[Azure] News for Developers, January 2018

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:

  • Having trouble with your web app? App Service Diagnostics is here to have you help yourself. A few new features have been enabled, including TCP Connections, Linux support and integration with Application Insights. (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!

  • Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.6 Preview 2 was released, featuring:
    • Better performance (yes, even better!)
    • C++17 Standards Conformance
    • Configuring CD to Azure using ASP.NET Core and Docker support, targeting an Azure web app for containers.
    • Test explorer now features a hierarchy: Project, Namespace, Class
    • Real time test discovery is now on by default.
  • Getting the reports you need is becoming easier by integration of PowerBI into VSTS Analytics. With upcoming: the ability to create your own customized views!
  • A new command view merge commit allows you to preview the exact merge for a pending pull request. This shows what the merge will look like when the PR is completed.
  • Also for PR’s, you can now use labels to tag a PR with useful information for reviewers.
  • PR comments now support TeX functions when you need to discuss mathematics.
  • Working with PRs is now a security permission you can grant to people or better yet: deny.
  • And lastly for PRs; there’s now an API which you can use to integrate PRs into your customized CI/CD pipeline.
  • When selecting areas or integrations, there are now suggestions and additional info shown (iteration dates).
  • When your repository is forked, VSTS can now build PR’s from that fork automatically.
  • GitHub Enterprise is now officially supported.
  • Large test result sets can now be filtered by name.
  • Using “Run Functional Tests” or “Deploy Test Agent” tasks is now deprecated.
  • You can now manage permissions directly on Azure AD Groups, instead of having to have an additional layer of VSTS groups.

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:

  • Last year, Azure Event Grid was launched in preview but it already made its way to General Availability! It doesn’t connect to all Azure services yet, but surely the most important ones are there. Start routing your events today! (link)
  • If your customers want the best connectity to the Azure cloud possible, ExpressRoute is what they need. This solutions helps (enterprise) customers connect to Azure and other Microsoft services via dedicated pipelines to bring you the best performance there is. It now features new monitoring capabilities and partnerships with – for instance – Cisco to guarantee the best result possible. (link)
  • Azure Search features new enterprise security features: encryption and security trimming. (link)

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

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