[Azure] News for Developers, August 2018

Technical / September 3, 2018 / Jasper / 0

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:

• If you’re into deploying Linux (or containers); Linux can now be used as OS on App Service! (link)
• If you like Windows more but still love containers, Windows containers are now available in preview mode (link)
• Running App Service on Azure Stack? Check out the newly released Update 3. (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!

For Visual Studio lovers:

• Visual Studio 2017 15.8 was released was previously released. If you’re using a Mac, check out version 7.6 of Visual Studio for Mac. (link)
• Visual Studio IntelliCode now infers coding conventions. (link)

And here’s the news from VSTS:

• The My Team(s) pivot allows you to quickly view the work assigned to the teams you’re a member of. (link)
• The Test Results section of a release was updated to better display summarized test results. (link)
• If your team is using Microsoft Teams, know that you can now directly integrate your VSTS dashboards into Teams! (link)
• And maybe even better, when chatting about stuff in your team, the improved Teams information will provide you the information you need right in context of the chat! (link)
• It’s now very easy to add a table of contents to wiki pages. (link)
• If you want to do a test-only release as part of a PR, you can now trigger releases from PRs just like builds. (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:

• Looking for some reading? The Developers Guide to Microsoft Azure eBook was updated with new information. (link)
• The Azure Database Migration Service was updated to support a specific migration activity in a single workflow, reducing the number of steps required. (link)
• A new 2.0 version of the JavaScript SDK for CosmosDB is available in public preview. (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”.

• Azure SQL Database reserved capacity offers a price reduction by pre-paying for resources for a one or three year term. (link)
• If you’re into deploying Linux (or containers); Linux can now be used as OS on App Service! (link)
• Integration between Azure IoT and Azure Event Grid is now generally available. (link)

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper