Seriously, it has a lot of really good code snippet ready to use and if gave me so many ideas...

Cloud

• How to develop secure applications using Azure Cosmos DB (Rafat Sarosh) - Nice post that answers a frequent question: Does my data is safe in Azure? (spoiler: yes)
• Sandbox Azure pour tout le monde (Wilfried Woivré) - A nice French post that describes a tool to build sandbox resources and that offer nice options about security and availability of those resources.

Programming

• What’s New for WSL in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (Tara Raj) - Great updates a lot of them were asked for a long time...
• Your Web App Secrets in ASP .NET Core (Shahed C) - Great tutorial that explains how to manage our secrets until we deploy.

Books

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast (Josh Kaufman) - That was a very interesting book. I devoured it much faster than I thought! As I was reading it, I was thinking... hey as a developer/programmer I already do a lot of those things... Things change so fast, technology changes... And a few pages later, the author was saying the same thing. :) It looks like we can adapt to many deferent situations. The author share with us a few journeys as he was learning new stuff. While I may not be interested to learn how to play to Go, I found all part of the book very interesting as those journeys a pact with tons of information.
ISBN: 1591845556 (ISBN13: 9781591845553)

Miscellaneous

• Oh the things you can learn with a fun weekend hack project (Swizec Teller) - An interesting and motivating post that shows that when we go out of our comfort zone... We learn a lot more.

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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 #346

Cloud

• Thoughts on Azure DevOps (Scott Allen) - Interesting review of the rebranded tool.
• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 160 - The BEST of Azure Tips and Tricks is now available as a FREE ebook (Michael Crump) - Fantastic! The BEST of Azure Tips and Tricks is now available as a FREE
• Introducing Azure Functions 2.0 (Eduardo Laureano) - Wow, the Azure Functions has evolved so much since the beginning. It's time to upgrade our old functions.

Programming

• Exploring the Docker Extension for VS Code and .NET Core (Shayne Boyer) - Wow, really nice update! It looks so easy.
• Hacktoberfest: Tips for growing open source communities in October and beyond | Microsoft + Open Source (Stephanie Morillo) - Nice post that provides a little bit more context about how to do things for the Hacktoberfest.
• Headless CMS and Decoupled CMS in .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that lists some of the most popular headless CMS.
• Join our #Hacktoberfest 2018 celebration! | Microsoft + Open Source (Bernd Verst) - Microsoft announced it's one month long hackaton on all his opensource projects. Learn more about where to find that list in this post.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft Ignite Aftermath ( Chris Pietschmann, Dan Patrick) - If you are like me and need to catch up on what append to Ignite, this post is a really good place to start as it contains a list of all the links we need.

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Reading Notes #325

Suggestion of the week

• 6 Presentation Mistakes Every Professional Should Avoid (Mike Pacchione) - Very interesting post about mistakes that most (read all) of us do, and of course how we could avoid them.

Cloud

• Dependency Injection and ILogger in Azure Functions (Rory Primrose) - Nice post that explains how to do logging with ILogger in Azure functions.

Programming

• About Blockchain (Clemens Vasters) - Blockchain; the what, the how, the why and probably all your questions about it are answered in this post.
• Connecting Your Azure Bots with QnA Maker Services (Abhijit Jana) - Nice post to get started with the bot framework and learn how to test your prototype.
• Join Microsoft Build Live for the ultimate digital experience (Microsoft Azure) - It's this week reserve your days!
• Keep VS Code from Becoming an IDE (Ryan Palo) - Great finally! I super happy to see I'm not the only one doing that. Now what we need is a way to quickly change setups... Going from Markdown editor to Azure C# Function.
• VS Code can do that?! (Burke Holland and Sarah Drasner) - Pretty cool little tips and tricks with vscode.

Data

• Power BI Desktop April Feature Summary (Amanda Cofsky) - Check out all the new features from April release.

Miscellaneous

• How Can You Be Sure Someone Has True Leadership Skills? Look for These 2 Rare Signs (Marcel Schwantes) - Interesting post. Its True, we all have our stories.

Books

• The ONE Thing The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
  
  Authors Gary Keller, Jay Papasan
  That book was fantastic, and I really mean it. It helps on so many points! Professional, personal, social... It must be in your library.
  ISBN: 978-1885167774

Reading Notes #313

Suggestion of the week

• 5 Crazy Easy Things You Can Tweak Now for Better SEO (Liza Wilde) - Guys 5 really simple tips easy to apply... We all need to read this.

Cloud

• Azure Storage for Serverless .NET Apps in Minutes (Jeremy Likness) - Very interesting little project both simple and useful using Azure Function and Azure Storage.
• Launching of my Azure Rocks! YouTube channel (Guy Barette) - Pretty nice channel named Azure Rocks, that my friend just started, it worth a look.
• The moment I came to play with .NET Standard 2.0 part 2! (Dominique St-Armand) - Great post packed with tons of gotchas and advices, just how I like them.

Programming

• Install and run Ghost 1.x on Raspbian on Raspberry Pi (Ghost Pi) - Pretty cool tutorial that mixes low tech with a recent blog engine.
• Exploring the Azure IoT Arduino Cloud DevKit (Scott Hanselman) - This is an excellent post to know where to star with arduino and make your mind of what to expect in terms of effort vs result.
• Scalable and Performant ASP.NET Core Web APIs: Introduction (Carl Rippon) - This post is the first of a promising series about best practices building efficient APIs.

Databases

• Interacting with Azure SQL Using All Command Line Tools (K. Scott Allen) - I'm a big fan of terminal prompt when it's time to write SQL queries, this nice little one even got auto-completion, that's cool.

Miscellaneous

• Building 0verkill on Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux - 2D ASCII art deathmatch game (Scott Hanselman) - That post brings back souvenirs...
• Running BBS Door Games on Windows 10 with GameSrv, DOSBox, plus telnet fun with WSL (Scott Hanselman) - This is a big chuck of my adolescence. I need to try that.
• You got this! You know the fundamentals. You are a learner. Plus The Imposter's Handbook (Scott Hanselman) - I think we all fit in there.

Reading Notes #302

Cloud

• Azure Event Grid vs Azure IoT Hub: Which is better for IoT? (Chris Pietschmann) - This great post explains both services and then their differences. Both can do most of the time, but when it becomes serious, which one is the best for your scenario?
• Azure Virtual Machines Anatomy (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - This post is an excellent biopsy of a virtual machine, it explains every part one by one.
• Experiment with Azure for FREE! (Anthony D. Green) - It's time to get started; it's free, and it's the real deal.
• List all App Service web apps outbound IP addresses used in a subscription (Stéphane Lapointe) - Nice little gem.
• User accounts made easy with Azure (Andrew B Hall) - Excellent post showings how easy it is to integrate user management in our app. I wish I had that when I started my last portal...

Programming

• You Have No Excuse for Dead Code (Erik Dietrich) - This post explains why more is not always better.

Data

• Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio Code (VSCode) October Updates (Jenny Jiang) - What I like about VSCode is that it is so customizable, it can still be very light and do a fantastic job for people with highly different goals.

Miscellaneous

• Use a second laptop as an extended monitor with Windows 10 wireless displays (Scott Hanselman) - Wow! How cool is that!
• Why You Shouldn't Worry About Imposter Syndrome (Jordan Scheltgen) - This post is a great piece of wisdom.

Reading Notes #301

Programming

• Botwin offers an interesting alternative option for routing with ASP.NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting “addon” for web dotnet project, it’s something that worth some more time.
• Writing Precompiled Azure Functions in Visual Studio 2017 – Visual Studio Magazine (Jason Roberts) - Good little post that introduces the new Azure Function project part of Visual Studio. Sweet!

Data

• ASP.NET Core Identity and PostgreSQL (Mark Rendle) - Nice quick fix.
• Avoiding circular dependency errors in DAX (Alberto Ferrari) - Very interesting post that explains how to avoid (or understand why we have) circular references.
• Put your databases on autopilot with a lift and shift to Azure SQL Database (Lindsey Allen) - This post shares the different type of SQL Database available for us in Azure and briefly explains when each of them is at his best.
• Why data modeling is important in #powerbi (Marco Russo) - Interesting thoughts about data modeling.

Miscellaneous

• My First Year as an MVP, part 1 (Jen Kuntz) - Interesting post. It feels soooooo familiar, and yet so far now. I look forward to meeting you in March fellow Canadian MVP.

Reading Notes #300

Cloud

• An introduction to Azure Web Apps on Linux (Christos Matskas) - Web App for all! Seriously, it's a really good news and it's already GA.
• Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update – September 2017 (Sriram Hariharan) - Get a good summary of all the new features in only one post. But of course, it's only an overview.
• Manage your Azure VM backups with Azure CLI 2.0 - Preview (Kartik P V R) - Azure CLI is so convenient, I know some will prefer graphical interfaces. However, CLIs are the only way for automation.
• Microsoft Integration (Azure and much more) Stencils Pack v2.6.1 for Visio (Sandro Pereira) - It's time (already..) to update our stencil to include the lastest and greatest. Thanks!

Programming

• Generating Google Slides from images using Apps Script (Wesley Chun) - Pretty neat features. Definitely worth the time to write a script when you need to edit tons of slides, or build a deck multiple times.
• 7 Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 2017 (Visual Studio Team) - This post shares not the usual tips. Seriously, how many you already knew before reading the article?
• Adding circuit breakers to your .NET applications | Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings on WordPress.com (Richard Seroter) - This post is a great introduction to Steeltoe and the circuit-breaker pattern. The code used in this sample is .net core but it also works with .Net framework. Perfect for all our micro-services.

Data

• Power BI Desktop October Feature Summary | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI (Amanda Cofsky) - Once again, this month release is packed with tons of great new features. I can't summarize thus the post, but the bookmarking capabilities alone worth your time reading this post or watching the video.

Miscellaneous

• #223: Mike Erwin—The Power of Solitude (Entreleadership - Mike Erwin) - Interesting reading suggests on leadership and the importance of solitude time.
• Microsoft announces next Azure OpenDev: October 25, 2017 (Ashley McNamara) - Awesome community event coming ... Save the date.
• Social Presentations with Mark Rendle (Carl and Richard) - That look like a very promising tool... except for the name that I continually forget... (but that's probably just me). I will definitely have a to the Github repo.
• The Simple Reason to Learn to Lead Yourself First (Joshua Spodek ) - Interesting thoughts about becoming a leader.
• What is a Cloud Developer Advocate? (Jeremy Likness) - Great article. A few of my friends joined that team, and even though I already had this talk with them, now I have a better picture.

Reading Notes #296

Cloud

• Create flexible ARM templates using conditions and logical functions (Kristian Nese) - I had so much oooh and aaah reading this post. Now ARM template won't necessarily be spaghetti.
• 6 Challenges Partners and Customers Face When Moving to the Cloud - Microsoft Partner Network (Tonny Siemons) - Excellent post that talks about real problems (situations) of real enterprises.
• An Introduction to Blockchain with Mark Russinovich (Mark Russinovich, Seth Juarez) - Great video from Mark Russinovich himself.
• Azure Functions – Prepare for continuous delivery (Mikael Krief) - The first post of a processing series, the focus of this one is all about creating our project from scratch in Visual Studio.
• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 10 - Quickly Connect to a Linux VM with SSH (Michael Crump) - Another nice tips and tricks post, and this one contain one I personally discovered very recently concerning ssh on windows.
• Overview on Web App for Containers and Azure App Service on Linux (Apurva Joshi) - Now that GA nothing should stop us. This post is a great overview of this Azure service.
• Why Healthcare Is Moving To The Cloud (But Isn't There Yet) (Martin Gontovnikas) - Very interesting article that explains few things from real life.

Databases

• Cloud Database? NoSQL? Nah, just use CSVs and CsvHelper (Scott Hanselman) - You are right Scott, keep it super simple sound waaaaaay better; love it.

Miscellaneous

• Ways to get involved in the local tech community (5 of 5) (Jason Haley) - This post close a nice series about the community. Looking forward to seeing you at a meetup...