Last Week

Last Week is a weekly column with an emphasis in articles and posts that I read and appreciated, it is a collection from a dozen of different sources. All the content shared is made by people which I believe that would highly appreciate your feedback, so don't forget to say thank you.

If you have a topic you would like to see reflected in this Last Week initiative, please leave a comment below!

Have an amazing week and always keep learning!

Azure

Observability from cloud to edge in Azure

Alert processing rules (formerly action rules) provide post-processing capabilities for fired alerts in Azure Monitor, such as scheduled suppression and at-scale actions management. Following the updated public preview from December 2021, this feature is now generally available. 

Check out the full article: Observability from cloud to edge in Azure

Guidance for Architecting Mission Critical Apps on Azure

Microsoft Azure makes it easy to deploy and manage cloud solutions. However, building mission-critical solutions that are always available and operational remains a challenge that requires extensive platform knowledge and engineering rigor to overcome.

“Tell us what good looks like” is therefore a common request, with organizations seeking opinionated guidance and reference deployments to establish technical confidence and accelerate moving their mission-critical workloads to the Microsoft Cloud.

With this in mind, we have developed an opensource project, which we are pleased to announce is now publicly available on GitHub as a preview.

Check out the full article: Guidance for Architecting Mission Critical Apps on Azure

Training a ML.NET Model with Azure ML

Model Builder makes it easy to get started with Machine Learning and create your first model. As you gather more data over time, you may want to continuously refine or retrain your model. Using a combination of CLI and Azure tooling, you can train a new ML.NET model and integrate the training into a pipeline. This blog post shows an example of a training pipeline that can be easily rerun using Azure.

Check out the full article: Training a ML.NET Model with Azure ML

General availability: Asset certification in Azure Purview data catalog

As an Azure Purview data catalog grows in size, it becomes important for data consumers to understand what assets they can trust. Data consumers must know if an asset meet their organization's quality standards and can be regarded as reliable. Azure Purview allows data stewards to manually endorse assets to indicate that they're ready to use across an organization or business unit. 

Check out the full article: Asset certification in Azure Purview data catalog

Generally available: Updated navigation menu in Azure IoT Central

This update brings an improvement to the information architecture of Azure IoT Central to help you more easily navigate around the UI and find product capabilities. The navigation menu has been improved by re-ordering, re-grouping, and re-naming pages. 

Check out the full article: Updated navigation menu in Azure IoT Central

Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Days: March Dates

Get training to help you better understand the cloud and perfect your skills at Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Fundamentals. Join us for this free virtual event covering cloud computing concepts, models, and services, from public to private to hybrid cloud. You’ll also learn the basics of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Prepare to take full advantage of the key Azure pillars of security, privacy, compliance, and trust. After completing this training, you’ll be eligible to take the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification exam at no cost.

Check out the schedule: Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Days

dotnet / C#

Interactive Notebooks with C#

.NET 6  and C#10 are here, Visual Studio Code is a nice environment for editing your code, and you can even edit your code in  the web. And a new feature has appeared to document your code: .NET Interactive. With it, you can create interactive notebooks and create interactive pieces of code, where you can share and try sample code.

Check out the full article: Interactive Notebooks with C#

.NET <3 GitHub Actions: Intro to GitHub Actions for .NET

Developers that use GitHub for managing their git repositories have a powerful continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) feature with the help of GitHub Actions. A common developer scenario is when developers propose changes to the default branch (typically main) of a GitHub repository. These changes, while often scrutinized by reviewers, can have automated checks to ensure that the code compiles and tests pass.

Check out the full article: Intro to GitHub Actions for .NET

Early peek at C# 11 features

We love designing and developing in the open! You can find proposals for future C# features and notes from language design meetings in the CSharpLang repo. The main page explains our design process and you can listen to Mads Torgersen on the .NET Community Runtime and Languages Standup where he talks about the design process.

Check out the full article: Early peek at C# 11 features

Parameter Null Checking in C# 11 and the ThrowHelper pattern

Throwing exceptions in C# seems straightforward enough. You check for a certain situation and throw if it is an exceptional situation. However, just by having the code that throws an exception in your method can be inefficient, even if the exception is never thrown.

Coming in C# 11 is a new feature named Parameter Null Checking. It's available at the time of writing in .NET 7 Preview 1.

Check out the full article: Parameter Null Checking in C# 11 and the ThrowHelper pattern

EF Core 7 Finally Divorces Old .NET Framework

It has been quite a project to rip out the Entity Framework bits from the old, proprietary Windows-only .NET Framework and put them in its successor, the open source, cross-platform ".NET Core" scheme that became just .NET 5, .NET 6, .NET 7 and so on.

Check out the full article: EF Core 7 Finally Divorces Old .NET Framework

React

An Introductory Guide To Concurrent Rendering

I hope the article will provide you with more design tools for web development and if you have any questions, just send me an email and I will respond as soon as possible. I hope you continue to support the site so that I can write more good articles. Have a nice day!

Check out the full article: 45 Front End Developer Tools

Top React JS Frameworks Every Developer Should Know

React Native is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to write native mobile applications using JavaScript. Supporting multiple platforms means dealing with each platform’s issue (React Native, iOS, Android). Not long ago, we described security challenges in React Native apps from an app architecture perspective.

Check out the full article: Top React JS Frameworks Every Developer Should Know

React Fast Accordion

Dynamic, fast, accessible & zero dependency accordion for React.

Check out the full article: React Fast Accordion

Writing Custom Useful React Hooks with TypeScript and Testing Them with React Testing Library

I think React hooks need no introduction, so I'll skip their description and get right to the point.
If you want to get the source code, you can visit the repository on GitHub.
Our primary goal is to write custom React hooks using TypeScript and test them to get 100% test coverage.

Check out the full article: Writing Custom Useful React Hooks with TypeScript and Testing Them with React Testing Library

Software Architecture

Logging at Twitter

While centralized logging previously existed at Twitter, it was limited by low ingestion capacity and limited query capabilities, which resulted in poor adoption and failed to deliver the value we hoped for. To address this, we adopted Splunk Enterprise and migrated centralized logging to it. Now we ingest 4 times more logging data and have a better query engine and better user adoption. Our migration to Splunk Enterprise has given us a much stronger logging platform overall, but the process was not without its challenges and learnings, which we’ll share in greater detail in this blog. 

Check out the full article: Logging at Twitter

The Four Innovation Phases of Netflix’s Trillions Scale Real-time Data Infrastructure

A couple of months ago, I left Netflix to pursue a similar but expanded vision in the real-time ML space. I think it’s a perfect time to summarize my learnings building the real-time data infrastructure at Netflix. I hope this post will help platform engineers develop their cloud-native, self-serve streaming data platforms and scale use cases across many business functions (not necessarily from our success but maybe more from our failures). I also believe that having an understanding of how data platforms are built can help platform users (e.g., data scientists and ML engineers) make the most out of their platforms.

Check out the full article: The Four Innovation Phases of Netflix’s Trillions Scale Real-time Data Infrastructure

Rapid Event Notification System at Netflix

Netflix has more than 220 million active members who perform a variety of actions throughout each session, ranging from renaming a profile to watching a title. Reacting to these actions in near real-time to keep the experience consistent across devices is critical for ensuring an optimal member experience. This is not an easy task, considering the wide variety of supported devices and the sheer volume of actions our members perform. To this end, we developed a Rapid Event Notification System (RENO) to support use cases that require server initiated communication with devices in a scalable and extensible manner.

Check out the full article: Rapid Event Notification System at Netflix

Seven Ways to Fail at Microservices

The first problem that I see is that we sometimes don't even know what the problem is. We feel we should be doing microservices, but we haven't really spent enough time defining why we are doing microservices.

What problem are we trying to solve? What's hurting us now? What's going to be better after we've done microservices? This is quite a natural human tendency, especially for us as techies. We want to jump to the solution. We want to play with the new shiny. Sadly, even though it’s really really important, figuring out what problem we are trying to solve is much less fun than solutioning.

Check out the full article: Seven Ways to Fail at Microservices