Reading Notes #305

Cloud

• A technical overview of Azure Databricks - This new product/ feature looks very interesting... More to come.
• Improvements to Azure Functions in Visual Studio ( Justin Clareburt ) - Wow. Azure Functions may evolve quickly but the tools are following, and this is impressive. Check out all the features that would be included in the next version (currently accessible in preview).

Programming

• Azure DevOps Project – public preview (Gopinath Chigakkagari) - This new type of project looks awesome, looking forward to trying it.

Miscellaneous

• Why speed is the skill I’m most dedicated to improving (Alex Mathers) - An interesting post that talks about the balance between skills.
• 4 Realities of Blogging All Bloggers Need to Talk About (ep 214) (Darren Rowse) - Very good and encouraging talk about some daily facts in blogger's life.
• How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog (and Why You Should) (ep: 216) (Darren Rowse) - Hmm. I thought I was consistent, and then I went backward in my archives.... Well things change in ten years.
• How to Leverage People Analytics (ep: 323) (Dave Stachowiak) - Interesting talk about what is and what's not analytics.
• Are we partners or competitors? Yes, we are - Microsoft Partner Network (Gavriella Schuster) - An interesting and inspiring post that talks of course about partnership how its build and what it means.

Reading Notes #304

Cloud

• Application Insights: VSTS dashboard chart widget now available (Mike Gresley) - Woohoo! Finally, it's there. I'm going to add it to all my projects right now.
• Monitor Azure services and applications using Grafana (Ashwin Kamath) - I didn't know that tool, but now it's definitely under my radar.
• Azure Durable Functions: Making Serverless Last (Mary Branscombe) - A great post that introduces the durable function and explains where it fits in the integration offer.

Programming

• Creating a Minimal ASP.NET Core Windows Container (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - This is an amazing post that shows how to optimize our containers. It may be about Asp.Net Core but it applies to any containers. It also shows one of the big improvements with .Net Core...
• WebOptimizer - a Bundler and Minifier for ASP.NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - This post shares a nice little tool available for Asp.Net Core.
• Why Is It So Difficult To Get Started Writing Automated Tests? (Matthew Jones) - So many very good questions are asked in this post, but what are the answers?

Databases

• Automatic tuning will be a new default (Veljko Vasic) - An important post t read and share to avoid any panic in January.

Podcast

• EntreLeadership #231: Renée Mauborgne—Move Beyond Competing (EntreLeadership Team) - A great episode with a few tools that look very interesting... And of course, a book reference that you should add to you to read list.
• Dotnet Rocks - 1491 Building VSTS using VSTS with Dan Hellem and Rogan Ferguson (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell) - Great show about VSTS... If you using or think of using the tool... That's for you.

Miscellaneous

• I Don’t Have Time is a Myth (Donn Felker) - I love it. We have so many opportunities; we just need to take them.
• The Main Challenges of Building Machine Learning Tech (Donn Felker) - Very interesting article about AI.
• Why I won't be switching to VSCode any time soon - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - I was surprised when I saw the title of this post, how could you not like VsCode? However, after reading it, I understand. Through preferences are personal, VSCode does a lot and needs a bit more than few minutes to be tame. I got also overwhelmed when I started using it. The secret is the documentation... and sometimes. Then it becomes whatever you want.

Reading Notes #303

Suggestion of the week

• Writing tests in Postman (joyce) - With all the connected things and all the API in our system, this post shows a brilliant and simple way to test all those external calls.

Cloud

• Benefits of using the Azure IoT SDKs, and pitfalls to avoid if you don’t (Yi Zhong) - All open sources and packed of good stuff thus post shares all these goodies and some best practices if you decide to go without it.
• Container Orchestration Simplified with Managed Kubernetes in Azure Container Service (AKS) (Scott Hanselman, Rob Caron) - Great video that shows us how simplified our work could be.
• How we set up daily Azure spending alerts and saved $10k (Mike Larah) - Cloudyn is definitely a must in many cases. I need to see how it manages CSP subscriptions and limited access for clients. This post also shared how to integrate it in Slack, pretty cool.
• One-click replication for Azure Virtual Machines with Azure Site Recovery (Sujay Talasila) - Fantastic! It couldn't be more simple.

Programming

• Miniblog.Core is a new blog engine built using ASP.NET Core 2.0 (Mads Kristensen) - This post is not only about a sweat new blog engine, but also a call for coders. Everything is available on GitHub.
• Server-side charts with ASP.NET Core, Node services and D3.js | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog (Gunnar Peipman) - D3 is an amazing and very popular library, this post shows a very nice project built with it.
• Create a .NET Core 2 application on Linux with Visual Studio Code (Benjamin Perkins) - Nice quick tutorial to quickly get started.
• How to install NuGet Package in Visual Studio Code Linux Ubuntu (Benjamin Perkins) - Quick and easy.

Data

• What is Power BI Embedded? (Guy in a Cube ) - A quick video that explains perfectly the purpose of The embedded offer.

Miscellaneous

• What’s Your Project Problem? (Johanna) - Interesting post of view and many good references about time and resourceful people management.