[Azure] News for Developers, July 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!
Do you sometimes feel lost in the world of Azure resources? Here’s the round-up of last month! It’s summertime, so this one is a bit shorter than normal.
App Service specific updates
These were the updates coming from the Azure App Services teams:
- The only update worth mentioning is below, down in the Generally Available category.
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!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- Visual Studio 2017 15.7 was previously released and 15.8 Preview 3 is out! (link)
- Visual Studio IntelliCode now infers coding conventions. (link)
And here’s the news from VSTS:
- Two new permissions allow for bypassing branch policies in PR’s (merging) without having the ability to directly push to a branch (which was possible before). (link)
- The wiki section now shows you broken links so you can get them fixed. (link)
- The Microsoft hosted Linux and MacOS agents are now out of preview. (link)
- Deployment gates can now be configured to have steady results over a period of time so you can ensure your solution is really doing fine. (link)
- Microsoft might have acquired GitHub, this doesn’t mean that VSTS will stop covering that ground. Bringing public projects to the game, this is a good example of just that. (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/.
Azure / other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- The new Azure AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) has been extended with something called Dev Spaces, allowing easy build & debug of applications running on AKS. (link)
- If you’re using CosmosDB, check out this new CosmosDB Explorer (in preview). (link)
- There were quite a few updates to Azure Maps, adding stuff like satellite images, batch services and advanced geospatial functionality. (link)
- Azure Fabric Mesh is a new offering (in preview) that brings you a fully managed version of service fabric. Simply run those (micro)services and have Azure worry about the rest. Me like! (link)
- And if you’re playing around with Mesh, definitely check out the developer tools as well. (link)
Generally Available
All of the items below are now GA, which means they are stable for production use and officially supported by Microsoft. Although its fine to use preview services for evaluation and development purpose, you’re safest option is to wait with taking things into production until they’re officially “GA-ed”.
- Synonyms are now available in Azure Search. (link)
- The integration of Azure API Management with Azure Applications Insights allows you to view more debug info on your APIs. (link)
- Also for Application Insights: user behavior analytics tools are now available. (link)
- Running Linux on an Azure App Service is now generally available. Get those Tomcats spinnin’ (link)
- The Azure DevOps projects, which are catered by VSTS are now available. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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