[Azure] News for Developers, January 2020

Technical / January 31, 2020 / Jasper Siegmund / 2

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”.

• For users of Azure DevTest labs, browser connect is now available through integration of Azure Bastion. (link)
• And if you want to cut down on costs, there’s now the option to automatically shut down DevTest labs VM’s after a user has disconnected (for a configurable while). (link)
• The new Azure Functions Runtime 3.0 has been released. This brings support for .NET core 3.1 and Node 12. It’s also highly backwards compatible. (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 out there and the preview version is 16.5 Preview 2. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.4 is available (link) and version 8.5 is on preview 2. (link)

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

• Updates in Microsoft Teams will now appear threaded. For instance: the completion of a pull request appears as a reply on the pull request update itself. (link)
• Pipeline decorators can be used to easily inject tasks like vulnerability scanners into every pipeline in your organization. (link)
• Release and Pipeline events are now available in the audit logs. (link)
• To prevent random organizations being created linked to your Azure AD, an Azure AD Policy is now available. (link)
• There’s now support for output variables in a deployment job. (link)
• Older images in Azure Pipelines hosted pools will be removed, including Windows Server 2012 R2 (VS2015), Mac OS High Sierra and Windows Server Core 1803. (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:

• Serverless Framework plugin for API Management and Azure Functions is now available. (link)
• User delegation access tokens for Azure Storage allow users to delegate a subset of their own permissions to others. (link)
• Having your IT infrastructure in the cloud doesn’t mean you do not have to worry about the carbon impact it has. The Microsoft Sustainability Calculator helps you gain insight into your carbon emissions caused by cloud use. (link)
• Azure Data Factory now supports copying data into SFTP. (link)
• If you’re looking to upgrade your Azure SQL managed instance database, the Azure portal now allows you to move from Gen4 to Gen5. (link)

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund