[Azure] News for Developers, July 2020

Technical / August 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.

• The Form Recognizer service is now GA. You can use this cognitive service to automatically OCR and recognize fields from receipts and other documents. (link)
• On the topic of cognitive services; new functionalities also include: custom commands and new neural Text to Speech voices. Text analytics for health is in preview. (link)
• You can now switch to the New Git user experience in Visual Studio using the preview feature toggle in the Tools -> Options pane. (link)
• The Azure SignalR Service now supports connecting via Private Link. (link)
• If you’re using the Azure Time Series Insights experience, check out these upcoming changes to S1/S2 SKUs. (link)
• Non-compliant certificate authorities are being revoked from Azure Services, which might impact your services with a bring-your-own cert. (link)
• On Azure Storage accounts you can now disable public access for added security. This ensures your storage account is invisible to the public when you don’t need it to be. (link)
• If you’re into architecting solutions, check out the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework which guides you when building Azure based solutions. (link)
• Azure AKS now supports Azure AD. (link)
• You can now connect Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate solutions to Azure Monitor using an Azure Monitor connector. (link)
• The MAXDOP (max degree of parallelism) option in Azure SQL Database is changing from 0 to 8. (link)
• There is now a new PowerBI component specially for React built web applications. (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 172 in Azure DevOps:

• You can now use state transition restriction rules to restrict work items from being moved from one state to another. (link)
• When copying a work item, you can select “Include child work items” to also copy the children. (link)
• By using “Exclusive Lock” you can now ensure that only a single run deploys to an environment at a time (using a check). (link)
• YAML pipelines now offer generic webhook based triggers which you can use to trigger your pipeline from the outside. (link)
• The ability to create org-scopes feeds from the UI has been brought back. (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