Reading Notes #423

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. You think you may have an interesting post, share it!

My office is in the basement... so I didn't conplained.

Cloud

• Integration Testing Azure Functions with SpecFlow and C#, Part 5 –... (Jonathan George) - Excellent post that concludes a series on Specflow, an interesting tool to tests our code.

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 5 release now available (Daniel Ruth) - New preview coming our way. Nice.
• Creating and Packaging a .NET Standard library | Visual Studio Blog (Sayed) - A very cool tutorial that explains all the steps to get to sharing your NuGet package.
• How to resolve a git merge conflict ( Brian Breniser) - Nice tutorial Git merges are so frequent...
• Windows Terminal Preview v0.11 Release | Windows Command Line (Kayla) - Hmmmmm.That terminal! Awesome.

Podcasts

• Michelle Khare - Her YouTube Series "Challenge Accepted": Training with the FBI, Marines & NASA (That Creative Life) - A very inspiring episode. We can push our limits with a lot of works.

Miscellaneous

• This Is The #1 Ritual You Need To Do Every Day (Pandemic Edition) - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric Barker) - A very nice story, and very simple things we can all do to say, happy healthy humans.
• How to Remote Desktop (RDP) into a Windows 10 Azure AD joined machine (Scott Hanselman) - Nice little tips here to RDPing.
• Injecting Services Into ASP.NET Razor Views (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice and simple post that explains the injection in the newest .Net framework.
• Local Azure Storage Development with Azurite, Azure SDKs, and Azure Storage Explorer (Jon Gallant) - A really cool tool that virtualized completely storage into a local version.Very interesting.
• Quarantine work is not Remote work (Scott Hanselman) - It's not normal...

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Reading Notes #422

Cloud

• Azure Functions: Extend Execution Timeout Past 5 Minutes (Chris Pietschmann) - Very cool post that explains how to take advantages of this new feature.
• Create, Build, Deploy and Configure an Azure Function with Azure DevOps and Azure CLI (Damien Bowden) - The perfect tutorial to get started with Azure DevOps.It contains all the code we need and a ton of references
• Introducing the Azure Key Vault Credentials Provider for Jenkins (Tim Jacomb) - Great news for all the Jenkins users and nice extension for Keyvault.
• Making an Interactive Cognitive Portrait Exhibit using some Creativity, .NET, Azure Functions and Cognitive Services Magic (Dmitry Soshnikov) - Very cool project mixing art and techno.

Programming

• GitHub is now free for teams (Nat Friedman) - That was definitely a piece of good news this week.
• Bring your own machine to Visual Studio Online | Visual Studio Blog (Allison) - Fantastic news! Before it was possible to access a powerful developer environment from our poor local devices. Now we can also access our own powerful machine from elsewhere! That's very very nice!
• Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Jason Etcovitch ( Jason Etcovich) - An incredible post there is so many awesome tools and references in it.

Podcasts

• 195: The Hanselman Machine Learning Model (Merge Conflict) - Great episode where Frank and James discuss how James could build a sentiment analysis of Hanselman tweets, is it possible or not and what would be the cost (effort, and money).
• GitHub Actions with Enrico Campidoglio (.NET Rocks!) - I think it's my first .Net Show since the Pandemie. Well with was a create show that dig deeper in the GitHub Action. Loved it.
• 068: How to Build Your Personal Brand (CloudSkills.fm) - I really liked this episode as I did "created" my personal brand (without really realizing it ) a few years ago.
• 455: How to Create Great Relationships, with Colleen Bordeaux (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion with the author of the book: Am I Doing This Right?: A Philosophical Guide to Life in the Age of Overwhelm, that is now in my to read list/

Miscellaneous

• Backing up SQL Server databases to Blob Storage using Impersonation (Dominique St-Amand) - Nice post that not only shows us and to do backups, but how to do it in a very secured and structure way.Excellent!
• Free SSL vs. Paid SSL Certificates: Why Pay for SSL? (Chip Securis) - Before reading this post I assumed what could be the differences. NOW I know.
• How viewers can be actors in streams on Twitch (null) - Interesting post about streaming and how to leverage the channel points
• Microsoft Learning Blog (Alex Payne) - This is nice.

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How I Build a Budget-friendly URL Shortener Easy to Deploy and Customized

Available in French here

I don't know for you but I share links/ URLs very often. And a lot of time it's from videos, so it needs to be short and easy to remember. Something like https://c5m.ca/project is better than a random string (aka. GUID). And this is how I started a project to build a URL Shortener. I wanted to be budget-friendly, easy to deploy and customizable.

In this post, I will share how I build it, how you can use it, and how you can help!

How I build it, with the community

This tool was build during live streams coding sessions on Twitch (all videos are in available in my YouTube archive). It's composed of two parts: a Serverless backend leveraging the Azure Function & Azure Storage, and a frontend of your choice.

The backend is composed of a few Azure Functions that act as an on-demand HTTP API. They only consume when they are called. They are in .Net Core, C# to be specific. When publishing this post, there are four functions:

• UrlShortener: To create a short URL.
• UrlRedirect: That's the one called when a short link is used. An Azure Function Proxy is forwarding all call to the root.
• UrlClickStats: Return the statistic for a specific URL.
• UrlList: Return the list of all URLs created.

All the information like long url, short url, click count are save in an Azure Storage Table.
And that's it. Super light, very cost-efficient. IF you are curious about the price I'll but references in the footnotes

The frontend could be anything that can make HTTP requests. Right now in the project, I explain how to use a tool call Postman, there is also a very simple interface done that you can easily deploy.

This simple interface is of course protected and gives you the options to see all URLs and create new ones.

How YOU can use it

All the code is available into GitHub, and it's deployable with a one-click button!



This will deploy the backend in your Azure subscription in a few minutes. If you don't own an Azure subscription already, you can create your free Azure account today.

Then you will probably want an interface to create your precious URLs. Once more in the GitHub repository, there is a List of available Admin interfaces and ready to be used. The Admin Blazor Website is currently the most friendly and can also be deployed in one-click.

How You can help and participate

Right now, there is really only one interface (and some instructions on how to use Postman to do the HTTP calls). But AzUrlShortener is an open-source project, meaning you can participate. Here some suggestions:

• Build a new interface (in the language of your choice)
• Improve current interface(s) with
  
  • logos
  • designs
  • Better UI 🙂
• Register bugs in GitHub
• Make feature request
• Help with documentation/ translation

What's Next

Definitely come see the GitHub repo https://github.com/FBoucher/AzUrlShortener, click those deploy buttons. On my side, I will continue to add more features and make it better. See you there!

Video version

References

• Azure Function Pricing
• Azure Table Storage pricing
• YouTube Playlist with all the videos building AzUrlShortener

Reading Notes #421

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. Enjoy!

Programming

• Running ASP.NET Core Apps on a Synology NAS with Docker (Jason Roberts) - Cool project to leverage your NAS to his max potential.

• Git Visualized: Forked a Repo, Now The Original Has More Commits (Saqib Ameen) - A nice little gem... Commun scenario that we all at one point struggle with.

• Add Discord Notifications to ASP.NET Core Apps (Steve Smith) - Really nice post that shows us how to use GitHub actions and Csharp to push info into Discord. I need to try something like that someday....

• How I Got My Website to Load in 1 Second (Jeremy Morgan) - An interesting story about a migration and some optimization choices.

• Top 3 Blazor Extensions for Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - Nice extensions that definitely deserve our attention.

• Try gh, GitHub's new CLI (John Papa) - Oh, that's really nice I like that. I find it funny that t should like you just got a hit in the chest. However, it looks powerful enough to cut your breath... so it probably deserves it.

• Use SimpleSQL from Github pages (Simone Mosciatti) - That's kind of really cool. It gives me a few ideas...

• Using Entity Framework in a Blazor Server Application (David Grace) - This post shares two nice solutions for a recurring error with EF Core.

Podcasts

• Internet Legend Hank Green! Founder of VidCon, Vlogbrothers and His Production (That Creative Life) - Strangely I didn't know much about this guest... What a pleasant discovery!

• How to Succeed In Building Developer Tooling with Peter Pezaris (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Don't blink, don't even blink. Not sure if it really apply when you listen to podcast, but this episode was so packed of great content. I really like the open discussion. An awesome show.

• 0241 - Etienne Tremblay - GitHub Actions (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Great episode that compare, discuss, and speculate with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. It's in French. I miss you guys it's been too long... Great show.

Miscellaneous

• Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19603 (Brandon LeBlanc) - Nice.... Are you on a developer's ring?

• How I Manage and Plan Tasks as a Remote Worker (Thomas Maurer) - It's very interesting to see how others are doing, and the kind of tools they are using..Even better when it's your colleague.

• Using Certificates from Azure Key Vault in ASP.NET Core (Damien Bowden) - An interesting post that leverages keyvault with Identity server.

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Reading Notes #420

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.

It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. This week I was less in a reading mode...

Programming

• Using WSL to Build a Python Development Environment on Windows (Chris Moffitt) - Definitely a post to ready, so much information! Did you know you can install serverX in WSL? I didn't

Miscellaneous

• The top 10 reasons to switch to the new Microsoft Edge (Liat Ben-Zur) - I didn't need 10 reasons to start using edge, but its great to see al those features and those coming soon too.
• If you want your OSS project to be successful… (Jeremy dmiller) - Interesting post, good idea, and comments.

Reading Notes #419

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. Enjoy!

Suggestion of the week

• Approval Workflows With GitHub Actions (Aaron Powell) - Wow! That's a very clever and impressive way to have step flow in GitHub. All the details are in the post if you would like to create your own.

Cloud

• How to use Azure App Service managed certificates (Michael Crump) - It's that simple. A few clicks and you will; have https.

Programming

• Using GitHub Actions to deploy a .Net Web App (Gregor Suttie) - A nice tutorial to learn how to deploy a Hugo website.
• Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 3 release now available (Daniel Ruth) - OMG! Super excited about all those new features as they will all help me in a current project I'm working on...
• Creating an event-driven architecture out of existing, non-event-driven systems (Richard Seroter) - An interesting post that explains the different options to go event-driven.
• GitHub with Azure DevOps | Premier Developer (GitHub with Azure DevOps) - Very interesting post that explains al the benefits of using this mixt, and why an enterprise would be interested to do that.

Podcasts

• The Joy of making with LEGO Master and Cosplaying Engineer Amie DD (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - A delicious episode and BTW I watch Lego master because of that.
• #31: Julie Lerman - Software Coach, Writer & Speaker (The Solo Coder Podcast) - I was really looking forward to listen to this interview. Julie is an extraordinary person and an amazing communicator.
• 193: UI Is Messy (Merge Conflict) - I, once more, had a nice moment listening to that discussion/ argumentation about different patterns pros and cons.

Miscellaneous

• Bond At A Distance With The Remote Team Cooking Challenge (Alexia) - We are so creative when we want. Super.

Reading Notes #418

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. Enjoy!

Cloud

• How to live-stream meetups on Twitch without any special equipment (Alex Casalboni) - Really cool experimentation and ideas using AWS cloud.

• Run Azure PowerShell in a Docker Container (Thomas Maurer) - Really useful tips to use different versions of PowerShell without having to install them.

Programming

• How to migrate an ASP.NET MVC app from .NET Core 2.2 to .NET Core 3.1 (Claudio Bernasconi) - This is a good step by step tutorial for a migration.

• EF Core 5.0: Using ToQueryString() method to translate LINQ query to SQL (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice little and cool feature coming up in the next version.

• How to create better code using Domain-Driven Design - Software House Altkom Software & Consulting (null) - A really interesting and complete article that explains it all.

• Introducing the New Pull Request Experience for Azure Repos | Azure DevOps Blog (Apeksha Awasthi) - Wonderful PR used to be a GitHub only feature... Really happy to see that it is now also present on Azure DevOps Repos.

• WSL2 will be generally available in Windows 10, version 2004 | Windows Command Line (Craig Loewen) - WSL2 is the next best thing I install on my PC since Win10 and used with the new Docker for Windows... It's fantastic

Shameless plug

• How to know how much your application is consuming on Azure (Frank Boucher) - Great post and video in both French and English that explains how to plan, visualize and monitor the cost of your applications in the cloud. And there is also a great MS Learn Azure Cost Management module.

Podcasts

• Des fonctions courtes, qui font une chose (Les Semi-Colons) - First time for me listening to this podcast, third time for them. A very interesting podcast in "Canadian French". They are passing through the book Clean Code of Robert C. Martin. This episode was about chapter 3.

• vygl - Le balado Ep.17 (vygl) - Great podcast in French. It was my first try and I really liked it. We can ear the experience of the speaker in their voice but also by the quality of this audio.

• Episode 14: What developers should know about security with Troy Hunt (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Okay, I know I've been a big fan of Troy for years, but this podcast is an incredibly interesting interview.

Miscellaneous

• An Update on the MSDN and TechNet Migration to docs.microsoft.com (Jeff Sandquist) - It was looking mostly like an impossible mission, but with a lot of work, it is really incredible the things that can be achieved. This post shares the status of the migration of each section.

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How to know how much your application is consuming on Azure

Are you worried when deploying a new application about our billing? Or afraid that you will receive an invoice from your cloud provider at the and of the month that put you in a bad situation? You are not alone, and this is why you should definitely look at the Azure Cost Manager.

In the video below, I explain how to use the Azure Cost Manager to see the actual cost and forecast for a specific application in the cloud and build a dashboard with your favorites information. Note that I said "cloud" because Azure Cost Manager can monitor both Azure and AWS resources. That's perfect for when we are "in" the portal, and that's why I will also show how you can make budgets, and set alerts, so you can track your resources automatically.

Useful Links

• Learn Cost Management
• Cost Management Labs
• Azure Cost Management
• Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Tools
• Get Started with Azure with a Free Subscription

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Reading Notes #417

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting.
It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.
Enjoy!

Cloud

• Making a cleaner and more intentional azure-pipelines.yml for an ASP.NET Core Web App - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - This post provides explanations about the steps of an Azure Pipeline file. If you are new to azure DevOps it helps a lot with the comprehension.

• Azure Free Account? Is it really free? ( Michael Crump) - Ooh yeah! I still remember that moment where I created my first service.... Get started free is free.

• Build apps for free with Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Deborah) - A free NoSQL database with the specs of Cosmo...thatts really cool. This post gives you an idea of what it means and a few ideas of what you could do with it.

• Cloud migration: 5 common traps and how to avoid them (Rael Winters) - A great post that can really help you to avoid losing time and money...Once you know the traps, it's easier.

• Tip 254 - Use WAF to protect your web applications with Azure Front Door (Michael Crump) - Nice and easy tip to live more secure in the cloud.

• Tips for keeping your Azure Subscriptions Clean (Michael Crump) - Great post that explains how to keep your money in your pocket.

Programming

• Postman: The Easy Way to Work with APIs - Postman Blog (The Postman Team) - A wonderful tool, a most if you work with API.

• Upgrade Your .NET Console App Experience (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice list of cool libraries to help to add color, table, and menus to our apps.

Podcast

• Making a Living on Instagram with J.N. Silva and Dave Krugman (That Creative Life) - Nice episode... Honestly, they got me with their history when they start doing photography.

• 192: Getting Started with Live Streaming (Merge Conflict) - Nice episode about what you need, or in fact what you don't need to start streaming.

Miscellaneous

• Recovering from Burnout and Depression (null) - An important topic. This post was recommended during a talk about remote working. Very interesting.

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