Reading Notes #502

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

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

Cloud

• Azure Functions V4 Versus V3 (Mengyang Chen) - Important and interesting short post for all Azure Functions users.

• How to Empty an Azure Resource Group without deleting it? #shorts (Frank Boucher) - Quick Tip in a short video done by myself.

Programming

• 13 Visual Studio 2022 Tips & Tricks (Claudio Bernasconi) - Wow! So many goods ones! How many did you learn in this post?

• Five Reasons To Master Git On The Command Line (zwischenzugs) - I said it in the past and will say it again...I learn a new command each time I read a Git-related post... So powerful.

• How to Access Query Strings in Minimal APIs (Shawn Wildermuth) - Those posts are the best! When we can not only learn the solution but also from the tests along the way. Great post.

• Working on two git branches at once with git worktree (Andrew Lock) - Wow, there are so many things possible with Git. Personally, I think I would just work in containers... But it's nice that other options are possible for other scenarios.

Podcasts

• Running a developer community (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Wow! Very impressed by all that structure and great community. So inspiring.
• How to do an Instagram Giveaway that Actually Works with Derek Videll (Influencer Entrepreneurs: Blogging & Social Media Tips) - That was a good one. Doing a giveaway is way harder than it looks.
• 142: Kevin Evans on Building Your Azure Cloud Career (CloudSkills.fm) - Very interesting discussion.

Miscellaneous

• How to Write Persuasive Technical Content (Karl Hughes) - Interesting post that explains the components and how to write convincing text.

~frank

Reading Notes #501

Another Monday, another Reading Notes. 😀

It's been five hundred weeks, this is more than nine years! Who knew I will keep doing that for so long... 

If you are new around here, welcome, The Reading Notes are a curated list of all 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.

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

Cloud

• Bicep Access policies and Managed Identity (Gregor Suttie) - This is a nice post that connects docs pages and different blog posts and information so we have the big picture.

• Cloud-Native Application Security (Samir Behara) - This post is listing so many best practices, patterns, and anti-patterns, it is a must for any "cloud-native people".

Programming

• Get started faster with the new 5-minute Quickstarts (Hannah Hunter & Nick Greenfield) - A short post that shares a few quickstart tips and examples.

• Compare Arrays in C# (Code Maze) - Great post that explains some subtleties in the comparison operators.

• Connecting a .NET Application with MongoDB Atlas (Assis Zang) - Great tutorial to setup a .NET 6 web app to connect to an existing MongoDB database.

• Microsoft Won't Do Drag-and-Drop for Blazor (David Ramel) - A very interesting post about the reasons that leaned Blazor developers team to let go of that feature.

• Run Custom Scripts In Docker With Arguments - ENTRYPOINT Vs CMD (devopscube) - A nice post. Did you know the difference? I didn't.

• Visual Studio Code March 2022 (VS Code team) - New commands, new features, new experiences everything is explained in this one post.

Miscellaneous

• Missing Insights from the Virtual Water Cooler (Modern Mentor) - There are smarts way to get the human interaction that we crave these days.
• Greg on The Genius of Routine (What's Essential) - Habits are very powerful tools in our toolbox for so many things... It's worth learning more about it.
• Short-Season Podcast: Is It Worth Your Time And Effort? (Feed Your Brand) - Seasons are everywhere, but does it applies to everything? This episode discusses the pros and cons.

Miscellaneous

• "New Boards Hub" Public Preview - Azure DevOps Blog (Dan Hellem) - Boards are so useful to visualize information quickly. Flip that preview switches on to give it a try.

~Frank

Reading Notes #500

It's Monday,

time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all 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 interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Automate your work day with workflows in Teams (Harysh Menon) - I’m a big fan (and user) of automation with Power Automate or Logic Apps there is so much we can do! This short post will give you a few ideas for sure.

• How to rollback a Container App revision using the Azure CLI (Jason Haley) - A very nice and detailed tutorial that continues to explain how to use Azure container App using real-life scenarios.

• How to set environment variables in a Container App using the Azure CLI (Jason Haley) - What a great post! I love that it came from a question during a talk, it shows that when we say" let me get back to you", we really want to. Good work.

Programming

• Conditional Blazor Styles (without the if statements) (Jason Hilton) - Nice little tips for Blazor developers.

• How to Deserialize a Complex JSON Object in C# .NET (Code Maze) - New way, old way this post covers them c both compares them and provides a lot of information to get good and consistent results.

• How to Remove the Start Text from PowerShell (Md. Fahim Bin Amin) - So simple! Of course, there are arguments, but didn’t I think about it?!

• How to delete all merged git branches with one terminal command (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Love that little script so simple.

• Improving your GitHub feed (Bruce Williams) - Great! A nice new feature on our GitHub page.

• Start working on GitHub Issues faster (Daniel Adams) - Oh, I love it! Looking forward to trying it.

• Why you should ship your silly side projects (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Refreshing post…And go see that website if Geocities means something to you. Totally agree with the shipping project; it is an excellent source of joy and you always learn new stuff.

Miscellaneous

• New data: What makes developers happy at work (David Gibson) - Interesting post. So many details…are developers are that different compared to other workers? I feel most people want the same…

~frank

Reading Notes #499

Good Monday, 

Monday means it's reading notes times. Those are a curated list of all 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 interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• How to Separate Production, Test and Development Resources in Azure (John Kilmister) - Great post. It is an extremely frequent question, and I am happy to have now documentation to support the best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Apps Autopilot (Justin Yoo) - A great DevOps post that great an automatic deployment process. Very inspiring, I think I may is some of it for my AzUrlShortener.

Programming

• Automate code metrics and class diagrams with GitHub Actions (David Pine) - Very cool post and GitHub action. Will it come next weekend's little project to give it a try? I'll let you know.

• Blazor&Dragons! How to consume gRPC-web from Blazor – part 1: the client (David Guida) - A pretty cool first part of the tutorial. Who said learning cannot be fun.

• Windows Package Manager 1.2 (Demitrius Nelon) - I just try it and it works so well. This is good news and there are already so many packages available.

Podcasts

• Adam Shoalts On The Importance Of Solo Adventures In Life (What's Essential) - As I was listening to this episode I was thinking what an interesting guest. Adam Shoalts, explains a few anecdotes of his numerous expeditions, and how the essential it most of the time in the middle of them. Then at the end, I connected the dots! Adam Shoalts author of the book Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic, I read that book :) and it's was part of the Reading Notes #460

• Headphones Vs. Earbuds Vs. AirPods: Which Is The Best Podcasting Audio Equipement? - (Feed Your Brand) - Really interesting episode about gears... And excellent timing, because yes I need some new ones.

• Entrepreneurship as a developer - (Software Engineering Unlocked) - WHat does it means to think at scale. I am not quite sure I would enjoy doing it his way, but it's definitely working.

~frank

Reading Notes #498

Good Monday, Already time to share my reading notes of the week. A list of all the articles, blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Tutorial: Using Azure Table Storage or Azure Cosmos DB with Microsoft Orleans (Nick) - A nice tutorial from a series this one focusing on Storage locally using Azurite.

Programming

• The Ultimate Web Dev Environment (Aaron Powell) - Extremely complete post that shows so many little details and how to make them work together.

• Containers on Azure App Service - Tips & Tricks - Philly.NET CodeCamp 2022 recording (Guy Barrette) - A cool video from my friend Guy sharing some tips and tricks. There is stuff to learn for everyone.

• Negative Space Scheduling (Oren Eini) - Very cool real-life scenario. So true! If you ever have worked on a scheduler, you know.

• vscode.dev Visual Studio Code for the Web (Chris Dias) - There was already some kind of flavor of vscode with the dev.github.com, but there is something amazing about the standalone version. Brilliant!

Miscellaneous

• 5 Tips on Managing a Remote-first Development Team (Marcelo Wiermann) - As all of us have been working remotely for a while, it's a good moment to remember how communication is important and understand that in a more normal situation being remote can be good.

• Maximizing 1on1 time with your manager (Mark Downie) - I love that. It is definitely a good plan.

~frank

Reading Notes #497

Good Monday, 

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

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• How to Upload a File to Azure Blob Storage (Claudio Bernasconi) - A nice tutorial that builds using .NET a little application to interact with Azure blob storage. And there is also a video.

• New Azure for Operators solutions and services built for the future of telecommunications (Jason Zander) - Good news in the network spheres...That's good for all of us.

• Serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps (Michael Ridland) - Now I understand not only how to create a container App but where does it fit in all the container services available in Azure. Very nice post.

Programming

• .NET GitHub Actions: Intro to GitHub Actions for .NET (David Pine) - This is a great post to get started with GitHub action. Thus one is about .Net o but of course, many other languages are supported. Right now the only thing I want is to add more workflow and improve the existing ones...

• Differences Between != And Is Not Operators in C# (Code Maze) - My first thought when I saw the title was well they are the same... And then I remember the differences. Great post the really take the time the explain the similarities and the differences.

• GitHub Previews Faster Codespaces Creation with Prebuilds -- Visual Studio Magazine (David Ramel) - This is awesome! I started to use containers for my development recently and the initial spark was codespace. You must try it.

• A Practical Guide to Dapper (Camilo Reyes) - A nice tour of the functionalities of the tool. It's clear how it can be useful in a Data Access Layer pattern. Not to be confused with Dapr.

Podcast

• Twenty Years of ASP.NET with Scott Guthrie (.NET Rocks!) - So nice to hear Scott Guthrie talk about those years and share a few stories.

• 568: How to Attract Attention, with Michael F. Schein (Coaching for Leaders) - An interesting conversation about our strengths and weaknesses with the author of the book: The Hype Handbook.

• Testcontainers: Using Code to Control Docker for Testing (DevOps and Docker Talk) - When, How, Why test the code running in containers... Nice episode.

• Jennie Allen On Finding Your People And Building Your Community (What's Essential) - A interesting discussion about what does it means to find your people, and how to do that.

Miscellaneous

• Why DevOps needs a change from a ‘me’ to a ‘we’ mindset (Chris Yates) - An interesting post about the required DevOps mindset.

~frank

Reading Notes #496

Good Monday, 

time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all 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 interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Is Serverless Just a Stopover for Event-Driven Architecture? (Mark Hinkle) - An interesting post. I'm still using many serverless services as one year ago... Am I marginal? Is there a trend that I did see (that more like it)?

Programming

• A Full-Stack Web App Using Blazor WebAssembly and GraphQL: Part 2 (Ankit Sharma) - This second post is in a series where there build a real-life type of application. Really interesting to see all pieces go together (have you ever noticed are package names are funny?). Nice work.

• Blazor Custom Components (John Peters) - Nice series to learn how to write reusable code.

• Testing ASP.NET Core 6 Apps (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice quick tutorial on how to do unit tests. Wonderful.

• Upgrading an ASP.NET Core Web API Project to .NET 6 (Christian Nagel) - This post is not about changing the version of the package, but how to use all those features to make you more productive with fewer lines of code.

Podcasts

• Modern Code Generation with Jordan Adler (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting discussion about code generation, the different pattern, difficulties, and so much more.

• SPI 551: Why Lying to Yourself Helps You Become More Successful with Marisa Peer (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Without falling into the magic thinking, this shows how strong our mind can be. Great episode.

• Make money with open source software (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Open source software is another world: Unknow, different, scary. This week guest shares his experience and story, while transitioning into Open-Source.

• Happiness with Arthur Brooks (A Bit of Optimism) - It's important to love what we do, as in has an huge impact on our level of happiness.

• Greg and Anna McKeown on The Power Of Small Wins (What's Essential) - Lovely episode where Greg's wife Anna joins him to share examples of small wins impact.

~Frank

Reading Notes #495

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. 

Suggestion of the week

• Include diagrams in your Markdown files with Mermaid (Martin Woodward, Adam Biagianti) - This is very interesting. For a simple little diagram, we can now do that in text in the same document... Looking forward to trying it. Mermaid is also supported in Azure DevOps

Cloud

• Azure CLI: Delete All Resources Within Resource Group (Chris Pietschmann) - Nice tips to delete all resources in a resources group. However I prefer deploying an empty resource group with override, work each time, and the command seems simpler.

• Creating Azure DevOps WIKI Pages from within a pipeline - part 2 (Stefan Stranger) - Super cools automation during a deployment. I love it.

• Host Static Web Sites for Free in Azure (Sameer Doshi) - There are still so many running on complex systems. Have a look.

• Isolated Azure Function in .Net 6 (Paul Michaels) - A nice short post that highlights the differences between these two types/versions of functions

• Start Creating Azure Bicep Modules for Code Reuse (Chris Pietschmann) - That looks amazing, and simple to do. I have a few complex ARM templates, I should try to break them down in bicep to make them easier to read and maintain.

Programming

• Observer Design Pattern in C# (Code Maze) - A really clear tutorial. I've been waiting for this kind of refresh to implement this pattern in a text-based game I was building... Maybe now is the time.

• 10 Best C# NuGet Packages to Improve Your Productivity in 2022 (Rajeshwari Pandinagarajan) - What I like with those lists of tools/ packages is that most of the time you found something you didn't know.

• Disguising Podman as Docker Desktop on Windows (Mark Richards) - Nice! A Docker alternative that could potentially interest many, but for myself, I will stick to Docker. I'm an occasional citizen, and I feel there will be more docs with the current favorite.

• Happy 20th Anniversary, .NET! (Beth Massi) - Very happy to see .NET reaching 20 so strong. Nice post, nice video packed with interesting anecdotes and nice moments.

• Introducing FakeAuth for .NET Core (Caleb Jenkins) - That looks very interesting! For PoC, demo, or temporary solution it's brilliant. Code and sample in GitHub.

Book

Greenlights

Author: Matthew McConaughey

This autobiography is funny, light, interesting, and even weird at some moments. But you know what? I liked it. I totally kept some quotes, as I found them good. I partially read it and listen to it. The audio version is done by Matthew and it's nice to hear him telling us his story.

~frank

 

Reading Notes #493

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. 

Just for the of it, I did a little funny video to answer the question: Where really is cloud computing? 

Watch it on your favorite platform ;) YouTube - TikTok

Cloud

• Migrating from GitHub Pages to Azure Static Web Apps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is a good tutorial that leverages the GitHub deployment to Azure.

• Tip 352 - How to trigger an Azure Function from Azure Cosmos DB | Azure Tips and Tricks - This is a clear tutorial about how to use an Azure function trigger connected to Azure Cosmo DB. Simple but very powerful.

Programming

• Minimal APIs, Blazor Improvements, and Tools Updates in ASP.NET Core 6 (Antonio Liccardi) - So many goodies in the last few days.

• Azure Static Web Apps, Blazor, Authentication and Visual Studio 2022 (Scott Kuhl) - There is a little bit more work than I would like but there is also a lot to interact with and monitor locally. Thanks to this clear tutorial we have all the steps to reproduce.

• Comparison of Dependency Injection in .NET (Nickolas Fisher) - A very complete tutorial, with all the required code even the GitHub reference. The perfect example to get started.

• VS Code Gets New Side Panel in v1.64 Update (David Ramel) - Nice! I like this new menu functionality.

Podcasts

• 291: GitHub Actions All The Things (Merge Conflict) - Sometimes building a CI-CD feels too cumbersome, but it's probably worth it. In this episode Frank and James share and they found their balance.
• Greg on The Power Of The Graceful No (What's Essential) - It's so hard some time to say this simple word... But it is an important, nice episode.
• Shaun Walker on Blazor and Oqtane - Episode 179 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Nice discussion with the creator of DotNetNuke and more recently Oqtane, about .Net and Blazor for today's solution.
• 564: Make Your Reading More Meaningful, with Sönke Ahrens (Coaching for Leaders) - As far as I can remember, I always struggled with taking "good" notes. Interesting topic, a few good tips, and tricks.
• Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History with Evan Amos (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Really interesting interview about... yes, photography. Scott is chatting with the photographer of those amazing images of the game consoles.

~Frank