Reading Notes #514

Another Monday, another ReadingNotes post. 

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. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• Web development is like assembling IKEA furniture (Christian Heilmann ) - A wonderful lesson here. Everyone should read it.

Cloud

• Deploying Applications with Azure Static Web Apps (Lee Stott) - Azure static web app is such a great tool to know. This post will get you started on a fantastic journey.

• Using Azure Service Bus in the wild (Paul Michaels) - This excellent post introduces the Service Bus as a crucial piece when working in a bigger system.

Programming

• Do I need Kubernetes? | Cloud Native Computing Foundation (Dave Blakey) - A nice little tour of kubernetes.

• Improved doc management personalization - Visual Studio Blog (microsoft.com) - This post list a few new features and customization, like a bigger dirty file notification.

• The VS Code Server (Grace Taylor) - I personally heard about it for the first time Friday on Clarkio live stream. This project is a fantastic idea! To get access, fill out the short form at the end of the post.

• Writing .NET Application Services for Kubernetes (Mike Hadlow) - I never used Kubernetes, but always found it interesting. This post is a gold mine of advice and best practices about how to plan your multi-container app.

Miscellaneous

• DevOps Release Management Best Practices (Stephen Watts ) - Nice post that shares a lot of great ideas and practices.

• Understanding Have I Been Pwned's Use of SHA-1 and k-Anonymity (Troy Hunt) - A very interesting post that explains some security limitations and the reason behind some technological choices.

~frank

Reading Notes #512

Good Monday everyone! It's time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes that catch my interest during the week. 

 If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Programming

• Performance Improvements in .NET MAUI (Jonathan Peppers) - Extremely detailed post that shows the performance of .NET MAUI between platforms, and performing some specific tasks.

• Copy a work item type using Azure DevOps API's (Art Garcia) - A nice piece of code to copy a workitem using PowerShell.

• Introducing Achievements: recognizing the many stages of a developer’s coding journey (Bailey Brooks) - I think this is a really cool idea. Looking forward to seeing some achievements popping up on profiles.

• Introduction to Regular Expressions in C# (Code Maze) - Regex is an extremely powerful tool to have, easy to get started hard to master. This is the perfect post to get started.

• Single Element Loaders: The Spinner (Temani Afif ) - A nice post that explains the pattern behind spinner animation. Easier than you may think. This is the first of a series.

• Visual Studio Code May 2022 (null) - Fine-tuned constantly, improved I always appreciate those update posts.

Podcast

• 31. Improving your CI/CD pipeline & how everything boils down to software - with Sarah Lean (Betatalks the podcast) - Interesting discussion with Sara about her journey as a tech woman (and a damn start one ;) ), CI/CD pipeline, and ... whiskey!
• Indexing Video using KlipTok with Jeff Fritz (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode with Jeff (aka csharpfritz) about his really interesting project KlipTok that he is been live coding on Twitch.
• EP 003 | Going Full Time YouTube at 40 with DAN BECKER (Matti Haapoja Podcast) - I didn't know those two knew each other! Very interesting chit-chat from two YouTubers in very different nice.

Miscellaneous

• Care for Yourself First (Chris Pietschmann) - So simple but seems so hard...right? It's worth it let's try harder.

~Frank

Reading Notes #511

Good Monday, it's time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, blog posts, and podcast episodes that catch my interest during the week. 

 If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Visual Studio Code Tools for Azure Revamped (David Ramel) - Time flies! Five years already... And probably the first extension I personally ever installed.

Programming

• Who should mark PR comments as resolved? (Dan Clarke) - In your team who is doing it?

• 14 Containerization Use Cases: Hit a Home Run with Containers (Hiren Dhaduk) - Nice list of real-life story and situation where docker shines and empower.

• Adding a CLA Bot to Your GitHub Repository (Calvin) - This seems simple to do... I assumed adding a bot in GitHub was more complicated than that. Nice post.

• Keep your experiments separate (Jessica Joy Kerr) - This post shares good practices when adding features to our app... Because we never know the full impact when we start.

• Static code analysis with NDepend (Andreas Nesheim) - I'm always curious about those tools. I think they could also be useful when connected to your CICD and automation processes.

• When WebAssembly Replaces Docker (B. Cameron Gain) - Interesting post that explains why WASM is indeed more interesting than docker in some scenarios.

Miscellaneous

• 5 great books for the summer (Bill Gates) - There are a few books that I put on my to-read list. There you go.

~Frank

How to re-open a repository cloned in a volume, from Visual Studio Code

I love Dev Containers, I use them a lot for most of my development. One of my favorite options is to clone a repository directly in a docker volume.

It takes a few seconds and you can work on your code without installing any SDKs or language that your current machine doesn't have. Marvelous!

Ideally, at the end of your session, you push your code to another repository (ex: GitHub). However, sometimes I forget or am interrupted I start working on something else, and my changes are not pushed.

How do you re-open that environment?! In this post, I want to share two ways that I use.

Open Recent

The first method is to use the history of the editor! For example, here in Visual Studio Code, select the File menu and Open Recent.

If you didn't open too many files since you used that dev container, it should be present as displayed in the image. It should look like: <Name of the repository> in a unique [Dev Container].

Make sure docker is already running and select it. Voila, in a snap you are back into the dev environment with your last changes waiting for you.

Open the Container

There are a few different options to do the next solution, I will share the one I consider the easiest for the people who are not Docker experts.

First, if not already present to your VSCode, add the Docker extension identifier: ms-azuretools.vscode-docker. Then from this new extension in the top section named containers search for your container. It should start with "vsc", for Visual Studio Code, then hyphen the name of the repository you cloned. Right-click on it and select start. After a few seconds, the container should have a little green triangle on its side and be ready to continue.

The next step consists of attaching the container to VSCode. Once more, from the Docker extension, right-click on the container and select Attach Visual Studio Code.

This will open a new VSCode window, we are mostly done but there is one last step to do. You will notice that the file explorer is empty. No worries we will fix everything with this last step. The terminal should be open in the home folder of the root user. Let's open our project folder by executing the command:

cd /workspaces/<repository-name>

Then the final command is to re-open VSCode in this folder and let the Dev Container do his magic. Execute the command:

code . -r

(the -r is to re-use the same VSCode windows. It's optional, if not provided it will open a new VSCode instance.)

And voila! The Dev Container is just as it was before.

If you know other ways to achieve this, leave a comment or reach out, I'm always happy to learn more.

~ frank

Reading Notes #506

Good Monday, Already time to share my reading notes of the week. A list of all the articles, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Introduction to Azure Chaos Studio (Paul Michaels) - This is a very interesting tool, looking forward to see more services included

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming in C# (Sukhrob) - A good post that takes the time to explain the why.Why we should complexify our code to make it asynchronous.
• ASP.NET Core CRUD with NoSQL: Part 3 (Matthew Groves) - We continue to learn, this time, a bit more about the sql+ and the create of the crud API.
• All Roads Lead Back to Infrastructure as Code (Joe Duffy) - From where it started to where it is going this very detailed post covers it all.
• Bringing code navigation to communities (Patrick Thomson) - This is really interesting... Looking forward to read more about it.
• Major update to the PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code (Sydney Smith) - Ok wow... I need a PowerShell script right now just to try that new version; it looks amazing!
• Visual Studio on an ultra-wide monitor - Visual Studio Blog (Mads Kristensen) - It's not a "problem" I particularly have because I used 2 regular monitors, but I heard about it. It's really nice to see that so many possibilities are available to us.

Podcasts

• Docker Desktop for Linux is Here! (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Great episode so much energy! Discussion about the brand new Docker Desktop for Linux, who to report bugs, ask for a new feature, and the DockerCon!
• Épisode 15 - Gengis Khan (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - I keep those episodes very preciously as a threat, and this one was such a good one! It's in French and the topic is the biggest empire that ever existed... No, it's the Romain.
• How to Productively Show Off What You've Learned (Modern Mentor) - Nice episode. That's a good idea I should share what I think of books and posts I read! ;) I guess I'm not too bad.
• Comparing Infrastructure-as-Code with Chris Klug (.NET Rocks!) - Terraform, Pulumi, ARM, and Bicep... All those are mentioned because it's all about Infrastructure-as-Code. Interesting talk about the different options we have.

Miscellaneous

• Understanding the Role of a Developer Evangelist (Karl Hughes) - As a cloud advocate, I don't remember how often I explained what is my role. This 360-degree post covers all angles and provides a really good answer.

~frank

Reading Notes #501

Another Monday, another Reading Notes. 😀

It's been five hundred weeks, this is more than nine years! Who knew I will keep doing that for so long... 

If you are new around here, welcome, The Reading Notes 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.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Bicep Access policies and Managed Identity (Gregor Suttie) - This is a nice post that connects docs pages and different blog posts and information so we have the big picture.

• Cloud-Native Application Security (Samir Behara) - This post is listing so many best practices, patterns, and anti-patterns, it is a must for any "cloud-native people".

Programming

• Get started faster with the new 5-minute Quickstarts (Hannah Hunter & Nick Greenfield) - A short post that shares a few quickstart tips and examples.

• Compare Arrays in C# (Code Maze) - Great post that explains some subtleties in the comparison operators.

• Connecting a .NET Application with MongoDB Atlas (Assis Zang) - Great tutorial to setup a .NET 6 web app to connect to an existing MongoDB database.

• Microsoft Won't Do Drag-and-Drop for Blazor (David Ramel) - A very interesting post about the reasons that leaned Blazor developers team to let go of that feature.

• Run Custom Scripts In Docker With Arguments - ENTRYPOINT Vs CMD (devopscube) - A nice post. Did you know the difference? I didn't.

• Visual Studio Code March 2022 (VS Code team) - New commands, new features, new experiences everything is explained in this one post.

Miscellaneous

• Missing Insights from the Virtual Water Cooler (Modern Mentor) - There are smarts way to get the human interaction that we crave these days.
• Greg on The Genius of Routine (What's Essential) - Habits are very powerful tools in our toolbox for so many things... It's worth learning more about it.
• Short-Season Podcast: Is It Worth Your Time And Effort? (Feed Your Brand) - Seasons are everywhere, but does it applies to everything? This episode discusses the pros and cons.

Miscellaneous

• "New Boards Hub" Public Preview - Azure DevOps Blog (Dan Hellem) - Boards are so useful to visualize information quickly. Flip that preview switches on to give it a try.

~Frank

Reading Notes #498

Good Monday, Already time to share my reading notes of the week. A list of all the articles, blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Tutorial: Using Azure Table Storage or Azure Cosmos DB with Microsoft Orleans (Nick) - A nice tutorial from a series this one focusing on Storage locally using Azurite.

Programming

• The Ultimate Web Dev Environment (Aaron Powell) - Extremely complete post that shows so many little details and how to make them work together.

• Containers on Azure App Service - Tips & Tricks - Philly.NET CodeCamp 2022 recording (Guy Barrette) - A cool video from my friend Guy sharing some tips and tricks. There is stuff to learn for everyone.

• Negative Space Scheduling (Oren Eini) - Very cool real-life scenario. So true! If you ever have worked on a scheduler, you know.

• vscode.dev Visual Studio Code for the Web (Chris Dias) - There was already some kind of flavor of vscode with the dev.github.com, but there is something amazing about the standalone version. Brilliant!

Miscellaneous

• 5 Tips on Managing a Remote-first Development Team (Marcelo Wiermann) - As all of us have been working remotely for a while, it's a good moment to remember how communication is important and understand that in a more normal situation being remote can be good.

• Maximizing 1on1 time with your manager (Mark Downie) - I love that. It is definitely a good plan.

~frank

Reading Notes #493

Good Monday, Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

Just for the of it, I did a little funny video to answer the question: Where really is cloud computing? 

Watch it on your favorite platform ;) YouTube - TikTok

Cloud

• Migrating from GitHub Pages to Azure Static Web Apps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is a good tutorial that leverages the GitHub deployment to Azure.

• Tip 352 - How to trigger an Azure Function from Azure Cosmos DB | Azure Tips and Tricks - This is a clear tutorial about how to use an Azure function trigger connected to Azure Cosmo DB. Simple but very powerful.

Programming

• Minimal APIs, Blazor Improvements, and Tools Updates in ASP.NET Core 6 (Antonio Liccardi) - So many goodies in the last few days.

• Azure Static Web Apps, Blazor, Authentication and Visual Studio 2022 (Scott Kuhl) - There is a little bit more work than I would like but there is also a lot to interact with and monitor locally. Thanks to this clear tutorial we have all the steps to reproduce.

• Comparison of Dependency Injection in .NET (Nickolas Fisher) - A very complete tutorial, with all the required code even the GitHub reference. The perfect example to get started.

• VS Code Gets New Side Panel in v1.64 Update (David Ramel) - Nice! I like this new menu functionality.

Podcasts

• 291: GitHub Actions All The Things (Merge Conflict) - Sometimes building a CI-CD feels too cumbersome, but it's probably worth it. In this episode Frank and James share and they found their balance.
• Greg on The Power Of The Graceful No (What's Essential) - It's so hard some time to say this simple word... But it is an important, nice episode.
• Shaun Walker on Blazor and Oqtane - Episode 179 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Nice discussion with the creator of DotNetNuke and more recently Oqtane, about .Net and Blazor for today's solution.
• 564: Make Your Reading More Meaningful, with Sönke Ahrens (Coaching for Leaders) - As far as I can remember, I always struggled with taking "good" notes. Interesting topic, a few good tips, and tricks.
• Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History with Evan Amos (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Really interesting interview about... yes, photography. Scott is chatting with the photographer of those amazing images of the game consoles.

~Frank

Reading Notes #486

It's Monday (the cyber one), time to 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

• A Simpler Way to Azure (Rob Conery) - A very cool and interesting project. Even though I have never tried Heroku I think it's always good to push forward and make the user experience easier.

• Azure CLI migration from ADAL to MSAL ( Chase Wilson) - That a good news and now with Graph... So manny will be happy about that.

• What’s New in the New Version of Az.Tools.Installer (Lei Jin) - Interesting tool. I love how so many changes are implemented based on the users' feedback... And it's on GitHub.

Programming

• Let's upgrade my main site and podcast to .NET 6 LTS (Scott Hanselman) - Nice! I need to do the same for so many projects...Any one like that too?

• ASP.NET Core Integration Tests With TestServer - How Did I Not Know About This? (Scott Hannen) - The perfect introduction post to get started with tests in .Net.

• How to parse JSON Lines (JSONL) with C# (Davide Bellone) - Interesting post about how to parse uncommon JSON files.

• Theme an ASP.NET MVC website with custom views (Steve Fenton) - Pretty cool solution to manage themes. Definitely inspiring.

• The newest Docker VS Code extension feature you’re not using (null) - That a very exciting new for dedv like me who are occasional visitors! I don't code every day so an intelisens is a must to help me.

• Upgrading a 20 year old University Project to .NET 6 with dotnet-upgrade-assistant (Uche Nkadi) - Great story of an upgrade.

~Frank

Reading Notes #474

Every Monday (or Tuesday when the previous was a holiday 😏), 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

• Achieving observability in async workflows (Colby Callahan, Megha Manohara, and Mike Azar.) - Interesting real-life story.

• The fastest way to get started with Microsoft Azure (Abhijit Jana) - That a piece of very good advice, I need to remember that next time someone asks me.

• Updating Azure App Service on Linux for Docker via Webhooks from C# - Dangl.Blog(); (Georg Dangl) - Yep it's so simple to update in PaaS.

Programming

• Exploring the Visual Studio Code REST Book extension for native Notebooks (Scott Hanselman) - Quick post about an interesting extension, and if you are interested you can collaborate.

Podcasts

• 118: How to Get Into Teaching & Public Speaking (Plus My Entire Gear List) (CloudSkills.fm) - If you are thinking about starting to Podcast or event streaming... This is a nice podcast to help you to get started.

• Automating all the Things with Home Assistant's Paulus Schoutsen (Hanselminutes) - I enjoy that episode... How did you start? And all those reflections about how to do it so everyone enjoys it even when not everybody is "pro-tech" at home.

• Having a Laugh with Michael McIntyre (A Bit of Optimism) - Definitely a fun episode to listen to.

• How to Show More Grit at Work (Modern Mentor) - New to remote work (aka pandemic forced to work remotely) you still need to make your work visible and this episode could help you to get started.

• The Art of Podcasting, the Future of Angel Investing, and Startup Ideas for Indie Hacker with Rob Walling of Tinyseed (Indie Hackers) - Interesting discussion about the podcast and the remote interaction with an audience.

• #93: Cristian Florea - Coach For Aspiring Developers (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Nice episode perfect for the new developers to help them to find that first job. I really like the live question part of it.

• SPI 486: One of the Most Important Things You Can Do for Entrepreneurial (and Life) Success (SPI podcast) - That was a nice episode talking about helping each other and doing so to grow. Tons of ideas.

• 0255 - Tidjani Belmansour - Azure Communication Services (Visual Studio Talk Show) - It's in French. Once more great episode, interesting talk about one of the "recent" addition to the Azure services and what you can do with it.

Miscellaneous

• How to achieve a pixellated secrets scene in OBS for Windows (LUCE CARTER) - So simple and very efficient.I will give it a try.

~frank

Reading Notes #473

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!

Suggestion of the week

• Transform C# objects to a flat string dictionary (Josef Ottoson) - I love so much those developer's coding journey. We learn so much more than if only the "happy path " was shared. Great post thank you for sharing.

Cloud

• Develop production-scale modern web apps quickly with Azure Static Web Apps (Daria Grigoriu) - Nice summary of what is an Azure Static web app and what and all the included features since it reached Global Availability this week.
• The New Azure Logo - Microsoft Azure Icon (Abhijit Jana) - This is my favorite so far.
• Using Auth0 with Static Web Apps (Aaron Powell) - Ah wonderful! I noticed this new feature in Azure static web App this week. This post details how it works and gives a great example.

Programming

• VS Code shortcuts that you must know! (Mac and Windows) (Raynaldo Sutisna) - Learning new shortcuts is always nice.
• 4 Tips on How to Refactor Code in Visual Studio Code (Alex Omeyer) - Nice! I didn't know about that cool extension.
• 5 Ways to Improve the Performance of C# Code for Free (Sasha Mathews) - Interesting deep dive in the performance of our code and the why it goes fast or could go faster.
• Add a README to Your NuGet Package (Christopher Gill) - Now I understand! I noticed that, earlier this week, and thought: Wow, this is wonderful, why they are not all doing that! Now it all makes sense.
• How To Customize Azure DevOps Projects Process Templates? (Abhijit Jana) - Azure DevOps is a very very powerful tool. This post and video will show you how to start customizing it.
• What Do You Mean By Automated Tests And Continuous Integration? (Charles L Flatt) - Great answer.

Podcasts

• Bonus: Understanding Digital Body Language (Modern Mentor) - That we wanted or not, we need to get better with those new tools: the webcam, the microphone. We need to understand how to use them correctly and how to understand what the person on the other hand is really sharing. Great episode.
• Social Robots with De'Aira Bryant (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Okay I crack at... If only they knew! A very interesting episode about... yes robots!
• Write Great APIs (Coding Blocks) - What's an API, what's a good API, why it's good, or why it's bad... Great episode that may me think... I really need to get back to my code and update a few things.

~frank

Reading Notes #472

Cloud

• Announcing NubesGen, an Open Source tool to automate Azure deployments (Julien Dubois) - A very interesting project use can use it participate and learn.
• Azure Bicep Refreshed (Justin Yoo) - Infrastructure As Code with Bicep. It looks great.
• Effective ways to delete resources in a resource group on Azure in 2021 ( Stephane Lapointe) - Nice post that shows us how to be smarter even when we delete resources.
• Getting Started with Azure Web PubSub Service (Abhijit Jana) - This is a great new service and the cherry on the top... It's fully managed!
• What’s the most configurable Kubernetes service in the cloud? Does it matter? (Richard Seroter) - Interesting post that compares the configuration options of the different service providers. From my point of view (code focus), it's not who has the more options that are the more appealing. It's Who let me go with the fewer click with a good setup.

Programming

• Build and ship software better with GitHub and Microsoft Teams (Teams team) - I installed the app with pure curiosity, but I kept it because it is useful. I'm happy to see those new features.
• 10 Reasons to Attend DockerCon LIVE 2021 - Docker Blog (David Oro) - It's coming soon...
• Blazor - Component Mockup Library (Cody Merritt Anhorn) - Anice tutorial that explains how to get started with this lib.
• Securing an ASP.NET Core app and web API using windows authentication (Damien Bowden) - Nice tutorial with tons of code snippets.
• tabs ↹ over ␣ ␣ ␣ spaces (Jiri Cincura) - Experimenting is still one of the best ways to learn things. Just like in this post.

Podcasts

• Designing the Future with Brian Collins (A Bit of Optimism) - Great episode, very inspiring. How as more experienced humans can we help the younger ones to build a better future... And learn in the process.
• Use Storytelling to Get Ahead at Work (Modern Mentor) - Storytelling is important and this episode help to get started. Because the best stories are not improvised.
• Épisode 93 - Quand la santé tourne à l’obsession (Grand écart) - In French, with so many people that run... We need to stay focus and do it for the good reason. It an eye-opening episode.
• Hello World: April 22, 2021 - Special Hello Earth! (Hello World) - Shameless plug... Hello World is now available in Podcast!
• 252: Linux GUI Apps on Windows - WSLg (Merge Conflict) - I was happy when I saw the news about the WSL GUI Apps announcement, but didn't have the time to try anything. In this episode, Frank and James ask all the good questions and provide so many answers. Awesome.
• SPI 482: The 3-Second Rule That You Need to Know (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Getting out of our comfort zone is hard. And introducing ourselves could be so challenging. I love the idea of that tips.
• Leadership, Radical Delegation, And Integrated Problem Solving with Admiral John Richardson (The Idealcast with Gene Kim by IT Revolution) - Interesting episode. The first thought was if the military can review their approach, everyone can. Great lesson.

Miscellaneous

• 10 Best Visual Studio Code Extensions for Increased Productivity (Dirk Strauss) - This post is so much more than a list of 10extensions...It explains some differences between Visual Studio and VS Code, and shares those extensions, and explains why there are so amazing.

~frank

Reading Notes #467

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!

This week's image brings us to 2017, back when I was a Microsoft MVP, yes my name is on that wall with so many of my friends! Have I great summit this week!

Cloud

• Azure Functions Support for node.JS 14 and .Net 5 Is Now Generally Available (Steef-Jan Wiggers Follow) - A quick post that detailed what is new and why it's nice.

• Azure Workbooks - Set it to Auto-Refresh (Shikha Jain) - Your mouse will thanks you, because of less clicks.

• Cloud-Native learning resources for .NET developers (Nish Anil) - A nice post that explains the cloud-native idea and lists sooooo many resources to get started.

Programming

• 5 things to include in your project ASAP (Lior Bragilevsky) - This is a very JavaScript focus post, but easily portable to other languages.

• Debugging configuration values in ASP.NET Core (Andrew Lock) - A great tutorial that teaches some great ways to debug and inspect the appSettings.

• Introducing AWS SSO support in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code | Amazon Web Services (Garret Sweetwood) - Another great VS Code extension, this time to help you with your authentification with AWS.

• Scaling Microservices on Kubernetes (Ashley Davis) - Interesting post about scaling. Scaling horizontally, vertically the advantages and complexities of each options.

• Tetris in Blazor WebAssembly (Matthew Jones ) - I keep repeating it, coding is fun and creative! Learn more about this cool open source project in this post.

• The common misconception about TypeScript (Narasimha Prasanna HN) - This is a great post that shares simple best practices in TypeScript.

Miscellaneous

• Get better at programming by learning how things work (Julia Evans) - Inspirational post to stay curious and keep learning.

~Frank

Reading Notes #464

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, 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.

Cloud

• Azure REST APIs with Insomnia (Jon Gallant) - Awesome post I didn't know that extension and they had never tried the import. Very useful.

• Microsoft Ignite 2021 Book of News (Microsoft) - If you are looking for the complete list of all the news done at Microsoft Ignite here it is.

• Top 5 things to get the most out of Microsoft Ignite (Rick Claus) - Nice tips to get ready.

Programming

• Tip 307 - How to create faster and smarter apps with .NET 5 | Azure Tips and Tricks - A nice quick review of .Net improvements.

• .NET Interactive with SQL!| .NET Notebooks in Visual Studio Code (Maria Naggaga) - A very interesting tool when you want to do a quick exploration of the data or invalidate some queries while in your code.

• Don't forget about the GitHub Command Line (Scott Hanselman) - I forgot about that CLI... That could be useful.

• Generate iCal calendar with .NET using iCAL.NET (Kristoffer Strube) - A nice quick tutorial for that package.Looking forward to seeing in the latest .Net version.

• IntelliSense for appsettings.json | ASP.NET Blog (James Newton-King) - That's a cool feature! How many times I was in the settings and struggling on the format, or name of a properties.No more Internet search!

• What Makes VSCode so Popular?. Visual Studio Code is bae | by Richard So | Feb, 2021 | codeburst (Richard So) - A great post that will put words into your thoughts. And if you don't use vsCode, it will explain why so many people around love it that much.

• You must be insane to be a software developer (Matt Lacey) - Interesting question.

Miscellaneous

• 4 Ways To Balance Under And Over-Communication As A Remote Work Manager (Shitika Anand) - Important and simple tools for our times.

~Frank

Reading Notes #461

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". This is a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, 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.

The suggestions of the week

• Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi - Raspberry Pi (Jim Bennett) - Great post from Jim. You can feel his excitement about this news... It's really motivating.

• Master These Three Skills to Improve Time Management 🚀 (Anastasia) - Wow. This post contains tons of information, references, and good advice. To read.

Cloud

• What Is Azure Functions (Mahesh Chand) - The great simple post that explains what is an Azure Function and how to create/ debug/ deploy one

Programming

• Creating a Running Game in VueJS - Part 3 - Component Files and Installing Vue - The Long Walk (Paul Michaels) - Interesting step by spet tutorial part 3 of a series.

• How to Install Windows Software Remotely Using PowerShell and Chocolatey - Petri (Russell Smith) - A very cool and simple way to solve a common difficulty why all those new people not working in the office.

• Open-source HTTP API packages and tools (Brady Gaster) - Excellent tutorial, second post of a series. It's definitely a great place to get started.

• Save the Date for .NET Conf: Focus on Windows, February 25, 2021 (Katie Akrop DeSantis) - Looking forward to this event. Thursday the 25th.

• Creating Discoverable HTTP APIs with ASP.NET Core 5 Web API | ASP.NET Blog (Brady Gaster) - An extremely complete tutorial to learn more about API.

Podcast

• Épisode 11 - La famine en Ukraine (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - OMG! I have nothing else to say. I knew that part of the history was dark and complex... but I knew nothing. Great episode.

• SPI 457: The Secret to Taking Risks & How to Make It Work - Behind the Scenes with Katie Kimbal (The Smart Passive Income Online Business) - Very motivating episode. When we start a journey we don't know most of the time where our decisions will bring us. Therefore it's always frightening to take risks, but with time and effort... grandiose thing can appends

• Containers on Azure with Tom Kerkhove (.NET Rocks!) - What a great episode! And it's so true there is so many ways "to do your containers" ( like in a recipe )

• Épisode 87 - La sécurité des coureuses (Grand écart) - Sometimes I feel so ashamed to be a man... I know I'm doing it right, but I need to do more... for the others that forgot that we are all equal.

• 633 - How to Use Rejection to Your Advantage (Modern Mentor) - In our lives, we will encounter many nos or rejection. This episode talks about how you could use those detours to learn more, and transform them in opportunities.

• 101: Windows Virtual Desktop with Travis Roberts (CloudSkills.fm) - I remember when "infra" people couldn't see anything positive about the cloud... Times as changed a lot. There are so many opportunities.

• The myth of turning your hobby into a job with writer Aley Arion (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Is it a myth or a reality? I totally think it's possible. But yeah in all the amazing love (or adventure) movies there are always some challenges. But happy 95% of the time.. I take that!

Miscellaneous

• Fun times with batch files : Algorithms for the masses - julian m bucknall (Julian M Bucknall) - Nice journey in the bach world.

• Scheduling Integration with the Azure Health Bot (Gregory Lisiak) - Nice way to use technology, today, to help to educate people.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

~Frank

Reading Notes #457

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

• 2 Local machines 1 Dev VM (John Friesen) - A nice tutorial that can help us get started and understand how things work.

• An Introduction to Azure Media Services - The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard (David Giard) - Media services is a gem that not enough people know. Nice little introduction post.

• Azure Storage - Zip multiple files using Azure Functions (Josef Ottosson) - Great project. I like the sharing of the thoughts or questions encounter during that build. We are all eventually meet them too.

• How To Calculate Pricing In Azure (Mahesh Chand) - Nice quick refresh or quick start. Cost is such an important topic.

• Integration tests using Azure Storage emulator and .NET Core in Azure DevOps (Dominique St-Amand) - A really interesting tutorial. I'm definitely bookmarking that one for later.

• Introducing Azure Health Bot—an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality (Lili Cheng) - Very inspiring to see the evolution of what bots are able to do.

Programming

• Advanced TypeScript Tips & Tricks - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 (Dino Kacavenda) - Very very interesting tips. As a new TypeScript coder, I found this really reassuring to know there is a way.

• Save the Date for DockerCon Live 2021! - Docker Blog (Matt Carter) - If you are a container user, or just thinking about it... Reserve the date.

• How to Use Query Strings in Blazor WebAssembly (Marinko Spasojevic) - Nice tutorial. Very detailed.

Miscellaneous

• Productive (And Realistic) Ways To Optimize Your Space For Remote Work (Genevieve Michaels) - Nice post that gives a lot of suggestions to make that space at home more comfortable and pleasing.

Reading Notes #456

The suggestion of the week

• Using the latest version of the Azure CLI (Gregor Suttie) - Whaaat! This is a master ninja tricks! Well, at the minimum it is freaking cool and useful. Awesome!

Cloud

• More with Gruut: Use the Microsoft Bot Framework to analyze emotion with the Azure Face API (Dave Brock) - This is a very complete tutorial to build a cool demo. Second in a series.
• 4 common analytics scenarios to build business agility | Azure blog and updates | Microsoft Azure (Kaiser Larsen) - Very interesting post that shares real-life scenarios where businesses used Synapse to create a great solution.

Programming

• Creating a Serverless Docker Image (Jason Robert) - A nice demo/ tutorial using Node.js to help us running things where we want.
• Entity Framework Core 5 free resources (Erik Ejlskov Jensen) - This is wonderful! A curated list of great EF documentation/ tutorials.
• Getting Started with Windows Terminal (Kayla Cinnamon) - Uh! I didn't know the preview version was also that easy to get. Pretty cool.
• Jump Start your Developer Skills with Visual Studio Code Coding Packs (Jen Looper) - So simple and yet so powerful! It's an awesome idea.
• How to Create a Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CI-CD) Solution for a Docker Project (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug. It's a simple solution, but I'm pretty proud of it and it does the job marvelously.

Podcasts

• Épisode 84 - Le bonheur de s’entraîner (Grand écart) - I'm not a runner, but I like (or use to) move and be outside. This francophone podcast is really motivating, and interesting.
• Eating Frogs with Brian Tracy (The Productivityist Podcast) - I just found this podcast. I liked that book when I read it a few years ago. It was nice listening to this episode talking about it. Brought back great ideas.
• Épisode 5 - La Chasse aux Sorcières (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - Okay, THIS IS A MUST. Seriously is yo understand French, it's both educational and funny. Great job!
• 2020 sucked - A year-end wrap-up with Scott's Wife, Mo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm so glad Mo accepted to comes on the show once more. This dynamic is very interesting. I need to make my wife listen to this episode and to my daughter too (she studying to be a nurse).
• 628 - How to Be Confident, Not Arrogant (Modern Mentor) - The line between those two is easy to cross. I appreciated the reflection time about it, that this episode offers.
• The Infinite Game with Dr. James Carse (A Bit of Optimism) - The Infinite Game, a great book that I read last year. It was awesome to listen to Simon talk about those ideas with Dr. Carse.
• #187 – Building a $38k/Month SaaS Business as a Solo Founder with Jorda O'Connor of Closet Tools (Indie Hackers) - When you like learning, and that you are not afraid to work hard, a little idea can bring you really far.
• 0251 – Joel Quimper – Microsoft Graph (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Why Microsoft Graph? It's all in this episode (in French). Great show once more.

Miscellaneous

• Attention Matters More than Time (Josh Duffney) - So true. The balance is hard to find, but let's keep trying to be better at it.
• What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2020 - Wow, a very impressive list of new features. I'm looking forward to testing a few of them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #444

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

• Optimizing bandwidth in the Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Matias Quaranta) - Optimization is an art& sooo important.

• Publishing an ASP.NET Core App to Azure App Service Using Visual Studio (Code Maze) - A nice tutorial very easy to follow that explains how to create and deploy your first web app to Azure using .Net.

Programming

• Cross-platform diagnostic tools for .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting sets of dotnet commands.

• .NET Conf 2020 and Community Events this October | Xamarin Blog (microsoft.com) - Nice event coming up mid-November...

• 6 Tools I use for Web Development (Jakob Klamser) - A nice list of great tools. I'm surprised to read that notion would be more flexible then OneNote, I heard a lot of good from it but never tried it.

• Bringing the browser developer tools to Visual Studio Code (Microsoft Edge Team) - Cool...I need to try that.

• Render diagrams on the fly in your Blazor apps (Jon Hilton) - A cool and simple way to add graphics inside your App, wonderful!

• WebAssembly Could Be the Key for Cloud Native Extensibility (Joab Jackson) - Oh, interesting topics, I need to check that podcast.

Reading Notes #442

Cloud

• ASP.NET Core Configuration – Azure Key Vault (Vladimir Pecanac) - A nice tutorial that shows how to setup our keyvaul. All the commands and code snippets are there to help.

• Azure SDK Release (September 2020) | Azure SDK Blog (Jon Gallant) - Super SDK update...

• Introducing the new Azure Tables Client Libraries | Azure SDK Blog (Christopher Scott) - Storage is everywhere, this post is an excellent starting point to benefits of how the new SDKs can help us.

• Project Bicep Sneak Peek (Justin Yoo) - Very interesting new project from the ARM team. I really need to try it.

Programming

• Dependency Injection with Azure Functions (Joseph Guadagno) - Interesting code perspective on the AzFunctions.

• Azure Container Instances - Docker integration now in Docker Desktop stable release (MacKenzie Olson) - Learn more about this really useful integration in this post.

• Creating a Progressive Web App with Blazor WebAssembly -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - A really cool idea, not perfect but pretty fun.

• Introduction à Bicep (Lucas de Carli) - A nice FRENCH post that gives us an introduction of Bicep and where it comes from.

• Making Scott Hanselman's Powerpoint Greenscreen trick work with RevealJS via Blazor Server (Jon Hilton) - Really cool post that shows the magic of another presentation tool.

• Starting to Use Git Hooks With a Team - Redgate Software (Grant Fritchey) - Interesting uses of the hook.nice.

• The First Blazor Dock Manager (Brian Lagunas) - Nice demo/ tutorial of the new dock manager with Blazor.The pretty cool component in this suite.

• VSCode Tips for Power Users (Boris Yordanov) - Because there is always something new that we can learn about this amazing tool.

Reading Notes #440

Cloud

• Azure portal August 2020 update (Angie Doyle) - Wonderful Updates better search, better productivity.Very nice.

• Path based routing in Azure Application Gateway with Azure WebApps (Dominique St-Amand) - Great post that explains how to get the most of our domain name and workaround a little limitation of the portal.

Programming

• How to Develop an ASP.NET Core Application Using Visual Studio Code (Mathankumar Rajendran) - The perfect post to get started without impacting too much (installing heavy software) your computer.

• Configuring Codespaces for .NET Core Development (Justin Yoo ) - This post goes deeper than the usual hello word type of post about Codespace. It really shows an example of configuration.

• Have you built your GitHub Profile README yet? (Mayank Choudhary) - What?! This is super cool, and I didn't know about it.

• How to Work With Client-Side Blazor (Jon Hilton ) - This is a great simple post to get started with Blazor web assembly. Simple enough so all can understand what it is and what's nice about it.

• Introducing Blazor Automatic Kingdom (null) - Interesting of the popular blocky UI/UX with Blazor.

• Introduction to SVELTE (Sohaib Nehal) - As I rediscover JavaScript, it's fascinating to see how much this language as evolve and now have so many great frameworks.

• WSL 2 Support is coming to Windows 10 Versions 1903 and 1909 | Windows Command Line (Tyler) - Yeah! One of my computers is not in the insider program and was still with WSL1... But not anymore.

Podcasts

• 087: Learning Azure with Gwyneth Pena (CloudSkills.fm) - In this episode, you will discover a freshly awarded MVP, a brilliant content creator, and super energetic women. Wonderful.

• Why you should double down on intergration testing with Kent C. Dodds (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Tests are important we all know that (well we should), but there is a shift about the type of tests that are the best one recently... Interesting.

• Working in Public: Open Source Software with Nadia Eghbal (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A very interesting conversation about the open-source work today. She is the author of the book Working in Public, which looks fascinating.

• #169 – Thinking One Step Ahead to Grow Your Business through PR with Dmitry Dragilev of JustReachOut.io (The Indie Hackers Podcast) - I think this quote used summarize perfectly: Just because you built it doesn't mean people will come. Great discussion.

• The Shorts -- Twindom (The Dirtbag Diaries) - A really touching story of two sisters and a hiking trip that changed her lives.

~