[Azure] News for Developers, February 2019
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!
App Service specific updates
There was just one applicable update coming from the Azure App Services teams:
- Tooling improvements for TypeScript have been made to Azure Functions. (link)
The app services team keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo. Check them out!
Visual Studio & Azure DevOps
Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- Visual Studio has improved multi monitor support with per-monitor DPI awareness across the IDE. (link)
- Enhanced in Studio 2019: Search for Objects and Properties in the Watch, Autos, and Locals Windows. (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 release candidate is out in the wild! (link)
And here’s the news from Azure DevOps:
- Work item status is now shown when referring to a work item #ID. (link) Same works on wiki pages as well. (link)
- YAML pipelines can now be created from an already existing file. (link)
- Very long filepaths are now supported in published artifacts. (link)
- There is now better support for artifact related tasks running from private agents. (link)
- Wiki pages now feature a permalink which won’t break on renames. (link)
- Azure DevOps is now available from the Azure CLI commands. (link)
- Azure DevOps now features a Slack app to remain up-to-date of pipeline statuses. (link)
- With scheduled releases, you can now select to only release when there’s a new version available. (link)
- Publishing of test results has been simplified. (link)
- Wiki pages now allow @mentions of users and groups. (link)
The Visual Studio blog can be found here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio. And the Azure DevOps team blog is here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes.
Azure / other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- In the “nice trick” category, completers for PowerShell let you easily select the values of cmdlet parameters such as Region. (link)
- Azure Stream Analytics got an update with new language functions. (link)
- Azure API Management was updated Feb 14. (link)
- The Azure Status Monitor blog provides more insight into Azure status and any outages or issues that might occur. (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”.
- Query Store for Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides insight on query performance. (link)
- Azure Cost Management is now GA for enterprise agreements. (link)
- Reserved Instance discounts now apply to classic VMs, Azure Cloud Services and Dev/Test subscriptions. (link)
- There is now more control over resource groups when using Azure DevTest Labs. (link)
- Azure Data Explorer is a fast, fully managed data analytics service for real-time analysis on large volumes of data streaming from applications, websites, IoT devices, and more. (link)
- Java support for Azure Functions is now GA. (link)
- New features for more reliable messaging are now available in Azure Event Grid. (link)
- Azure database for MySQL now supports read replicas (link), and for MySQL and PostgreSQL new compute options are available. (link)
- Azure Lab Services allow you to easily set-up a number of preconfigured VMs. Use cases include training, hands-on labs, hackatons, etc. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
Leave a Comment