[Azure] News for Developers, December 2019

Technical / January 4, 2020 / 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.

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!

This episode is a little bit later than what you’re used from me, due to the holiday season. But at least you’ve got your Azure news ready for going back to work after hopefully great holidays and you’ll be up-to-date very quickly since it’s traditionally not a lot this time of the year. 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”.

• Proximity Placement Groups allow grouping of IaaS resources to get low latency. (link)

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 16.4 is GA bringing GitHub publishing from team explorer, hot XAML reloads and a lot MORE. Check out the => (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.3 is available and version 8.4 is on preview 4. (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 160 & 161 in Azure DevOps:

• For those using the Kotlin programming language, this is now supported within the Azure DevOps online editor. (link)
• When you want your main pipeline structure not to be in the pipeline yaml file itself (for reuse for instance), you can now use the extends keyword. (link)
• New functionality for service connections include authorizations and approvals and checks. (link)
• When manually running a YAML pipeline you can now choose to skip stages. (link)
• To keep track of things which are not for a specific team, you can now create a dashboard without a linked team. (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:

• The Azure Functions 3.0 go-live release is out in the open! (link)
• Azure Service Fabric 7 is available as well. (link)

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund