Reading Notes #536 (Book edition)

Good first Monday of 2023!

As a way to close the Reading Notes of 2022, I changed a little today's post by sharing the books I read during the year. I didn't include the novel and thriller as I'm not sure they would be relevant in this kind of post.  However, if you are interested, find me at goodreads.com/fboucheros.

Let's make this new year a better one, and as usual, I'm always happy to receive your blog post and recommendations.

Books

Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection  
Author: Ximena Vengoechea

I like the stories and examples in this book. I mean it's 'easy' to say listen carefully but demonstrating how the opportunity was missed, and how to correct it is way more complex. Nice book.

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Author: Chip Heath, Karla Starr

I really enjoyed reading this book. Data is in the middle of everything, and when communicating that information it's often translated into numbers. To have an impact, the way we communicate those number is crucial. A book to read and probably read again after a while to refresh our memory.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Authors: Chip Heath, Dan Heath

This book oversimplifies a really complex topic, but I believe it was important to make each point clear. Nice read, it will help to be less afraid of making changes.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

A nice book that mixt great advice and more 'easy' ones. Nevertheless, it was interesting to revisit what I already knew and to learn new things. With so many distractions around us, focusing is important.






Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons 

Author:  Ben Riggs

Big fan of D&D and this book is a great read. It is a history of the game and the people behind it. It is an excellent read for anyone who is interested in the game or its history of it. I had no idea of all the "drama", and honestly even I didn't know either what it takes to create those books/games.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work 

Authors: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

The important message here where we can achieve a lot more with less. The book shares many examples and breaks them down into simple principles. I recommend it to anyone who is looking to improve their work-life balance.





Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds 

Author: David Goggins

The mind is incredible. Goggins pushed it to not eleven... to twelve! We all encounter difficulties in our lives, and the lesson here is that the real limit is way past what we think. Great book and he just published a new one.

Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping 

Author: Richie Norton

The first time I heard of that book it was in a podcast and it seems very promising. Even though I didn`t fall in love with that book the ideas are interesting and definitely worth the time to learn them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #535

Good Monday,
it's the last ReadingNotes of 2022! So many great articles, podcasts, and blog posts. More than 350 of those catch my interest this year...

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

Cloud

• Azure App Configuration, Key Vault and Managed Identity Implementation (Kevin Logan) - Security is essential and yes it adds complexity at first, but not that much. Have a look.

• Microsoft Azure CLX: A personalized program to learn Azure | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Priyanka Rawat) - More options to learn, and this one has a practice test in it, something that so many are looking for.

Programming

• 11 Ways of Making Your C# Harder to Use (Brendan Enrick) - A refreshing topmost post that shows the best practices. Well done!

• Containerized Blazor: Microsoft Ponders New Client-Side Hosting (David Ramel) - Looking forward to this feature being out.

• How Wolverine allows for easier testing (Jeremy Miller) - This looks like a great tool for testing.

• Introducing Wolverine for Effective Server Side .NET Development (Jeremy Miller) - The first time I read about that tool looks very interesting.

• WebAssembly vs. Kubernetes (Cameron Gain) - Very interesting thoughts. Only time will show if it's true.

Miscellaneous

• Can the Kindle Scribe replace the yellow notepad? Notes on taking notes with Amazon’s new device (Todd Bishop) - Didn't Know Remarcable 2 had a competitor. I like the idea of reducing paper usage but right now the solutions seem too expensive, at least for my usage. I will continue to use a digital keyboard or tablet pen notes app.

~Frank

Reading Notes #534

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

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

Cloud

• Introducing a better way to integrate Azure AD with API Management (Adrian Hall) - Cool, new features for APIM.

• The Life of Sadukie (Sarah Dutkiewicz) - This is a nice tutorial part of a series to build a website. Very well done.

Programming

• 5 new MVC features in .NET 7 (Andrew Lock) - With .NET 7 a few nice features we introduced, and this post list seven of them.

• Entity Framework Core 7 JSON Columns | Mapping | Querying | Updating | Example (Bommidi Naveen) - This post shows a simple mapping done with EF 7. The perfect bite-sized tutorial.

• Get your developer news - Visual Studio Blog (Mads Kristensen) - So many happy developers! After being missing for a few years, the dev news is back and better than ever!

Podcasts

• How to Avoid the Quiet Firing Trend with Dr. Tim Elmore (The EntreLeadership Podcast) - An interesting episode about those rebranded trends and how to avoid them.
• Do I stay or do I go? - Tech career advice with Mekka Williams (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - There is I believe a generation behavior here, but who's right? Interesting discussion.
• Les exoplanètes à portée d’œil avec le futur télescope James Webb (Fascinant!) - The star is at million of light years, but they managed to say what gaz is present in the atmosphere. Incredebile!
• Hacking APIs with Dana Epp (.NET Rocks!) - While listening to this episode I felt like I needed to put on the hood of my hoodie, take my laptop and go to a dark corner. Very interesting episode.

Miscellaneous

• DasBlog support for WebFinger (Mark Downie) - Interested to integrate your domain to a mastodon server? This post is for you

• Microsoft is adding a quick launcher to PowerToys for easy access to the best Windows utilities (Sofia Wyciślik-Wilson) - Who doesn't like new toys?

~frank

Reading Notes #533

Good Monday!

It's time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles and blog posts, that caught 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

• Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions in Public Preview (Renato Losio) - This is interesting this way you could beneficiate the trigger and keep the code outside of the database.

Programming

• Install Terminal App Themes in Windows 11 (Sofia Sondh) - Simple and we have the choice, great!

• My Top 10 Visual Studio Code Extensions for 2022 (John Kilmister) - Oh wow, there were a few gems I didn't know in this post. Great list.

• Ref vs Out C#: Which is the Better Choice when? (Byte Hide) - A simple post that lists the differences between those two keywords.

• Web Security 101 - Part 1: Secrets (Abbey Perini) - This is a nice post that lists places or methods to save our secrets and explains the pro and cons of each.

• Fluent Insights EP4: Slots (Paul Gildea) - The new episode of Fluent UI Insights is out. This one talks about slots, JSX children, and triggers.

Miscellaneous

• 10 SEO Tips For Technical Writers And Software Developers (Mahesh Chand) - A great post about SEO and why we should care.

~Enjoy!

Reading Notes #532

Good Monday, time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that caught 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

• Setup the Auto-shutdown on VM using Bicep template (Massimo Bonanni) - VMs are so useful. One of the best ways to save money is to turn them off when you are not using them. Part 6 about Bicep explains how to do it in your IaC script.

• What is Azure Container Registry? (MakendranG) - A quick intro on Azure Registry and how to create one.

Programming

• Authorization and Authentication in Minimal APIs (Assis Zang) - This is a great tutorial...Time to secure our APIs

• Converting Markdown to DOCX and PDF in C# (Bjoern Meyer|) - Interesting post with all the code required to do this project.Shorter than I thought.

• How to publish .NET 7 apps directly to Docker (Dennis Frühauff) - Pretty cool stuff. I need to try it.

• Make a Web Reporting App Using a Blazor Reporting Tool & Microservices | ActiveReports.NET (Sergey Abakumoff) - Report services... That brings memories! I like the idea of using Blazor as the container to display the reports.

• The dangers and gotchas of using scoped services in OptionsBuilder (Andrew Lock) - A very complete post that shares all you need to know about scopes.

Miscellaneous

• My IoT problem: the garage door opener : Algorithms for the masses - julian m bucknall (Julian M Bucknall) - Technology! Marvelous, when it works...

~frank

Reading Notes #531

Good Monday, 

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

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

Cloud

• Azure SDK Release (November 2022) - Azure SDK Blog (Azure SDK team) - New release with tons of updates.

Programming

• .NET 7 Web API CRUD Using Entity Framework Core (Naveen Bommidi) - This is a good tutorial to build our first simple API with EF...and it uses the brand new .NET 7.0

• 7 Reasons for Startups to Choose ASP.NET Over Node.js (Michael Shpilt) - I believe the most crucial point is to use a language that your team is comfortable with. If everyone already masters Node, then continue with that. If you are starting a new team or need specific performance or requirements that Node doesn't provide then, of course, .NET must be considered.

• 7 common mistakes new contributors make in Open Source Software - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 (Jessica Wilkins) - Good health check of our practices when collaborating on an open-source project.

• Minimal API validation with ASP.NET 7.0 Endpoint Filters - Ben Foster (Ben Foster) - That minimalist API can really make us save some keystrokes

• Multi-repository Support Released! - Visual Studio Blog (Jessie Houghton) - That's very good news and so many developers will be happy about it.

• .NET Interactive Notebooks is now Polyglot Notebooks! - .NET Blog (Claudia Regio) - A new name, the same great tool with a bright future.

~frank

Reading Notes #530

Good Monday!

It's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. Are you done watching all the videos from .NET Conf and GitHub Universe? I know I don't...

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

Cloud

• The cloud isn't the issue, you're just using it wrong (Jeremy Daly) - Great post about, unfortunately still, a controversial topic: the cloud!

Programming

• Fundamental ASP.Net Minimal API Integration Tests (Peter Ritchie) - This post is the perfect high overview to get started with testing.

• Announcing .NET Community Toolkit v8.1.0 Preview 1 (Sergio Pedri) - So many updates. Have an overview in this post.

• Welcome to C# 11 (Mads Torgersen) - This blog is the perfect appetizer to get us excited to learn more. C# 11 seems to be a great new version.

• What's New for ASP.NET Core & Blazor in .NET 7 (David Ramel) - So many goodies in this update from both .Net 7 sides and Blazor. This post overview most of them.

• What's new in Orleans 7.0 (Brady Gaster) - Simplified, faster, and so much more learn all the news about Orleans 7 in this post, and join them on Discord.

• What’s new with Codespaces from GitHub Universe 2022 (Nik Molnar) - I'm a big fan of codespace and DevContainer. I was delighted to learn about the global availability and the free monthly hours. This makes it a must for many open-source projects.

Miscellaneous

• How Link Building Can Help You Grow Your Blog (Sam Bowman) - Are links and backlinks still a good practice in the world of SEO? This post answer this question in detail.

• Why You Should Make Time for a Seasonal Cleanup (Suzanne Scacca ) - It takes a little bit of time, but I guess it is worth it since we and our devices will run more efficiently.

~frank

Reading Notes #529

Good Monday (standard time for many :) ),

It's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week. 

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

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) – November 2022 Release (Savannah Ostrowski) - New beta version released with java and bicep updates...Great work.

• Azure SQL Database Overview (Daniel Calbimonte ) - This post is a great one to get started on Azure SQL Database. It answers many of the initial questions and provides the answers.

• Build a globally resilient architecture with Azure Load Balancer | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure (Mahip Deora) - An azure load balancer is definitely a powerful tool when your customers aren't centralized. This post provides a nice overview.

Programming

• Create your .NET portfolio in the .NET Conf student zone (Katie Savage) - The .NET Conf conference is next Tuesday (Nov. 8) and students have a very special place. Have a look!

• How to Implement Decentralized Storage Using Docker Extensions - Docker (Marton Elek) - Second and last part of a series discussing about the storage with docker.

• Performance improvements in ASP.NET Core 7 (Brennan Conroy) - It's both impressive and inspiring to see so much improvement in performance in that next version.

• [Improving Your Desktop Applications—ToolTips in .NET MAUI](Leomaris Reyes ) (https://www.telerik.com/blogs/improving-desktop-applications-tooltips-dotnet-maui?utm_source=readingnotes) - Tooltips are now here!

• Personalize a static site based on a previous site referral (Salma Alam-Naylor) - This is a cool tutorial that explains how to leverage Netlify edge code to change a static website page base on where the visitor came from.

Miscellaneous

• Bicep for Real Site Launched (Sam Cogan) - Wonderful! The tutorial a was waiting for and it will be good because it's done by Sam.

~frank

Reading Notes #528

Good Monday, 

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

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

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Roadmap update (Gloridel Morales) - Nice update for Azure DevOps, and more details for us.

• Azure Service Bus Performance - Azure SDK Blog (Paul Michaels) - A nice post that explores the edge of the service Bus services in terms of speed and size of the messages. It could have a big impact on your design, depending on your business scenarios.

• Use Power Automate to Retrieve Data from an Azure Function for Reporting – Code with Dan Blog (Dan Wahlin) - This post teaches how to build a cool tool without code.

Podcast

• 42. Programming languages; from .NET and C# to JavaScript, from Python to Rust, and even Rockstar - with Dylan Beattie (Betatalks the podcast) - Another great episode of Betatalks the podcast about that passion burning inside that make people do so many wonderful things.
• Celebrating the Second Edition of Code with Charles Petzold (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - What an amazing interview with the author of the book Code. I heard so much about this book, and now with this new edition++, I think I should put it on my reading list.
• Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara (A Bit of Optimism) - Whaaat?! This is such a great idea! I need to read that book and go to that restaurant. I love the idea.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing the Docker+Wasm Technical Preview (Michael Irwin) - It seems like a good mix. I really need to try it out.

• Windows Terminal is now the Default in Windows 11 - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Woot Woot! Great work for all these people. Windows terminal is a great project well though. Learn more about its journey in this post.

~frank