[Azure] News for Developers, September 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.
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!
New offerings / services
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”.
- A lot of offerings are in preview, which is probably because of next months Ignite conference. So expect a lot of services to go GA during that time frame! Microsoft Ignite is held November 4 – 8, 2019.
Visual Studio & Azure DevOps
Here’s the news coming from the Visual Studio and Azure DevOps teams!
For Visual Studio lovers:
- Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3 is GA bringing .NET Core 3.0 support and version 16.4 is on preview 1. (link)
- With VS 2019 16.3 Preview 3 you’ll get a brand new Visual Studio terminal. (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3 is available and version 8.4 is on preview 1. (link)
And these updates were part of sprint 156 in Azure DevOps:
- Personalized notifications in Slack apps are now available when using @-mentions. (link)
- Azure Boards now shows a roll-up progress of parent tasks based on their siblings. (link)
- Also, the task board now live updates when things change!! (link)
- You can now resolve work items by using a phrase like “this change fixed #476” which automatically creates a reference to work item 476. (link)
- Using the VSCode extension for Azure pipelines, you can now create new pipelines directly from within VSCode. (link)
- There’s a new task for configuring Azure App Service app settings. (link)
- Service Hooks are now supported for YAML pipelines. (link)
- The Azure Pipelines App for Jira was updated to provide extended linking support when using Azure Repos. (link)
- There were several improvements made to the GitHub release task. (link)
- The Lead and Cycle time widgets now support advanced filtering. (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.
Azure / other
Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:
- Did you know you can now use cognitive services to automatically process forms and receipts, for instance to get the amount or date? Check out Form Recognizer (link)
- The Azure DevTest Lab services now integrates with Azure Bastion (in preview) which enables you to access your VM directly from the browser. (link)
- Azure CDN now offers support for bring your own certificates, instead of having to use the out of the box ones. (link)
- If you’re running managed instances of SQL Databases in Azure, you can now leverage the auto-failover functionality. (link)
- When using resource tagging, policies can now help to remedy and bring all resources into 100% tag-compliancy. (link)
- You can now register self-hosted SQL DB’s with Azure Resource Provider to have them show up in the portal just like managed SQL databases. (link)
- Azure Storage Explorer is on version 1.10, adding support for managed disks among other updates. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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