Reading Notes #649

Welcome to another edition of my reading notes! This week I've come across some interesting articles spanning from programming decisions to career tips and AI innovations. Hope you find something valuable in this collection.

Programming

• Why we built our startup in C# (Sam Cox) - I really like those true-story blog posts; they teach us about the thought process and the reason behind a decision.

• It wasn’t the idea that failed: it was the execution (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Even though I feel like I'm missing a few points about sigma and new stuff coming up in 2025, this post is an amazing memory of our past in terms of evolution in the web industry

AI

• Accelerate AI innovation and business transformation (Byron Rader) - It's important to look forward, and you know what? There are people to help and guide you and your enterprise.

• Why APIs Are Essential and MCP Is Optional (for Now) (Gil Feig) - Great post that clarified the distinction between an API and the mCP servers. It's an interesting post.

Miscellaneous

• Thriving After a Layoff: The First 30 Days (scrappy girl project) - A friend of mine shared with me this post, and I think it will help me in the upcoming days. So here I am sharing so more can benefit from it

Books

• The Let Them Theory (Mel Robbins) - Stop wasting energy on things you can’t control. It something we all know, but probably forgot the power if it. Let go is hard, but it works in so many scenario. In this book Mel explains how to make it works, and how to use it with a let me action.
   

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you have interesting content, share it!

~Frank

Reading Notes #648

Welcome to this week's reading notes! Dive into the latest on Microsoft's new AI chat template, explore Docker's MCP CLI, learn about integrating AI into .NET applications, and discover how to automate .NET MAUI library publishing with GitHub Actions. 

Whether you're interested in AI advancements, programming techniques, or DevOps practices, there's something valuable waiting for you below.

MsDevMtl Meetup - Uno

Suggestion of the week

• Exploring the new AI chat template (Andrew Lock) - This new .NET template looks pretty useful and has a lot of components already baked in. This post explains those and shows how to customize it for our usage.

Programming

• Crates and Dependencies: NuGet, Meet Cargo - Chris Woody Woodruff (Chris Woodruff) - Interesting comparison there, a bit more love toward Rust, I think, but that doesn't make this series less valuable.

• How to Host Blazor WASM on Docker (Rikam Palkar) - Nice post with all the code you need to reproduce.

DevOps

• Packaging and Publishing a .NET MAUI Library with GitHub Actions - .NET Blog (Sweeky , David) - I'm always amazed by what we can do with automation. Second post of a series on .NET MAUI.

AI

• Getting Hands-On with the Docker MCP CLI (Sarthak Varshney) - How to get, use, and connect the brand new MCP tool from Docker.

• AI Repo of the Week: GitHub Copilot Adventures (Dan Wahlin) - When open-source meets AI, and this time, games! Interesting series where AI-related repositories are featured.

• Microsoft.Extensions.AI: Integrating AI into your .NET applications (Japhlet Nwamu) - This package is amazing. It allows you to connect to many models hosted in many different places. This post is the perfect place to get started.

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you have interesting content, share it!

~Frank

Reading Notes #647

This post is a collection of my latest reading notes, highlighting interesting articles and resources on AI, programming, databases, and more. Each link includes a brief summary of what I found valuable or noteworthy.

AI

• Getting Started with Azure MCP Server: A Guide for Developers (Lee Stott) - Quick post about this new feature.

• Protecting against indirect prompt injection attacks in MCP (Sarah , Den) - Security must be in our list of priorities in all types of projects. This post explains how we can secure them.

• How to build and deliver an MCP server for production (Colin McNeil) - That makes sense doctor is known to encapsulate and simplify the portability of application

Programming

• Set the default file encoding - Visual Studio Blog (Mark Downie) - Nice tip! As a developer who works daily on different operating systems, I know to well this issue.

• 4 real-life examples of using reflection in C# ( Ali Hamza Ansari) - Very interesting and useful post that go over 4 scenarios

• Microsoft Extends SLNX Solution File Support in .NET CLI - InfoQ - Have you tried yet the new format? It's still on my to-do list.

Databases

• DuckDB in Depth: How It Works and What Makes It Fast (Barry Smart) - This is a very interesting post that explains a little bit more how a vectoral database works and why it's so performant with documents

Miscellaneous

• Help yourself to thrive (Salma) - The human body is an extraordinary machine, extremely strong and conciliant, but it also requires a fine turning. Great post, we must learn from it.

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you have interesting content, share it!

~Frank