Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Cool Blob Storage is generally available. Cool Blob Storage is low cost storage (as low as $0.01 per GB in some regions) for cool object data which is infrequently accessed but requires similar latency and performance to the more frequently accessed hot data. Example use cases for cool storage include backups, media content, scientific data, compliance and archival data. In general, any data which lives for a longer period of time and is accessed less than once a month is a perfect candidate for cool storage -   Microsoft Azure Blog *  Brazil uses Google Translate more than any other country. Ninety-two percent of our translations come from outside of the United States, with Brazil topping the list.  *  Microsoft is among the Top Chefs contributing to IFTTT recipes * The website Postcards-From-Google Earth contains a compilation of distorted images on Google Earth.  They reveal a new model of representation: ...

Notes from articles around the web: * Azure Resource Manager and Azure Service Managment "Classic" deployment models are not completely compatible with each other.  * To simplify the deployment and management of resources, Microsoft recommends that you use Resource Manager for new resources, and, if possible, re-deploy existing resources through Resource Manager. *  The Resource Manager version of  Azure PowerShell  commands have the format Verb-AzureRmNoun whereas the Service Management version of  Azure PowerShell  commands have the format Verb-AzureNoun *  Resource Manager added the concept of the resource group. Every resource you create through Resource Manager exists within a resource group.  *  The Resource Manager deployment model provide several benefits: - Deploy, manage and monitor Azure resources as a group -  Deploy resources repeatedly -  Supports creating templates. Templates can be created to include a s...

* What is a Workspace? It is a mapping between a computer and TFS for the purposes of version control * When files are checked in, they are... all tracked as part of the same changeset and that changeset has a number * What is the Product Backlog? List of all desires and requirements for the product * What is the Sprint Backlog? List of Product Backlog Items or User Stories for the sprint plus the tasks to be performed * If you are not currently connected to TFS via a network, what is required to perform a version control Undo on a file? A local workspace * If you have a Local workspace, what do you need to prevent someone from modifying a file in TFS? A check-in lock * What does the Scrum Board do? Helps you to visualize and manage the state of the project during a sprint * What does a Branch help you do? Simultaneously work on different versions of a code base.This helps in feature development isolation. * What does a Merg...

This Week I Learned - *  Bing Code Search  makes it easy to get code snippets for a specified programming task *  Earlier this month, Google Compute Engine, Google’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering and Amazon Web Services alternative, went down across all regions for 18 minutes. The outage was reportedly caused by two bugs in Google’s network management software, bugs triggered by a configuration error after Google engineers made changes to GCE’s network configuration in an effort to speed it up. Jet.com whose pages use services from Lytics, an online ad-targeting company, suffered a slow down of its site as Lytics outsources its IT infrastructure to an IaaS provider. Google Cloud Platform - Planet Performance * Cross-site scripting (XSS), exploits the trust a user has for a particular site. XSRF or CSRF (sometimes pronounced sea-surf) exploits the trust that a site has in a user's browser. * On 27/07/2016, the amount of storage that comes with OneDrive will ...

The article A look into YouTube’s video file anatomy   by YouTube Engineering experts, provides a nice overview of what makes up a video file & how it has evolved - A video file contains the video and audio data wrapped up in some container format and associated with metadata that describes the nature of the content in some way. The video and audio data is typically compressed using a codec and of course the data itself comes in a variety of resolutions , frame rates , sample rates and channels (in the case of audio). Without compression we would not be able to stream media over the internet.. There are three main components of media files today: the container , the compressed bitstream itself and finally metadata .  The bitstream (called the video and audio “essence”) contains the actual audio and video media in a compressed form. It will also contain information about the size of the pictures and start and end of frames so that the codec knows h...

This Week I Learned - * REST, or Representational State Transfer, in the JSON/Atom Custom Search API is somewhat different from traditional REST. Instead of providing access to resources, the API provides access to a service. As a result, the API provides a single URI that acts as the service endpoint.  Google has also provided a Nuget package Google.Apis.Customsearch.v1 for .NET client. *  Did you know that you can securely and easily take Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) and Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) exams online from the comfort of your home or office? [ YouTube video ] You will need a computer with a microphone & webcam for an online proctored exam * ICICI Bank has launched iWork@home, an initiative that allows women employees to work from home for up to a year. The technology platform for this programme has been developed in-house by ICICI Bank in partnership with students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. To ensure t...

For the first version of Openness Days which replaces MVP Open Days, Microsoft invited active MVPs as well as alumni to a 3-day event at Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad. As it started on a Sunday (March 20th), I had the good fortune of attending it just for that one day and meeting many current MVPs and alumni I knew from the time I was an ASP.NET MVP (from 2005-2010). One of the takeaways for me from that meeting was the session by expert presenter, PowerPoint MVP & author, Geetesh Bajaj (one of the first from India to be awarded the yearly MVP award and for most number of times) on the importance of story telling in business communications. Excerpts: Stories ..evoke emotions ..establish human connect quickly ..have fluctuations Storytellers: understand audiences leave remembrances are first convinced Give them ..and also - Conflict & resolution Problem & Solution Villain & Hero Hopelessness & Hope Stories need to be - Small - easy to tell Sim...

This Week I Learned - *  One of the great benefits of Azure VMs is the ability to change the size of your VM based on the needs for CPU, Network or disk performance using either Azure Classic Compute VMs or the newer Azure Resource Manager VMs. *  Linus Torvalds transformed technology twice - first with the Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and again with Git, the source code management system used by developers worldwide.   Excerpts from his TED talk: - Linus by his own admission is "not a people person"..is "myopic to other people's feelings" (and is not proud of that) ..is hellish stubborn - Both Linux and Git (a management system for software development) arose almost as an unintended consequence of his desire to not to work with too many people - "Linux wasn't started as a collaborative project.  I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at the time for myself, partly because I needed the end re...

I like books which have tables, lists and illustrations ( diagrams to ogle ). They make points easier to visualize and more memorable. I therefore found Enterprise Cloud Strategy by Microsoft veterans Barry Briggs and Eduardo Kassner, very useful. The ebook ( available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle formats ) answers questions like “How do I start?”; “How should I build a plan for cloud migration for my entire portfolio?”; and “How will my organization be affected by this change?”. It provides a road map and strategies that can aid an organization in planning for their journey to the Cloud (more specifically to Azure) Microsoft IT began its cloud migration journey in 2009. The authors relate their experiences and cover a lot of insightful topics in about 100 pages of excellent content.

This Week I Learned - *  Google Search uses Base64-encoded images .  Base64 encoding will produce large output. The trade off with using Base64-encoded images in a web page is that you get instant image loading in exchange for inflating your page size slightly. What you don't want to be doing is using this for massive detailed images. Where it does shine is if your Web server is compressing output before delivering it. Because of the nature of Base64, it compresses exceptionally efficiently, so a dense amount of data like that will squash down to a very small size. *   With HTTPS the hostname (api.somewebsite.com) is passed in the clear but the full URL is not  (so it will not be susceptible to casual traffic sniffing attacks).  In HTTPS, the actual URL is sent only after the SSL handshake has been performed.   HTTPS uses TLS, which is Transport Layer Security. HTTP as a protocol, runs above the transport layer . * A URL like "https://api.somewebsite....

Re-branded / Re-named Azure Services: Azure Security Center, Azure Defender - Microsoft Defender for Cloud Azure Defender for loT - Microsoft Defender for loT Azure Sentinel - Microsoft Sentinel Microsoft Cloud App Security - Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps -  November 2021 Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics - November, 2019 Log Analytics is now called Azure Monitor logs -  February 2019 Azure Table storage is now part of Azure Cosmos DB which also has a Azure Cosmos DB Table API offering Windows Azure branded Microsoft Azure - 2014 SQL Azure branded Azure SQL Database - 2012 Retired Azure Services & their retirement dates: Azure Container Service - January 31, 2020 Azure Scheduler - 30th September 2019 ; Move from Azure Scheduler to Azure Logic Apps Azure Access Control (ACS), a service of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) - November 7, 2018 Azure Service Management support  - 30 June 2018 ; move to Resource Manager Operations ...