Reading Notes #130

Suggestion of the week

• Distributed Automated Browser Testing with Selenium and BrowserStack (Scott Hanselman) - Testing the UI is never a walk in the park, and often the easiest solution is to use reall users. This post talk about two tools to automate these processes.

Cloud

• Azure: ExpressRoute Dedicated Networking, Web Site Backup Restore, Mobile Services .NET support, Hadoop 2.2, and more - Once again, a lot of new features available in windows azure are presented in this post. I'm looking forward to try this Expressroute and the web api support.
  
• Announcing Windows Azure ExpressRoute, new partnership with Level 3 and exciting updates to other Azure Services (StevenMartinMS) - This post gives more details about the new ExpressRoute of Azure presented last week.
  
• Windows Azure Mobile Services with .NET Backend (Shiju Varghese) - Great code sample that demonstrates how easy it is to do .Net web api for azure mobile services.
  
• WindowsAzure Lessons Learned : Be Stateful - Very interesting post that compares efficiency and cost of stateful application versus stateless.
  
• Code in the Cloud Using Visual Studio Online - It's magic! You can have Visual Studio without any installation...

Programming

• Using Claims in your Web App is Easier with the new OWIN Security Components (suhasbj, levibroderick, betty, on ap standa Daniel Roth) - Very useful informations about own and his ability to manage easily claims.
  
• Remove unused CSS in your Web Application - Nice tips to get better performance.

UX

• New UI and capabilities for Windows Phone App Studio Beta developers - Nice update for windows phone developer.

Reading Notes #129

Suggestion of the week

• Auto-Healing Windows Azure Web Sites (Mark Brown) - Amazing new feature, that will simplify our lives. A post to read.

Cloud

• Stupid Azure Trick #5 – Got a Penny? Run a Simple Web Site 100% on Blob Storage – Cost Analysis Provided (Bill Wilder) - I can easily imagine plenty of scenarios where this static (and mostly free) website could be really useful.
  
• This Day on WindowsAzure Will be Back Shortly - This post is announcing a really promising series about the re-editing of a cloud application.
  
• Best Practices: Windows Azure Websites (WAWS) (Mark_Brown) - Interesting post that explains how we should use the tools and services available to follow the best practices.
  
• Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Nice update on a post that is still very true today.
  
• Microsoft has Released a Set of Symbols/Icons to Visually Represent Windows Azure Solutions - Time to refresh our presentations, and schemas....
  
• WindowsAzure Lessons Learned – Continuous Services Require Continuous Attention - The best way to improve is to learn for our "problems" or perhaps those of others.

Programming

• Content Negotiation and Web API for the ASP.NET MVC Developer - Web API is a big step forward in a web architecture.
  
• Unit Testing 101: Creating Flexible Test Code - Interesting way to structure unit tests.
  
• EF 6.1: Creating indexes with IndexAttribute (Arthur Vickers) - Nice tutorial that introduces the index management in EF 6.1.
  
• How to Write Unit Tests to Check Your HTTP Headers (and Other HTTP Request Stuff) in C# - This post is a good tutorial that will help to write HTTP unit tests.
  
• Converting AutoMapper to a Portable Class Library (Jimmy Bogard) - Good post that explains the conversion of the automapper (a great tool, btw) to a Portable Class library(PCL).
  
• A cleaner way to use setTimeout and anonymous callbacks (Dave Ward) - Nice tricks, It's a lot clearer.
  
• How I Work Around The require(“../../../../../../../”) Problem In NodeJS - This post shows one possible solution to the unpleasant ...... problem.

Databases

• Gartner Report: Big Data will Revolutionize the Cybersecurity in Next Two Year (Saroj Kar) - Interesting point of view about the impact of bigdata in a near future.
  
• How to count the number of rows in a table in SQL Server - Interesting demonstration of the cost generated by a simple row count operation.
  
• Not unit testing your databases? You should be - Interesting post that explains how we could (should) test our databases. It also quickly introduces tSQLt framework.

Miscellaneous

• How do we know if mobile apps are secure? (Scott Hanselman) - Outch! I was hoping the stats would be better. We definitely need to pick our apps more carefully.

Reading Notes #128

Suggestion of the week

• What is Windows Azure? - This post gives the definition of Azure that is short enough to be said in one breath.

Cloud

• Windows Azure Remote Debugging (Anjana Mazumder) - Really useful tips when searching for that bug how's only happening in the cloud...
  
• How to Setup and Protect an Azure Application with a Barracuda Firewall (Ashwin Palekar) - Great tutorial the builds a real application that used network security.
  
• Stupid Azure Trick #4 – C#, Node.js, and Python side-by-side – Three Simple Command Line Tools to Copy Files up to Windows Azure Blob Storage (Bill Wilder) - Nice and useful snippets.
  
• “The Cloud Never Goes Down”, Azure SLAs and other availability trivia - This post explains what we should expect from the cloud (from all providers) SLAs.

Programming

• If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014? (Scott Hanselman) - Learning a new language every year is a good practice, but we all run out of time. Here are some suggestions to get stared.
  
• Dependency Injection with Unity (Dominic Betts, Grigori Melnik, Fernando Simonazzi and Mani Subramanian) - Fantastic book that covers completely the Dependency Dnjection topics. It used Unity framework. A lot of code samples, detailed informations on different patterns and unit tests are also in this book.
  
• EF 6.1: Turning on logging without recompiling - I'm always impressed by all the little things in EF that could simplify our life as developer.
  
• Intercepting Asynchronous Methods Using Unity Interception - Great post that explains how to use IoC with Unity in an async situation.
  
• Understanding Entity Framework Code First Migrations (More..) - All steps are explained in this nice tutorial.
  
• Content Negotiation and Web API for the ASP.NET MVC Developer - Web API is a big step forward in a web architecture.

Miscellaneous

• Download Wrappers and Unwanted Software are pure evil (Scott Hanselman) - It is more and more difficult to install something without also installing unwanted stuff...