[Azure] News for Developers, April 2019

Technical / May 2, 2019 / Jasper Siegmund / 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!

For this month I’ve switched up the order of the sections a bit, this seems to make a bit more sense based on the amount of news items in each category. Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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”.

• Visual Studio 2019 was officially launched early April. If you haven’t yet: get it while it’s fresh! (link)
• New geospatial features in Azure Stream Analytics are now available. (link)
• Azure Premium Blob storage complements existing hot, cold and archive tiers. (link)
• The “Identity Experience Framework” for Azure AD B2C allow you to customize the business to consumer identity options of Azure AD. Nice to know as well: B2C pricing has dropped! (link)
• Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage allows to detect security threats in regards to your storage accounts. (link)
• Cognitive Services Custom Vision brings machine learning power to your doorstep and makes it simple. Even provides near real-time processing on devices by use of containers. (link)

Visual Studio & Azure DevOps

Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!

For Visual Studio lovers:

• As stated above, Visual Studio 2019 was officially launched. This new version of VS includes a feature called “Live Share” which brings a new level of pair programming. Check it out! (link)
• The VS launch did not only target Windows users. VS 2019 for Mac was released as well. (link)
• The VS 2019 version 16.1 preview 2 is already available for download as well. (link)

And these updates were part of sprints 150 and 151 in Azure DevOps:

• For who likes dark themes, Azure DevOps now has one! (link)
• Azure boards now support a badge to provide an overview on any given page. (link)
• For CSV lovers: any board query resultset can now be exported into a CSV for download. (link)
• When merging Pull Requests, you can now chose a Rebase and Fast Forward merge, or a Semi-Linear merge which is equal to a rebase + merge. (link)
• The Visual Studio Test Task has been updated to support VS2019. (link)
• There’s now a task assistant which makes editing YAML based pipelines a lot easier! (link)
• The PowerShell Az module is now supported on hosted agents. (link)
• Several Analytics options have been added without additional costs. (link)
• Personally voted for this one! Wiki pages now offer the option to follow & be notified of changes! (link)
• The Task board people switcher makes it easy to get focus on the tasks of a specific person. (link)
• There is now an Azure Pipelines app for Microsoft Teams, which brings pipeline status but also things like approvals and more directly into Teams. (link)

Changes to Azure DevOps can take up to three weeks to roll out across tenants. 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.

App Service specific updates

There was just one applicable update coming from the Azure App Services teams:

• You can now run Windows Server 2019 based containers on Azure App Services. (link)

The app services team keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo. Check them out!

Azure / other

Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:

• The Azure Portal got some updates which include updates to security center, azure data explorer, intune and more. (link)
• The Azure API Management developer portal is getting an overhaul. (link)
• Also for Azure API Management, here are the April 4th (link) and April 19th updates. (link)
• Are you using Cloud based load testing on Azure? Then be aware that this service will be discontinued on March 31, 2020. (link)
• The AzCopy tool v10 now supports Amazon S3 storage as a data source. (link)
• Not sure whether your ASP.NET site can migrate to Azure. Check out this migration assessment tool. (link)
• For Service Fabric, version 6.4 CU5 Refresh (link) and version 6.5 runtime and SDK are available for download. (link)
• Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 and WAF v2 SKUs are available which bring autoscaling, static VIPs, header rewrites and more. (link)

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund