[Azure] News for Developers, March 2020
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”.
- PowerShell 7.0 is now generally available. (link)
- Here is an overview of the Azure SDK’s that are GA in March 2020: (link)
- Looking to start using Azure DevTest labs? Check out the discounts mentioned here: (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 16.5 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.6 preview 2. (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.5 is available. (link)
- Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5 brings support for decompiling C# code without needing third party tools (but via partnering with ILSpy). (link)
- Want to know what’s coming? You can check out the Visual Studio Roadmap Spring 2020 to find out! (link)
- For Visual Studio Code there’s now a new extension to Deploy to Azure. (link)
And these updates were part of sprint 166 in Azure DevOps:
- Azure DevOps now supported multi organization billing. (link)
- In Pipelines you can now use typed runtime variables, which do not automatically become environment variables. (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:
- DataFactory adds Flatten transformation, single-row look-ups and updated UI for container activities. (link)
- CosmosDB now features a FREE tier! The first 400 RU/s and 5 GB of storage are free for the lifetime of the account. (link)
- Also on CosmosDB, the logical partition size has been enlarged to 20GB instead of the previous 10GB. (link)
- Azure SQL Managed Instance now enforces TLS 1.2 on outbound connections. (link)
- You can now leverage scanning for vulnerabilities in container image stored in Azure Container Registry. (link)
- Azure Service Fabric 7.0 fourth release was rolled out. (link)
- You can now integrate you Azure App Service in Regional Virtual Networks. (link)
That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!
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