[Azure] News for Developers, June 2020

Technical / July 3, 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. Want to know more? Check out the readme.

Azure

Here is a roll-up of all the Azure news which might relate to you as a developer. Note that all services mentioned are Generally Available (GA) so they can be used in production scenarios today. Exact availability of services might vary based on the Azure region you’re deploying to.

• A new consolidated API version for Azure Monitor Logs is now available. This might help you better leverage the data found in Azure Monitor. (link) Also for Azure Monitor, there were some new features and insights released which might be of interest to you. (link)
• A new refresh release for Azure Service Fabric, version 7.1 is now available. This includes bug fixes and performance enhancements. (link)
• The maximum vCore limit for Azure SQL Database serverless has increased more than twofold from 16 vCores to 40 vCores. (link)
• Regional virtual network integration for Linux apps on Azure App Service is now available (link) and in the same category, so are hybrid connections. (link)
• Azure CDN now offers a standard rules engine which you, for instance, can you to enforce HTTPS on static websites like we did for mstack.nl! (link)
• Simple but impactfull: CosmosDB now offers case-insensitive string functions like Contains, EndWith, StringEquals and StartsWith. (link)
• Here is the rollup of changes to Azure CLI: (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 16.6 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.7 preview 2. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.6 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 168 and 169 in Azure DevOps:

• You can now filter task board and sprint backlog board by the parent item of the the backlog items. (link)
• NPM and NuGet packages from GitHub can now be consumed as a resource in YAML pipelines. (link)
• There is a new security policy in place which allows turning off the Team and Project administrator roles from inviting new users. Project Collection Admins can always add new users. (link)
• Linux/ARM64 has been added to the list of supported platforms for Azure Pipelines agents. (link)
• You can now use tags along with your CI pipelines to determine when to run / automatically trigger. (link)
• There is more finegrained control over which marketplace extensions may be added into an environment. (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.

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

#azure, #Developers

Jasper Siegmund