Reading Notes #705

This week’s collection features a mix of critical .NET lifecycle updates and practical strategies for optimizing your database interactions. These selected articles offer helpful insights into everything from edge computing deployments to the evolving landscape of AI in modern workflows.

AI

• AI Raised the Bar (And Now We're All Tired) (Golnaz) - It's so true! So much can be done quickly today. An interesting question is: how do we avoid burning out resources and tokens? How, as human we stay smart? After all, life is a marathon, not a sprint!

Cloud

• How to Deploy Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) – Bringing Azure to the Edge (Thomas Maurer) - This post shares many information about what is possible to deploy on edge devices. It's not a how-to, however.

Databases

• EF Core LINQ Querying: Filtering, Projections, and Performance (Nick Cosentino) - This is a great post to quickly learn key principles and immediately improve the performance of our interactions with the database when using EF Core.

• EF Core vs Dapper in .NET: When to Use Each (Nick Cosentino) - Great post for developers or architects planning a future project. Both tools are great, so the decision factor depends on the context.

• Optimizing PostgreSQL on Azure directly in Visual Studio Code (Jesse Sullivan) - Interesting new tools in VS Code and Azure for PostgreSQL users. Curious to learn more about that Azure HorizonDB.

DevOps

• WSL container is now available for public preview (Craig Loewen) - This is great news; this will help improve deployment as now people can have an environmental test in WSL.

Programming

• Creating Dual Use Windows GUI and Console Applications (Rick Strahl) - I never thought about that complexity, and you would think that in 2026 it would be much simpler. Good to know!

• SkiaSharp 4.0 is here: announcing the first stable release - .NET Blog (Matthew Leibowitz) - Learn more about SkiaSharp that run under things like .NET MAUI and UNO platform. This new release should improve performance a lot.

• .NET 8 and .NET 9 will reach End of Support on November 10, 2026 - .NET Blog (Rahul Bhandari) - Time flies; it's good to have a reminder. This post includes a helpful timetable and references to help you migrate.

Miscellaneous

• Evaluating performance and efficiency of the GitHub Copilot agentic harness across models and tasks (Shibani Basava & Carlos Castro) - This is a nice post to learn a little about benchmarks.

~frank

Reading Notes #605

It's reading notes time! It is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

Cloud

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problem.

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Programming

• Reimagining Pong Wars with C# and MVUX (Uno Team) - This is a very interesting post that details all the architecture and code of this game.

• How to Check Your Docker Installation: Docker Desktop vs. Docker Engine (Jay Schmidt) - A very instructive and useful post that list all details related to Docker Desktop and Docker Engine for Mac, Linux, and Windows platform.

• Empowering Developers at Microsoft Build: Docker Unveils Integrations and Sessions (Vanessa Fournier) - Nice post. You should definitely watched the Build session where they show how to target multiple platforms, and many new features

• Docker Compose Profiles, one the most useful and underrated features (Oskar Dudycz) - Woah! For now on, I shall have a profile in all my docker compose file. We'll probably not all, but I'm definitely using them. This post is the perfect place to get started and understand what are profile and how to use it.

• General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development (Damian Edwards) - Fantastic news! It an amazing tools that simplify local development and give us the opportunity to see what is happening.

• 5 easy tips to improve your personal website performance ( Salma Alam-Naylor) - I accept the challenge, I will review my websites to see how I can improve the performance. Interesting post that shares many great ideas.

AI

• A Quick Guide to Containerizing Llamafile with Docker for AI Applications (Sophia Parafina, Marc Sherwood) - Great post tht goes over how to put our favorite AI model in a container to work locally.

~Frank

Reading Notes #450

Cloud

• Announcing Az Predictor (Damien Caro) - Very nice tool to add. Why it didn't exist before?

• Cross-Platform App Authentication with Azure AD B2C And The Uno Platform (Ian Bebbington) - This is a great post that covers a lot. If you are or planning to build an app...it a must.

• Tip 294 - 5 Things you didn't know about Azure Kubernetes Service | Azure Tips and Tricks - Nice stuff as usual those tips and tricks.

Programming

• Announcing ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 (Daniel Roth) - It's definitely, exciting news that .Net 5

• Design patterns in C# - The Facade Pattern (Carmel Eve) - Pretty cool post and so interesting. I need to dig for more of those pattern explanations it's awesome.

• Introducing a UI for the Syncfusion Blazor Project Template for Visual Studio Code (Dheepa Kumar) - It definitely interesting, I'm curious to try it and also to see if it slow down vscode.

Podcasts

• Cake 1.0 with Mattias Karlsson (.NET Rocks!) - I'm a fan of Cake and of the team working on this project for a long time. Great show with our glorious Carl and Richard.

• 496: How to Generate Quick Wins, with Andy Kaufman (Coaching for Leaders) - Great conversation about how Agile should be view, and a few tips about how you could start this turn in your entourage.

• #65: James Montemagno - From Printer Software to Xamarin (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Great Interview of James. I learn a lot about in this episode. Nice show.

• #399: The Practice of Shipping Creative Work with Seth Godin (The EntreLeadership Podcast) - I knew who Seth Godin was, and read one of his books recently (Tribes). And honestly, I feel like I will read another one soon. Great mind, I like how clear is the example... Great episode.

Miscellaneous

• Run Your Legacy .NET in the Cloud with Tanzu (David Dieruf) - An interesting solution for a legacy application.

• Creating a question friendly environment (Scott Hanselman) - Does the environment are very important and we must do our best to preserve them.

~frank