This is the last TWIL (This Week I Learned) of 2021 and it’s coming a bit later than usual due to holidays and other stuff. There’s a couple of articles on Quantum Computing (by Microsoft) and a few on Microservice Architecture topics. Also, I recommend an interesting article on the Metaverse and another about the 4-day workweek. Enjoy!

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Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1771: The Future of Blazor with Daniel Roth
.NET 6 was huge for Blazor – what’s next? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Roth about how Blazor continues to evolve as a C#-centric way to build web applications. Daniel talks about a bunch of the key features from .NET 6, including smaller runtime, Hot Reload, and rendering components from JavaScript. The conversation also digs into the evolution of Blazor Fluent UI and MAUI – which also leads to the futures conversation, taking advantage of multithreading, and other great features you can see in the road map on GitHub. More Blazor is coming!

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Quantum Computing

Four Years of Q#
Azure Quantum launched in public preview early this year. This was a huge step for our team and for the Q# language. Among other milestones, it was the first time that members of the public could run Q# programs on real quantum hardware. Most of the team’s work this past year has been on Azure Quantum: fixing bugs, adding new features, and making it easier to use. Azure Quantum can be used from Python, Q# Jupyter notebooks, or the Azure CLI. It can also be accessed using the REST APIs from any environment that can create an HTTP request.

Hybrid Quantum Applications with Azure Functions
Quantum computers harness the unique behavior of quantum physics and apply it to computing. This approach promises massive speedup in compute time compared to classical computing, especially in areas like optimization, simulation, or machine learning. However, quantum computing components have a different operating model compared to classical software. There are typically one or more classical compute components that orchestrate the execution of quantum components. Azure Functions are one option for implementing these classical parts. This blog shows how Hybrid Quantum Applications with Azure Functions provide an easy way for exposing quantum functionality via APIs making it easy to access from classical code.

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Microservice Architectures

Service Discovery & why it is so important in Microservices
Service discovery is the pattern of automatically finding what instances of service to fulfill a given query. Service Discovery has the ability to locate a network automatically making it so that there is no need for a long configuration setup process. Service discovery works by devices connecting through a common language on the network allowing devices or services to connect without any manual intervention.

RabbitMQ with Java and Spring, asynchronous communication between microservices
In this article we will go over RabbitMQ practical implementation and try to look to the theoretical concepts meanwhile. We will be covering only windows installations with details, but the rest of the article work the same for any OS.

Microservice API using gRPC on .NET
gRPC is a hot cake now for Microservices development. It is a high-performance, lightweight RPC framework for Microservices development. It uses Contract-first API development, using Protocol Buffers by default, allowing for language agnostic implementations. Protobuf (Protocol Buffers) binary serialization reduces the network usage which makes it highly performant. gRPC is based on Remote Procedure Call (RPC) pattern, uses HTTP/2 protocol for communication and uses three basic concepts Channel, Remote Procedure calls (streams) and Messages.

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Azure Services

Load Balancer vs Application Gateway vs Traffic Manager vs Front Door service in Azure
Often confusing when to use what and landed into the same boat while explaining it to one of my friends and that has encouraged me to write this article. Each and every individual service mentioned here has a specific purpose, let’s understand them.

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Security

9 key security threats that organizations will face in 2022
For 2021, cybercriminals took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic, the ongoing shift to hybrid work and the vulnerability of organizations to ransomware. For 2022, we can expect more of the same as well as a host of worsening threats to keep us on our toes. A report released Tuesday by cyber threat intelligence provider Check Point looks at some of the security challenges that organizations will likely face next year.

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Cool Stuff

Kill the 5-day Workweek
People who work a four-day week generally report that they’re healthier, happier, and less crunched for time; their employers report that they’re more efficient and more focused. These companies’ success points to a tantalizing possibility: that the conventional approach to work and productivity is fundamentally misguided.

What is the Metaverse? A Primer
Ultimately, the metaverse is the culmination of a wide variety of emerging technologies maturing simultaneously. The long list includes virtual reality, augmented reality, 5G, cloud computing, IoT, haptics, cryptocurrency, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and, with that, machine learning, object recognition, computer vision, and conversational AI. This wave of new technologies will enable a full digitalization of the physical universe and seamless interconnection of everything, creating a new interactive, digital dimension.

immudb
immudb is a database with built-in cryptographic proof and verification. It tracks changes in sensitive data and the integrity of the history will be protected by the clients, without the need to trust the database. It can operate both as a key-value store, and/or as relational database (SQL).

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Happy holidays!
I’ll see you in 2022!

Photo by Ilham Rahmansyah on Unsplash