Reading Notes #558

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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!

Databases

• Introducing GitHub Copilot for Azure Data Studio (Drew Skwiers-Koballa) - That's such a great idea! I spend less time writing queries than I used to. This will help save time remembering the schema and other quick things.

Programming

• Introducing Dev Home (Kayla Cinnamon) - Very excited by the potential of DevHome.It was announced at Build and it's looking great already. As Kayla talked about it I installed it from the store. A project to watch for sure.

• 8 Free and Open Source Blazor UI Libraries (Claudio Bernasconi ) - Wow! I didn't know so many free and great libraries existed!

• Announcing an update for .NET Upgrade Assistant with a new CLI tool! - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - An interesting tool indeed! Would be if we could do the same to upgrade the packages.

LowCode

• Create a Microsoft Power App for your ASP.NET Core Web API - Visual Studio Blog (Julia Kasper) - This is an excellent tutorial to build a mobile app without code and using an API as a source of data.

• What’s new: Power Apps May 2023 Feature Update (Clay Wesener) - That month was packed! I need to try these new features.

• Transforming Excel into Power Apps: A Game-Changer with Microsoft's CoPilot AI (Shane Young) - Hopefully this will helps a few people to move out of Excel. Because yes there is a time for that.

• More power with pipelines in Power Platform (Anthony Sheehi,) - Next deployment new feature in the Pipeline. There are also a few video references to learn more about it.

• Power Apps is empowering coders with next-generation AI capabilities (Ryan Cunningham,) - So many mind-blowing new capabilities! Copilot's presence will really change the game in terms of productivity.

Podcasts

• Remote Versus Local Development with Mike Brevoort (Screaming in the Cloud) - Remote or not remote, that's the question... right? Interesting discussion around a polarized question.
• DevPod for Dev Containers (DevOps and Docker Talk) - I heard of DevPod before, but it wasn't stable enough for my occasional usage. But now it looks just perfect! Looking forward to trying it!
• Blazor Web Assembly by Example with Toi B. Wright (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - You can hear the passion in her voice! I'm sure the book is excellent, plus I love the idea of picking only the part that you want/ need and not missing anything.

~Frank

Reading Notes #557

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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!

Open Source

• Introducing Dart | Windows (Tim Sneath) - This a nice post that makes us dive into a world close to the machine. An interesting open-source project indeed.

Programming

• Boost Your Local Testing Game with the LambdaTest Tunnel Docker Extension (Salman Khan, Ajeet Singh Raina) - With this extension, we can test simply and securely our application. This tutorial helps us get started.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.18 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of super cool features coming up in this release. Kalya and Hanselmann showed a few of them during Build keynote.

• PSReadLine 2.3.1-beta1 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - And it keeps getting better. This tool helps everyone. Make heavy user faster, and save the occasional user with suggestions.

LowCode

• Ridiculously Simple Power Apps Drop Shadow Technique (Matthew Devaney) - New cool looks for our apps.

• Building Quick and Visual Reports with Power Apps Reporting not Power BI (Shane Young) - This post shares an interesting alternative to PowerBi when requirements are less demanding.

Podcasts

• Toi Wright: Blazor WebAssembly - Episode 246 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Great interview about this .NET author.
• Episode 179: Maintainer Month with GitHub's Martin Woodward (Sustain) - Learn more about the Maintainer Month during this episode. Martin talks also about the status of GitHub, five years after being acquired by Microsoft.
• Contribute to Kubernetes (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Inspirering episode about open source. The focus is on Kubernetes but this is true for any project.
• Computing History with Atari and Commodore's Leonard Tramiel (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I grow-up with a Pet Commodore and Commodore 64. This episode is a great interview.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft Learn announces Microsoft Q&A Assist and new content for building AI skills (erinrifkin) - This is brilliant. Asking the question correctly or asking the right question make all the difference to the answer we will get.Looking forward to seeing this available more broadly.

~Frank

Reading Notes #556

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - May 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - The Azure Developers CLI just is evolving so fast! New Java early functionalities, improvement with Container Apps... Looking forward to watching Build sessions and seeing all of it!

Programming

• Announcing the new Azure Container Registry libraries (Mario Guerra) - Nice update! And there are more languages supported, which is fantastic.

• How I used GitHub Copilot to build a browser extension (Rizel Scarlett) - Another great story about how Copilot helps the productivity of a developer. And at the same time, great tutorial to build and Chrome extension.

• Choose Your Own Adventure in Open Source: Paths to Success (Bekah) - This is a nice post that provides many excellent reasons why you should start contributing to open source and how it is good for you

• Quick Progress in Software Development (Mike Krop) - Interesting... A Development Sim game?!

LowCode

• Exploring the Power Platform GPT Prompts: Unleashing the Potential of AI in the Power Platform (Lee Stott) - When new tools are coming up with such potential its great to have ideas of how to work with it. This post helps users get started or find new ways, and advance users an opportunity to share.

• Fueling Creativity: Introducing our Power Platform Prompt Samples Repository! | Power Platform Developer Blog (April Dunnam) - A great initiative to get us started when the spark is missing.

Podcasts

• Molly's Game with Molly Bloom (A Bit of Optimism) - What a story! An inspiring journey with so many challenges.
• 357: The Zune UI was the Best UI (Merge Conflict) - Ahhh! Now I understand why so many people are talking about the Zune! Great episode that go over some souvenirs and memories.

Miscellaneous

• Discover Ways to Make Open Source Contributions to Microsoft (Kiran Panjwani) - Great post shows how you, students, can make a huge difference.

• Why Put PostgreSQL in Azure - Grant Fritchey (Grant Fritchey) - Great post that explains why Azure is a great hosting platform. In this case, it's about the database and it is so true. But it's also true with many other services...

~Frank

Reading Notes #555

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

The suggestion of the week

• How to Contribute to Open Source without Knowing How to Code: A guide with project suggestions (Bekah) - Yas! This is so true! Many of the contributions in my projects aren't code and each time that really helped. Correcting a single typo is useful!

Programming

• Docker Desktop 4.19: Compose v2, the Moby project, and more ( Sylvialynn Favello) - Compose v2 is here time to move up!

• Blazor Basics: What is Blazor? (Claudio Bernasconi ) - You would like to build a Single Page Application (spa) but are unfamiliar with Blazor? This post is an excellent place to get started before doing your first "hello world" app.

• Docker Init: Initialize Dockerfiles and Compose files with a single CLI command (Marc Sherwood, Nuno Coracao) - That's a very useful new command! And there is a demo video to see it in action.

Databases

• Database 101: How social media “likes” are stored in a database (Daniel Reis) - Great share! What ever using ScyllaDB or something else thinking about how your data will be queried is always good.

Podcasts

• 5 strategies for managing your manager (Modern Mentor) -
• Failing Intelligence () - An interesting discussion about AI and it's potential impact to our society.
• 192. Increase Productivity in the Workplace (Effortless Work Series) (The Greg McKeown Podcast) - Who's not thinking about productivity or being pushed to be more productive? I think all of us. In the episode, Greg revisits the core ideas of doing it but effortlessly.

Miscellaneous

• Getting started with Microsoft Learn (Johan Myburgh) - Lear has grown to such a complete and diversified source of information. It's definitely a must to learn new stuff!

• How do we get a tech team to make a big technical change? (Chelsea Troy) - A deep reflection on how to approach the changes and a very well-explained context on why it would or wouldn't work.Nice post.

• The 15-Minute Meeting: Change Your Workday, Change Your Life (Donn Felker) - I like the idea of shorter meetings, it's true that some could be shorter.

~frank

Reading Notes #554

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Migrate ASP.NET Web App to Azure App Service (Justin Yoo) - This great post shows and explains the very few changes suggested to migrate our .NET website into Azure.

Programming

• Minimal API growing with .NET 7 (Christian Nagel) - Ooh! That looks really nice! I will need to play around a little with it to fully appreciate all and I have just the right project for it.

• Visual Studio–Generate C# client for OpenAPI (Bart Wullems) - Interesting post that explains what is happening behind the scene of the OpenAPI client generator.

• Web API development in Visual Studio 2022 - Visual Studio Blog (Sayed Ibrahim) - Wow! You have the choice of that super detailed post with all the new features to help us be fantastic at creating APIs or also included in the post the video with a similar overview.

Podcast

• Episode 172: Maintainer Month 2023 with Sarah Boyce & David Blass (Sustain) - Special double episode for the Maintainer Month.
• Donovan Brown is Retiring - Episode 242 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Whatever Donovan is talking about you can feel his passion. Extremely interesting episode. Enjoy your new challenge sir!
• 356: Sunsetting software, libraries, & APIs (Merge Conflict) - You build stuff? Great, but what do you do after, when do you know when it is time to retire an API or a service? James & Frank might not have all the responses, but they definitely feel the problem.
• 56. Building Drabble.social using Azure PaaS - Bram de Buyser (Betatalks the podcast) - Great episode! What a challenge. It takes only a few seconds to create an account ;)
• Can You Really Convert Podcast Fans Into Active Subscribers? (Feed Your Brand) - So many great tips in this episode. By looking at the type of email I receive... many should listen to it.
• Creating Walkable Cities with Nathan Allebach (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - What do you think when you read walkable? Was it what was discussed in this episode? Strange how something great ideas are derailed without any bad intentions.

LowCode

• Master Power Apps Do Until Loops for Efficient Workflow Management (and Unleash Your Inner Nerd) 🤓 (Shane Young) - Funny and educational tutorial about a very powerful tool indeed.

~frank

Reading Notes #553

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Programming

• Smoother rebases with auto-squashing Git commits (Andrew Lock) - Git is a very powerful tool, it worth make do the thing the way you like them.

• Accelerate API Development in Visual Studio with .http/.rest Files! (Dirk Strauss) - Nice integration to Visual Studio.That way we can have less software up and running while coding.

• Let's Learn .NET Virtual Events - All Around the World - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup) - Super cool events to get started with Azure using .NET and the best of it in many different timezones or languages!!

LowCode

• Low-code signals 2023 (Richard Riley) - Interesting post that shares numbers related to the growth of low-code practice.

• Power Apps PDF Function: Create, View & Download PDFs (Matthew Devaney) - A nice cool app with a lot of features!

Miscellaneous

• I'm a former Microsoft VP of HR. Here are the real reasons why layoffs are happening and how much longer they'll last. (Chris Williams ) - Interesting post that explains what this layoff season is really about.

~frank

Reading Notes #552

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Resource Group Location Matters (Sam Cogan) - And voila! Planning is everything... Almost

Programming

• Visual Studio Code Day 2023 (Burke Holland) - An event is coming up for VS Code and you don't want to miss that. During that one day, so much will be shared about this amazing editor.

• Docker Gets up to Speed for WebAssembly (B. Cameron Gain) - Excited to see this wasm + docker story progressing. Should I give it a try or wait a little more... That's the questions

• Create a Custom Connector for your Web API from within Visual Studio (Marcel Ferreira) - Interesting! So the question is not IF I will create a connector, but more by WHAT should I start?!

• Static Methods vs. Non-Static Methods in C# (Matjaz Prtenjak ) - Learn all the differences, pros, and cons between the two. No stone is left unturned.

• Docker Compose Experiment: Sync Files and Automatically Rebuild Services with Watch Mode (Milas Bowman) - This preview command is available for an easier development time.

• Docker Gets up to Speed for WebAssembly (B. Cameron Gain) - take the best advantages of the Wasm ecosystem.

DevOps

• Choosing a container platform (Kit Dergilev) - This is a great post that shares different options for our container environment based on some scenarios.

Miscellaneous

• How to contribute to Microsoft documentation (Luke Murray) - Oh yes! You should give it a try the feeling you get when your changes are merged...

~Frank

Reading Notes #551

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Microsoft Cost Management updates—March 2023 (Michael Flanakin) - Because we all need it and or worry about it. Learn the new features that are available for you in the cost management.

• Azure Spring Clean: Compliance for Bicep with Checkov (Sam Cogan) - That's a pretty cool tool to add to our box. I need to get that onto my pipeline...like now!

• Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - April 2023 (Kent Weare) - One of my friends shared this with me, and I loved it! It's packed with information about new features, and upcoming events...

• This Month in Azure Container Apps: March/April 2023 (Anthony Chu) - I caught the live stream by pure chance and they pass through all the news contained in the post. Very happy to see Azure Container App growing so quickly!

Programming

• Run dotnet core projects without opening visual studio (Karthik Chintala) - Yes, it is possible and even fun! I code in VSCode 80% of the time.

• How to Do an Inner Join in LINQ? (Code Maze) - Nice post to get started about relations between tables type of joints and of course how to do it with LINQ.

• Running .NET Console Apps in Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - A neat way to run an application in the cloud. Have a special look at how the secret config is managed to avoid pushing them into the code repository.

Podcast

• Let's Chat About AI (Ep 76) (Community Pulse) - Extremely interesting episode about AI. Should we be worried, what would be the impact? So many great questions asked.
• 54. Cloud native and the Container landscape on Azure - with Daniel Paulus (Betatalks the podcast) - A little bit about the container's history, its present, and potential future.
• Chris Sainty: Blazor in Action - Episode 238 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - I already like Blazor, but I think you will also after listening to this episode.
• Down A Rabbit Hole with Seth Godin (A Bit of Optimism) - Great episode is about many different little things to make life better. You can feel the complicity between Seth and Simon.
• Windows WSL and Containers in 2023 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - WSL what it is and why people say it's so useful. All that and more in this episode.

Miscellaneous

• Technical Writing 101: Working with SMEs - Big Nerd Ranch (Cole Henry) - effectively.

~frank

Reading Notes #550

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Programming

• Improving multi-platform container support - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - I really enjoy those optimization posts. The explanation of why things as been decided, and how it was made. This is a very interesting post.

• Creating a ToolTip Component in Blazor (Steven Giesel) - What a nice little gem! This is a fantastic tutorial that explains how to create custom components.

• GitHub Copilot for the Command Line is amazing! (Christian Heilmann) - Wow! Those explanations are a huuuuge plus. Not only Copilote helps us at that time but then it also helps us to learn and improve. I like that. Looking forward to use it.

Miscellaneous

• Managing Workflows with the GitHub Actions Extension for VS Code (Anthony Bartolo) - This is a great extension! With highlights and all definitely useful when trying to understand a workflow.

~Frank

Reading Notes #549

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Teams: Advantages of the new architecture (Sumi Singh) - Nice journey on performance optimization, embracing the open source. Learn more about your new Teams and the details and effort to make it better in this post.

Cloud

• Downloading Files from Azure Container App to your Local Machine via Azure Blob Storage (Nikhil Vetteth) - This is a useful tip to extract our logs or other local files.

Programming

• Manage networking with Docker Compose (Eric Goebelbecker) - Nice post that explains with a sample how communication is possible between containers just by using Docker compose.

• Build custom communication experiences with Azure Communication Services UI Library for Microsoft Teams users (David de Matheu) - Nice new library for the Teams developers. You can now build more with less code by leveraging Azure Communication Services (ACS).

Podcasts

• The Wisdom of Anxiety with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (A Bit of Optimism) - A very interesting episode about mental fitness... I love it!

Miscellaneous

• Welcome to the new era of Microsoft Teams (Jeff Teper) - Get more memory and CPU back! I start using it and it makes a great difference. See you there.

• New Microsoft Loop app is built for co-creation | Microsoft 365 Blog (Wangui McKelvey) - I've been hearing about loop for a while now... I'm excited to finally try it.

~frank

Reading Notes #548

The suggestion of the week

• GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience (Thomas Dohmke) - Wow! Very excited about this news. Copilot is way more than just a buzz. After using it for a while I really appreciate the suggestions it was making. Looking forward to trying that next release.

Cloud

• Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - A nice online event is coming up. I'm honored and excited to be part of the sneakers. Looking forward to it.

• General Availability: ASP. NET web app migration to Azure App Service using PowerShell Scripts - This a nice tool that can help so many with that first step.

Programming

• A first look at Blazor and .NET 8 (Damien Bowden) - The future of Blazor looks very promising and interesting in .NET 8

• Announcing Docker+Wasm Technical Preview 2 (Djordje Lukic) - This wasm+docker is making progress fast! I feel like it was yesterday when they announced the first bits.

• Secure your .NET cloud apps with rootless Linux Containers - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - In this post, the .NET teams explain their decisions ti make the images more secure. Safer containers are always better, right?

• Turn your database into an API in minutes with Data API builder for Azure Databases (Jasmine Greenaway) - A pretty cool open-source project that can definitely help.

Miscellaneous

• What’s different about these layoffs (Eira May) - It is a troubled period. how many of us were affected directly or indirectly.

~frank

My Ubuntu laptop finally works with my docking station!

I've been running Ubuntu on my personal laptop, a Dell Inspiron 13. I love it. It's slim, performant and I can code, play, read, stream without any difficulty. Yet when I try to use my bigger PC monitors by connecting my laptop to a docking station, I've had a lot of trouble. I've tried 2 docking stations, but none of them worked with Ubuntu. Some solutions found online suggest rebuilding my kernel, but I didn't want to do that, it felt too extreme for what should be trivial.

This post is about how I finally got my docking station to work with Ubuntu 22.04.

My current docking station is a Targus USB-C Docking Station and it works perfectly with other Windows devices. While doing some cleaning on my desk a logo catches my attention on the dock; the Displaylink logo. And that was the beginning of the end for the problem with that dock station.

After a quick search (aka Googling with DuckDuckGo) I found exactly what I was looking for on Synaptics web site. A solution for the older Linux versions! 

Following the instructions: How to install DisplayLink Software - Ubuntu, I was able to downloads the Synaptics Ubuntu Driver Download and install them in a few minutes. After a reboot... It worked!

I hope it will help others with the same problem. 

Reading Notes #547

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Managing your Azure Cognitive Services Costs (Matt Eland) - Cost management is always a good idea. This post is part of a series of spring cleaning is not an exception.

• Uploading Large Blobs in Parallel with the Azure SDK (Mark Heath) - Wonderful! I tried recently to write a little POC of something like that but it did work as expected. Looking forward to digging into this code as I think I already see my mistake. Great post.

Programming

• Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing (Kin Lane) - This is an interesting post not about code but more about words, ideas, plans, and more.

• Adding Dependency Injection to a Console App in .Net 7 (Paul Michaels) - Short an simple the perfect answer to a how-to question.

• How to write your own cron Job scheduler in ASP.NET Core (like Quartz, Hangfire, ...) (Steven Giesel) - A really cool post that shows and explains how to build a simple background Service. I love those kind of projects as you learn so much doing them by yourself.

• PSReadLine 2.3.0-beta0 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - I'm a big fan of the Predictor, looking forward to trying this upgrade.

Miscellaneous

• How atomic Git commits dramatically increased my productivity - and will increase yours too (Samuel Faure) - A simple best practice to avoid pain later... I like it!

~ Frank

Reading Notes #546

Cloud

• How to build, test and deploy your application using Azure and GitHub - Azure DevOps Blog (Liam Hampton) - A nice DevOps tutorial that requires no installation because it all happens in the browser.
• Introducing the Reliable Web App Pattern for .NET - .NET Blog (Matt Soucoup, Nish Anil) - This post explains the best practices build on top of the well architect Azure framework.

Programming

• Run Appwrite on a Raspberry Pi (Jim Bennett ) - This post will make you save money and time while setup your dev environment.
• Can WebAssembly Solve Serverless's Problems? (Cameron Gain) - This is an interesting post that shares why WASM is an excellent idea and how it can help today's businesses.
• How to Read and Parse a JSON File in C# (Januarius NjokuUnknown) - Multiple ways to parse a file. How many did you know?
• How to automate your dev environment with dev containers and GitHub Codespaces (Kedasha Kerr) - Since I discover the devcontainer I use it all the time. Lucky for me my computers are powerful enough to manage my simple project. Codespace provides all that comfort but online...Have a look.
• Write a high-quality README for NuGet packages - The NuGet Blog (Lynn Dai) - Wonderful initiative! I believe that well-written documentation is the missing piece to many great hidden projects.

Podcasts

• 344: Exploring CoreData and CloudKit (Merge Conflict) - Honestly it felt good hearing about those two genius struggling with data. But more than that to see them continue to look for different alternatives, and try new tools and patterns. Great episode, as usual.
• 51. Minimal web API’s and API Management & learning by teaching - with Jonah Andersson (Betatalks the podcast) - Jonah is just amazing! I knew her before listening to the episode, I just love her even more! Brilliant mind mixed with a contagious passion!

Books

• 
  
  Learning Blazor (David Pine) - This book is just perfect! It explains a bit of everything. It is packed with real examples and code variation (because there are so many ways to write something). There was even a full chapter un test with playwright, I didn't expect that and it was great!

Reading Notes #545

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure portal January 2023 updates (Allison Cordle) - Noce quick update from the portal.A few new features related to VMs.

• Creating a Configuration Module for your Infrastructure as Code (Sam Cogan) - This is a great post to help us be more efficient in our DevOps practices when writing IaC.

• Fetching Credentials with the Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - Awesome post that shares very useful commands. Add this on your cheatsheet or bookmark that post.

• Host WordPress in Microsoft Azure with App Service (PaaS hosting) (Chris Pietschmann ) - When we are interested in WordPress, we are looking for a key in-hand experience. We don't want to manage code and connections and too much technical stuff. Having it hosted in PaaS Azure simplifies even more this.

Programming

• Docker Desktop 4.17: New development functionality (Alyssa Shames) - Learn more about how this new release helps us to be more secure and track the details of our containers in the post.

• Dapr 1.10 - More steps in the right direction (Mark Heath) - This is great! I'm happy to see the multi-app functionality as I was totally waiting for it. And the workflow is definitely something that interests me.

• What To Be Wary of With Iterators and Collections in C# (Nick Cosentino) - An interesting deep comparison between different ways to fetch and manipulate data in C#.

~ frank

Reading Notes #544

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Programming

• Web3 DevOps: The Series (Donovan Brown) - I'm just getting started with web3 there are so many tools.

• 5 Developer Workstation Security Best Practices | Docker (Briana Swift) - This is an interesting post that shares guidance to secure our development as early as possible in the development chain.

• How to Compare Two Json Objects Using C# (Code Maze) - Data is the core of most if not all applications and a common way to define the data is JSON. This post helps to understand how to compare a piece of information. Very useful.

• Keys To An Accessibility Mindset — Smashing Magazine (Daniel Yuschick) - Accessibility is important and the POUR Principles make them clearer and easier to consider when developing a new project.

• Upgrading your .NET projects with Visual Studio - .NET Blog (Olia Gavrysh) - That's pretty cool! Often when people (and I'm part of them) need to upgrade their projects they don't know exactly where to start and what exactly changes.

Podcasts

• Taking Comfortable Risks with Scott Galloway (A Bit of Optimism) - One thing he said that will stick with me I think, and that I need to now transform into my words: "There is nothing that will happen to you if you don't take some uncomfortable risks and talk to some people".
• Colin Bowern: Deployments and Ops using Octopus Deploy - Episode 231 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Never had the chance to play much with Octopus, but it always seems very interesting, now more than ever.
• How to manage through a season of layoffs (Modern Mentor) - A season like those required more effort from everyone. It's hard and we all need to say nice and as much human as possible.

~Frank

Reading Notes #543

Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

The Suggestion of the week

• What is .NET, and why should you choose it? (.NET Team) - This is not an ordinary blog post. It makes me think of those deep interesting MSDN articles. A great read for young or older developers that would like to know more about .NET or refresh their memory.

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Pipelines: If Expressions and Conditions (John Folberth) - This nice post in the series on Azure Pipeline focuses on conditions. Avery has efficient tools to customize our pipeline just like we want them.

• What is an Azure Load Balancer? (Cary Roys) - Do you know what an Azure Load Balancer is or you only thing you know? In this nice post not only you will learn what it really is but it the post shares some OSS tools to test your ALB and explains how to use them.

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming Patterns in .NET (Code Maze) - This is a great tutorial that explains 3 asynchronous patterns with code samples and explanation. Perfect to get started and understand legacy code or write new one.

• Coding 102: Writing code other people can read (Max Pekarsky) - This is an excellent post with so much wisdom in it. Writing readable code is extremely important. Whether it's just a few lines in excel, a script, a query for a database, or a full app.

• Use multiple identity providers from a Blazor WASM ASP.NET Core App secured using BFF (Damien Bowden) - An interesting post that explains how to implement authentification.

Podcasts

• Sustainable Open Source with Sarah Novotny (.NET Rocks!) - Great episode with the Microsoft Open Source Lead talking about why truly open source is important and how Microsft really believes in its future.
• Digging Up the Past with Sarah Parcak (A Bit of Optimism) - Using satellite images to do archeology... wait what?! Great episode really interesting from the early second until the last one.

Miscellaneous

• ChatGPT: One million people have joined the waitlist for Microsoft's AI-powered Bing (Liam Tung) - What a first day! This is a little post that shares a little info about the new Bing and its kickoff.

~Frank

Reading Notes #542

Cloud

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 1 - Azure Service Bus (James Dawson) - In this post the author switch the pub sub service and it looks so simple. Interesting.

• Adventures in Dapr: Episode 0 - Introduction (James Dawson) - This first post of the series provides us details about the plans and why Dapr seams interesting as a resource for this project.

• Azure Communication Services February 2023 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Happy to see the new release coming up packed with useful features and capability.

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - February 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Wow! The Dev CLI is kicking the new year with a big release. New templates on many languages and new features.

• General availability: Mount Azure Storage as a local share in App Service Windows Code (Unknown) - Important milestone reached. Congrats!

Programming

• A Fancy Hover Effect For Your Avatar (Temani Afif) - Wow! From my point of views this look loke magic. With only one HTML element and a few lines of CSS... Bravo!

• Blazor and Azure OpenAI (Michael Washington) - Cool demo using OpenAI API. Because yes ChatGPT is fun but there are APIs to build real apps.

• How to use Entity Framework Core in ASP.NET Core (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - This is a very nice tutorial that guides us each steps along the way. Clear detailed, very nice.

• Merging Git repositories without losing history (Dennis Doomen) - Great tutorial that not only provides the solution but explains step by steps why we do each of them.

Podcasts

• 341: Frank Masters In-App Subscriptions (Merge Conflict) - A big thank you to Frank and James for sharing that journey. We too often only ear about the happy path, and it's great to listen to all those challenges you incountered and how you managed to move forward.
• Embracing The Fall with Carla Hall (A Bit of Optimism) - YES! So true! Falling instead of failling. Like a very wise man told me long time ago, the important is to bounce; get back on your feet and standup.
• Alice and Bob Learn App Security with Tanya Janca (.NET Rocks!) - Great great episode with the amazing Tanya. Looking forward for that next book!
• 49. Using Azure Container Apps, KEDA, Infrastructure as Code and ARM - with Eduard Keilholz (Betatalks the podcast) - From the MVP stories, to the infrastructure as code with the detour around the bulletproof demo or candies... This episode is indeed like a delicious candy.

~Frank

How to edit a JSON object inside an Azure Logic App

I use Azure Logic Apps in many of my solutions, I find them so conviennant to integrate different systemes. Recently one of them was failling and by lookink at the error message: The property value exceeds the maximum allowed size, I knew what was wrong. I was tying to save a JSON object into a Storage table but one property was too long. For this particular case I didn't need the value contain in the property so the plan was to delete it. At first, I thought it wasn't possible to edit a variable of type object in a Logic Apps, but it is!

In this post I will show how to use Compose action and setProperty to perform data operations in Azure Logic Apps.

The Context

First think to know is that the Compose action does not update the the current object but creates a new one. In this demo the JSON object use is quite short to simplyfy the demo.

{
	"firstname":"Frank",
	"lastname":"Boucher",
	"alias":"fboucheros",
	"bio":"With many years of experience in the IT industry, François (Frank) Boucher is a trusted Microsoft Azure professional whose expertise and bilingual service are relied upon in large Canadian markets (Ottawa and Montreal) as well as internationally. Among his many accolades, Francois has been awarded four times Microsoft Azure MVP status, named a Microsoft Azure Advisor, and Microsoft Azure P-Seller. Frank created the “Cloud 5 minutes” show. Where every second week, a new episode that answers a different technical question, is published both in French and English (cloud5mins.com). "
}

The Details

The Logic App recieve a JSON object from the request body. This is transfom as an Person object. To empty the bio property the action Compose will be used.

Inside the Compose action, use the context menu to find setProperty in the Expression section. The expression setProperty takes three parameters: the object, the property name, and the edited value. In this demo the goal was to empty the property therefore and empty string will be assign like this:

  setProperty(variables('Person'),'bio','').

The edited object is accessible from the output of the Compose action and this what will be return in the Response action.

The Result

By adding a single action it's possible to edit JSON object in a Logic App without requiring to use inline code or external tools. A demo wouldn't be complite without a end-to-end run so here the result of a HTTP POST to the Logic App passing the Person JSON and the returned result.

Video version

If you prefer, I also have a video version of this post.

Useful links

• 🔗 Compose Action: https://c5m.ca/Compose
• 🔗 SetProperty: https://c5m.ca/setProperty

~ Frank

Reading Notes #541

Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

Cloud

• Learn Azure DevOps from Zero to Hero (April Edwards) - Nice series of videos to learn Azure DevOps.

Programming

• Jan. Extensions: Deploy Kubernetes and Run Cloud Apps Locally (Amy Bass) - I like those extension of the month post. It makes you discover little gem that you have not be interested at first.

• 5 .NET MAUI Features for Building Great Desktop Apps (James Montemagno) - Nice top five that shows us one more time how .NET MAUI is a great idea when it's time to create an application UI.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1! Better, faster MVVM source generators, .NET 7 support, and more! (Sergio Pedri) - Great new toolkit with many honestly very cool features.

• Generating Sample Data with Bogus (Shawn Wildermuth) - We all need seed data, test data, temp data... Bogus seams sample and efficient. I'm definitely trying it, in my next project.

• How to Get an Enum Member as a String in C# (Code Maze ) - This post provides a nice overview, with code samples, of three different ways to get the text value of an enum.

• Generating argument expressions for minimal APIs (continued): Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 5 (Andrew Lock) - Another nice post in that series that explains how things works under the hood for Minimal API.

Books

Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance 

Author: Erica Dhawan 

It's been a while since I had so many "ah-ah" moment while reading a book. Digital body language is about communication using many different technologies by different culture, generations and individuals... 

It a must if you care about how your message are received.

Miscellaneous

• 6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day (Eric Barker) - A nice post that reminds us of simple things to regain or productivity.

• How I Use Stream Deck (Brian T. Jackett) - Its always interesting to see how others are using some tools. It provides inspiration for our own setup.

~frank

Reading Notes #540

Good Monday!

Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Accelerate your Azure cloud management using Azure Cloud Shell with Predictive IntelliSense (Jason Helmick) - That's excellent news! After trying it locally, I cannot stop using it.

• Take your Azure CLI skills to the next level (nadavbh) - Oh wow, nice! I'm customizing my prompt right away!

Programming

• Bringing GitHub Actions to GitHub Mobile (Maximilian Sachs) - I'm Involved in a few repos, and being about to review some PR or questions and be able to answer them quickly is super nice. Learn more about this app in the post.

• How I built the first PDF report for KlipTok using IronPDF (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - A nice tutorial that shows how this tool was used with a Blazor static web site to print reports. A real implementation with his real challenges.

• Windows Package Manager 1.4 (Demitrius Nelon) - The more I use this tool the more I like it. Nice update that makes it even easier to use.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.17 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Nice new features, new configurations...I like that mica effect.

Databases

• Azure Data Studio 1.41 release - Microsoft SQL Server Blog (Erin Stellato) - Nice new update on this nice tool. Not all of them are visible, but the impact is big nevertheless.

Miscellaneous

• Practice Tests released on Microsoft Learn (Georgia Kalyva) - So many of you asked me about where they could find those tests... Happy to provide an easy answer moving on.

Reading Notes #539

Good Monday! 

It's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

 

Programming

• Making an Asynchronous Breakfast in .NET (Assis Zang ) - This post explains so well using a task that we all did the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code. It's in .NET, but valid for all languages (that support async code of course).

• A first look behind the scenes of minimal API endpoints: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 1 (Andrew Lock) - First, of a series, this post digs into the code to understand why minimal APIs are so performant. There is a lot in there, looking forward to reading the next one.

• December Extensions Roundup: Improving Visibility for Your APIs and Images (Amy Bass) - I use more than I create docker images these days but I can see how this extension would be useful.Very cool!

• Exploring the model-binding logic of minimal APIs: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 3 (Andrew Lock) - The third post in a series where we dig into how Minimal APIs do their magic.

• Extracting metadata from a minimal API handler: Behind the scenes of minimal APIs - Part 2 (Andrew Lock) - Another deep technical post of the series where Andrew shows us are things works under the hood of minimal APIs.

• How To Use GitLens To Figure Out Who Introduced A Change In Your Code (Mohd S.) - Great post that shows how to use a tool with a real case. Nicely done!

• Reducing Blazor WASM size by providing custom ICU data - Gérald Barré (Gérald Barré) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to help us understand and get started.

Podcasts

• Best of DevOps 2022 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Nice review of 2022, DevOps style, by 3 Docker captains.

• Source Open vs Open Source and IdentityServer with Dominick Baier and Brock Allen (.NET Rocks!) - I used in the past IdentityServer and didn't know the story. Very interesting post about Open source.

~Frank

Reading Notes #538

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - January 2023 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - Easier to install and more secure. A nice update.

• Develop Your Cloud App Locally with the LocalStack Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Harsh Mishra) - Interesting tools that can emulate your AWS environment locally, perfect to develop and not stress about the cloud cost busting your budget.

Programming

• 6 Command Line (PowerShell & CLI) Tips & Tricks for Microsoft Azure you should know about! (Thomas Maurer) - Great tips that really enable us to be more productive and efficient.

• Get Started with GitHub Actions (Mandy Hubbard) - This is a great post to get started with CICD. GitHub is free and accessible, give it a try and then automate some tests or a deployment.

• Introduction to DevSecOps on Azure (Daniel Krzyczkowski) - New Pluralsight course announcement.

• The Problem With Dependency Injection Frameworks (James Shore) - A very interesting post that continues to explain why DI frameworks are bad even though they help us.

• Public Preview: Azure Automation Visual Studio Code Extension - Nice I like Azure automation. An extension to manage those cloud cron jobs, I say yes.

• Release notes for Microsoft Q&A - Love that new look!

• Why tuples in C# are not always a code smell (Dennis Frühauff) - I didn't use Turple yet but it's not hard to see the potential and how it could become ugly. This post shows and explains a few simple rules to stay clear.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Cosmos DB to Azure Data Explorer Synapse Link (public preview) (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Two worlds touched. This new connection looks super cool.

• Lazy and once-only C# async initialization (Ian Griffiths) - An amazing post that explains so much and that has all the code snippets to be clear about it. I will have to copy-paste those into some test applications to really try them, but it is clear what I should expect.

~frank