Reading Notes 2013-02-25

Cloud

• Creating a Game for the Windows Store (Tyler Doerksen) – Great tutorial that explains how to write your first Windows store application.
• Publishing ASP.NET Web Sites to “Windows Azure Web Sites” Service – Quick overview of the new publish Web Site feature in Visual Studio.
• Global Windows Azure Bootcamp – april 27th (Maarten Balliauw)- Yeah! Are you free on April 27th??
• Want Better Personal Video? Think Underwater Tech And Free Cloud Storage (Michael Chang) – Interesting thoughts about today’s cloud business reality and the future of cloud platform applications.
• Announcing New AWS CloudFormation Deployment Enhancements – Major announcement from Amazon who is directly competing with Windows Azure PaaS.
• Microsoft DevRadio: (Part 11) Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil – Worker Roles (Jim O’Neil) – Nice short video that explains what is a worker role and his purpose.
• Amazon releases beta of application management solution called OpsWorks (Kenneth van Surksum) – Another post about the new AWS service OpsWork.
• Learn Windows Azure Cloud Services from Beginning: a Mini Online Course (Haishi) – Nice series of videos to get started with Windows Azure.
• Improving Windows Azure Table Storage query performance (Ki Yi) – Quick post about best practices regarding querying Azure table storage.
• What's New? – Another release of AWS services this week; this one is about CloudFormation: a tool to enhance automatic task on EC2 instance to reduce the downtime when those tasks are to be executed.
• Windows Azure IaaS Cmdlets Source Code is Now Available (Michael Washam) – Great! Really good code sample that implements a lot of functionality.
• Windows Azure Virtual Machine and Virtual Hard Disk Management Tool – Can save you Money! (Stephen W. Thomas) – Wow, that's a great tool! This post tells you were to find this application, its features and how to use it. Good job. 

Programming

• Why I Write Tests (Jason Whaley) – If you don't understand the advantages of working in TDD, or if you don't know what's the utility of those unit Tests, this post is for you.
• Getting Busy at Script Junkie (Michael Desmond) – Quick review of what has been done since the site has been moved "under" MSDN.
• Windows Store Apps: A Guide for WPF and Silverlight Developers, Part 1 – Nice post that explains the technical particularities and new concept of the "new" Windows RT platform.
• Using Markdown in Sublime Text 2 on Windows – It's nice to see that other people are playing around with these tools too.
• You're just another carriage return line feed in the wall (Scott Hanselman) – This post talks about the issue with carriage return and line feed in merge tool… like github.
• Get Rolling With The Readability API (Richard Ziade) – Nice update for the developper's community. 
• Has the term "big data" completely lost meaning yet? – Thoughts about the Big Data buzz word.
• SQL SERVER – Shortcut to SELECT only 1 Row from Table – Good idea, I never think of that! So simple. 

Miscellaneous

• Teach your kids to be fans (Scott Hanselman) – Good lesson. Today, it's simple to publish hard critics about anything… It's as easy as to congratulate someone. So do it! 

These posts are from François Boucher and are also posted on http://www.frankysnotes.com/2013/02/reading-notes-83.html.