Reading Notes #178

Suggestion of the week

• Scaling #Azure Cloud Services to Zero - This post is a really important piece of the puzzle that a lot of us don't see clearly.
  
• The Zen of Code Reviews: Pre-Review Comments (Michael Sorens) - Very interesting post that all developers should read. This post is a must.

Cloud

• Application Insights: Moving from Visual Studio Online Portal to Azure Preview Portal (Rahul Bagaria) - This move is a good decision. It will simplify things.
  
• New additions to the Azure VM PowerShell DSC Extension (Kundana Palagiri) - Great news, very powerful command.
  
• Getting admin by adding a new user to sudoers when you're locked out of an Azure Linux VM (Scott Hanselman) - Oh! That a really nice ninja trick!
  
• Pragmatic IoT on Azure Part 1: Introduction - A truly interesting post about a very popular topic, a series to follow...

Programming

• Understanding ASP.NET 5 middleware (Andrei Dzimchuk) - Very nice tutorial about how to implement a middleware in AspNet.
  
• Rapid PowerShell Development with ISESteroids (Tobias Weltner) - An incredible tool that every developer should know and try.
  
• Bitbucket Launches Snippets for Teams (Steffen Opel) - An interesting new feature that a lot of people were waiting for...

Miscellaneous

• Tragedies of the Remote Worker: "Looks like you're the only one on the call" (Scott Hanselman) - As a remote worker myself, I can say that if feel less alone in my loneliness... ;)
  
• Wake Up and Get S#!t Done – A Practice of Awesome (James Chambers) - Wow. Your are I mind reader! I love this post.

~Frank

Reading Notes #177

Suggestion of the week

• The Modern JavaScript Developer’s Toolbox  - If you eared about those buzz words: Grunt, Gulp, Sublime, LESS, Angular, want to know more, This is THE post you are looking for.

Cloud

• Get Your Reading On: Azure eBooks (Jonathan Rozenblit) - 8 free books, what else to say... Thanks of course.
  
• Cloud Computing Can Make Any Old Beater a Connected Car (Alex Davies) - Interesting article about the close future.
  
• Azure API Management Part 1: An Introduction - Nice introduction about the APIM, nice warm up.
  
• Free ebook: Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Automation (Kim Spilker, Mark) - Nice free ebook.

Programming

• Getting Started with TypeScript – Classes, Types and Interfaces - Very nice and clear introduction wit also a video.
  
• Welcome Back! - The AJAX Control Toolkit March 2015 Update (Vittorio Bertocci) - Yeah! A long wait but it's here now... Learn all the nice features of this new release in this post.
  
• Comprendre et maîtriser npm - Introduction - The perfect post to get started, for whom read French.

Miscellaneous

• How Leaders Should React When Someone Disappoints (Peter Bregman) - Interesting post about how we should react, simple and efficient.

Tons of statistics and metrics for Microsoft Azure websites (not only Asp.Net)

Your website is finally online. That great, good job. But now, you have a lot of questions: How much visits do I have? Which part of the site is mostly visited? Does the site performs well? In this post, I will show you some tools that exist in Microsoft Azure that will help you to get some answers.

Request and Error

When you create a website in Azure, you automatically got some monitoring. Go on portal.azure.com (the preview portal), and select your website.



This will be useful to see how many requests and errors you got. You could create some alerts, by clicking the "+" sign, and you would be notified by e-mail if the number of request is greater than x, over the last hour.

Analytics

The first time you will click on this section all the instruction will be given to you.

To collect end-user usage analytics about your application, insert the following script into each page you want to track. Place this code immediately before the closing </headtag, and before any other scripts. Your first data will appear automatically in just a few seconds.

To get analytics for the whole web site, in an Asp.Net MVC site, a good place will be: \Views\Shared\_Layout.cshtml.

In a Ghost blog, if you are using the default theme, the file will be /content/themes/casper/default.hbs. Otherwise, just replace "casper" by your theme name in the path.

Once your website is re-deployed, re-open the website blade and click again on the Analytics graph. And you will be able to see a lot of information: Session per browser, information on page's views, slowest pages, details on sessions, etc.





When you click on a graph, the Metrics Explorer blade will be visible. On the top of this blade, you will have many different options to customize your results. You will be able to add a chart, change the time range, add some filter and even set some alerts.





Moreover, if you click on those Charts, tables or even on a row, you will have more details and options to fine-tune the result.

Application Insights

You thought it was enough? Well, Microsoft Azure still has one more tool for you, that will cover in this post: Application Insights. With this one, you will be able to see the health of your application by adding some tests, custom events, logs, errors, etc.
Adding Application Insights to your Asp.Net website, can easily be done via Visual Studio, like I explained in a previous post.

Since Azure is compatible with many different languages, chances are that you are using one of those. Let say you are running a node.js Ghost blog, how could you add Application Insights? By using website extensions. To add an extension you could use the Kudu interface. This interface is easy to access. In a browser, type the URL of the website but inject "scm" between the name of the application and the azurewebsites.net. Something like http://mybookmanager.scm.azurewebsites.net/





Once you are in the Kudu interface, click on the tab Site Extensions, then section Gallery. Add the Application Insights Extension.
It's also possible to add a website extension using the website blade.





This will gives you a lot of information already, but to add more customs metric in .Net by sure to add the Application Insights SDK to your porject. In node.js use the applicationinsights package from npm,

~Frank Boucher

References

• Microsoft Azure
• Ghost
• Application Insights Extension
• Write custom telemetry with Application Insights API
• Applicationinsights package (npm)
• Kudu

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

Reading Notes #173

Suggestion of the week

• Building Your Resume Like a Boss with CI (Steven Edouard) - I had so much fun playing with this…

Cloud

• Azure Data Factory Updates: Diagram View Enhancements (Gaurav Malhotra) - Really good work from Azure Data Factory team here, those changes are amazing.
  
• Enabling WP CLI in Azure Websites - Nice post that introduces some Azure WebSite Extension, and plays with Kudu.
  
• How to enable a Site Extension in Azure Websites - Nice post that explains the power of the Azure website extension.
  
• Get Started with the Enterprise Mobility Suite in Minutes (Simon May) - Nice post that gives a lot of very useful informations.
  
• Connecting on-premises Active Directory to Azure AD can give your org these 5 great advantages (Simon May) - Perfect pst to understand how azure active directory could be the perfect extension you are missing…
  
• Saving #Azure Resource Manager Templates to JSON files on disk (Alexandre Brisebois) - Useful post, learn how to manage your Azure resources…

Books

C# Tips
By Jason Roberts
Publisher: Leanpub
Released: December 2014

This book it undoubtedly for people who already know C#. If you want to learn C# by doing the best practices, I would strongly suggest to start with something else. However, if you already know how to code, and you want to improve your, or got this little plus; this book is a must.

It’s not a very big book, but all the zones are covered. It’s split into three parts. The first one will provides many good this to improve the performance of your code, customizes your debug experience, and more. The second part will focus on the very useful design patterns that we should all have in our back pocket. Finally, the third and last section introduces tools and frameworks (NUnits, Moq, etc.) to facilitate your work.

I would definitely recommend this book to any developer. The book is available in all the digital format for free, but if you like it consider giving a donation. :)

Miscellaneous

• Finding an Invisible NAS on a Network (Alexandre Brisebois) - I like those stories where people, like us, learn something the “hard way” , and share their fresh experience.

~Frank Boucher

Visual Studio Online is definitely more than text editor online!

5 powerful features that make Visual Studio online an indispensable tool

If you are a .Net developer then you know Visual Studio. Few months ago, Microsoft released a new version of this tool call Visual Studio 2013 Community edition. This version offers all the features and is completely free. Many of us already have downloaded and installed this version. Another version is also available, but doesn't have the popularity of his brothers... yet. Let's talk about Visual Studio Online.
 

Get Started

Did you know that Visual Studio Online is available for free? Go to http://www.visualstudio.com/ and create an free account that will included:

5 FREE Basic user licenses

Unlimited team projects and private code repos

FREE work item tracking for all users

FREE 60 minutes/month of build

and much more.... 

1- It's a Source Control

It may be called Visual Studio Online, but it has all the features from Team Foundation Server (TFS).
Let's create a new project. From your home page, under the tab Overview (selected by default) click on New. This will pop the form to create a new team project. One interesting thing to note is that both TFS and Git are supported as Version control system.
For the post I will create my project MyBookManager using Git.

2- It's an Agile board

Now that we have a project, it's time to describe it. Visual Studio Online has an entire section just for collaborative work. From the home screen of your VSO click on _Users_ tab. Create your users, roles and manage their permissions.
It's now time to time to describe all the features of the project. Click on _Overview_ tab to get back to Home. Select your project, then click on _Work_ tab. From here you will be able to create all the features you need, and split them in tasks and sub tasks; perfect to fill-up a backlog item list and plan your next sprint.
Once a sprint is started, it's also from here that you will be able to see and interact with the Board.

From this board, cards can be move by dragging them in the column that reflected the current status of the work. Open the on-premise Visual Studio. From the bar Team Explorer click on the little plug, and select: “Select Team Project…”. If your VSO Server is not present, just add it, then select the your project (ex: MyBookManager).
For this post I will create an empty Asp.Net MVC project. In the Models folder I add a new class Book with very basic code.

public class Book
{
     public int BookID { get; set; }
     public string Title { get; set; }
     public bool Read { get; set; }
}

Then by right-clicking on the folder Controllers select the Add new Scafolded Item option, and use that to create our CRUD controller and views for the Book model we just created. Let’s check-in the code, and go back to VSO. You should see the code.

To give more visibility to the work’s status, you can create very nice chart and pinned them on the Home page. To add a new chart, go in the Work tab select Queries.  You can use the existing query or simply create a new one. To add a chart to the Home page right-click on the query and select Pin to Home page.

3- It's a build / Deployment server

If it's one think that seem always complex for a developer is the automation build and deployment server setup. With VSO no need for all that complexity and resources, only follow a short wizard and your build machine will be setup in Azure ready to deploy as soon as you want.  You can setup an automatic build and deployment from the Azure Portal and Visual Studio. In this post, I will use Visual Studio.

From the Team Explorer bar in Visual Studio, click on Builds then New Build Definition, to get the wizard.



First step, just put a name who makes sense.



Step two, we need to choose what will trigger the build. I select continuous integration, so the build should start at every check-in.



When I create my project I select Git as a source control, so for the next step I will need to expand the Build process template zone, by clicking Show details.  Then from the list select GitContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml.

The build definition is done, save and let it there for now.

4- It's a Code Editor

If it's one feature that you could expect from a tool like VSO is to be able to edit code online.  The online version is obviously less powerful then the on-premise one, but still you will it very convenient and easy to use.

Let's change the button in the book list to be more modern. First, select Code tab.  Now let's find the Index.html file under the View folder. Once the file is selected, click on Edit button. It's time to add some bootstrap classes to transform the look of our button. As you can see even we are in a web  browser we have IntelliSense. 



Hit Save and it will commit our change. Since we create a continuous build, this one should kick-in and build and deploy our changes. We can see the status of our build by going in the Build tab in Visual Studio Online. It’s also possible to see it in the Home page by pinning it.
When the build will be done, our change will be visible in the website. Of course, this build is very simple, unit test and more complexes processes could also be implemented.

5- It's a Test server

Another great feature is the possibility to create a test plan for the quality assurance (QA) tester. You could create it via VSO as a test plan by going in the last tab Test. And create a checklist,  so they can follow it to test the application feature by feature.  You could also record the action with Microsoft Test Manager and then do a load test on the website by running simultaneously multiple tests on different instances in Azure.

Verdict

Visual Studio Online is a great tool and win to  be now more. What are the features you enjoy the most in VSO?


~Frank B

References

http://www.visualstudio.com/

Reading Notes #172

Suggestion of the week

• Using #PowerShell to Upload Content to #Azure Storage - Very useful script here that will save you a lot of time more than once… A post to bookmark!

Cloud

• Starting with Continuous Integration in the Cloud with Steven Edouard - Very interesting podcast episode to learn all about CI. I like the compilable resume.
  
• Security and Performance Tips for Azure Storage Queues - This post is a great list of tips, and you will also find answers to frequent asked questions about security.
  
• Free ebook: Microsoft Azure Essentials Fundamentals of Azure (Jan Kim Spilker) - Fantastic, all that in one book…a free book!
  
• Announcing Azure Preview Portal Improvements (Leon Welicki) - Wow! This preview portal is was nice, but with all those little tweaks… It a great tool.
  
• Azure vs Amazon vs Rackspace vs HP vs Google - Interesting infographic that compares some major cloud providers.
  
• Continuous Delivery on Windows Azure Websites using Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Great tutorial about doing continuous integration using Visual Studio Online. A must to all .Net developer.
  
• Azure WebJobs are awesome and you should start using them right now! - Everything is said in the title, Azure Websites are awesome.
  
• Securing Production #Azure SQL Databases - This post if the perfect security checklist.

Miscellaneous

• Automating Azure Virtual Machine Deployment with Chef (Diego Viso) - This post is a quick introduction about how Chef could help you in your automation.
  
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Pairing Experience - Interesting post to read before your next team work.
  
• VIDEO: Do you really know how to use Microsoft Word? The Power of Tabs and Indents (Scott Hanselman) - Awesome video. you must watch this.it for everyone!

~Frank B.

Reading Notes #171

 

Different readings which kept my interest during the week.

Suggestion of the week

• Automatic deployment of multiple repositories to Azure - Very powerful tips to deploy with a less common repository structure.

• Walyou (Jasmine Henry) - This is why you should care about Windows 10.

Reading Notes #170

Suggestion of the week

• Rollup: Microsoft HoloLens, Surface Hub, Windows 10, Xbox One game streaming and more. (Scott Hanselman) - How 2015 could not be a big year for Microsoft with all this?

Cloud

• Scaling #Azure Cloud Services Up and Down Like Clockwork (Alexandre Brisebois) - Really interesting post that explains how scaling up & out and down &in can mean huge saving in our pockets.

• Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure (Corey Sanders) - This post describes what in the new release of Azure.

• Azure Search – How to Add Suggestions (auto-complete) to your Search Applications (Liam Cavanagh) - Interesting example of how Azure Search can improve the user experience on our website.

• Using Windows Azure Service Bus for communication across two ASP.NET MVC Applications - Great tutorial that shows step by step how to use the power of Azure Service Bus in our website.

• Data Pipeline Guidance (patterns & practices) - Interesting project using Azure Eventhub's best practices in an IoT context.

Programming

• Using the Wrapper Pattern (Scott DePouw) - This post explains a useful pattern for testing or other context.

• NuGet Package of the Week: Polly wanna fluently express transient exception handling policies in .NET? (Scott Hanselman) - Wow! Polly looks awesome. Looking forward to trying-it in my next project.

Podcast

• Computer Vision Explained with PyImageSearch's Adrian Rosebrock - While listening this podcast, I'm not sure if I was more scared or exited. However, one thing is sure, this episode is really interesting!

Miscellaneous

• Removing Distractions - Interesting post where the author share is experience while trying to be less connected.

~Frank B.

2014 numbers for Franky's Notes

Franky's Notes in 2014 |Create infographics

Reading Notes #169

 

Happy New Year!

 

Suggestion of the week

• Magic Strings – No More! - Great post that explains different ways to manage string in our code. Clear and efficient.

Cloud

• The cloud saves the day and other non-myths (Brian Heckert) - Nice post that discusses some myths mentions in Gartner's presentation about the cloud.

• Automating Azure on your CI server using a Service Principal - Great tutorial that explains how to use Active Directory (AD) to access resources in Azure.

• Scaling #Azure Cloud Services Up and Down Like Clockwork (Alexandre Brisebois) - Really interesting post that explains how scaling up & out and down &in can mean huge saving in our pockets.

Programming

• Could not load file or assembly… NuGet Assembly Redirects (blog.maartenballiauw.be) - Nice clever tricks to avoid losing time.

• UI Considerations When Using Asynchronous Methods (Jeremy) - Good tutorial that explains some key features we must adapt in the UI when making our code async.

Miscellaneous

• 4 Simple Tricks to Help Make Your Content Stand Out (AJ Agrawal) - This post provides a nice list of tools to improve our content.

• Why You Should Say Goodbye to Work-Life Balance in 2015 (Aaron O'Hearn) - Interesting thoughts.

• The Key to Increased Productivity? Stop Working (Justin Bariso) - This post suggests simple thins to do to improve our productivity. Perfect to start the new year...

• XML Sitemaps for the Ghost Blogging Platform - Time to update our Ghost blogs...

~Frank Boucher

Reading Notes #168

Suggestion of the week

• Lift and Shift of a Console Appication to Microsoft #Azure - Great post that explains all the steps required to deploy a console app to Azure.

Cloud

• Ghost 0.5.x from Source to Azure Web Sites (David Wesst) - If you prefer starting from the source code to deploy your Ghost blog, some steps could be less obvious. This post, the first of a series, will guide you through the deployment.
  
• Ghost 0.5.x from Source to Azure Web Sites–Part 4 (David Wesst) - Bonus post in the 3 part series, this is a useful tips to set https on an Azure web site, very clear.

• Deux cas d’exception où l’infonuagique n’aide pas (Pour consulter tous les articles de André Giroux →) - Nice post that explains two reel cases were going was not a good option.

Programming

• Clean Code – Is my code always readable? - A simple but very efficient way to think when we a writing or re-factoring our code. I like it.

• Grunt and Gulp Intellisense in Visual Studio 2013 (Google+) - Quick tips to get intellisense in javascript files.

• Could not load file or assembly… NuGet Assembly Redirects (blog.maartenballiauw.be) - Nice clever tricks to avoid losing time.

Miscellaneous

• 11 Tools We Use at Ghost for Distributed Teams & Digital Nomads - Many very nice tools. I fall in love with Slack and coffitivity.

See you in 2015!


~Frank B

Reading Notes #167

Suggestion of the week

• SQL Server to Azure Search Synchronization (Scott Klein)- Great demo with Liam C. This is a 15-minute video that you don't want t miss.

Cloud

• Now easier to create a sample Azure SQL Database and develop schema in Visual Studio (Sanjay Nagamangalam) - Wow, I cannot be easier than that. The post also contains a short video that shows how to do it.

• How to Sync SQL Server Data with Azure Search (Liam Cavanagh) - This post explains all the advantage to use Azure Search to implement a fulltext search in your application. It also shows how to do it.

Programming

• .NET Blog (Christiaan Rakowski, Linux Al, Ron, Nathan Dimitriades, Warren, EShy, Thomas Levesque, Svolo4, Jeremiah Gowdy, les, James S, Srigopal C Immo Landwerth [MSFT]) - Very interesting and complete post that explains the goals behind the .Net Core and how it is useful to us.

• Clean Code – Is my code always readable? - A simple but very efficient way to think when we a writing or re-factoring our code. I like it.

Books

DynamoDB Applied Design Patterns
By Uchit Vyas, Prabhakaran Kuppusamy
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Released: September 2014
ISBN 13: 9781783551897

This book takes you where you are and brings you directly in the cumulus. It starts gently by explaining the basic of the NoSQL, then move to DynamoDB fundamental: what is a data model and how to create a table.

Chapter after chapter, the book moves you to the next level by bringing new complexities and explains how to manage them with his simple but complete scenario. All the code samples are in Java and extremely well explained. With my .Net background, I always understood.

The book ends by presenting many best practices to get the best of DynamoDB, and compare it to other popular NoSQL databases.

I will definitely recommend this book to all people looking for a NoSQL database. DynamoDB is unavoidable when we are looking for a no-relational database, and this book is a must to have in our bookshelf.

Miscellaneous

• How to Ask for Feedback That Will Actually Help You - Interesting post about the importance of a good communication.

~Frank B

Stop losing time installing your software

Automation is the key to many hard situations. Everyone knows that, yet a lot of tasks are done manually. In this post, I will share with you some easy steps to install all your applications.

Let's get started

For those how follow this blog I talked many times about Chocolatey. For all the others, Chocolatey is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get (on Linux), but built with Windows in mind.
Assuming that you don't have Chocolatey installed, let's start by that. Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator, and execute this command:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

Now anytime you need an application you can simply do a choco install command. This will download the latest version of the package online the last package, and install it on your PC.
Here are some examples with popular applications:

Application	Command
Notepad++	choco install notepadplusplus
Atom	choco install atom
7-Zip	choco install 7zip
Skype	choco install skype

You can find the complete list of all applications on the Chocolatey web site. Many other commands are also available to search, list and update some packages:

Command	Description
choco install atom -Version 0.140.0	Install old version (0.140.0) of Atom
choco list nunit	Show all package that contain nUnit
choco update	updates chocolatey to the latest version
choco update notepadplusplus	updates NotePad++ to the latest version

Let's go a step further

Will it be nice if we could chain them? This is possible with Boxstarter, a repeatable, reboot resilient windows environment installations using Chocolatey packages. To install Fiddler, Atom, and Visual Studio 2013, simply type this command in Internet Explorer (IE) and Boxstarter will starts his magic.

http://boxstarter.org/package/fiddler4,atom,visualstudiocommunity2013

---

Note: This will work only in Internet Explorer (IE), on Chrome or Firefox you will need a "Click-Once" extension.

---

Turn it up to 11

Now that we know we can chain them, what is stooping us to create a script that will install ALL our favorite applications? Well, nothing!

Boxstarter is a very easy and powerful way to automate the installation of software. Here an example to show some of the great features supported by Boxstarter. In the following script I will: configure Windows, install the latest Windows updates, install Visual Studio Community 2013 with an extension and install many other applications.

# Windows Configuration
Update-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
Set-ExplorerOptions -showHidenFilesFoldersDrives -showProtectedOSFiles -showFileExtensions
Enable-RemoteDesktop
Disable-InternetExplorerESC
Disable-UAC #Win8
Set-TaskbarSmall

if (Test-PendingReboot) { Invoke-Reboot }

# Update Windows and reboot if necessary
Install-WindowsUpdate -AcceptEula
if (Test-PendingReboot) { Invoke-Reboot }

# Install Visual Studio Community 2013
choco install choco install visualstudiocommunity2013

# VS extensions
Install-ChocolateyVsixPackage PowerShellTools http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c9eb3ba8-0c59-4944-9a62-6eee37294597/file/112013/6/PowerShellTools.vsix


# Install WebPI (Platform Installer) 
choco install webpi

# Install
#  . SSDT
#  . Microsoft Azure SDK - 2.4.1
#  . Microsoft Azure SDK for .NET (VS 2012) - 2.4
C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer>WebpiCmd.exe /Applications: SSDT, WindowsAzureSDK_2_4_1, VWDOrVs2012AzurePack.2.4


if (Test-PendingReboot) { Invoke-Reboot }

# Install Favourite Tools
choco install sourcetree
choco install resharper
choco install Atom
choco install LinqPad
choco install fiddler4

You can now execute this script executing the command in IE:

http://boxstarter.org/package/url?C:/dev/Demoscript.txt 

In this case, the file was on a local folder, put it could have been in a share folder on another server, or somewhere online like in gist.github.com.

Wrapping up

I hope it will help you to automate repetitive task and save time. For more information about Chocolatey or Boxstarter, go visit their respective web site. Any comments, suggestions and/or questions are welcome.


~Frank B

Reading Notes #166

Suggestion of the week

• Unit Testing Asynchronous Code - This post is a wonderful source of information about how to test ascyn code following the best practices.

Cloud

• Security and Identity Management with Azure Mobile Services - Great article from MSDN Mag that provides important information.

• Comparing Clouds : IaaS Scalability Options (Richard Seroter) - Very interesting article that compares one the key feature: scalability between the biggest cloud providers.

• Scaling a Multi-Tenant Application with Azure DocumentDB (John Macintyre) - Very good post that reviews and explains different scaling strategies in the NoSql context.

• Applied Azure: Infographic of how “Have I been pwned?” orchestrates Microsoft’s cloud services - One year after the launch of Have I been pwned, see what this service has become, and what was learned during this journey.

Programming

• 5 Incredible Features in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview - (Michael Crump) - Still didn't try visual studio 2015? This post will describe so of his greatest new features.

• ASP.NET 5: Using POCO controllers - Very interesting tutorial that explains some functionalities of Asp. Net MVC 5.

• 3 Useful Tools for Local Development & Testing - (Brian Rinaldi) - It's always nice to find new toys.

• Getting ready for the future with the Microsoft .NET Portability Analyzer (Scott Hanselman) - So many great tools that can help us are available easily and for free.

Miscellaneous

• How to Use Google in the Most Unusual Way to Make Your Self-Editing Faster, and Better (Guest Blogger) - Nice and very clever tips.

• 5 Quick Questions with Robert Scoble: What Makes a Great Tech Blog? (Stacey Roberts) - Everything about how to have a good tech blog.

• This is your bank, please verify your details – No, you verify YOUR details! - This situation arrived to frequently. I got in the same situation and mostly at the equivalent conclusion... how about you?

• The Small Personal Risks That Actually Change Behavior - Interesting post where the author shares his life, experience, inspiring.

• Is Blogging Dead? How Blogs are changing and How You Can Stay on Top (Stacey Roberts) - Very interesting post about the evolution of the blogging platform as medium and suggestion n how bloggers should be adapted to today's reality.

• Top Blogging Tools For the Blogger’s Soul (Matt Banner) - A nice list of online tools.

• The real and complete story - Does Windows defragment your SSD? (Scott Hanselman) - Nice post that removes the voile on a great "mystery".

~Frank B.

Reading Notes #165

 

Suggestion of the week

• OmniSharp - Making cross-platform .NET a reality, and a pleasure (Scott Hanselman) - This is both really exciting and easy to bring in your environment.

 

Cloud

• Azure : Blob Storage / Retrieval (sachabarber) - Excellent post to get started with the azure storage blob.

• Security and Identity Management with Azure Mobile Services - Great article from MSDN Mag that provides important information on how the cloud can help line-of-business (LOB) application developers create and support all platforms.

Programming

• Visual Studio 2013 Community - "Professional" development for free (Greg Duncan) - This post gives all the detail about this new community version: what is in, how to get it, the compatibility or incompatibility... everything.
• The Blog of Jason Roberts (Jason Roberts) - This book looks awesome, and the author Jason Roberts offer that we pay what we want. More to come.

Integration

• Azure BizTalk Services: An Introduction - This is the second post of a series on BizTalk. We are still in an introduction mode, but this is good, BizTalk is not a little application or system, and in this time of the Internet of things, it's good to have the good tools.

~ Frank B

Toby, did you see what I just did!

Today, I was running around with my laptop trying to find someone to show him what I did. My problem was that since I'm working from home, I found no one except my dog... Toby, did you see what I just did! He was looking at me and didn't really care about that I was doing some C# in Atom, a regular text editor. So, here I am now, sharing my discovery with you.

The "What"

While reading some article on the Internet, I fall on a video talking about OmniSharp.

A family of Open Source projects, each with one goal - To enable great .NET development in YOUR editor of choice.
SO I decide to give it a try in one of my favorite text editors this time called Atom.

Less than two minutes after, I was running across my house....

The "How"

What I like about Atom that it is so easy to install and to customize. The easiest way to install it is via Chocolatey.

Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind.

Assuming that you don't have Chocolatey installed, let's start by that. Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator, and execute this command:

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

In a new command prompt again with the administrator permission, let's Install the text editor Atom:

cinst Atom

and Git:

cinst Git

Now to install the OmniSharp in Atom you have two options. You could do it through the Settings or using a console. For this post, I will use the second option. Let's open a new command prompt, always as Administrator.
The reason why I use a new prompt every time is to be sure that environment variable gets refreshed.

Execute these command:

apm install language-csharp
apm install autocomplete-plus-async
apm install omnisharp-atom

Now open Atom and let's put some code:

using System;

namespace ConsoleAppDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
          var myBook = new Book{Title="Get Started with OmniSharp"};
          Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Here is my review of: {0}", myBook.Title));
        }
    }

    public class Book
    {
      private string _review;

      public string Title{get;set;}

      public string Review{
        get{
          if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(_review))
          {
            _review = "This book is nice";
          }
          return _review;
        }
        set{
          _review = value;
        }
      }
    }
}

Nothing special until you start the OmniSharp server with Ctrl-Alt-o.

Boom!

As you can see now the intelisense, completion, code navigation and so more! If you click on the little green flame on the bottom left you see details about notification and error message.

The end

OmniSharp is a frontend compiler, not a complete compiler so it doesn't generate CLI code. But It's already a lot. Today, you can use OmniSharp with Sublime Text 3, Atom, Emacs, Brackets, Vim and with command line only. So whether on your old laptop or your new PC, whether you run Linux, Mac or Windows let's do some C#!


~Frank Boucher

Four Simple Tips to Improve your Asp.Net MVC Project

When it's time to do the re-factoring of a solution, it's always a good idea to clean the code before doing any re-factoring. In this post, I will share with you simple but very efficient ways to improve your solution.

1- Forget the magic string

By default in Asp.Net MVC magic strings are used every where.

return View("Index");

or

@Html.ActionLink("Delete Dinner", "Delete", "Dinners", new { id = Model.DinnerID }, null)

Nothing bad here, but nothing will tell you that to did a typo, or that the method name as changed. This is where T4MVC will become a great tool do add to all your project.

To add it a simple Nuget command is enough: Install-Package T4MVC. By doing this a T4 file (T4MVC.tt) will be added to your project that will generates a number of files. These generated files will simplify your life and gives you the opportunity to code using strongly type.

Here are few transformations:

// Before ----------------
  return View("Index");

// After with T4MVC
  return View(Views.Index);

An action link in a view.

// Before ----------------
  @Html.ActionLink("Delete Product", "Delete", "Products", new { id = Model.ProductID }, null)

// After with T4MVC
  @Html.ActionLink("Delete Product", MVC.Products.Delete(Model.ProductID))

An Ajax call.

// Before ----------------
<%= Ajax.ActionLink( "RSVP for this event",
                 "Register", "RSVP",
                 new { id=Model.DinnerID }, 
                 new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId="rsvpmsg", OnSuccess="AnimateRSVPMessage" }) %>

// After with T4MVC
<%= Ajax.ActionLink( "RSVP for this event",
                 MVC.RSVP.Register(Model.DinnerID),
                 new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId="rsvpmsg", OnSuccess="AnimateRSVPMessage" }) %>

A redirection.

// Before ----------------
return RedirectToAction("Details", new { id = product.ProductID });

// After with T4MVC
return RedirectToAction(MVC.Products.Details(product.ProductID));

When writing the code, it gives you intellisense where you normally would not have any. At compile time, it validates all the code so no typo or other misspelling errors are present.

2- Clean your views

You know all those "@using" on the top of each views that we copy over and over... It's time to remove them. The way to do it is by moving them to the web.config file in the "Views" folder.



So you can move the namespaces used globally

@using Microsoft.Security.Application
@using System.Globalization;

by including them to this section:

<system.web.webPages.razor>
  <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage">
    <namespaces>
      <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
      <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />

      <add namespace="Microsoft.Security.Application" />
      <add namespace="System.Globalization" />

    </namespaces>
  </pages>
</system.web.webPages.razor>

3- Don't lose time debugging

To many people are losing time debugging their application or web site. Start using Glimpse right away! This will provide information in real time across all layers of your application from the UI to the server and database side. Perfect to know everything that happen on a click of a button: javascript validation, controller code and even the query in the database.







Install it in ten seconds with the Nuget command manager and pick the version you need.

PM> Install-Package Glimpse

Glimpse is secure and is configured to be accessible only from localhost by default. But don't trust me and try it by yourself, or go check this one minute Glimpse Heads Up Display youtube video.

4- Start monitoring your website health and usage

Move your website on Microsoft Azure and use the Application Insights. This will gives you the opportunity to monitor that availability, performance and usage of your live application.




To add it you got many possibilities, one of them from Visual Studio 2013, just right-click on the project and select Add Application Insights Telemetry, and voilà!

Now you just need to run or deploy the website and after few minutes or so you will have plenty of information, graphs waiting for you in the Azure Portal.







You will find a lot of information about Application Insights on the Microsoft Azure

Wrapping up

I hope it will help you, thanks for reading. Any comments, suggestions and/or questions are welcome.

~ Frank Boucher

References

• T4MVC Documentation: https://t4mvc.codeplex.com/documentation
• Glimpse Documentation: http://getglimpse.com
• Application Insights: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-insights-start-monitoring-app-health-usage/