Reading Notes #365

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management now general availability for enterprise agreements and more! (Raphael Chacko) - Great news for the PAYG and enterprise subscriptions.
• Configure resource group control for your Azure DevTest Lab (Tanmayee Kamath) - This is a fantastic news. The DevTestLabs were real little resources groups generator, so now we will be able to keep it cleaner.
• Make the most of your monthly Azure Credits (Angelos Petropoulos) - Yes, that true you can run a lot of things for free!
• Step-By-Step: Getting Started with Azure Machine Learning (Anthony Bartolo) - This is a fantastic post to get started with machine learning.
• Remove a directory from your Azure account (Dominique St-Amand) - Awesome quick tips. It's time to clean up these accounts!

Miscellaneous

• How Satya Nadella Uses Learn-It-All to Beat Know-It-All (Terence Mauri) - Interesting thoughts, it totally makes sense.
• Microsoft Build 2019 Developer Conference May 6-8 Seattle, WA (build) - Great! Registration starts end of February .
• Why you don't have time to advance your career - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - An excellent post as I was reading it I couldn't stop thinking yep so true!

Books

I Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling In Love with Your Fears Can Change the World (Kyle Cease)

I was definitely not expecting that, when I picked up this book, but I am happy I did.

This "self-help" book is filled with a ton of comedy and I appreciated it. I felt like my best friend was talking about a serious topic but because he was in a crazy good mood was just having a good time telling me his story. Simple and real. It leaves you with a lot to think about.

Reading Notes #364

Cloud

• Azure Automation of A-to-Z, Part I (dbakevlar)
  - This is a great post very instructive, that explains how and why we should structure our scripts.
• Azure Policies (Gregor Suttie) - One of the best tools to he
  lp us with the governance in Azure is the policies. This post is a nice introduction to how it could help.
• Setting Up Azure Key Vault w
  ith an Azure Website (Web API) (Luis Valencia) - This is the second post of a very instructive series, and this time it focuses on Keyvault.

Programming

• Debug your live apps running in Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes (Visual Studio Blog) - Nice addition to the rem
  ote debugger experience
• How to set up Gatsby and Auth0 for easy authentication on your next project -
  A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller ) - Cool post that shows how to implement an auth authentification within a static website.
• Top 5 Open Source Features i
  n Azure Pipelines (Edward Thomson) - Learn why the Azure DevOps Pipelines are so great in this post about the evolution of an opensource
  project.

Miscellaneous

• A Few Coding Patterns with the MongoDB C# API (Julie Lerman
  ) - An instructive post about how to use MongoDB.
• If You Think “Digital Transformation” is About Kubernet
  es, You’re Wrong (Richard Seroter,) - Interesting thoughts, looking forward to read what's next.
• Why Containers are a Game Changer for Software Development (Mike Hadlow) - Very interesting
  post about containers and the raise of gitOps.

~

Reading Notes #363

Cloud

• Automating Releases in GitHub through Azure Pipelines (Raiyan Alam) - So cool, I need to find a project to do that. Ok bye.

Programming

• Creating a Windows Container Build Agent for Azure Pipelines (Jakob Ehn) - This excellent post explains how to build a container with all the components required to have a full .Net build agent.
• How to use Windows 10's built-in OpenSSH to automatically SSH into a remote Linux machine (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that explains how to configure what we already have, instead of installing yet another tool.
• Remote debugging with VS Code on Windows to a Raspberry Pi using .NET Core on ARM (Scott Hanselman) - A great example of the mojo: if you do a thing twice... automate it.
• Security bugs are fundamentally different than quality bugs (Tanya Janca) - This is a nice post that examines, dissects the difference between QA and security tests.

Databases

• MongoDB on Windows in Minutes with Docker (Jeremy Likness) - A great quick tutorial to install a mongodb in a container in 2 minutes.

Miscellaneous

• Simplicity is Key - Exploring Minimal Web Design (Cameron Chapman) - A very inspiring post that shows us many good designs.
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective IT Leaders (JD Meier) - Interesting post. It covers pretty well all the aspect of efficient IT people. Easy to identify hard to master.
• What's the Best Video Stabilization Software? Premiere, After Effects, Resolve Reviewed (Lewis McGregor) - Very detailed analysis of the stabilization feature.

~

Reading Notes #362

Suggestion of the week

• ARM Templates vs Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - What a great post that answer (well..explains) the pros and cons of each method. Great post Mark!

Cloud

• Creating a Massively Scalable Blog with Ghost, MySQL and Azure (Rob Conery) - Nice script, neat explication and tweak.
• Deploying a personal blog with GitHub Actions (Den Delimarsky) - Very cool tutorial... Nice to see a static generator in Go.
• Moving your ASP.NET applications to the Microsoft Cloud (Premier Developer) - If you are thinking to migrate to the cloud, it's important to plan your migration. This post is the perfect point to get started, it contains references to deeper books and documents.

Programming

• Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server in NodeJS Applications (Michael Szul) - Nice tutorial that shows how to write some test in Typescript.
• What are all the Chocolatey repositories for? (Gary Ewan Park) - Woooh.I didn't know Chocolatey had so many repos! Awesome and very instructive post.
• Kubernetes Ingress Controllers and Certificates: The Walkthrough (Jessica Deen) - Awesome video!
• The Life of a GitHub Action (Jessie Frazelle) - A nice quick post that clarifies things around those actions.
• The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code (Lyn Levenick) - Cool statistics about editor usage. Not sure of the real correlation with the editor used and the skill level, but it's still an interesting coincidence.

Miscellaneous

• How to Forget About Work When You’re Not Working (Art Markman) - Interesting post that treats an important topic.
• Stream Deck Tricks for Streamers… and Muggles too! (Jeff) - Fantastic post that explains so much why that little thing can save you so much pain. As THE day when I'm starting to stream get closer and closer... This is gold.

~

Reading Notes #361

Cloud

• Deploying ASP.NET Core App Services using Azure Key Vault and Azure Resource Manager templates (Damien Bowden) - Great tutorial easy to follow. It's the perfect one t get started using keyvault and an ARM template.
• Choose your default view in Azure Portal (Abhijit Jana) - Nice new little tweak for your landing page in the portal.
• Deploying Azure Functions with the Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - This is a nice tutorial that explains all the step to great your setup with Functions.
• Four ways to take your apps further with cloud, data, and AI solutions from Microsoft (Frederico Pravatta Rezende) - A very interesting post that provides an easy checkbox list of actions we can do to improve our solution.
• How to set up a Let's Encrypt SSL Cert for Azure Web App with Linux in 5 steps (Jessica Deen) - Very useful tutorial to switch our webapp to https.

Programming

• Creating Web Pages with Blazor ( Peter Vogel) - This post is definitely a good place to get started with Blazor.
• Load your work items into Azure DevOps Boards with .NET (Jeremy Lindsay) - A project to follow very interesting tutorial that explains how this migration tool was built.
• Continuous Integration (David Posin, Paul Duvall) - This is the chapter 1 of a book. It covers all aspects of a CI, really Really interesting.
• Converting OpenAPI specs to Postman collections (Abhijit Kane) - Oooooh that's awesome... I really need to try this new import feature.
• New year, new GitHub: Announcing unlimited free private repos and unified Enterprise offering (Nat Friedman) - Awesome news! So happy about that!
• VS Code: Now creating pull requests (Meaghan Lewis) - Another must have extension I think...

Miscellaneous

• Relationship Hacks: Playing video games and having hobbies while avoiding resentment (Scott Hanselman) - It's always such a pleasure to read those post full of wisdom. It gives us a windows to see how others are doing and ideas on how to improve.

Books

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

Author: Chris J. Anderson

Fantastic book that covers a lot of topics related to presenting. It covers the before, during, and even the after very smartly. There are no recipes here and this is exactly what makes this book so great. A must.











~

Reading Notes #360

Cloud

• Azure IoT Hub deployment with ARM template and how to retrieve the primary connection string (Vivien Chevallier) - This post helps us to see the steps to build an efficient ARM template for an IoT Hub.
• Migrating to the New Azure Service Bus SDK (Mark Heath) - This is a nice post to avoid losing t much time trying to migrate. Also if you are not sure, this post explains some benefices in addition to showing some gotchas.

Programming

• Demystifying ClickOnce (Eric Law) - Hmm. Its been so long since I ear about ClickOnce...

Miscellaneous

• 5 ways to prepare your organization to adopt emerging technology (Jason Miller, Dunbar Armored) - A really good list of advice to make a difference in your organization.
• Chocolatey on Windows (Daniel Franciscus) - One thing that I like about Chocolatey, I mean other than the fact that it's awesome, is that it never stops to impress me!
• Imposter’s Handbook, Season 2 is Released (Rob Conery) - I look forward to read this book, I'm sure it will be both fun and instructive.
• When you code, write down everything - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - Good advice... And I would add if it's numeric you will be able to do search faster in it...

~

Reading Notes #359

Cloud

• GitLab 11.6 Supports Serverless Function Deployment (Sergio De Simone) - Interesting post that introduces a CI/CD tool that works really well with the serverless offering from all providers.
• How to migrate from AzureRM to Az in Azure PowerShell (Madeleine Clayton) - A mandatory read to migrate without hiccups.
• Great News, Azure Developers! Microsoft is Simplifying Your Path to Certification! (Liberty Munson ) - That's excellent news!

Programming

• 11 Of the Best Scrum Tools to Increase Your Team’s Productivity (Ben Aston) - Nice list of great tools. I would add Azure DevOps to it.
• Background jobs in ASP.NET Core made easy with Hangfire (Matthew D. Groves) - This post helps us to be quickly set up with hangfire.
• How to Use a jQuery Progress Bar in Your Web App (Alberta Williams) - This post shows many different ways to use some progress bar as long as you have Kendo UI.
• Introduction to Bash Scripting: Iterative Statements Using Loops (Daniel Farina) - Great introduction tutorial to the fundamental loops. This time it's in bash... Yeah, if you didn't know, you probably need it.
• Quick Introduction to C# Span. (Doug Mair) - A nice new feature in C# that is absolutely not related to the span in Html that we know....aaah!
• Using Visual Studio Code to program Circuit Python with an AdaFruit NeoTrellis M4 (Scott Hanselman) - Very cool son-dad project post and how to use the tool we like.
• When You SHOULD Comment Your Code (Peter Kellner) - Commenting or not commenting... Should it be THE question?

Databases

• MongoDB on Windows in Minutes with Docker (Jeremy Likness) - This post is a fantastic setup tutorial, perfect to get started in a snap! Using docker so easy...

Miscellaneous

• Enjoy some DOS Games this Christmas with DOSBox (Scott Hanselman) - With DOSBox and Retropie... We should be good for the holidays... If you don't have a Raspberry Pie this post is perfect for you since it focuses on DOSBox.

Books

How to Be a Bawse A Guide to Conquering Life
Lilly Singh
Not only the message is strong, but the way she delivers it is awesome. Many times I laugh and nod of the head... Definitely a great book to read at the end of the year when resolution time is not far...









~

Reading Notes #358

Cloud

• Managing Durable Functions Orchestration History (Mark Heath) - Perfect quick post to learn the new features in Azure durable function.
• Microsoft Announces New Features and Integrations for Azure Pipelines (Steef-Jan Wiggers) - Really cool new feature to work with the Azure DevOps Pipeline...like a VSCode extension!

Programming

• Using Cake GitHub Action (Gary Ewan Park) - This post explains how to bonify our CI/CD very interesting.
• API Controllers in ASP .NET Core (Shahed Chowdhuri) - Interesting post to learn more about the Controllers and its nuances.
• Introducing check runs and annotations (Meaghan Lewis) - A nice new update to the GitHub extension.

Miscellaneous

• Get to code: How we designed the new Visual Studio start window - Super interesting post that shows how Microsoft take our feedback, listen and react to our comments in order to continuously improve their/our tools.
• How to remove words from the Windows Autocorrect Spell Check Dictionary (Scott Hanselman) - Great tips thanks Scott.
• Why you should write [code] every day - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - Great post to be motivated. Keep doing it and to do it more!

~

Reading Notes #357

Suggestion of the week

• Use Azure Cognitive Services to recognize karting images with Custom Vision service (Vivien Chevallier) - Really cool post that explains how to build an API and trained it.

Cloud

• ARM - Etendre vos templates grâce à Azure Function (Wilfried Woivré) - A very clever way to leverage some services resources it ARM.

Programming

• How to set up ASP.NET Core 2.2 Health Checks with BeatPulse's AspNetCore.Diagnostics.HealthChecks (Scott Hanselman) - This is a nice quick tutorial perfect to get started.
• Finding your next .NET Open Source project using the command line (Shayne Boyer) - Really cool tool/ project to get started.
• Ghost : A Father-Daughter Project, Part 1 (David Pallmann) - This is both a nice tutorial to build a simple game and a great project to do with new developers.
• Visual Studio 2019 Preview .NET Productivity (Kendra Havens) - This is a nice overview of what Was announced at Connect.

Miscellaneous

• A crash course on Serverless with AWS — Running Node.js 11 on Lambda (Adnan Rahić) - Great tutorial that will take you from zero to definitely knowing enough to be dangerous.

~

Reading Notes #356

Suggestion of the week

• Security Headers (Tanya Janca) - Interesting post that shows the code/configuration we need to add, in order to get a more secure website.

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure portal December 2018 update (Peri Rocha) - Nice new update.. The last one of the year.
• Serverless Google App Engine Flex Custom Docker Runtime & Cloud SQL Backend with Swift & Vapor Web API (Alfian Losari) - Great tutorial that explains how to build a web backend.
• Créez vos Logic Apps via des templates ARM (Wilfried Woivré) - An excellent post in French that explains step by step how to build our ARM template to deploy an Azure Logic Apps.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core 2.2 Parameter Transformers for clean URL generation and slugs in Razor Pages or MVC (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains a new feature of the new core release.
• How to become a Git expert (Aditya Sridhar) - A very nice post that explains how to fix common mistake users does and also explains how to keep our history clean.
• Web Architecture 101 (Jonathan Fulton) - This is a very complete article that does a tour of every piece of a web solution.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Books That Will Help You Become a Better Writer (Glenn Leibowitz) - A nice little list of books for the holiday...
• Becoming a better supporter of women in tech (Tom) - Great post. Share it.
• Leadership Mode Activate (Allen Pike) - Don't be affray to move forward and smash!
• Write more compact SQL Server code using new features (Sergey Gigoyan) - This is a nice way to learn how to be more efficent with SQL.

Books

Fast Focus: A Quick-Start Guide To Mastering Your Attention, Ignoring Distractions, And Getting More Done In Less Time! (Damon Zahariades) - Great book well organized. Simple strike to the point. It is divided into three parts: understanding focus, creating an environment for focus, and employing tactics to focus. It lists the top 10 obstacles to staying focused and gives you a great idea on how to get start your journey.











~

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.









~

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.

~

Reading Notes #352

Suggestion of the week

• Node.js Everywhere with Environment Variables! (John Papa) - Wow! This awesome post brings you from zero to hero with steps of a extreme clarity. If you are interested in Node.js it a must.

Cloud

• Azure Functions Contact Form HTTP Trigger (Tom Faltesek) - A really interesting and useful utilization of an Azure Function to boost an existing solution (in this case a blog)

• Azure Functions Dependency Injection with Autofac (Jason Roberts) - An interesting tutorial that explains how to improve our functions.

Programming

• Best practices for building Kubernetes Operators and stateful apps | Google Cloud Blog (Palak Bhatia, Jun Xiang Tee) - Great post that lists the best practices to for our kubernetes projects

• Building a Web App With Yeoman (Oscar Salas) - A very complete and detailed post about yeoman. What it is, what it can do, how to install it. The only thing missing could be one final example to get started.

• Testing a WebAPI in .NET Core with Integration tests (Dominique St-Amand) - This post explains a good and simple way to build tests.

Data

• Azure Data Architecture Guide (Ed Price) - Nice new book, based on the best practices of the AzureCAT... Yeah. We all need this book!

Miscellaneous

• Updating my ASP.NET Website from .NET 2.2 Core Preview 2 to .NET 2.2 Core Preview 3 (Scott Hanselman) - Really cool "live" post where we follow Scott updating his website.

Books

• The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business (Josh Kaufman) - An interesting book that helps to get in the mood, get prepared, and maybe for some whom weren't sure yet about the idea of a personal MBA (compare to the regular one)... Help to start planning and get moving. This book isn't an one book miracle MBA certification, but most likely a really good way to understand the journey the reader is about to start. The complete list of books to achieve this adventure is constantly updated and is available online. 

~