Reading Notes #207

Suggestion of the week

• A Beginner’s Mind - A very inspiring article, especially for the younger, but also for the more experienced, that want to keep their interior flame.

Cloud

• Build it, Use it, Destroy it! - Interesting thoughts about a different approach when working with VMs.
  
• Public Cloud Anxiety – Dealing with maintenance & failures of VMs (marc) - Very nice pot that explains how Azure can be stable even during "bad" events.
  
• How to Incorporate Application Insights into a JavaScript Web App (Mansib Rahman) - An incredibly detail and precise tutorial about Application Insights.
  
• Playing with Azure Connectors (Adarsha Datta) - Twilio IFTTT and Logic App are incredible connectors.

Databases

• How to create a MySQL Database on Azure (Susan Ibach) - Excellent post that explains how to have a MySQL database in Azure.
  
• October update for Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Matt Usher) - Learn more about the latest improvements.

Programming

• Lazy Loading Images on the Web - (Brian Rinaldi) - Very cool post that share (and explains) a lot of tools and frameworks to implement a lazy loading process.
  
• Integrating Visual Studio Code with dnx-watch to develop ASP.NET 5 applications - Cool task in VsCode to auto-refresh asp.net website.
  
• It's happening - OpenSSH for Windows...from Microsoft - Great news for any and every PowerShell user. We are moving forward!
  
• An Introduction to the new TFS/VSO Build System (Lachezar Arabadzhiev) - Great video that will give you everything you need for doing your next project in VSO.
  
• ASP.NET - ASP.NET 5 Anywhere with OmniSharp and Yeoman - Amazing post, the perfect starting point to all developers on Mac... or Linux.
  
• Visual Studio - Bower: Modern Tools for Web Development - Fantastic post that demystify bower and an excellent tutorial.
  
• How to use Visual Studio Online to Streamline Your Application Development with Agile Methodology (Mansib Rahman) - Great tutorial that gives us a little tour of VSO work section.

Miscellaneous

• My Story: How I work, the services I use (Simon May) - Interesting post where the author shares his favourite tools and how he uses them.

Reading Notes #206

Cloud

• Automating Azure Resource Group deployment using a Service Principal in Visual Studio Online: Build/Release Management (Roopesh Nair) - Great tutorial who step by step explains how to setup a continuous deployment in Azure.
  
• My Azure Virtual Machine Won’t Start (Alexandre Brisebois) - Great quick fix, simple and efficient.
  
• Azure PowerShell 1.0 Preview (David Justice) - It time to move forward and stop using Switch-AzureMode. Check what's coming next in Azure PowerShell with this post.
  
• Azure Site Recovery with Azure Pack Update (Ashish Gangwar) - Interesting: Disaster Recovry as a service.
  
• Troubleshooting - Can't Delete Azure Resource Group (Alexandre Brisebois) - I found this post really interesting (sorry Alex) because things are not always going as planned. However, that when we learn the most.
  
• Monitoring an already-live Azure Web App (Beckylin Orooji) - Very useful post that explains how to get Application Insight profiling our web app without redeploying or having access to the code.

Programming

• Learn You Node with VS Code (G. Andrew) - This post is really an excellent starting point to learn Node.js. It gives good references, tools, and tips.

Miscellaneous

• MVP Award Update - Oct 2015 - This post explains the changes done to the MVP program to improve it. A must to all current and future MVP candidates.

Reading Notes #203

 

 

Suggestion of the week

• Adding Insights and Telemetry to Logic Apps through Power BI (Jeff Hollan) - Fantastic post that explains how to integrate Logic Apps and Power BI. And for the lazy one that doesn't want to read, check the first haft of this video.

Cloud

• September update: Azure Preview Portal improvements (Leon Welicki) - The portal is changing again, and you can see how Microsoft is really listening to his users.
  
• Azure Service Fabric 101 - This video explains in only ten minutes, what is service fabric and why we should care.
  
• Azure Service Fabric 102 (Scott Hanselman) - You know our bases or you watch the 101; this post goes the code and explains how it can work.

Programming

• Battle of the Free Code Editors (Brian Rinaldi) - Nice post that compares three free, popular, and powerful code editor.

Databastes

• Easily Transform JSON Data When Importing to Azure DocumentDB (Stephen Baron) - Great post that explains powerful ways to import our data in DocumentDB.

Miscellaneous

• Going Back to One (Alexandre Brisebois) - Organize our work to become a performer, could be easily done in Windows. 10.

~Frank 

Reading Notes #198

Cloud

• Announcing Backup of Windows 10 machines using Azure Backup (Giridhar Mosay) - Low-brainer, safe and efficient it's a must.
  
• Announcing Geospatial support in Azure DocumentDB! (Aravind Ramachandran) - Fantastic, this option was present in the wishlist of many people. And we can try it right now in the DocumentDB playground.
  
• Azure Site Recovery is now available in Central US, North Central US, South Central US, East US2 (Ashish Gangwar) - Great news!
  
• Copy a Blob From an Azure Datacenter to Another Using PowerShell (Alexandre Brisebois) - I write previously about that here, but the monitoring idea is a nice addition. time to update my scripts.
  
• What’s New In Azure Storage (Gaurav) - Nice summary of the azure blob storage (.Net client), on how to use the new AppendBlob type.
  
• Moving a CentOS Virtual Machine to Another Azure Datacenter (Alexandre Brisebois) - Very complete script to move Linux machine using RAID0 between accounts.
  
• Azure Automation, Remote PowerShell And a Virtual Machine (Alexandre Brisebois) - This post provides a nice PowerShell script clearly commented, to execute commands remotely in an Azure VM.
  
• Meet AzureCon (Nicole Herskowitz) - A date to remember: September 29.
  
• New CDN features – country filtering, compression and analytics (Manling Zhang) - This post announced a new feature in Azure CDN.

Podcast

• .NET Rocks! - Great episode very interesting discussion about the new Azure Service Fabric.

Programming

• Using Callbacks with Moq (Richard Carr) - The callback method is a powerful tool in Moq, and this post explained it very clearly.
  
• AC's Blog: Running Mocha Tests with Visual Studio Code - Nice little tutorial that goes to the essential and explains debugging with. VSCode and Gulp.
  
• 12 tips to increase the performance of ASP.NET application drastically – Part 1 - Evangelism - Nice tips to improve performance. I like the sixth one, I wonder how much the performances are improved with it.
  
• 12 tips to increase the performance of ASP.NET application drastically – Part 2 - Second part of the performance tips list... still very interesting.

Databases

• JavaScript as Modern Day T-SQL (Andrew Liu) - This post explains the awesome evolution of the Javascript Query language DocumentDB.

First VSCode Tasks in less than 5 minutes

I'm working on solution to automating the generation of my weekly post: Reading Notes. While this work is finished, I still need to do many steps manually. I introduced in a previous post VSCode, that already supports markdown. In fact, from any markdown file, you can press Ctrl+Shift+V to preview the oupput. However, today, it's not possible to do anything with this preview. This post explains how we can use VSCode task to fix this problem.

Goal

Create a task that will quickly transform my current open markdown file in HTML.

Step 1 - Get a Markdown parser

First, we need Markdown parser. I'm sure many different are available, but in this post, I will use markdown-js, a Node.js parser that is available on github. To install it, just execute the following command:

npm install -g markdown

Step 2 - Create a Task

Secondly, we need to create our task. Open Visual Studio Code, and type Ctrl+Shift+P to open the Command Palette and then start typing Configure Task. Press Enter or select “Configure Task Runner”. This will create a new file tasks.jon, with many different samples of tasks. Before you replace the content of the page by the following code, take a look at the comment block at the top of the page. You will see different context variables that are available.

// Simple Task to transform MarkDown to Html
{
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "command": "md2html",
    "isShellCommand": true,
    "args": ["${file}"]
}

This defines our task using the json format. The command name in this case is md2html and we pass the name of the current open file as parameter using the variable ${file}. Finally, the "isShellCommand" is set to true so the task will be triggered by pressing Ctrl+Shift+B.

Step 3 - Try it

To try it, open a markdown page, hit Ctrl+Shift+B, and voilà! You should see in the output the HTML code generated.

References

• Node.js
• Markdown-js
• Visual Studio Code - Docs

~Frank

Reading Notes #186

I finally watch most of the recorded sessions from Build, Ignite and MVPvConf, and I had more time to read.

Suggestion of the week

• Learning to git bisect (Rural) - Very, very interesting walkthrough, I never knew Git got that kind of feature.

Cloud

• Azure preview portal support for Cloud Services (Nick Harris) - +1 for the Preview portal.
  
• Azure Bits #1 - Up and Running (Rik Robinson) - Nice little tutorial that implement an asp.net website with queue and tasks.
  
• Azure Automation: New Graphical and Textual Authoring Features (Chris Sanders) - Perfect post to get started on Azure Automatiom.
  
• Azure PowerShell DSC Extension v1.10 released (Kris Bash) - Cool
  
• A taste of DocumentDB through our Query Playground (Andrew Hoh) - This post is a quick introduction of an interesting tool available for free on the Azure website.
  
• .NET Rocks! - Episode 1137 (Carl Franklin and Richard Cambell) - Nice episode where Sam Vanhoutte shares with us his impression about BizTalk in Azure in all it's different flavor: VM, SaaS, LogicApp.
  
• Debugging Desired State Configuration (DSC) on (Alexandre Brisebois) - This post explains every step of a debugging session with DSC using PowerShell.
  
• A Monster VM Azure Resource Manager Template (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice deep dive into how to create a custom template for the Azure Resources Manager.
  
• Microsoft – the only vendor named a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrants for IaaS, Application PaaS, and Cloud Storage (Nicole Herskowitz) - Very interesting post that summarizes the Gatner document about today cloud leaders.

Microsoft is currently the only vendor to be positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service , Application Platform as a Service , Cloud Storage Services and Server Virtualization

• Getting Started with Azure Notification Hubs (xximjasonxx) - This is a nice post to get started with Azure Hub and nice tool Service Bus Explorer (available online).

Programming

• JustDecompile Engine Becomes Open Source (Iana Tsolova) - Time to go checks what's under the hood.
  
• Create Node Task for Visual Studio Code (Steve Michelotti) - Nice post that explains clearly how create a task in VisualStudio Code.
  
• Customize ASP.NET MVC 6 View Location Easily (Jeff) - Nice tips, and a very simple solution to make the Shared folder more visible.

Miscellaneous

• Task Management for Teams (JD Meier) - Interesting thoughts about the size of our planned periods.
  
• Getting Started with Azure Notification Hubs (xximjasonxx) - This is a nice post to get started with Azure Hub and nice tool
  
• Open Source: A Small Guide for Newcomers (Felix Rieseberg) - If you already know your base with git and would like to jump-on the open-source wave, this post is the perfect start point. It provides nice advices and good references for more detail information.

~Frank

Note about the image of this week: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.

Meet my new best friend: Visual Studio Code

On the last week of April, Microsoft was having a huge event call //Build. During three (3) days many great conferences were presented. You can watch them on-demand on Channel 9. The keynote of day one is a must! It was during this keynote that Microsoft reveals many amazing news. One of them: Visual Studio Code. In this post, I indent to share my impression of this tool after one week of usage.

The Beast

You may be thinking: VSCode, it must be a light version Visual Studio... To that, I will reply it's not.

VSCode doesn't go without remembering other modern text editor like Sublime text, or brackets. The interface is far different from Visual Studio though. At this day, three themes are available but you can customize e v e r y t h i n g.

VSCode is free, and it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, it includes great tooling for web technologies such as HTML, Asp.net, Nodejs, CSS, LESS, SASS and JSon. It has syntax highlighting and a true IntelliSense. It also included: package managers, repositories, Git experience, debug tools, tasks, and so more!

I could continue over and over, but all the features are well explained on the official website.

My experience

It took me less than a minute to install on my "old" surface one. The interface is fast, and everything was looking good... Until I try to do something.

First, I was a bit confused. How should I open or create a project? Where is the menu? How do I use the debugger? After few minutes reading the excellent documentation on the official website, everything became clear. Visual Studio Code is sharing his name with his big brother, but he is really different. VS Code is using a folder approach, and a lot of shortcuts (so you keep your hands on the keyboard). And you quickly learn to use the Command Palette (Ctrl + Shift + P) to do more specific work.

My initial test was why Ghost. I cloned the repository directly from Github to my computer. Then from VSCode, open the folder. Without changing / editing anything, VSCode knew my project was in JavaScript, and the coloring and IntelliSense were working. And(F5), the debugger and I felt already more at home.

A little message informed me that I needed to specify the starting point in the configuration file and voilà! I was debugging a Node.js project, that was easy.

Verdict

After a really short adaptation, Visual Studio Code reveals to be a reel gem. I strongly suggest that you spend few minutes reading the documentation before, to enjoy all his capabilities! The further I use it the more I become completely addicted. Visual Studio Code is an indispensable tool for everyone doing web development or looking for a powerful code editor.

 

 

Reference:

• Visual studio code: Official website where you can find documentation and download VSCode for your favourite platform.

Reading Notes #184

Last week, Microsoft released tones of news during the //Build 2015. The event was broadcast live, but if you are like me, you probably work during the day.... That smile because the conferences were recorded and are now available on Channel 9

You should definitely take a look and create your own schedule, but in all cases, you must watch the day's one Keynote
Enjoy!

Suggestion of the week

• Sometimes You Just Have to Scale Up! (Alexandre Brisebois) - Awesome tutorial again from Alexandre, that put together a very useful script for us.

Cloud

• Improving the GitHub workflow for the Microsoft Community - Get the details about this release here.

Programming

• NPM for Everything - This post explains hw to use Node Package Manager (npm) to do... well everything.
  
• Preview the OneDrive API for Work and Life - That a real good news, and I know exactly how I can will use it. Perfect timing...
  
• Extensions for Visual Studio Online, REST APIs for TFS 2015 RC, and more from Build 2015 - Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management - Site Home - MSDN Blogs (Will Smythe) - A concentrated of the latest news about visual studio.
  
• Application Insights now supports ASP.NET v5 applications (Sergey Kanzhelev) - Perfect post to get started.
  
• Introducing Visual Studio Code for Windows, Mac, and Linux (Scott Hanselman) - Quick intro to VisualStudio Code, that was released at Build.
  
• Node.js Tools 1.0 on GitHub and VMs Available  - A very nice tool, if you are doing Node.js it's a must. Even more since it's now included in the Azure community VMs...

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft is becoming cool again  - Interesting post about the "new" Microsoft.