Reading Notes #135

 

Suggestion of the week

• Patterns and Anti-Patterns for Scalable and Available Cloud Architectures (Jonathan Allen) - Fantastic overview of some really useful pattern and anti-pattern to improve the performance of our cloud applications.

Cloud

• Cloud Load testing with Visual Studio Online - Launching General Availability (Charles Sterling) - Nice walktrouth of this great new feature available in Visual Studio online. Also available in video.
  
• Blogging On Virtual Machines (Corey Sanders) - This is the first post of a new blog, focusing n IaaS. That's a good news.
  
• Creating an Azure Mobile Services .NET backend from scratch (Carlos Figueira) - Great tutorial here without magic. Every steps are well explained.

Programming

• Windows Phone 8.1 for Developers-Choose your weapons - Nice post that enumerates the options newly available to develop on Windows Phone.
  
• Announcing TypeScript 1.0 - Great news, TypeScript is finally version 1.0! No more excuses.

Book

• What is DevOps? (Mike Loukides) - Interesting short and free book that gives you a historical overview of devOps.

Miscellaneous

• DevOps, Cloud, and the Lean “Wheel of Waste” - An Interesting post about devops advantage by avoiding waste.
  
• Microsoft Quiet On New APIs for Windows Phone 8.1 - This post lists the new features in windows Phone 8.1.
  
• On Critics, Criticism and Remarkability (Seth Godin) - An Interesting post that could improve team spirit.

Reading Notes #134

Cloud

• Speak to the Lonely Cloud Data Center Workers (Bill Wilder) - Smiley.
• PowerShell Remoting with Azure Windows VMs (Ravikanth C) - This post contain all the useful code we need to improve our Powershell scripts.
• BUILD 2014 day 1 Keynote recap (Laurent Duveau) - Great one page summary of the build day 1.
• BUILD 2014 day 2 Keynote recap (Laurent Duveau) - Nice quick recap of what was as been presented on day 2 of the //Build.

Programming

• C# Extension Methods Demystified - This tutorial explains the extends methods with simple code sample.
• Git for Team Foundation Developers–Branches (Kirk Evans[MSFT]) - Clear 101 tutorial, that bring TFS users more comfortable with Git.

In my previous post, Git for Team Foundation Developers , I showed how to create a project in Visual Studio Online,

• Azure Mobile Services in Project Siena (James Quick) - Very cool tutorial that play with mobile services in a Windows app.

Miscellaneous

• Scott Hanselman’s Complete List of Productivity Tips (hanselman.com) - If you didn’t have the chance to see this talk here is your chance to have a summary of the content.
• Drive Productivity by Limiting Work in Progress - Interesting reading suggestion.
• Nouvelles | Bière + l’entraînement = un bon mélange? - Interesting facts about a beer after doing sports.
• What to Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing and You Have Nothing to Say (John Sonmez) - Really interesting and motivating post about how overcome the inercy when it’s time to write.
• Video Tutorial and Screenshots: Windows 8.1 Update 1 (hanselman.com) - Great recap of all the features in the new Windowws 8.1 update. It also include a useful tutorial video.

~Frank

Reading Notes #133

 

Suggestion of the week

• Rockin’ Windows Azure with Visual Studio (Jonathan Rozenblit & Paul Laberge) - Great video that takes the time to talk about all the great tools we have to develop with Microsoft Azure.

 

Cloud

• Microsoft is pushing Windows Azure BizTalk Services - Wiki Ninjas - Official Blog of TechNet Wiki - Site Home - TechNet Blogs - Stay up to date with Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) by following the author in this list.
  
• The Windows Azure Service Bus and the Internet of Things, Part 2 - Very interesting, and a bit unusual, tutorial where we build a mobile application, that will control an Arduino through Microsoft Azure.

Programming

• Changes in the Microsoft MVP Program - MVPs for Open Source Contributions (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting change in the MVP program.
  
• Obtaining Twitter Access Tokens with ASP.NET Identity - Very complete tutorial about how to transform the user / pws of Twitter in a reel claims.
  
• Using Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) in MVC 5 Application Using Visual Studio 2013 (Gaurav) - Woh! Things look so easy in Visual Studio 2013... Very constructive reading.

Miscellaneous

• Back to Basics: When allowing user uploads, don't allow uploads to execute code (Scott Hanselman) - Wow, it's crazy how "bad" peoples always found a way inside our application.

Reading Notes #132

Suggestion of the week

• TypeScript for C# Programmers (Steve Fenton) - Great book that in less than hundred pages, explains to me how to code in TypeScript. I feel so comfortable already I will add TypeScript in my next web project, and I will strongly recommend this book to everyone. If you are a C# developer, know your base in JavaScript this book is available in PDF for free!

Cloud

• Cloud projects and cross-country moves ( Buck Woody) - Nice story a like the correlation with IT projects.
  
• I put my Azure website in the wrong location, now what?! - I like when posts are based on reel life "problem." This post is one of them, and is really interesting.
  
• Windows Azure = Security + Privacy + Compliance (Jonathan Rozenblit) - This post provides a very crisp answer for some essential cloud related questions.
  
• How do you Inject Configurations into Windows Azure Cloud Service Startup Tasks? - A great tutorial indeed! It shows how to have dynamic configuration in our startup tasks, and who doen't?
  
• Saved by a ZIP File and a Command Line - Interesting option to zipfile in a Windows Azure startup task. Could it be easier with PowerShell?

Programming

• Facade Pattern - Nice explanation of the facade pattern also knew as a proxy pattern.
  
• Welcome to the OneNote API! - Great news, a new API to build great application and/or tools.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #9 – Embrace SSL During Development when authenticating with Azure Active Directory (Bill Wilder) - Nice quick tips with a fantastic introduction to security using certificates.
  
• Five Reasons ASP.NET Developers Should Care About Node.js - This post is a strong, but very honest, promotion of Node.Js and highlights the reasons why .Net developer's myth be interested in.
  
• Automate your development tasks using Grunt (Marco Franssen) - This post explains what's Grunt, and how to configure and execute Grunt tasks.
  
• Pester - This is the readme of an incredibly easy to use PowerShell unit test framework.
  
• Sublime is Sublime Part 1 - I do like sublime, really. However, myth I be interested to use it instead of VisualStudio.... that's another story but in this series, the author explains how SublimeText could become your IDE for everything. Part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7

Miscellaneous

• OneNote and Microsoft's quiet API revolution (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains the impacts and meaning of the new OneNote features (API) release.

Reading Notes #131

Suggestion of the week

• Build End-to-End Apps with TypeScript (Gil Fink) - Amazing tutorial that gives the opportunity to learn a lot about recent language and tools. A mandatory reading for all web developers.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Websites online tools you should know about (Nir Mashkowski) - Nice quick and clear introduction to Kudu dashboard.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #8 – Take control of Management Certificate names (Bill Wilder) - Nice clarification about certificate and security management in Windows Azure.
  
• Remote Administration of Windows Azure Websites using IIS Manager (Nir Mashkowski) - Soooo convenient. This post explains how we can remotely connect to a Windows Azure website with IIS.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #7 – Use Windows Azure’s Local Storage Emulator with Web Sites & VMs (Bill Wilder) - Nice trick that explains how to use Azure emulator, because it's something we (or will) need.
  
• #WindowsAzure Lessons Learned : Don't be Afraid to Duplicate Data - Interesting re-design of a cloud solution.
  
• Announcing General Availability of Oracle Software on Windows Azure and Updates to Windows Azure Traffic Manager (Steven Martin) - Great new images and useful feature are now available.
  
• Tutorial: Finding Virtual Machine Images for Windows Azure in VM Depot (Ross Gardler) - That a very nice upgrade: an amazing search/sort engine.
  
• Is Your Application Built for the Cloud? - Interesting questioning about when to know if our application is built for the cloud, and nice list of pattern that are really well compatible with cloud solutions.

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: FluentAutomation for automated testing of Web Applications (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting tools to automate things like the ScriptCS.(Available via Chocolatey).
  
• Remove that dirty CSS! - Very useful tutorial that uses Node.js and Grunt.

Miscellaneous

• How to Clear Your Mind in 15 Minutes (Kevin Daum) - Sometimes to get more productive, we need to pause. Here are few tips on how-to achieve that.
  
• Why NOT measure progress using subjective percents - | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog - Interesting point of view about calculating project progress.
  
• Keepin' Track of Your Views - I found this post interesting because it explains how pageviews are counted.
  
• Logiciel libre : soyons clairs! (Laurent Bounin) - Very interesting point of view about open-source software (in French).
  
• Back to Basics: Assert your assumptions and diff your source code (Scott Hanselman) - Aah debugging... Never assume something. Thanks for sharing this story, I feel less alone now.

~Frank

Reading Notes #130

Suggestion of the week

• Distributed Automated Browser Testing with Selenium and BrowserStack (Scott Hanselman) - Testing the UI is never a walk in the park, and often the easiest solution is to use reall users. This post talk about two tools to automate these processes.

Cloud

• Azure: ExpressRoute Dedicated Networking, Web Site Backup Restore, Mobile Services .NET support, Hadoop 2.2, and more - Once again, a lot of new features available in windows azure are presented in this post. I'm looking forward to try this Expressroute and the web api support.
  
• Announcing Windows Azure ExpressRoute, new partnership with Level 3 and exciting updates to other Azure Services (StevenMartinMS) - This post gives more details about the new ExpressRoute of Azure presented last week.
  
• Windows Azure Mobile Services with .NET Backend (Shiju Varghese) - Great code sample that demonstrates how easy it is to do .Net web api for azure mobile services.
  
• WindowsAzure Lessons Learned : Be Stateful - Very interesting post that compares efficiency and cost of stateful application versus stateless.
  
• Code in the Cloud Using Visual Studio Online - It's magic! You can have Visual Studio without any installation...

Programming

• Using Claims in your Web App is Easier with the new OWIN Security Components (suhasbj, levibroderick, betty, on ap standa Daniel Roth) - Very useful informations about own and his ability to manage easily claims.
  
• Remove unused CSS in your Web Application - Nice tips to get better performance.

UX

• New UI and capabilities for Windows Phone App Studio Beta developers - Nice update for windows phone developer.

Reading Notes #129

Suggestion of the week

• Auto-Healing Windows Azure Web Sites (Mark Brown) - Amazing new feature, that will simplify our lives. A post to read.

Cloud

• Stupid Azure Trick #5 – Got a Penny? Run a Simple Web Site 100% on Blob Storage – Cost Analysis Provided (Bill Wilder) - I can easily imagine plenty of scenarios where this static (and mostly free) website could be really useful.
  
• This Day on WindowsAzure Will be Back Shortly - This post is announcing a really promising series about the re-editing of a cloud application.
  
• Best Practices: Windows Azure Websites (WAWS) (Mark_Brown) - Interesting post that explains how we should use the tools and services available to follow the best practices.
  
• Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Nice update on a post that is still very true today.
  
• Microsoft has Released a Set of Symbols/Icons to Visually Represent Windows Azure Solutions - Time to refresh our presentations, and schemas....
  
• WindowsAzure Lessons Learned – Continuous Services Require Continuous Attention - The best way to improve is to learn for our "problems" or perhaps those of others.

Programming

• Content Negotiation and Web API for the ASP.NET MVC Developer - Web API is a big step forward in a web architecture.
  
• Unit Testing 101: Creating Flexible Test Code - Interesting way to structure unit tests.
  
• EF 6.1: Creating indexes with IndexAttribute (Arthur Vickers) - Nice tutorial that introduces the index management in EF 6.1.
  
• How to Write Unit Tests to Check Your HTTP Headers (and Other HTTP Request Stuff) in C# - This post is a good tutorial that will help to write HTTP unit tests.
  
• Converting AutoMapper to a Portable Class Library (Jimmy Bogard) - Good post that explains the conversion of the automapper (a great tool, btw) to a Portable Class library(PCL).
  
• A cleaner way to use setTimeout and anonymous callbacks (Dave Ward) - Nice tricks, It's a lot clearer.
  
• How I Work Around The require(“../../../../../../../”) Problem In NodeJS - This post shows one possible solution to the unpleasant ...... problem.

Databases

• Gartner Report: Big Data will Revolutionize the Cybersecurity in Next Two Year (Saroj Kar) - Interesting point of view about the impact of bigdata in a near future.
  
• How to count the number of rows in a table in SQL Server - Interesting demonstration of the cost generated by a simple row count operation.
  
• Not unit testing your databases? You should be - Interesting post that explains how we could (should) test our databases. It also quickly introduces tSQLt framework.

Miscellaneous

• How do we know if mobile apps are secure? (Scott Hanselman) - Outch! I was hoping the stats would be better. We definitely need to pick our apps more carefully.

Reading Notes #128

Suggestion of the week

• What is Windows Azure? - This post gives the definition of Azure that is short enough to be said in one breath.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Remote Debugging (Anjana Mazumder) - Really useful tips when searching for that bug how's only happening in the cloud...
  
• How to Setup and Protect an Azure Application with a Barracuda Firewall (Ashwin Palekar) - Great tutorial the builds a real application that used network security.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #4 – C#, Node.js, and Python side-by-side – Three Simple Command Line Tools to Copy Files up to Windows Azure Blob Storage (Bill Wilder) - Nice and useful snippets.
  
• “The Cloud Never Goes Down”, Azure SLAs and other availability trivia - This post explains what we should expect from the cloud (from all providers) SLAs.

Programming

• If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014? (Scott Hanselman) - Learning a new language every year is a good practice, but we all run out of time. Here are some suggestions to get stared.
  
• Dependency Injection with Unity (Dominic Betts, Grigori Melnik, Fernando Simonazzi and Mani Subramanian) - Fantastic book that covers completely the Dependency Dnjection topics. It used Unity framework. A lot of code samples, detailed informations on different patterns and unit tests are also in this book.
  
• EF 6.1: Turning on logging without recompiling - I'm always impressed by all the little things in EF that could simplify our life as developer.
  
• Intercepting Asynchronous Methods Using Unity Interception - Great post that explains how to use IoC with Unity in an async situation.
  
• Understanding Entity Framework Code First Migrations (More..) - All steps are explained in this nice tutorial.
  
• Content Negotiation and Web API for the ASP.NET MVC Developer - Web API is a big step forward in a web architecture.

Miscellaneous

• Download Wrappers and Unwanted Software are pure evil (Scott Hanselman) - It is more and more difficult to install something without also installing unwanted stuff...

Reading Notes #127

Suggestion of the week

• Source Control considered harmful - Excellent post! Don't stop at the first paragraphs, everything will be clear as you read through.

Cloud

• Stupid Azure Trick #3 – Create a Dev Virtual Machine in Windows Azure (Bill Wilder) - Very simple and efficient.
  
• Can I use Multiple Monitors with Remote Desktop (RDP)? Yes. Here’s how. (Bill Wilder) - How could I have missed that?!
  
• Gartner's 2014 MQ for PaaS: Organizing the Chaos - This post is sharing interesting though about the new PaaS Gardner's Quatran.
  
• Deploying TWO websites to Windows Azure from one Git Repository - This post explains a ninja trick with Azure Website and Git.
  
• Where’s Azure? Mapping Windows Azure 4 years after full General Availability. (Bill Wilder) - Interesting quick post that maps Azure today.
  
• WordPress 3.8 on Windows Azure Websites (Mark_BrownMS) - It's time to upgrade our blog on Azure website.
  
• Le Global Windows Azure Bootcamp à Montréal (Samedi 29 mars, 2014) - Time to reserved your place!
  
• Amazon is Still the Leader When it Comes to Cloud Pricing (Saroj Kar) - Good news for cloud user, the prices are going down...
  
• Brownfield Windows Azure Solutions & Hidden Treasures - Nice example of how a simple website could be optimized / become scalable in multi iteration so it doesn't affect negatively the user experience.
  
• Amazon Launches New Reporting Tools For EC2 (Frederic Lardinois) - Great new tools that help seeing stats of all kinds about resources and billing.

Programming

• For your convenience, please disable security warnings - This post explains why we soudln't turn-off security warning. It looks obvious, but ...
  
• Here’s how Bell was hacked – SQL injection blow-by-blow - About sql injection.
  
• Pro NuGet second edition is out - A book to add in your bookshelf (virtual or not)
  
• 10 Reasons Web Developers Should Learn Angular - Whatever it is because you need munitions to get Angular to be adopted at your work or because you what to know more about it, this excellent post is for you.
  
• Web Essentials 2013: Where is the TypeScript support? (Google+) - Important explanation for TypeScript user.

Databases

• Hadoop 2.0 – A Big Step For Big Data (Saroj Kar) - Nice post that introduces MapReduce v2 (MRv2) one the best new feature of Hadoop last release.

Integration

• Streaming Xml Transformations (Christos Karras) - Great tutorial that explains very clearly what are our solutions when we are in front of a complex XML transformation.

Miscellaneous

• Internet of Things or Thing on the Internet? - Interesting thoughts about today's and tomorrow's Internet.
  
• Fixed: The Synology NAS with Plex Server and mismatched version numbers - Nice catch. If you don't know Plex here to read about it.
  
• The Heart of Innovation: How to Prepare for Brainstorming - Nice post to help us to improve our meetingproductivity.