[Azure] News for Developers, March 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:
- The .NET Core February 2019 update has been deployed to all Azure App Services. (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 2019 for Mac is now on Preview 3. (link)
And here’s the news from Azure DevOps:
- If your team has not yet adopted Azure DevOps in the cloud, the on-premises version of Azure DevOps Server 2019 is now available! (link)
- You can now directly navigate to Azure Board items from Github comments. (link)
- It’s now possible to edit or delete existing comments in work items. (link)
- The Azure PowerShell Az module is now available from Azure Pipelines. (link)
- Free accounts can now run maximum 60 minutes jobs (was previously 30 minutes). (link)
- Slack users can now approve / reject pipeline deployments directly from within a channel. (link)
- Upstream sources are now available for Maven package feeds. (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:
- ARM templates were updated with some new functionality such as condition() and utcNow(). (link)
- You can now schedule refreshes of Power BI dashboards using the REST API. (link)
- Azure Blueprints help you to deliver ISO compliant infrastructures into your own landscape. (link)
- Are you building games? Then check out the Microsoft Game Stack, featuring loads of stuff that make game development a lot easier. (link)
- The Azure Portal got an update in March, check out the link for what has changed. (link)
- Azure API Management instances were updated, with a couple of updates to Jwt tokens. (link)
- To ease moving from classic monitoring alerts, Microsoft has created a tool which helps you migrate. And when you don’t, they will do it for you starting July 2019. (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”.
- Microsoft has opened their first datacenters in South Africa, making Azure available to the South African continent from Johannesburg and Cape Town. (link)
- The SignalR bindings for Azure Functions are now generally available. (link)
- Azure Lab Services allow you to easily spin up preconfigured machines for training, hackathon or similar purposes. (link)
- Azure Backup for SQL Server in virtual machines is now availably. (link)
- Azure Premium Blob Storage is bringing high performance for workloads that require high transaction rates or very fast access times. (link)
- In the same category, High-Throughput with Azure blob storage brings you better performance for larger blobs. (link)
- You can now secure Azure storage blobs and container using Azure AD integration using role based access control. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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