Reading Notes #549

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

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

The suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Teams: Advantages of the new architecture (Sumi Singh) - Nice journey on performance optimization, embracing the open source. Learn more about your new Teams and the details and effort to make it better in this post.

Cloud

• Downloading Files from Azure Container App to your Local Machine via Azure Blob Storage (Nikhil Vetteth) - This is a useful tip to extract our logs or other local files.

Programming

• Manage networking with Docker Compose (Eric Goebelbecker) - Nice post that explains with a sample how communication is possible between containers just by using Docker compose.

• Build custom communication experiences with Azure Communication Services UI Library for Microsoft Teams users (David de Matheu) - Nice new library for the Teams developers. You can now build more with less code by leveraging Azure Communication Services (ACS).

Podcasts

• The Wisdom of Anxiety with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (A Bit of Optimism) - A very interesting episode about mental fitness... I love it!

Miscellaneous

• Welcome to the new era of Microsoft Teams (Jeff Teper) - Get more memory and CPU back! I start using it and it makes a great difference. See you there.

• New Microsoft Loop app is built for co-creation | Microsoft 365 Blog (Wangui McKelvey) - I've been hearing about loop for a while now... I'm excited to finally try it.

~frank

Reading Notes #548

The suggestion of the week

• GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience (Thomas Dohmke) - Wow! Very excited about this news. Copilot is way more than just a buzz. After using it for a while I really appreciate the suggestions it was making. Looking forward to trying that next release.

Cloud

• Announcing: Azure Developers (Mehul Harry) - A nice online event is coming up. I'm honored and excited to be part of the sneakers. Looking forward to it.

• General Availability: ASP. NET web app migration to Azure App Service using PowerShell Scripts - This a nice tool that can help so many with that first step.

Programming

• A first look at Blazor and .NET 8 (Damien Bowden) - The future of Blazor looks very promising and interesting in .NET 8

• Announcing Docker+Wasm Technical Preview 2 (Djordje Lukic) - This wasm+docker is making progress fast! I feel like it was yesterday when they announced the first bits.

• Secure your .NET cloud apps with rootless Linux Containers - .NET Blog (Richard Lander) - In this post, the .NET teams explain their decisions ti make the images more secure. Safer containers are always better, right?

• Turn your database into an API in minutes with Data API builder for Azure Databases (Jasmine Greenaway) - A pretty cool open-source project that can definitely help.

Miscellaneous

• What’s different about these layoffs (Eira May) - It is a troubled period. how many of us were affected directly or indirectly.

~frank

My Ubuntu laptop finally works with my docking station!

I've been running Ubuntu on my personal laptop, a Dell Inspiron 13. I love it. It's slim, performant and I can code, play, read, stream without any difficulty. Yet when I try to use my bigger PC monitors by connecting my laptop to a docking station, I've had a lot of trouble. I've tried 2 docking stations, but none of them worked with Ubuntu. Some solutions found online suggest rebuilding my kernel, but I didn't want to do that, it felt too extreme for what should be trivial.

This post is about how I finally got my docking station to work with Ubuntu 22.04.

My current docking station is a Targus USB-C Docking Station and it works perfectly with other Windows devices. While doing some cleaning on my desk a logo catches my attention on the dock; the Displaylink logo. And that was the beginning of the end for the problem with that dock station.

After a quick search (aka Googling with DuckDuckGo) I found exactly what I was looking for on Synaptics web site. A solution for the older Linux versions! 

Following the instructions: How to install DisplayLink Software - Ubuntu, I was able to downloads the Synaptics Ubuntu Driver Download and install them in a few minutes. After a reboot... It worked!

I hope it will help others with the same problem.