Reading Notes #507

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

• #11: Share Content with Docusaurus & Azure Static Web Apps ( Nitya Narasimhan) - Another great example of a static web app this time for documentation perfect match!

• Azure Static Web Apps: named preview environments with Azure DevOps | I CAN MAKE THIS WORK (John Reilly) - This is pretty cool, a unique URL for the staging/ qa environment...I like that

• Blazor WebAssembly for Headless CMS on Azure Static Web Apps (Justin Yoo ) - Woo! Amazing idea, you get the comfort of WordPress for writing and the lightweight of a static webapp.

• Create and connect to an Azure SQL DB in 6 easy steps (Davide Mauri) - Learn how to build an excellent Azure CLI script in this post. Sort and useful.

• Deploying Blazor WebAssembly applications to Azure Static Web Apps (Damir Arh) - Nice overview of the static webapp double with a tutorial to build a CI-CD using GitHub Action.

Programming

• The Magic of Docker Desktop is Now Available on Linux (Chris McLellan) - Wonderful, I believe that offering the same experience to your users independently of the platform is a sign of maturity.

• Configuring the Diagnostics Port for dotnet monitor (Mark Downie) - This post shares news about this monitoring tool that is as cross-plaforn as .NET is.

• Docker Extensions: Discover, Build & Integrate New Tools into Docker Desktop (Amy Bass) - This is really good. Now the entire community can add functionalities to the environment.

• DockerCon 2022: Community-powered, Developer-obsessed (Scott Johnston) - I watch the keynote and it was very interesting. Looking forward to see those demos

• How to run Kubernetes clusters locally on Windows - Simple Talk (Boemo Mmopelwa) - This tutorial goes over the functionalities of Kind. One of the two tools available to help us use Kubernetes locally. It looks simple and fun!

~frank

How to re-open a repository cloned in a volume, from Visual Studio Code

I love Dev Containers, I use them a lot for most of my development. One of my favorite options is to clone a repository directly in a docker volume.

It takes a few seconds and you can work on your code without installing any SDKs or language that your current machine doesn't have. Marvelous!

Ideally, at the end of your session, you push your code to another repository (ex: GitHub). However, sometimes I forget or am interrupted I start working on something else, and my changes are not pushed.

How do you re-open that environment?! In this post, I want to share two ways that I use.

Open Recent

The first method is to use the history of the editor! For example, here in Visual Studio Code, select the File menu and Open Recent.

If you didn't open too many files since you used that dev container, it should be present as displayed in the image. It should look like: <Name of the repository> in a unique [Dev Container].

Make sure docker is already running and select it. Voila, in a snap you are back into the dev environment with your last changes waiting for you.

Open the Container

There are a few different options to do the next solution, I will share the one I consider the easiest for the people who are not Docker experts.

First, if not already present to your VSCode, add the Docker extension identifier: ms-azuretools.vscode-docker. Then from this new extension in the top section named containers search for your container. It should start with "vsc", for Visual Studio Code, then hyphen the name of the repository you cloned. Right-click on it and select start. After a few seconds, the container should have a little green triangle on its side and be ready to continue.

The next step consists of attaching the container to VSCode. Once more, from the Docker extension, right-click on the container and select Attach Visual Studio Code.

This will open a new VSCode window, we are mostly done but there is one last step to do. You will notice that the file explorer is empty. No worries we will fix everything with this last step. The terminal should be open in the home folder of the root user. Let's open our project folder by executing the command:

cd /workspaces/<repository-name>

Then the final command is to re-open VSCode in this folder and let the Dev Container do his magic. Execute the command:

code . -r

(the -r is to re-use the same VSCode windows. It's optional, if not provided it will open a new VSCode instance.)

And voila! The Dev Container is just as it was before.

If you know other ways to achieve this, leave a comment or reach out, I'm always happy to learn more.

~ frank

Reading Notes #506

Good Monday, Already time to share my reading notes of the week. 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

• Introduction to Azure Chaos Studio (Paul Michaels) - This is a very interesting tool, looking forward to see more services included

Programming

• Asynchronous Programming in C# (Sukhrob) - A good post that takes the time to explain the why.Why we should complexify our code to make it asynchronous.
• ASP.NET Core CRUD with NoSQL: Part 3 (Matthew Groves) - We continue to learn, this time, a bit more about the sql+ and the create of the crud API.
• All Roads Lead Back to Infrastructure as Code (Joe Duffy) - From where it started to where it is going this very detailed post covers it all.
• Bringing code navigation to communities (Patrick Thomson) - This is really interesting... Looking forward to read more about it.
• Major update to the PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code (Sydney Smith) - Ok wow... I need a PowerShell script right now just to try that new version; it looks amazing!
• Visual Studio on an ultra-wide monitor - Visual Studio Blog (Mads Kristensen) - It's not a "problem" I particularly have because I used 2 regular monitors, but I heard about it. It's really nice to see that so many possibilities are available to us.

Podcasts

• Docker Desktop for Linux is Here! (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Great episode so much energy! Discussion about the brand new Docker Desktop for Linux, who to report bugs, ask for a new feature, and the DockerCon!
• Épisode 15 - Gengis Khan (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - I keep those episodes very preciously as a threat, and this one was such a good one! It's in French and the topic is the biggest empire that ever existed... No, it's the Romain.
• How to Productively Show Off What You've Learned (Modern Mentor) - Nice episode. That's a good idea I should share what I think of books and posts I read! ;) I guess I'm not too bad.
• Comparing Infrastructure-as-Code with Chris Klug (.NET Rocks!) - Terraform, Pulumi, ARM, and Bicep... All those are mentioned because it's all about Infrastructure-as-Code. Interesting talk about the different options we have.

Miscellaneous

• Understanding the Role of a Developer Evangelist (Karl Hughes) - As a cloud advocate, I don't remember how often I explained what is my role. This 360-degree post covers all angles and provides a really good answer.

~frank