[Azure] News for Developers, June 2017
Are you having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going around in Azure? You’re not alone! In an effort to do so myself, I’m starting a monthly series called “News for developers” which is exactly that: a summary of all of the Azure flavored news specifically for software developers. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!
App Services updates
The app services team announced a couple of new updates in their monthly blog post. These include:
- Azure CDN now supports https on custom domains, something that you could previously only do with one of the external CDN services (link).
- New App Service Overview Blade
The new overview blade should perform faster making is easier to switch between apps. The charts can be pinned to custom dashboards which might improve the performance of those as well (a little bit). - Integrated experience for Windows and Linux based apps
When creating a new app service instance, you can now pick which OS the instance needs to host your app. - App Service Advisor recommendation history
The app service advisor will provide proactive recommendations on how to solve problems within your application. It now features the ability to view past recommendations.
Blog post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/06/30/june-2017-app-service-update/
Visual Studio (Team Services)
From the world of Visual Studio team services:
- Visual Studio 15.3 preview has been released. You can install and check it out today! (link) It features:
- Azure Continous Delivery support for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core apps.
- Increased visibility on extension impact on performance. For some reason it recently advised me to close the Errors pane. That’s right, just ignore them!
- The Visual Studio Team Services updates for this month include:
- Sharing fields across processes, making it easier to query across team projects that use different processes.
- Support for custom work item icons and a library to pick them from.
- Filtering a pull request tree by file name. Same goes for the tree view in Code views.
- Web view for Git Tags. This view allows to view, delete and filter based on tags. Managing tags can be set-up with separate permissions.
- Import and Export on Build Defintions. This was one of the top-voted items on UserVoice!
- Hosted agent pools for building your code are changing. No longer are there agents that support multiple versions of Visual Studio; you need to pick the correct pool now.
- Comprehensive updates have been made to the NuGet, npm, Maven and dotnet task manager tasks, fixing a lot of bugs.
- Streamlined user management including bulk remove, optionally add new users to projects and easily view subscriptions.
Check out https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/articles/news/2017/jun-22-team-services for the complete overview.
Other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- Manage ACS, Cosmos DB, Active Directory Graph and more with release 1.1 of the Azure management libraries for .NET (link).
- Text Analytics API now supports sentiment analysis in 16 languages (including Dutch, HOERA!) (link).
- Azure SQL Data Sync was refreshed, bringing portal support and a REST API (link).
- Azure Traffic manager got two new features: fast failover and TCP probing (link). The failover options include:
- Endpoint checking interval can now be set to 10 seconds instead of the default 30
- Configure the number of tolerated failures (0 – 9)
- Configure the time-out interval for each probe attempt
- TTL can be down to 0
The TCP probing enables probing of resources that might not be able to return a HTTP response.
- The Cognitive Toolkit v2.0 is fully released. This toolkit allows developers to incorporate self-created and trained neural networks into their applications. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news.
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