[Azure] News for Developers, February 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:
- Deploying a new Azure App Service is now available as a CLI command. Simply type webapp new and get going! (link)
- The Application Settings UI has been revamped.
- In-app MySQL instances now support data export and import.
- WebApps on Linux now support .NET Core 2.0.
- Ok, not strictly App Service but Application Insights does have a tight relationship with App Services. Log Alerts for Application Insights is now in preview, allowing you to create alerts based on the data in 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!
- CRAP! Deleted you repository by accident? Repositories that were deleted less than 30 days ago can now be retrieved via the API’s an soon also in the UI.
- There’s now integration of VSTS within Microsoft Teams using the VSTS messaging extension.
- In work items and discussions you can now @-mention a group. Already used this one a couple of times, very handy!
- VSTS can now be used as a symbol server, which allows you to get debugging info (pdb) for your assemblies.
- Filter branches now include Github support (git was already there) and include and exclude filters.
- Automatic release creation can now be based on Azure Container Registry or Docker Hub.
- When you have artifacts coming from Jenkins, those can now be automatically propagated to an Azure Storage instance.
- ASP.NET apps can now be deployed to Azure V using the Azure DevOps project.
- When editing a build or release definition, any extenion (for adding tasks) you might want to add can now be added directly instead of having to go to the marketplace first.
- You can now use upstream package sources (NuGet, npm) to integrate into your Package management.
- When using Azure AD groups to manage permissions, group member changes could take up to 24 – 48 hours to propagate. This time is now down to 1 hour.
- You can now, yourself, decide to leave an account you’re a member of. So do the right thing and leave all those old accounts you’re still a member of 🙂
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/2018/feb-14-vsts.
Azure
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- If you’re using Ansible for automating your DevOps activities, you can now use the Azure Cloud Shell to manage your Ansbile configuration. (link)
- Nowadays, Search is a solved problem you do not want to worry about any more. And the solutions keep getting better, as Azure search now supports unlimited documents and has improved performance. (link)
- The Graph API endpoint for Cosmos DB has been made generally available in december and now comes with improved performance and stability. (link)
- The following Azure B2C features have been added in preview: Custom password complexity, B2C specific audit events in the portal and GitHub as an identity provider. (link)
- If your application is used worldwide and makes use of Redis; Redis cache geo-replication is now generally available for use in (for instance) disaster recovery scenarios. (link)
- I suspect most of the devnews audience are .NET developers, but if you’re writing Go (as well?) you might want to know that the SDK Azure for Go is now generally available. (link)
- And should you also not use VSTS for your CI/CD but Jenkins, you might want to check out this new reference architecture for running a Jenkins server on Azure. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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