Reading Notes #46

 

Cloud

• War in the Cloud ! (Pradeep) - Today few big players are fighting to get their part of the cake. This post try to found how could be the winner.
• Article: I’ve built a SaaS solution on Windows Azure: now, how do I know what to charge my customers? - Great idea. A tool to help monitoring our application.
• Preparation is key to a successful cloud deployment - This post gives some advice to prepare our cloud life
• 5 Reasons to Start Working with Windows Azure - Highlight some keys features of Windows Azure especially debugging tools.
• Automating Azure deployment with Windows PowerShell (adambird.com) - Quick intro and nice script to get started about using Azure PowerShell cmdlets to deploy.
• All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels) - Big announcement from AWS for the .Net community. Amazon is releasing is RDS for MSSQL and a tools kit for Visual Studio.
• Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution (Switch Mark Thiele) - Nice post that will help you to focus on the good things and ask you the good questions when planning your cloud adventure.
• Is AWS or Windows Azure the Right Choice? It’s Not That Easy. - Really good question that compare AWS with Azure.

 

Programming

• Ajax Control Toolkit May 2012 Release - Great! The timing is perfect. One day after this new release some project arrived and they need exactly this new version of the upload control... thanks!
• Request Filtering, URLScan With Windows Azure Web Role (Avkash Chauhan - MSFT) - Simple script for start-up task to install URLScan since it's not there by default with IIS7.
• Create a Continuous Client Using Portable Class Libraries - Very nice article. By following the realisation of an application to solve a real world problem, the author introduces the client portable library “cpl” that gives the opportunity to easily write a cross platform application.

“there is, as Joshua Topolsky puts it, “a missing link in our computing experience” (engt.co/9GVeKl). “

• The key to AddOrUpdate (Arthur Vickers) - While waiting for the next release of EF this post explain very clearly how to implement an extension method to help use in a more generic context when we want the same functionality of the DbSet.Find in a AddUpdateEntity method.
• Mocking Dependencies != IoC (or at least it doesn’t have to) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting tutorial that explains an alternative to mock without using dependency injection IoC by using the Lazy.

 

Integration

• Michael Stephenson - Tips on when not using BizTalk config file and reference on another post to more details.

"I wrote a blog post a few years ago around the options for where you could put configuration settings in BizTalk (Click here)."

 

Miscellaneous

• The Blog of Scott Hanselman - Interesting post here Scott explain how he did introduce Star Wars to is kids. I like the 20 minutes segment idea.
• The Myth of Informed Consent - I agree, how many times did you got a firewall or anti-virus popup asking to approve something that you really don't know about? That why we install them, so they should take the decision...
• The key to AddOrUpdate (Arthur Vickers) - While waiting for the next release of EF this post explain very clearly how to implement
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't make sense anymore (hanselman.com) - Really funny, if you are older than 30... So just for fun ask around to the junior people if they know about those techs.

~Frank

Reading Notes #45

Cloud

• 5 tips for surviving a cloud outage (Brandon Butler) - More focus in Amazon web services this post in fact is saying don't put all your eggs in the same basket.
• Say Hello to Windows Azure, The World’s Most Misunderstood Cloud (Cade Metz) - Azure is different. It represents the new Microsoft. This post relates two stories of companies that move from Amazon to Azure.

“Azure lets us focus on our product rather than focusing on how we need to scale the application”

• Windows Azure Storage for the ASP.NET Developer (Adam Hoffman) - What a nice post. Clear explanations, with great references and it come from a series.

“For a rich comparison of SQL Azure and Windows Azure Table storage, see Joseph Fultz’s MSDN Magazine article at: http://aka.ms/SQLAzureVsAzureTables.”

• Scale-First Approach to Database Design with Federations: Part 2 – Annotating and Deploying Schema for Federations (Cihan Biyikoglu) - Second part of a series about Azure SQL Federations, this post explain all the particularities of the database to know before deploying for a optimum results.
• Joining the dots in the cloud - Nice post about the new collection of cloud tools that will help you to connect services or applications together and the things you should be aware of.
• CloudDrive: Possible Data Loss when calling Create() or CreateIfNotExist() on existing drives - Hopefully the SDK 1.7 is coming soon and the "feature" will be fix. However this is a excellent workaround.
• Load Testing in cloud using Visual Studio (Vignesh C) - Good idea for a load test using Azure.

“This blog has three posts that give detailed explanation of how a test rig with Controller and Agents can be created in Windows Azure.”

• Networking in the Cloud–Understanding Windows Azure Traffic Manager - Great post to get started with the Azure Traffic Manager. Of course to master it you should do the lab, but this post will help to understand the high level concepts.
• Four Different Ways to Get Windows Azure Accounts and Services - I'm sure there one that fits you.
• Run the Azure worker role in elevated mode to register HttpListener - Nice workaround to be able to use Raven in an Azure worker role.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Start Here (Brian H. Prince) - Preface of the great learn Azure post series and introduce a contest.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 100 (Brian H. Prince) - First of a series that regroup a lot of information to get started on Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 200 (Brian H. Prince) - Great exercises about storage
• Windows Azure Learning Path–Level 300 (Brian H. Prince) - Third of a series, this post regroup advanced exercises reference (level 300) about the Azure connectivity options.
• Part I of III - How to access an Azure OAuth v2 ACS secured service with Java (mbutler01) - First post of series of three about how to use oAuth v2 with Java using ACS.

“There does not seem to be any good working OAUTH v2 examples for Java using ACS”

• Windows Azure App Scaling to Need (Grigori Melnik, Julian Dominguez) - Very nice video about Wasabi the Windows auto-scaling Application block. A must.
• How to Use Windows Azure for a Small Web Site (avsol) - Good tutorial that give a lot of tips on how you could do you setup for a small web site.

Programming

• Introducing Workspace Reloader - A Visual Studio AddIn to save your open files across project reloads - Nice post about a little Visual Studio Add-in that will keep your files open when the solution is re-loaded.
• Ruby tricks: Array syntax (chatgris) - Quick post quick tricks... now I looking forward the next time I will try it.
• Ajax Control Toolkit May 2012 Release - Great! The timing is perfect. One day after this new release some project arrived and they need exactly this new version of the upload control... thanks!

Miscellaneous

• Thinking The Wrong Things About E-Book Pricing - Interesting topic: How much should cost a e-book?
• Trust Me, I'm Lying (Jeff Atwood) - Interesting post. Why lying is necessary.
• SlideShare and LinkedIn sitting in a tree… (rashmi) - Great new for both SlideShare and LinkedIn... A perfect match.

~Frank

Reading Notes #44

They will bring you in the cloud.

Cloud

• “You Complete Me” Says SharePoint to Windows Azure (Jonathan Rozenblit) - Really nice post that just open the possibilities on how could be implanted Azure with other application and in this case with SharePoint.
• Services Hosted in Windows Azure Service Bus (Stephen Kaufman) - This is definitely something to remember... How to work with proxies and Azure.
• Cloud Computing is Designing For Failure - Nice short post about the why using cloud computing instead of the other more common web server developing.
• A world of pretty cloud drive icons - SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, BitBucket and GitHub (Scott Hanselman) - Nice free icons for ours cloud storage.
• SkyDrive brings your personal cloud across devices (Steve Clayton) - Great new, it will become a lot easier to share or "backup" files with this new tool.
• Why Infrastructure As A Service Is A Bad Deal - It could be difficult to have a idea of the saving you could do going in the cloud. This post only looks the storage scenario. You could be surprise of the result, but I bet that the arrival of Google Drive and is aggressive pricing will makes thing moved.
• Using Windows Azure Caching for Session State can make the application slow if right programming practices are not followed (Farida Bharmal) - Nice tips. Simple once you know it.
• Five ways to reduce Azure Costs - Really good advice, this post is a must! It also contain ref to good tools or more detailed articles.
• Amazon: Cloud computing to be the norm in future - Nice post that show how easy and cheap to do a gigantic task using the cloud computing.
• Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off (Ellis Hamburger) - The most complete and detailed comparison ever. Really nice post. Pick the best tool(s) for your needs.
• Windows Azure Diagnostics–From the Ground Up (Greg Oliver) - Really nice post with a lot of good references and a lot of information. Perfect to get started or have a better understanding of Azure diagnostics.
• Fun with the Service Bus (Part 1) - What a great tutorial! This post is covering a lot a material by doing for a to z an application where the heart is Azure Service Bus.
• Announcing Windows Azure Achievements for Visual Studio (Karsten Januszewski) - Nice update even more since the achievements are good things.
• Auto-scaling Azure with WASABi–From the Ground Up (Greg Oliver) - Great tutorial about Wasabi framework.
• Greenpeace Cloud Protest: Do Amazon, Microsoft Deserve the Doghouse? - Those giants need to take care of the environment and also they need us to remember it.

Programming

• Code First model builder versions (Arthur Vickers) - This post explain how to configure EF code first to avoid any breaking code when updating the framework to a newer version. Nice work.
• Créer son propre Gem et le publier - Very nice tutorial (in French) that explain in detail with a simple case how to create and also publish a Ruby Gem.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Tricks for a Killer Company Blog - Five simple tips to get started blogging in a business perspective.
• Hit the Presentation Sweet Spot - Twenty minutes is very short. Maybe it is a good idea for a specific type of presentation... How do you plan a 2-3 formation?
• Your Personal Brand as a Developer: Implementing (Part 2 of 2) (Jonathan Rozenblit) - Part 2 on an unusual topic but important. Our brand, as a person. On the internet everything is amplified and could be seen by a lot of people very quickly. A post to read "before it is too late".
• Coping with Email Overload (Peter) - This could be a good advice for a lot of people. While I'm working on a project where co-workers are across the country I not sure I can do this but maybe tweaking it with rules for only those people.