[Azure] News for Developers, December 2017

Technical / January 1, 2018 / Jasper Siegmund / 0

First of all I’d like to start by wishing everyone a very happy 2018! 2017 was a great year and I’m sure that 2018 will also have some great new things to come! Traditionally December doesn’t bring us that much news so this edition is a little shorter than what you’re used to.

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 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 Service specific updates

These were the updates coming from the Azure App Services teams:

• Azure Functions runtime preview 2 has been announced (link)

The app services team keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo. Check them out!

Visual Studio (Team Services)

Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services teams!

• The Blame view now features history so you can track exactly what happened with a specific line of code over time (so you can blame exactly the right person).
• The new multi-phase builds have been enhanced. You can now:
  • Specify a different agent queue for each phase
  • Run tests in parallel
  • Set conditions for a phase to run
• A scheduled build can be skipped when nothing changed in the repo that it’s linked to.
• The test results view features new filter options to more easily go through large test results.
• When you’ve got tests that sometimes pass and sometimes don’t, VSTS can now re-run these flaky tests. This enhances the outcome as these types of tests would previously be marked as failed even though one test run might have succeeded.
• Developers working with Office365 can now enjoy support for the latest Office365 APIs right within Visual Studio. Note that you should change your existing apps to use the new Graph API’s if you want them to stay supported (and working) (link)
• Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.6 was release for download. Check the updates and grab it here: (link)

The Visual Studio blog can be found here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio. And the VSTS team blog is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/release-notes/2017/dec-11-vsts.

Azure

Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:

• The Azure Bot Service and LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligence Service) are now generally available! So all those bots you’ve built are ready to go to production 🙂 (link)
• If you are using more serious amounts of storage, Azure Archive Storage might help you limit your monthly costs a little bit. Pricing starts as low as $0.002 per gigabyte (link)
• The Azure Cosmos DB service now features Graph API endpoints. (link)
• Working with IoT solutions? You might want to check out Microsoft IoT Central which is a SaaS solution designed to get you up&running quickly with all Azure IoT components (link)
• When working on an app that requires some sort of location services (maps, routes, tracking); check out Azure Location Based Services which is a nice set of out of the box services you can use to quickly implement these kinds of things. This service is in preview (link)
• Ever have the feeling you’re lost in what Azure has to offer? In that case the Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure might just be the (free!) eBook for you! (link)
• Open Service Broker API is a standardized way to connect cloud platforms and leverage their services in your applications. Azure now supports these standards for 11 services and plans on extending that support over the next year to include most others (link)

That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund