Reading Notes #154

 

Suggestion of the week

• New handy Visual Studio extensions - Three great extensions that add this little thing that simplify our life...

Cloud

• Azure Automation: Reliable, Fault-Tolerant Runbook Execution Using Checkpoints (Chris Sanders) - Really interesting and complete post about automation in Azure and how to follow the best practices.
  
• Mostly Cloudy – Sept 5th, 2014 - Really interesting post that resumes the last release of Azure. It also gives a reference for every feature to get more detail.
  
• How do You Like Your Pizzas Delivered? - #Azure #PaaS - A short and simple explanation of what is in the cloud.
  
• Cloud Cover 152: Azure Search with Liam Cavanagh (Channel 9) (Chris Haishi Bai) - A really excellent web episode and a great demo of the new Azure Search.
  
• Making Azure Blob Storage Searchable Using Azure Search Service (Gaurav) - Great tutorial about the new Azure Search with a lot of details. The code is available online.
  
• Writing a Site Extension for Azure Websites (Elliott Hamai) - Great tutorial that explains how to build and test our Site Extention. It also explains how to publish it privately or publicly.
  
• Azure DocumentDB: first use cases (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting post that places the new DocumentDb compares to the other solution in Azure.
  
• Azure DocumentDB: Working with Microsoft's NoSQL Database in the Cloud (Gastón Hillar) - This post is a great tutorial to get started with Azure DocumentDB in C#.
  
• IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS ? - Nice images to see the differences between each of them.

Programming

• #PowerShell Invoke-RestMethod - the underlying connection was closed - Useful tips to save some headache while developing.
  
• A chatroom for all! Part 1 - Introduction to Node.js - This post is the first tutorial of a series about developing a real application in Node.js and putting it to Azure. In this one, learns how to setup your Windows environment.
  
• Public Data Sources – finding them and using them - Useful post that lists different data sources.
  
• Introduction to Machine Learning Studio - Great article that introduces Machine Learning ML and shows us how to do a simple application in ML Studio...
  
• Two free video courses: Intro to ASP.NET MVC and Responsive UI with Bootstrap - Nice two courses (part of the Microsoft Virtual Academy) about an unavoidable tool these days: Bootsrap.
  
• Integrating OneDrive into Your Windows Store Apps - Excellent post that gets us started with the Live SDK, so we can add One Drive capabilities to all our applications.

Miscellaneous

• Can you hear me now? Unmute your microphone (Scott Hanselman) - This post published a useful tool that we should include in all our meeting description: HowToUnmute.com.
  
• Don't Check Your Email in the Morning (Scott Hanselman) - Who will raise this challenge?
  
• I can't hear you over the sound of how small your fonts are (Aaron Bertrand, JK Wood, lkh, Dandy Weyn BuckWoody) - Quick tips and indispensable tools for all speakers.

~Frank

Reading Notes #153

Suggestion of the week

• Azure Virtual Machines Part 0: A VM Primer - This post is "the reference" about the Azure VM. It explains mostly... everything about them.
  
• Azure Event Hubs, Queues and Workers (Jeff Levinson) - Really great tutorial that put together many different components.

Cloud

• Azure Search Scenarios and Capabilities (Pablo Castro) - This post is a nice summary of the Azure Search.
  
• Getting Started With Microsoft Azure Search - This post describes how to start playing with the new Azure search feature. A nice library that wrapped the REST API call is also used and shared on Github.
  
• Mostly Cloudy–August 21st 2014 - Nice post that summarizes what's new about the Azure world and what's coming.

Programming

• New feature in Pester 3.0: Code Coverage metrics (Dave Wyatt) - Pester continues to evolve. This post introduces the code coverage feature in the new release.
  
• Introducing Gulp, Grunt, Bower, and npm support for Visual Studio (Scott Hanselman) - This post presents a very promising integration for VS14, if you are web developer read this.
  
• Playing with Roslyn (Ayende Rahien) - Interesting "test" to play around with Roslyn.
  
• Using Visual Studio 2013 with TFS and Git repositories on same project - Nice tips!

Miscellaneous

• 10 Vital WordPress Security Tips (Guest Blogger) - This post provides the perfect quick review of our security knowledge when blogging.

~Frank

Reading Notes #152

Suggestion of the week

• Azure: New DocumentDB NoSQL Service, New Search Service, New SQL AlwaysOn VM Template, and more (Scott Guthrie) - Here is the detailed description of all the new features in the Azure August release.

Cloud

• Microsoft NoSQL database and full-text search service previews available on Azure (Mary Jo Foley) - Quick introduction of the two last Azure services.
  
• Azure DocumentDB (Ayende Rahien) - A pretty hard review of the new Azure DocumentDB. Compare to RavenDB to make us understand the issues.
  
• Use Distributed Cache in Microsoft Azure - Great post that describes all the options we have to store our session state, and explains how to do it.
  
• Microsoft Azure Media Services - This article explains how works Azure Media Services by following a real case step by step.

Programming

• Getting Started with Git and GitHub (Dhananjay Kumar) - Very clear and simple tutorial that explains the basic command of Git Prompt and Git in VisualStudio.

Databases

• Documents, Databases and Eventual Consistency - A very interesting article about different types of database and their utilities.

UX

• 5 Strategies for Building Mobile Apps with Telerik (Cody Lindley) - Interesting post that explains different ways to build mobile app using Kendo UI.

Miscellaneous

• The Plague of Methods and Frameworks (Jurgen Appelo) - Interesting point of view.
  
• 10 Vital WordPress Security Tips (Guest Blogger) - This post provides the perfect quick review of our security knowledge when blogging.

~Frank