Reading Notes #196

Suggestion of the week

• Push-to-succeed: a look into Azure Notification Hubs for business (Alexander Laysha) - Interesting post that explains how Azure and his Notification Hubs could be really useful in marketing.
  
• Getting Started with Windows 10 - This week it's the Windows 10 week. And this post regroups many useful tutorial to get started.

Cloud

• July update for Web apps and App Service environments in the Azure preview portal (Ron Tardif) - This post is a great summary of the new July features.

Programming

• One of My Favorite PowerShell Functions - Nice and useful little piece of code.
  
• Describe Your PowerShell Variables - Nice quick tips to help us remember what we thought when we created those variables.
  
• Installing EF Power Tools into VS2015 (Julie) - Interesting tutorial that shows how to "upgrade" an extension to use it in VS...
  
• Five Common Daylight Saving Time Antipatterns of .NET Developers - Ah the "time"... The more you play with it, the more confuse you can be. Interesting post to avoid common mistakes.

Miscellaneous

• The Secret (and Oh So Simple) Way to Get People to Pay Attention to You (Betty Liu) - Interesting post about business relationship.
  
• How to stay productive while working from home (Xavier Nayrac) - Being myself a remote worker a found this post very close to the reality and inspiring.

~Frank

Reading Notes #195

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing the Azure SDK 2.7 for .NET (Brady Gaster) - Sooooo many new features, options, and tools in only one release!! This post reviews a lot of them.

Cloud

• Announcing Cortana Analytics Suite and New Partner Investments at WPC 2015 (Takeshi Numoto) - I'm looking forward to trying it out.
  
• How exactly does Event Hubs Throttling Work? (Dan Rosanova) - Thi post shares useful information about a frequent question.
  
• Three big areas of focus for Microsoft’s Canadian channel (Paolo Del Nibletto) - Interesting news about Microsoft's focus.
  
• Importing Data to DocumentDB Just Keeps Getting Better (Stephen Baron) - If you never ear about DocumentDB Migration Tool, this post is for you. It explains how you ca import documents, even from another NoSql database like DynamoDB.
  
• Why I got the MCSD Azure Solutions Architect Certification (Chris Pietschmann) - Really great work, thanks for sharing.
  
• Azure Logic Apps – monthly update July 2015 (Saravana Kumar) - The Azure Logic Apps team did their monthly release this week, this post tells all about the new features.
  
• Azure SQL Database Web and Business edition retirement September 12th, 2015 (Guy Haycock) - Time to upgrade, September is coming pretty fast.
  
• Can’t recover VMs in Azure with volumes greater than 1TB? Use Storage Spaces! (Anoob Backer) - Great tutorial to get super performance.

Database

• Available now – Cross-region Replication, Triggers, and Streams - Nice new feature.
  
• Azure SQL Database with direct connect – Microsoft Power BI Preview - Nice tutorial to explore our Azure database.

Programming

• Performance and Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 (Dan Taylor) - This post is the perfect point to get started about all the great diagnostics tools available in VS2015 for everyone...because it's included in all versions.
  
• The Glimpse Team Joins Microsoft (Visual Studio Blog) - Great new, I really like Glimpse.

~ Frank

Reading Notes #194

Suggestion of the week

• How to use Azure Search with D3.js to Build Interactive Data Visualizations (Liam Cavanagh) - An awesome idea to display the result of Azure Search, and it look really cool.

Cloud

• My First Azure DocumentDB Account (Eitan Blumin) - Nice tutorial that explains how to create a documentDB from scratch.
  
• Azure Preview Portal Improvements (June Update) (Leon Welicki) - Wow! See how little things can have a great impact on the user experience.
  
• Hey Azure, how's my Web App doing? - Great post about web apps metrics.
  
• New DocumentDB ORDER BY Features in the Azure Preview Portal (Stephen Baron) - Nice new feature.
  
• Cloud Cruiser and Microsoft Azure Billing API Integration - Interesting post that shows how we can use the new Azure billing API as data to there services.
  
• Gain insights into your Microsoft Azure resource consumption (BryanLa) - Interesting post to know more about our consumption.
  
• Azure Redis Cache Updates for June 2015 (Pranav Rastogi) - Nice quick post about the new Redis Cache features.
  
• Move VMware, AWS, Hyper-V and Physical Servers to Azure (Abhishek A. Hemrajani) - An amazing tool, and a great opportunity to try it for free!

Customers can replicate on-premises workloads to Azure with Azure Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge

• Integrate your on-premises infrastructure with Azure (Jim Dial) - A great tool to visualize the infrastructure to help in a hybrid situation.
  
• Announcing Cortana Analytics Suite and New Partner Investments at WPC 2015 (Takeshi Numoto) - I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Programming

• Microservices Guide - This is the perfect post to get started with micro services. a nice overview what it is, and when to use it.
  
• Are You Making These 10 DDD Mistakes? (Daniel) - Nice infographic about the most frequent mistakes.
  
• Transitioning from ASP.NET Web API 2 to ASP.NET MVC 6 - Great post that will walk you through all the things to watch before doing a transition to Asp.net 5 and Mvc6.
  
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the ASP.NET Web API and AngularJS (Dhananjay Kumar) - Nice tutorial that presents a complete but simple scenario easy to follow.
  
• Node.js: Understanding NPM - This is the perfect post to get started on the Node NPM. A tool that every developer should know.

Documentation

• Role-based access control in the Microsoft Azure portal (Justin Hall) - Very complete doc.

Miscellaneous

• Cortana for Android Leaks Early, Available for Download (Kellex) - Nice, we can try Coryana today!
  
• Microsoft’s Global Partner Conference in Toronto July 2016 - Not far from home, this is really good.

~ Frank

Reading Notes 193

Suggestion of the week

• Inside Azure Search: Chaos Engineering (Heather Nakama) - Great article about this really amazing way to test: chaos monkeys

Cloud

• Container Apps now available in the Azure Marketplace (Vybava Ramadoss) - Good news, marketplace just got a new "alley"...
  
• General availability: Azure Virtual Machine services in Azure Resource Manager - Great, ARM continue to grow.
  
• AzureSearchTool - the easiest option to query Azure Search! (Max Melcher) - This post introduces a very promissing tool, that is now available but in an early phase.
  
• Announcing the 1.0.0 release of Application Insights Windows SDKs (Joshua Weber) - Great new about this SDK, reaching an important milestone.
  
• My First Azure DocumentDB Account (Eitan Blumin) - Nice tutorial that explains how to create a new documentDB from scratch.

Programming

• Announcing Atom 1.0 - Woohoo. Version 1 finally makes it. Really happy.

Miscellaneous

• Windows 10 is coming...here's what to tell non-technical parent (Scott Hanselman) - Once again, really good video for non-technical people. This one explains how to get ready, and get your free upgrade.

Image from  Inside Azure Search: Chaos Engineering

Reading Notes #191

Suggestion of the week

• Free recorded webinar on Pluralsight: Why SQL Injection Remains the #1 Web Security Risk Today - Security is so important. This video helps us to remember and shows us some simple attacks.

Cloud

• Azure DSC Extension v2.0 released (PowerShell Team) - Details about the new version and how to upgrade.
  
• Calling Logic Apps from an HTTP Action (Jeff Hollan) - Very interesting post that shows a powerful and flexible scenario with the Azure Logic Apps.
  
• New Azure Billing APIs Available - Wow very useful API, looking forward to try it.

Programming

• How to use Process Monitor and Process Explorer - Great video that explains a lot. We often learn more than what we expect in a debugging session.
  
• Why TDD for PowerShell? Or why pester? Or why unit test a "scripting" language? - Very interesting thoughts... I wonder what is the opinion of my heavy script coder friends...
  
• Docker and Microsoft announce more innovation to cross platforms and win hearts (Corey Sanders) - This post resumes some key things that happen at DockerCon. Really interesting.
  
• Visual Studio Code and Docker (Chris Dias [MSFT], Mark Rendle, DvdBrink Sean McBreen [MSFT]) - Nice post, I am happy to see that great plugin are coming.

Miscellaneous

• Stop Worrying About How Much You Matter - Interesting thoughts in a world of instant gratification...

Image by FutUndBeidl / Flickr

The Journey of an Azure SDK upgrade

Recently, with my team, we needed to upgrade a web solution to Azure SDK from 2.4 to 2.5.1. The upgrade was much longer and complex then expected, so I decide to share what we learn so maybe other could benefit from our experience.

The problem

The upgrade of the code and library was not really a problem. The documentation is available on MSDN and it's easy to follow. Few breaking changes were part of the version 2.5. One is the reason of this post: Diagnostics configuration must be applied separately after deployment[...]

Continue reading full article here

~Frank

Reading Notes #190

Suggestion of the week

• Cloud Success Comes in Completing the Cloud Handshake (James Staten) - Great post that places different tools or services in context one to the other, that helps to get a better view of the big picture.

Cloud

• Testing Visual Studio on Azure (Alexandre Brisebois) - If you need to deploy a dev environment, this post explains how to leverage the AMR to do the quick and smart way.
  
• Locking a Virtual Machine Resource - Azure Resource Manager Template (Alexandre Brisebois) - A post to read, period.
  
• Azure Bits #3– Adding a Message to an Azure Queue (Rik Robinson) - Nice tutorial that shows how to interact with Azure Queues from an Asp.Net MVC web site.

Programming

• Visual Studio Online Wunderlist extension on GitHub (Clemens Reijnen) - Interesting idea of a VSO extension.
  
• Deploying an Azure Web Site using the new build system in Visual Studio Online (Charles Sterling) - This post shows ow easy it is to build & deploy a simple website using VSO.
  
• Visual Studio Web Development Tip - Add Chrome Incognito Mode as a Browser (Scott Hanselman) - The great tips are often the simpler! That should be in by default.
  
• Why to avoid fat controllers (Gunnar Peipman) - Interesting thoughts about different types of architecture and their testability.
  
• Historical Debugging, Profiling, New Diagnostic Tools in Visual Studio 2015 (Scott Hanselman) - Another good reason to start using VS2015.

Miscellaneous

• Write Once, Publish Anywhere (Jonathan Rozenblit) - An energizing post that shows here to find writting oportunities
  
• How to Build Your Blog’s Audience with Long Form Evergreen Content (Darren Rowse) - Interesting reflection on how the length of our post affects the traffic of our blog.

~Frank

Reading Notes #189

Suggestion of the week

• Search enable your applications with Azure Search (Andrei Dzimchuk) - Very interesting introduction, the perfect post to get started with Azure Search.

Cloud

• Moving to Azure DNS (Alexandre Brisebois) - Another awesome post that shows the power of Azure Resource manager and powershell.
  
• Azure : Event Hub A First Look (Sacha Barber) - This post a good introduction to Event Hub. It adds context to the MSDN documentation.
  
• Demystifying Azure Cloud Services – Part 1 (Adarsha Datta) - This post explains very clearly what is an Azure Cloud Services and demystify the common confusion about it.
  
• Auto-update your Azure Site Extension (Zain Rizvi) - Nice tips to simplify the upgrade.

Programming

• How to Compare files in Visual Studio Code ? - Nice tips.
  
• Evolving ASP.NET Apps–Javascript (Simon Timms) - Interesting post that explains how to structure our Javascript code in our solutions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #188

I was really happy to ear about Microsoft Azure Data Center that will be built in Canada. And it was definitely not only good thing that was published this week...

Suggestion of the week

• Create Multi-Geo Environments using Azure Resource Manager (Alexandre Brisebois) - Very interesting experience with ARM. The result is explosive.
  
• Press Release - Fantastic news!

Cloud

• MCSD: Azure Solutions Architect - Announced at Build, here is the detail about the new Azure certification.
  
• New Azure Infrastructure Services Implementation Guidelines (Joe Davies) - Great new! A free guideline for the IaaS.
  
• Import Sample Data to Azure DocumentDB (Stephen Baron) - Document playground is not the only tools available to get started. This post introduces the Data Migration tool.
  
• Spotlight Resources - This post lists some of the useful tools that can help you when working with Azure.
  
• Use the Azure Resource Manager Copy Operation to Deploy Duplicates - Always exploring the possibility with ARM, Alexandre Brisebois show us how to be very productive when deploying.
  
• Azure data services part 1 HDInsight (Alice Waddicor) - Nice introduction post about HDInsight.
  
• Microsoft to open data centres in Toronto and Quebec City (David Shum) - Watch this great announcement about the new Azure data center...in Canada!
  
• BREAKPOINT: Know Your App Inside and Out with Application Insights (Lachezar Arabadzhiev) - Great show about a great tool.
  
• Application Insights Pricing Effective June 1 (Dale Koetke) - Nice post that explains the cost and features.
  
• Announcing Custom Origin Support for Azure CDN (Manling Zhang) - Nice announce of a more convenient solution, more flexible.
  
• Microsoft to open data centres in Toronto and Quebec City (David Shum) - Watch the recorded video of the TV announcement.

Programming

• Was This Trip Really Necessary? (Rod Vagg) - Interesting thoughts about the Node's journey.

Database

• New Titan DB offering from ClearDB (ron Tardif) - Aah! I know a lot of WordPress users that will be very happy with this news.

Miscellaneous

• And the Release Date for Windows 10 Is... (Paul Thurrott) - The official date is finally out!
  
• Totally stressed out? Sync to Paper (Scott Hanselman) - ... And I thought I was different. ;)
  
• Visual Studio Time Saver – Presenting code in PowerPoint (David McCarter) - If you do technical presentation, this tool is a must!
  
• What's the deal with Windows 10 for the Non-Technical Friend (Scott Hanselman) - Because we are the head of IT support for our friends and family...
  
• Speaker style bingo: 10 presentation anti-patterns - This post provides a list of nice tips to be a better and more organize presenter.