Reading Notes #157

Suggestion of the week

• Microsoft Azure Web Site Cheat Sheet - Wow! I really think that ALL the information about Azure website is on this page, and it's super clear. Amazing job.

Cloud

• Soup to Nuts: From Raw Hardware to Cloud-Enabled Device - Excellent article that shows very exiting Raspberry Pi projects with Azure Services.

• Cloud, cloud, everywhere - This post makes me realize how many different cloud solution I'm using.

Programming

• Three steps to use jQuery UI in ASP.NET MVC 5 (Dhananjay Kumar) - Direct to the point. This is a good tutorial to not losing time and gets our solution correctly configured the first time.

• 3 Essential Sublime Text Plugins for Node & JavaScript Developers (Scott Smith) - Great! Life is so beautiful when we have the right tools.

• Inception-Style Nested Data Formats (Scott Hanselman) - What seem to be a good solution at one point could put you in a big problem tomorrow. This post explains one possible cause.

• WordPress -> Ghost -> Harp (Remy Sharp) - Great post about customizing a Harp blog (node.js).

• **The Ajax Control Toolkit are now maintained by DevExpress - Good news for a very nice library.

• Visualizing Security Information with Fiddler (Eric Lawrence) - This post explains how to customize the view in Fiddler to see security information.

• I was wrong about AngularJS - In this post, the author explains why after a difficult start, he now prefers AngularJS to BackBone.

• Implement Step-by-Step Generic Repository Pattern in C# - Nice post to know more about howto implent this important pattern.

Database

• Azure SQL Database Point in Time Restore (Tony Petrossian) - Nice post to know more about Azure SQL database backup.
  
• Let's play with Azure SQL Database backup and the Point in Time Restore (Frank Boucher) - A simple post to demistify the new Backup/Restore service in Windows Azure. ;)

Miscellaneous

• The most marketable skill in the job market: communication! - Nice advice for all new people on the market.

• Markdown Style Guide - This post gives some simple tips to keep our Markdown document easy to read when not converted.

• Announcing Windows 10 (Terry Myerson) - Great news about features in the next Windows...

• Windows 10: First Impressions - Get some idea of how it feels..
• How to create a Virtual Machine for run Windows 10 Technical Preview (Sara Silva) - This post is perfect if you want to try by yourself the new Windows 10, it will guides you to be all set.

~Frank

Let's play with Azure SQL Database backup and the Point in Time Restore

Did you know that you can have: a full database backup once a week, a differential database backups once a day, and a transaction log backups every 5 minutes of your Azure SQL Database? Did you know that all this is done automatically when you are using the new Azure SQL Basic, Standard or Premier service tiers? Even more, you will have access to the Point in Time Restore self-service. In this post, I will show how to "configure" the database to get the automatic backups, and how to do a restore.

Setup the automatic backup

If you are like me, your Azure SQL Databases are set to Web or Business edition.  The first thing to do will be to change that. You will need to do it anyway since the Web and Business service tiers will be retired in September 2015[1].  That the only required since backup service are built-in the Basic, Standard and Premium tiers.

For the demo purpose, I will use the Basic tier. To change the tier of the database, go on the Azure Portal. In the left panel click on the SQL Databases et select the database that you want to update (ie: FrankDemo). Once the right section is updated, select the Scale tab and change the Service Tiers for: Basic.



Now, if you return in the Dashboard tab, a new option will be available.



Your database now has built-in backups to support self-service Point in Time Restore and Geo-Restore. Azure SQL Database automatically creates backups using the following schedule:

• Full database backup once a week
• differential database backups once a day
• transaction log backups every 5 minutes.

The full and differential backups are replicated across regions.

The retention period will vary between 7 and 35 days base on the selected tiers.[2]

Restore an Azure SQL Database

Restoring a database is really easy. Remember that new button at the bottom of the screen, it's now time to click on it.

This will bring the settings options. It's now time to type the name of your restored database. Note that you must use a different name than the original.  It's always a good practice to double-check that you are pointing on the good database on the correct server. Pick a restore point using the slider or by filling the date and time fields. When you are done click the button. The portal will let you know that the restore is successfully completed by a notification.




I hope that this post shows you how easy it is to use the backup/restore with Azure SQL Database. Thank you for ready, Any comments, suggestions and/or questions are welcome.



[1]: Web and Business service tiers will be retired in September 2015, more
details on the Windows Azure site.
[2]: Detail about the retention period on Azure SQL Database Backup and Restore



~ Frank Boucher

Reading Notes #156

Suggestion of the week

• Your Azure website CPU is going nuts and it’s not your fault (Troy Hunt) - This post tells us about a troubleshoot on Azure when looking for the casu of CPU spikes.

Cloud

• Enabling Hybrid Scenarios on Microsoft Azure (haishibai.blogspot.ca) - Nice post that presents five hybrid cloud scenarios with Azure.
  
• #Azure Talk - Working with Microsoft Azure Resources - Useful post that compares many different tools that manage Azure resources.
  
• Azure Websites for the Enterprise with Virtual Networks - Nice quick tutorial about connecting an Azure website with an un-premises computer.
  
• Mostly Cloudy – Sept 19th, 2014 - This post introduces some nice opensource project and reminds us to update our OS Familly in Azure.
  
• How I used Azure Mobile Services in my Unity game (Mickey MacDonald) - This post shows us some of the options available to simplify our life when we want to use Azure Mobile Service in our mobile apps.
  
• Soup to Nuts: From Raw Hardware to Cloud-Enabled Device - Excellent article that gives very exiting Raspberry Pi project that uses Azure Services.

Programming

• Choosing a JavaScript Framework with Craig McKeachie - Really interesting episode talking on key features to pick a Javascript framework, base on our projects or code that you like .
  
• Jump-Location - A Change Directory (CD) PowerShell Command that reads your mind (Scott Hanselman) - Great little tools to have.
  
• Towards a better console - PSReadLine for PowerShell command line editing (Scott Hanselman) - Two really nice PowerShell tools in one post.
  
• Web API Documentation Tools -- Visual Studio Magazine (Terrence Dorsey) - Many great tools to generate API documentation.

Miscellaneous

• **Scaled Agile Framework: Using TFS to support epics, release trains, and multiple backlogs whitepaper (Gregg Boer) - This post introduces us to an interesting whitepaper.

~Frank

Reading Notes #155

Suggestion of the week

• Azure: SQL Databases, API Management, Media Services, Websites, Role Based Access Control and More - Amazing new features that j4ust arrives in Azure!

• TIP: Lazy Code Snippets in Visual Studio (Jonathan Rozenblit) - OMG this post just makes my day!

Cloud

• How Azure Mobile Services enable your Cloud First Mobile First World (AdarshaDatta) - Nice post to get started on Azure Mobile Services.

• Automating Integration Testing with Microsoft Azure - Great post that explains how to use Web Plaform Installer to leverage our unit tests.

• How to host a ClickOnce deployment in Azure Blob Storage - This post is a nice crossover with ClicOnce and Azure, it's explained how to prepare our deployment to do it.

• Troy Hunt: 10 things I learned about rapidly scaling websites with Azure (Troy Hunt) - Another great post about scaling in Azure; how much it cost, how to manage it, etc....

Programming

• 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.

• Revisiting - how to make your EF queries testable (tilovell09) - Interesting post about testing our EF query.

• Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages (Maarten Balliauw) - Who never needed to fight to include an unsigned DLL to a project?! Here is nice to that will help to do it.

• 5 skills every programmer needs in 2014 - This post is a good place to start if we are looking to learn a new language.

• Git: It’s Just Data! - This post shows us Git from a database point of view. Julie also gives really good reference for tool and book.

• Choosing a JavaScript Framework with Craig McKeachie - Really interesting episode talking on key features of your projects or code that you like to pick a Javascript framework.

Databes

• What is new in RavenDB 3.0: Client side (Ayende Rahien) - This post explains the major improuvment the the last RavenDB release.

Miscellaneous

• Upgrade to BlogEngine.NET 3.1 (rtur.net) - Time to upgrade your blog engine.

• Lineup of Windows books and ebooks (Kim Spilker) - Nice windows books list.

• How do you deal with anxiety when Live Coding in Technical Interviews? (Scott Hanselman) - Nice tips, a post to share.

• Authoring Markdown - What, Why, How - Interesting post to introduce markdown.

~Frank

Setup an automatic deployment on Azure with Dropbox in 5 minutes

(this post is also available in French)

This post is about creating an automatic deployment that could be used by everyone. I picked Dropbox as source control because today mostly everyone got is account. If you need one, feel free to use this invite it will gives you 500 MB of bonus space for free!

Step 1: Configure the automatic deployment

To configure the deployment, connect to the Azure management portal. Although the new portal is my favourite to manage and visualize information on websites, as I write this post the features needed for the Dropbox deployment were not yet available. We must connect to "old" portal and select the Web site. You a website is not already created you can add one using the quick create.
After selecting the site, you need to click on the option: Set the deployment from source control, which is located at the bottom right of the dashboard code.




From the dropdown list, choose Dropbox and click the arrow. Microsoft Azure deployment will now aks you to have to access on a directory in your Dropbox account.

Step 2: Publish Web Site

From your computer, access Dropbox. If you left the default settings, the directory should be under Apps / Azure / [dirname]. You can now copy the code, images and all other files that you need. After synchronization with DroxBox completed (the small green checks everywhere) you can return to Azure portal.

It is now time to deploy. To do this you need to click Sync.




Once completed you'll get a message informing you that the deployment is done. You can now check the log to see the deployment steps in detail if you wish.



The new version of your website is now available!

Conclusion

Deploy a blog, a static business site, a family owned site with Dropbox is so simple! It`s even better than the good old FTP, if something goes wrong, you can redeploy by one click.

References

• Microsoft Azure Website
• DropBox

~Frank

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

Reading Notes #151

Suggestion of the week

• How I’ve started loving PowerShell (Fabien Dibot) - This nice post is a real pep-talk. And gives references for more information about PowerShell.
  
• MSDN magazine brings you a wealth of practical info about Azure Websites (Erez Benari) - Here why we soundn't miss the July's MSDN Magazine if we are interested to cloud computing...
  
• Automating Integration Testing with Microsoft Azure - This post gives a lot of detail on how a test environment could e build in Azure, iteration by iteration. Really interesting.

Cloud

• Introducing Azure Web Sites Services - This post describes an overview of the current Microft Azure Website situation.
  
• Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure - This book fantastic, and fill with important pattern and best practices. Even more because it's a free book!
  
• Desktop in the cloud: synchronize user logon and log off with Microsoft Azure - Interesting trick to get one step further in automating the Azure VM start stop process. Simple but cleaver.
  
• Azure Mobile Services .NET Updates (Henrik Frystyk Nielsen) - Great new update in the azure services, learn more here.
  
• Architect for the Cloud Using Azure Web Sites - That the article we need to read before doing our website on Azure. From A to Z, everything is explained to plan exactly what we need.
  
• Hybrid Connectivity: Connecting Azure Web Sites to LOB Apps Using PortBridge - Excellent deep-dive post / tutorial about a connection on a premise to the cloud.
  
• Azure Storage Explorer Preview 3 Now Available: Queue Support, Blob and Table Enhancements (David Pallmann) - Very happy about these new features.

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: MarkdownLog makes log files much prettier - I like markdown I found it very easy to read or edit on any platforms or devices. This package could be very useful.
  
• ASP.NET MVC 6: New HttpContext - Interesting post that talks about what is coming next in the MVC framework.
  
• Kendo UI Grid Custom Columns: How to Show a List of Links (Rachel Hagerman) - Nice tutorial for my co-worker that are on a project where Kendo grid is really present...;)
  
• Tips for Best Practices in WordPress Development - Tuts+ Code Article (Damian Logghe) - This post explains the best practices to follow when "playing" with WordPress. It's true that some info are available on the WordPress website, but here is a little "je ne sais quoi" that make it very clear.
  
• Migrating from Subversion to Git with svn2git on Windows (the tricky bits explained) (Troy Hunt) - Useful walkthrough.

UX

• Hey Developers - is it UI, UX, UI/UX or Something - Very interesting post that explains things clearly.

Miscellaneous

• The Experience Paradox -How to Get a Job Without Experience (simpleprogrammer.com) - Great post that can help junior developers to get started, or even the not so young to continue...
  
• How to create a file with a . dot prefix in Windows Explorer - Nice tip!
  
• Surface Pro 3 - Initial Impressions - Really good review of the Surface 3 from a user / tech guy point of view.

~Frank

Reading Notes #150

 

Suggestion of the week

• How I’ve started loving PowerShell (Fabien Dibot) - This nice post is a real pep-talk. It also gives references for more information about PowerShell.

Cloud

• Using Reserved IP Addresses with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines - Nice PowerShell scripts and comments to help us with our Azure fixed IP.
  
• Getting Acquainted with #Azure Service Bus Event Hubs - This nice post describes the event bus of Azure, when more muscles are needed.
  
• Affinity Groups in Azure - Nice post that clarifies the purpose of the affinity group.
  
• Integrating Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services with Salesforce.com - Really nice tutorial that explains how to send a message to a SaaS in Microsoft Azure.
  
• Azure Databases - Restore Local Database To Azure - This post describes a quick and easy way to copy our database to the cloud when we have a simple database.
  
• AWS Wants to Attract Mobile Developers with New Services (Saroj Kar) - Nice new tools from Amazon.

Programming

• Why you need to use Bower - If you are hesitating about if you should or not try Bower, this post will pin down the nail.
  
• Image Sprites made easy with Web Essentials (Josh Eastburn) - If you thought that using sprite was too complicated for the benefit you could have, this post will show you how effortless it is today.
  
• New Compiler and Moving to GitHub - Interesting improvement about the compiler, looking forward to try those new features... And time to add GitHub followed projects to add Typescript.
  
• Git to TFS Migration Experiment: Part 1 - Get all the tools you need to move. Part 2, Part 3 - Last post of the series, focuses on the troubleshooting...
  
• Day 28: Doing More Interesting Things With Buttons (james.chambers) - Nice tricks to get an amazing dropdown control.
  
• Day 30: Loading Bootstrap Modal Content via AJAX (james.chambers) - "The season finally" of a great series about Asp.Net MVC bootstrap. If you didn't have read it already go for it.
  
• How to fake session object / HttpContext for integration tests - Useful tips to get better or more complete integration tests.
  
• Visual Studio Online updates include enabling Azure Active Directory support and self-service account deletion - Nice update.

Integration

• Troubleshooting the WCF-Custom adapter - Typed-Polling with dynamic SQL & empty result sets - Great post that gives a lot of little tips so next time we don't get stock.

Miscellaneous

• Don’t Let Your Head Attack Your Heart - Interesting thoughts about how leadership is closer to us and our feelings.
  
• Just Let Me Code! (Andrew Binstock) - Interesting share about the evolution of coding and the impact on the developers.

Reading Notes #149

Cloud

• Using the Internal Load-Balancer with Azure Virtual Machines - Fantastic post that explains how we can use the internal load balancer in Azure. Even the PowerShell scripts are included.
  
• Using Reserved IP Addresses with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines - Nice PowerShell scripts and comments to help us with our Azure fixed IP.

Programming

• Free eBook on Model View View Model design pattern (Surf4Fun) - MVVM is a very useful pattern, so a free e-book on he topic is a good news!
  
• Unusual Ways of Boosting Up App Performance. Boxing and Collections - Interesting post that explains how to find and fix different memory issue in our application.

Miscellaneous

• How To Come up with Great Ideas for Blog Posts, Every Single Time - Good advice to fight the white page situation.

Reading Notes #148

Suggestion of the week

• Scaling a standard Azure website to 380k queries per minute of 163M records with loader.io (Troy Hunt) - Amazing post that shows and explains scaling tests over huge spike. It's a long post but the read worth the time.

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity (dabbling in Java code) (Maarten Balliauw) - Very promising teamcity plug in with Azure. Early tester requested...
  
• Azure Hybrid Connections (Tyler Doerksen) - Nice quick post about the new hybrid connection and what opens to.
  
• NodeJs, Azure and IIS (Ugo Lattanzi) - This post shares a very simple solution to a problem.

Programming

• ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory (Ken Kilty) - Interesting introduction to a new feature that come with SQL Server 2014.
  
• Day 14: Bootstrap Alerts and MVC Framework TempData (James Chambers) - Really interesting wait to manage alerts in a Asp.Net MVC project. I like it. Day 18: Customizing and Rendering Bootstrap Badges - This post introduces quickly the bundle to manage our css files. Day 19: Long-Running Notifications Using Badges and Entity Framework Code First - This post introduces the mvvm pattern and the EF migration capability. Day 20: An ActionFilter to Inject Notifications This post explains how to create actionFilter: a powerful tool.
  
• Various strategies to initialize Database in Entity Framework (Sourav Kayal) - Nice post that explains the four options to initialize our database with EF.
  
• Visualizing Nuget packages dependencies without Visual Studio Ultimate (Pascal Laurin) - Great work! If you don't have the Visual Studio Ultimate edition, this post is for you. Discover a useful tool to see dependencies and how this tool was built.
  
• How to Deal with Slow Unit Tests with Visual Studio Test Runner - Interesting tips to be sure that a maximum of tests are executed as often as possible.
  
• The Repository Pattern in ASP.NET – Part 1 - Nice videos that explains a useful pattern in the .Net framework.

Miscellaneous

• Try.Fail.Learn.Improve (Steve Rowe) - Interesting thoughts about how we should approached life or any challenge.
  
• On Programmers Productivity (Patrick Smacchia) - Interesting sharing of positive productivity practices.

Quick Tips:How to save money with your VM

(This post was originally published on Matricis Blog)
(Version anglaise de: Astuces rapides pour économiser avec les machines virtuelles Windows Azure)

At the office, we use a lot of virtual machines for our development and tests. It's really useful to be able to pop any number of VM in just few minutes and dispose of them once the job is completed. However, sometimes we need them for a long period, wouldn't it be great if we could save money? In this post, I will show you how you can achieve that.

Tip #1

The first tip is to shut down the VM when you don't need them. Why should you pay for it 24/7 if you only use them from 9 to 5, five days a week?! The common way to do it is by log-in into the Windows Azure management portal and to go in the virtual machine list. Select one by one the VM you want to close and click the shutdown button in the center of the bottom screen.
If you have many VMs, this task could become very boring. A PowerShell script is the perfect tool for that. Here are two scripts to start of stop one virtual machine.

Script to start the VM

#Full path of the publish Setting file downloaded from Azure.
$NameOfSettingFile = ".\MySettings.publishsettings"

# The name of the machine to get started
$VMName = "dev2"

# Azure Subscription Name
$SubscriptionName = "Frank Dev"

cls

if(!(Test-Path $NameOfSettingFile)){
    echo "Download the Publishing Setting files, and re-run the script."
    Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile
    exit
}

Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile  $NameOfSettingFile

Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName

Write-Host "Starting the VM $VMName" -ForegroundColor Cyan
Start-AzureVM -Name $VMName -ServiceName $VMName

do{
    Start-Sleep –Seconds 2
    $vmInfo = Get-AzureVM -ServiceName $VMName -Name $VMName
    $vmStatus = $vmInfo.InstanceStatus
    Write-Host "The VM $VMName is still $vmStatus..."
}
while($vmStatus -ne "ReadyRole")

Write-Host "The VM $VMName is now accessible by Remote Connection." -ForegroundColor Green

read-host "Press enter key to close"

Script to stop the VM

#Full path of the publish Setting file downloaded from Azure.
$NameOfSettingFile = ".\MySettings.publishsettings"

# The name of the machine to get started
$VMName = "dev2"

# Azure Subscription Name
$SubscriptionName = "Frank Dev"

cls

if(!(Test-Path $NameOfSettingFile)){
    echo "Download the Publishing Setting files, and re-run the script."
    Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile
    exit
}

Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile  $NameOfSettingFile

Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName

Write-Host "Stop the VM $VMName" -ForegroundColor Cyan
Stop-AzureVM -Name $VMName -ServiceName $VMName -Force

Write-Host "The VM $VMName is now shuting down." -ForegroundColor Green
read-host "Press enter key to close"

Tip #2

The second tip could be applied only on VM that don't need to scale or to be under a load balancer. A developer's machine is the perfect case for that. We need to change the tier of the VM. That a new feature since (put the date of the release here), so all your VM should be presently to standard.



We need to change the tier for basic. With this change apply the Billing rate will change. You could go on the pricing page to see more detail, but to give you an idea on a large VM this represent 40$. Interested? Here's how to change this setting. First, if you are not already, connect to the Windows Azure management portal. Then in the list of the virtual machine select the VM you want to change. Click on the Setting tab then change the tier. If the VM is running it will need a reboot, so save any work before.

I hope this quick tips could help you. Let me know if you have other idea and I will add them.


~Frank

Reading Notes #147

Suggestion of the week

• What happened to Code Spaces could happen to you. On Amazon, Azure and any host out there. (Maarten Balliauw) - Great post that highlight today's security concerns and responsibilities.
  
• Day 12: Implement Search Using Inline Forms and AJAX (James Chambers) - Great tutorial to build a Ajax control in an Asp.Net MVC context.
  

Cloud

• Deploying WordPress on Azure and using MySQL in a VM (Chris) - Nice post where the author tells us his journey when he was looking for a new blog engine and how effortless it was to get it online.
  
• Microsoft #Azure – Where Should I Start? - This post is a great starting point for anyone looking for good references: books, e-books, podcast, websites, etc.
  

Programming

• NuGet Package of the Week: ASP.NET Web API Caching with CacheCow and CacheOutput (Scoot Hanselman) - Useful Nuget package to manage the cache.
  
• Day 8: Semi-Automatic Bootstrap – Editor Templates (James Chambers) - Nice post. simple and efficient. Day 10: HtmlHelper Extension Methods - Nice tutorial on how to create a Html Helper using Gravatar as context.
  
• CodeLens for Git improvements in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Update 3 RC (Real McCoy, Peter Jean-Marc Prieur) - Really amazing add-ons this CodeLens. I hope the next project I will work on will be on Git so I can try it. ;)
  
• ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory (Ken Kilty) - Interesting introduction to a new feature that come with SQL Server 2014.
  

Miscellaneous

• Creating custom data graphics in Visio (Visio Team) - Nice tutorial that explains how to improve our diagrams very easily.

~Frank

Reading Notes #146

Suggestion of the week

• Day 2: Examining the Solution Structure (James Chambers) - Mandatory post to any new (or less new) web developers, learn what's in an MVC project.

Cloud

• Trying Redis Caching as a Service on Windows Azure (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains how easy it is to use Redis cache everywhere.
  
• ASP.NET Scalability: the Good, the Bad and the Hype (Dino Esposito) - Excellent post that explains everything we should know about the famous buzz word scaling.

Programming

• Day 0: Bootstrapping Mvc for the Next 30 Days (James Chambers) - Very promising series. Day 1, Day 3 , Day 4 , Day 5, Day 6
  
• Adventures in Custom Testing Infrastructure - This is an interesting post about building a unit test tool.
  
• Glimpse 1.8.6 released (Anthony van der Hoorn) - Nice update for glimpse.
  
• How to Automate IIS 7 Configuration with .NET -- Visual Studio Magazine (Patrick Steele) - This post is a incredibly well done tutorial that explains how to create a tool to automate configurations, exploiting the capabilities of the library Microsoft.Web.Administration.

Architecture

• The Onion & The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ (The Open Group Blog) - This post expains the analogy between an onion and a business process and is limits.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Tough Questions You Should Ask Your Team Today BY Paul B. Brown  @FromPaulBBrown (Paul B. Brown) - Really interesting thoughs about how to make your company evolve.
  
• Sometimes Clothes Make the Presentation BY Steve Cody  @RepManCody (Steve Cody) - Interesting point of view about cloths...

~Frank

Reading Notes #145

Suggestion of the week

• Thinking About Strings, Quotes, Tokens, And Tildes In Less CSS - Less CSS seams really interesting. Next web projects, I seriously think use it.

Cloud

• Lessons Learned – On #Azure, Log Everything!s (Alexandre Briseboi) - Great post about how we should use the Event Trace Windows (ETW) to do our logs.
• Using Time-based Partition Keys in #Azure Table Storage (Alexandre Briseboi) - Nice tips about how saving our logs in Azure.
• How to get notifications from a Windows Azure website - Wow, this is truly amazing and really easy to do.

Programming

• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.
• PowerShell Tools - v0.8.0 - Now with REPL! - Time to get or update this great add-ons in our Visual Studio.
• Thinktecture.IdentityManager as a replacement for the ASP.NET WebSite Administration tool (Scott Hanselman) - This post introduces a great project to manage our memberships in our Asp.Net projects through a nice interface.

Mobile

• Windows First: A New Strategy for Mobile Development and Beyond - Programming multi platform application is becoming much easier. This post explains some of your options.

Architecture

• The Open Group Open Platform 3.0™ Starts to Take Shape (The Open Group Blog) - This post talks about an interesting white paper. What’s good in it and why we should read it. This new 3.0 platform look very promising.

Miscellaneous

• How to use an Xbox One controller on your Windows PC (Scott Hanselman) - Really.?! That simple? That’s great!
• Windows Live Writer going Open Source? - This post explains why our help is needed in order to give a future to Windows Live Writer.

Reading Notes #144

 

Programming

• Automate Backups using PowerShell  - Great post that explains how to do backups, but also shows how powerful is PS scripts.
  
• How To Simplify Asynchronous Programming with Await and Async – Visual Studio Magazine (Peter Vogel) - Good tutorial that explains clearly how to use Async in a Windows Form context.
  
• How to connect your Windows Phone 8 & 8.1 app to Yammer - Nice short tutorial to learn how connect Windows Phone (wp) apps to Yammer.

Miscellaneous

• Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 8.1 (Scott Hanselman) - Useful post to refresh our memory. I mean the memory in our head… and gain disk space in your PC.
  
• Introducing OneNote Clipper for Chrome and Springpad to OneNote migration tool (blogs.office.com) - Since a year now, I’m a big user of OneNote. Why only one year? Because, I never try it before. Since I started, I just use it more and more… I’m really happy about the new chrome extension.

Reading Notes #143

Cloud

• Microsoft Azure and Open Source Power Grid Computing - A nice article about an integration solution using JavaScript (with different components) and the cloud.
• How do you build features on #Azure? - Nice post that describes a real job situation and a really good team spirit.
• AppVeyor - A good continuous integration system is a joy to behold - (Scott Hanselman) - Wonderful post that gives us a taste of what VenyorApp is capable of.

Programming

• Managing NuGet packages dependencies with the Package Visualizer tool (Pascal Laurin) - Wow what a useful tool. I just have a very painful moment upgrading an application. Using this tool could have saved me a lot of troubles. Looking forward to see the other tools that his talking about.
• Comparing LINQ with Stored Procedure - Quick tips to help us to decide if we pick linq or sproc when starting a new project.

Miscellaneous

• What fuels your development efforts? - Hey, it looks like you just level up brother and got +1 of wisdom…

Note: Less reading this week, I spent some time re-installing my PC. Thanks to boxstarter.org, part of it was really easy.

~Frank

Reading Notes #142

Suggestion of the week

• How To Refactor for Dependency Injection -- Visual Studio Magazine (Ondrej Balas) - I really liked this post. Seriously, I'll be referring to it each time someone will be asking why we should use IoC.

Programming

• Web Performance Optimization is Simple - Can Your Developers Execute? (love2dev.com) - Nice post that explained why knowing more than a hello word is important.
  
• Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 - Ah. Great.
  
• The Magic of using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET 4.5 plus an important gotcha (Scott Hanselman) - This post explains very clearly how we should do our async call in a web app.
  
• Using Asynchronous Methods in ASP.NET MVC 4 - Great tutorial that covers everything we need to know about async in a web application context.
  
• Test Plan and Test Suite Customization with TFS2013 Update3 (Manoj Bableshwar) - Visual studio is already to update 3! This post shows one of the new feature that was the most requested by users.
  
• Becoming SOLID in C# - Really interesting article that encoureage us to know more about SOLID principles in C#.
  
• Change Risk Anti-Patterns & Code Complexity - This post explains an interesting method to calculate the risk of your code when facing changes.

Mobile

• Xamarin.Forms - Write Once, Run Everywhere, AND Be Native? (Scott Hanselman) - Very interesting post that proved how amazing Xamarin is becoming.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today - A really interesting article that explains an concept in a simple way.
  
• Waterfall to Agile (Andy Watson, B. Clay Shannon JD Meier) - I likethis post because it shows strong images to explains the difference between waterfall and agile.
  
• Self-Improvement In Agile Teams - Interesting post about how we should think when we feel to do something more, in an agile team.

Reading Notes #141

Suggestion of the week

• Moving to Microsoft Azure (Filip Ekberg) - Another story about a blog migration on Azure. It's always interesting to learn what kind of trouble the people got while doing that.

Cloud

• Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler (Maarten Balliauw ) - Not only this post explains how to optimize our calls to blob storage, but it means that MyGet is a lot faster!
  
• Visual Studio Online Update – May 20th (Brian Harry MS) - Heads up about the last update on Visual Studio Online and what's coming next. BTW try it's very nice.
  
• Puppet Module Updates to Better Manage Microsoft Azure Resources (Ross Gardler) - Quick post that introduced a new featured of Azure that look incredibly powerful.

Programming

• All ASP.NET MVC Forms Need To Include Html.AntiForgeryToken() For Security (Peter Kellner) - This post is a nice quick explanation of an important security feature in Asp.net Mvc.
  
• From Requirements to Deployment: The Modern SW Developer using TFS (Tom Walker Jonathan Rozenblit) - Nice video.
  
• Bloggers: Know when to use a JPG and when to use a PNG and always Squish them both (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - This post contains useful tools to compress the images inside your posts, and some nice tips for the format selection.
  
• NuGet Package of the Week: ImageProcessor - lightweight image manipulation in C# (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - Another useful tool library to edit our images in our code.
  
• Setting up an Internal PowerShellGet Repository (Kris Bash, Roman Kuzmin, Peter Kriegel) - This post introduced a nuget for PowerShell packages, and how to install our private repository. Nice!
  
• The Future of .NET on the Server: ASP.NET vNext content and videos from TechEd 2014 (hanselman.com) (Scott Hanselman) - This post suggested to two videos presented at TechEd about vNext. If you are curious about what is coming next in .Net world it's a must.
  
• Indigo Studio from a Developer Perspective - I was also skeptical, the first-time someone talked me about Indigo. However, the best way to make your idea about something is to try it...

Mobile

• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone–Adding Assertions (Lori Lalonde) - This post is the third of a great series on how to test the UI of a phone application.

Miscellaneous

• 5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today - Really interesting article that explains important concepts in a simple way to understand.

Reading Notes #140

 

Suggestion of the week

• Azure: VM Security Extensions, ExpressRoute GA, Reserved IPs, Internal Load Balancing, Multi Site-to-Site VPNs, Storage Import/Export GA, New SMB File Service, API Management, Hybrid Connection Service, Redis Cache, Remote Apps and more… (Scott Guthrie) - So many new great features that were expected since a long time.

 

Cloud

• Virtual Machines Best Practices: Single VMs, Temporary Storage and Uploaded Disks (Drew McDaniel) - Nice tips to improve vm’s users experience.
  
• Using OneNote API to count degustated beers - This short post describes a real and interesting project using OneNote, and how easy it looks!

Programming

• Tips to improve Entity Framework Performance (rahulgbhatia) - This post gives nice and simple tips to optimize our Linq to entities queries.
  
• Performance Considerations for EF5 - If you are doing or planning to do a project with Entity Framework, this white paper really worth the reading.

~Frank

Reading Notes #139

Suggestion of the week

• Refactoring your CSS with LESS in Visual Studio Web Essentials (David Paquette) - Web essentials is really essential! This post explains how easy it is to manage our CSS files with LESS.

Cloud

• Simple Web Site Backup retention policy with WebJobs (Eduardo Laureano) - That’s a really nice tutorial that explains how to use Azure webjobs.
• Basic Tier Virtual Machines (Kenai Kwa) - It’s time to save money. We need to change the type of our VM to be basic for all Azure VMs that don’t need load balancer or scalability.
• IIS Reset on Windows Azure Web Role (Value Maker) - Safe yourself sometimes and gray hair by reading this post before you got to do IISReset on an Azure VM…
• Cloud Power: How to scale Azure Websites globally with Traffic Manager (Scott Hanselman) - Great example of scaling a website with Azure.
• Managing your Azure Storage account with Zudio - This post introduces a very intuitive tool for when we want a quick and simple view of our stuff.

Programming

• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone - Part 1 (Lori Lalonde) - This post lists the prerequisites required to do a UI unit test that will be explains in a future post.
• What should I be looking for during Code Reviews? - Very interesting post that gives us a good idea of what we should think about when doing a code review.
• ASP.NET MVC Helper - MoreLessText (James Curran) - That’s a nice HTML helper simple and efficient, like all the best are.

Mobile

• Build Some Ears on Your App and then Listen! (Mark B Schramm) - This post lists the best practices about how we should take care of our apps once they are live.

Miscellaneous

• SonicAgile Now with Dropbox Integration - Nice new add-on to this great management tool.
• FREE Pluralsight video: “Get Involved” in community! (Scott Hanselman) - Excellent video that will help you to get started. You don’t have any excuse anymore since it’s free!
• VM Image PowerShell ‘How To’ Blog Post (Christine Avanessians) - Really useful post that gives a lot of code snipets with the explication on what they do. A must.

~Frank