Reading Notes #399

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2019 Q4 (Gloridel Morales) - Since the multi-stage pipeline launch in May, the team as been listening to his community. In this post learn more about what they have been working on and what is their roadmap.

Programming

• Azure DevOps - Docker Release Pipeline (Jeffrey Chilberto ) - A nice and simple tutorial that shows the best practices. Fantastic!

• Code Comments (Donn Felker) - Very smart idea! I'm staring using that rule right away.
• Microservices Fundamentals (Mark Heath) - New course on Pluralsight about an indeed challenging topic. This post shares the plan of that Microservices course.
• Stop Waiting! Start using Async and Await! (Simon Hawe) - Learn the power of async in this excellent post. The example may be in Python the idea is the same however language we are using.

Miscellaneous

• How to Authorize Users in Blazor Declaratively -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - Great article that explains how authentication could by manage with Blazor.
• What’s in my bag for Microsoft Ignite 2019 (Thomas Maurer) - As I'm packing my own bag, going to Ignite for the first time it's interesting to see what others bring... (Note to myself next time don't leave at home your network cable adapter)

Books

Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, And Build a Successful Business

Author: Pat Flynn

I really like this book, and planning to read it again soon. I like the way things are simply explained. Like if you deconstructed a situation and then re-building it. It felt authentic and true. It's nothing transcending, but the way it is explained is great.




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Let's the adventure beginning!

It's coming!  I'm not talking about winter here but I'm about Microsoft Ignite. One of the biggest Microsoft events for the DevOps and Dev amount us. This 4 days long event is a fantastic opportunity to get up to date with your favorite technology, learn the best practices, get certified and meet tons of experts to talk about your projects!

This year it's very special for me because I have the great pleasure to be part of the adventure, I will be presenting two sessions that are part of the Learning Paths.

A Learning Path is a series of connected learning modules that include sessions, hands-on experiences, technical workshops, certifications, and expert connections. Learning Path’s work together to build upon what you’ve learned to provide a comprehensive set of skills to help you reach your goals.

Figuring out Azure Functions (AFUN95)
Tailwind Traders is curious about the concept behind “serverless” computing – the idea that they can run small pieces of code in the cloud, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. In this session, we cover the world of Azure Functions, starting with an explanation of the servers behind serverless, exploring the languages and integrations available, and ending with a demo of when to use Logic Apps and Microsoft Flow.

Options for building and running your app in the cloud (APPS10)
See how Tailwind Traders avoided a single point of failure using cloud services to deploy their company website to multiple regions. We cover all the options they considered, explain how and why they made their decisions, then dive into the components of their implementation. In this session, see how they used Microsoft technologies like Visual Studio Code, Azure Portal, and Azure CLI to build a secure application that runs and scales on Linux and Windows VMs and Azure Web Apps with a companion phone app.

But wait, there is more...

For the second time, after the Microsoft Ignite "the event", will starts another event a tour! This year, it is thirty (30) cities that Microsoft Ignite The Tour will visits! All continents, except for Antarctica (why?! 😉), will be visited. Check the complete list of the cities on the website and mark the dates on your calendar!

I will also be presenting many different sessions during this tour. While I'm not doing all of them, I'll be present on many occasions.

Looking forward to meeting you

So if you are planning to go to one of those events, and would like to meet to talk about your project, show some bugs, ask questions, or just to chat! Reach-out, It's ALWAYS a pleasure, and I'll bring some stickers and some special swag¹ with me...

Drop me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.


1: Follow me on Twitter to know more about this ;)

Reading Notes #398

Cloud

• Developing your first Azure Durable Function (Saturnino Pimentel) - An excellent tutorial that explains the durable function. Very well done.

Programming

• Setting expectations for open source participation (Brett Cannon) - Excellent post (also available in video) about open source, where based on his experience the author share with us great advice. Thanks, Aaron for that reading suggestion.

Miscellaneous

• Be a Technology Tourist (Scott Hanselman) - A very nice and inspirational post.

• Interactive tabletop RPG table — The MagPi magazine (Rob Zwetsloot. ) - Simple yet sooooo cool! I always wanted to play does games.

Books

10-Minute Focus: 25 Habits for Mastering Your Concentration and Eliminating Distractions 

(Daniel Walter)

Nothing new here but it's clear and very well explained. Honestly it good to revisit those productivity/ focus habits... It helps to stay on our toes...

Reading Notes #397

Suggestion of the week

• Visual Studio for Nintendo Switch? - FUZE4 Nintendo Switch is an amazing coding app (Scott Hanselman) - Whaaat?! If someone in your entourage or a citizen of your life ( like Scott says) owns a Nintendo switch...you MUST read this post.

Cloud

• SSL certificates management using Lets Encrypt, Azure Automation and Web Apps (Dominique St-Amand ) - Security, of course. Automatically ... I'm in! This post explains how to automate your renewing process.
• Serverless Deployment Best Practices (Fernando Medina Corey) - A nice post that shows some of the best practices for serverless and how AWS implements them.

Programming

• How partners like GitKraken use GitHub Actions (Marc Campbell) - So cool to see what people are doing with the GitHub Actions.
• How to make ASP.NET Core compile modified views (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice update of Asp.net core... Following the best practices
• How to make a pretty prompt in Windows Terminal with Powerline, Nerd Fonts, Cascadia Code, WSL, and oh-my-posh (Scott Hanselman) - It's great to have a step by step on how to install it. Even if the documentation is well done on Github, it could be confusing to set everything up altogether.
• Why jQuery is Obsolete and Time to Stop Using It (Chris Love) - Great post. I was a big user of jQuery, and these days I do less front end stuff, so it is nice to see how things have evolved and to understand the impact jQuery had.
• Getting Started with Git (Sarah Lean) - Great post that explains the basic functionalities of Git.

Miscellaneous

• Video Interview: Between Two Nerds ( Steve Carroll & Scott Hanselman) - Really cool and interesting video interview.

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Reading Notes #396

Suggestion of the week

• The one who created languages (Anne-Laure Civeyrac) - Fantastic article and video. It's a must.

• What's the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell? (Scott Hanselman) - Fantastic post short and clear. It's so simple, yet could still be confusing at the same time. Well, until you read this post.

Programming

• Now is the time to make a fresh new Windows Terminal profiles.json (Scott Hanselman) - I have never been so excited about a terminal. But this one wants to do things right, option and flexibility without being too complex to use and setup.

• Blazor Server in .NET Core 3.0 scenarios and performance (Daniel Ruth) - Great post that explains which version of Blazor could be used in different scenarios and when it better to use something else.

• ASP.NET Core and Blazor updates in .NET Core 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (Daniel Ruth) - Wonderful! The release candidate is already available.

• How to build with Cake on Linux using Cake.CoreCLR or the Cake global tool (Andrew Lock) - Great post playing with .Net Core on the Linux side...does v3.0 will have an impact...

• Run an External Executable in ASP.NET Core (Changhui Xu) - An interesting post, very clear.

• Visual Studio Remotes: Simplifying developer environments (Martin Moxon) - If you didn't try yet the remote feature of VSCode, read this post and give it a try. It's a game-changing feature.

Miscellaneous

• Runtime binding with Azure Functions (Craig Shoemaker) - Great post that goes over the Azure Function binding.

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Reading Notes #395

Cloud

• Announcing Azure Storage Explorer 1.10.0 | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Catherine Wang) - That new managed disk capability is a really requested feature and embeded azcopy is awesome.

• Building a serverless blog site on Azure (Erik Lieben) - A very cool post that explains how to build a static website generator using serverless. Weel done!

Programming

• GitHub Pull Request Integration with Glo Boards (Jonathan Silva) - Really nice integration and automation with Github PR...Already using and loving it.

• New workflow editor for GitHub Actions (Chris Patterson) - Have you tested the new GitHub action? If yes you will be pleased with this new editor...Ending the research of that missing space somewhere.

• Single Page Applications and ASP.NET Core 3.0 (Shawn Wildermuth) - A very interesting post that explains all the little configurations or twists required to have a great SPA experience with .Net Core.

Miscellaneous

• What You Need for Effective Remote Work (William Gant) - This is a full chapter of an up coming book about remote workers... If you are new to this adventure and even more if you are fulltime remote, this read is a must.

Books

Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives 

Author: Gretchen Rubin 

I really enjoyed this book. I found very interesting the categorization of all those habits and comportment grouping. I like also the habits association to help to break some or creating new ones. It's obvious, but I didn't think about it before.

Cleaning your mess in the cloud automatically

We all do it. We create resources in the cloud for a demo, or a presentation and forget about them. Then at the end of the month, we receive a bigger invoice then expected and it's the panic.

This is why I thought about AzSubscriptionCleaner. It's an open-source project that could be deployed in your subscription very easily. The goal is to have it deployed by one click directly from GitHub.

The tool can be deployed in two versions, using Azure Automation, or Azure Functions. Based on a schedule it will execute a query to search all resources with a tag expireOn with the value is older than now(), and delete them.

I wrote two blog posts, paired with a YouTube video that explain how to tools where built.

Azure Automation

Read the complete post on Dev.to: Keep your Azure Subscription Clean Automatically

Video:

Azure Functions

Read the complete post on Dev.to: Use Azure Function to Clean-up your Mess, Automatically

Video:

GitHub Repo

This is an open-source project github.com/FBoucher/AzSubcriptionCleaner, you are welcome to see the code, clone the repository, ask for more feature or do a pull request to add a new one!

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Reading Notes #394

Suggestion of the week

• How the .NET Team uses Azure Pipelines to produce Docker Images (Matt Thalman) - Woaaah! I knew there were many docker images, but I didn't think it was that much. It's Incredibly interesting to read everything that is in place to do all those images...automatically.

Cloud

• Announcing the Azure Repos app for Slack (Karthik RG) - Nice features.

Programming

• ASP.NET Core and Blazor updates in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 9 (Daniel Ruth) - Already Preview 9 with a ton of upgrades. This team is sick! Seriously, awesome work.

• Containerising a Blazor WebAssembly App (Chris Sainty) - Once more Docker is displayed as a very useful development tool.

• Git Graph Visualizes Branches in VS Code for Free (Steve Smith) - There so many great extension for VSCode, the community is amazing.

• Moving from jQuery to Vue (Shawn Wildermuth) - An interesting post that explains Vue and gives references from a jQuery user...like me.

Reading Notes #393

Suggestion of the week

• GitHub stars won’t pay your rent (Kitze) - What a great story! This is an awesome journey of a developers who worked hard, took some risk and... Got result. All developer should read this.

Cloud

• 5 Minute Serverless Functions in Azure without an IDE (Heather Downing) - This post and videos are a fantastic way to get started with Azure Function the good way... With security.
• A quick introduction to Azure function proxies (Nadeem Ahamed) - A nice quick intro... That remind's me I should definitely use proxies in one of my project!
• Using KeyVault References to Read Key Vault Secrets (Scott Allen) - Excellent News!

Programming

• Blazor – on the server or on the client (Christian Nagel) - A great post about blazor that explains very well the current status of this very promising tool.
• What Are gRPC Web Services and When Should I Use Them? -- Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - A very good post that clarifies things. I'm looking forward to see the example with .Net Core.

Miscellaneous

• Role Based Security in an ASP.NET Core Application (Mahesh Sabnis) - A great tutorial that gets you started with identity and asp.net core.