Reading Notes #176

Suggestion of the week

• Autoscaling Azure–Virtual Machines (Kirk Evans) - Great tutorial that explains very clearly how to work scaling with azure vms.

Cloud

• Announcing Azure Preview Portal Improvements (February Update) (Leon Welicki) - A really nice update, good work.
  
• Introducing Get-AzureVMDscExtensionStatus cmdlet for Azure Powershell DSC Extension - Windows PowerShell Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Great, very useful new command.
  
• Using Windows Azure Mobile Services in ASP.NET MVC (Mahesh Sabnis) - Nice tutorial that shows how versatile are Azure Mobile Services.

Programming

• Make Debugging Faster with Visual Studio (Andrew B Hall) - A big deep dive in fine tuning Visual Studio to get the best performance session.
  
• Simplicity Principles and Anti-Patterns (Timothy Klenke) - Nice post that talks about pattern and anti-pattern, because simpler is often the better.

Miscellaneous

• 3 Thinking Tools for Minimizing Dependencies Between Products - (Mike Cottmeyer) - Interesting post about products planning best practices.
  
• One Example of How to Use an Agile Tool with Balance (peter) - Interesting post about how a team is using Jira.

~Frank B

Reading Notes #175

Cloud

• Running the Ruby Middleman Static Site Generator on Microsoft Azure (Scott Hanselman) - Really nice post. It looks very fun. It's amazing what we can do with git and Azure!

• Lift and Shift of a Windows Service to Microsoft #Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - Nice tutorial with a lot of clear explications for every step.

• Another reason to like azure web sites - free analytics - Nice quick post that summarizes a great Azure Friday episode about statistics.

• Using Stream Analytics with Event Hubs (Kirk Evans) - Great post that plays with both Azure event hub and azure stream analytics.

Programming

• Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck (Scott Hanselman) - Another great post that will help to ask ourselves some better question when it's time to investigate so performance issue.

• Atom-Shell for cross platform desktop apps with Paul Betts (Scott Hanselman, Paul Betts) - Nice episode that clarifies things around Atom-Shell.

• Bad Practices Building Microservices (Jan Stenberg) - Interesting post that talks about what why shouldn't be doing.

Miscellaneous

• Becoming Great Remote Developer - Interesting thoughts and tips about remote work.

• Microsoft or Google? - This post shares some thoughts about a very common question that a lot of people are asking.

~Frank

Reading Notes #174

Suggestion of the week

• How I Use Git On Windows – Setup and Tooling (Jesse) - Great post that gives a lot of little tips for Windows developers. A post to read.

Cloud

• Saving #Azure Resource Manager Templates to JSON files on disk (Alexandre Brisebois) - Useful post, learn how to manage your Azure resources.
  
• Configuring Internal Endpoints on #Azure Cloud Services (Alexandre Brisebois) - Quick post that explains how we can configure and deploy internal endpoint in our solution.
  
• Stories from the trenches: Sizing and penny pinching with Azure websites - Once again, a very interesting post on scaling and how the reality could differ for our expectation.
  
• Opening Windows Firewall Ports on #Azure Cloud Services - Great post that talks about how execute startup tasks in an Azure WebRole. At some point we will all need to do that, and this is the correct way.

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: A different take on ASP.NET MVC Forms with ChameleonForms (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting package that looks like a view engine, but that is, in fact, a kind of Razor forms booster.
  
• Using Bower with Visual Studio - Excellent tutorial to migrate projects package manager from nuget to bower. If you don't know bower, do a quick search on it first.
  
• Adding WinJS to your website (davidvoyles) - Nice tutorial to add different Javascript "tools" in our projects.
  
• Kanban split columns, inline adding and editing – Feb 18 - Great list of updates on VSOnline, good job!
  
• Why You Should Use Markdown for Your API Documentation - Nice post that talks about some useful tools when it comes to document our API.
  
• Proper benchmarking to diagnose and solve a .NET serialization bottleneck (Scott Hanselman) - Another great post that will help to ask our self some better question when it's time to investigate so performance issue.

~Frank Boucher