[Azure] News for Developers, September 2020

Technical / October 2, 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.

• New series of virtual machines are now available for use. D v4 and E v4 for respectively general purpose and memory intensive workloads. (link)
• Want to have a one-stop cost overview for your multi-vendor cloud services? Azure cost overview now supports AWS! (link)
• I normally only cover .NET development news, but here’s one for Java devs! Meet Azure Spring Cloud, an Azure based service for your Spring based apps! (link)
• You can now initiate a failover for Azure SQL Managed Instance yourself. (link)
• Durable Functions 2.3 is now available, bringing support for enabling geo-redundant durable functions, long running timers and scheduled events. (link)
• Visual Studio Codespaces, the cloud based development environments are consolidating into GitHub Codespaces. (link)
• If you’re using Docker containers, you might be interested in the integration of Azure Container Instances in the latest version of Docker Desktop. (link)
• Several updates were made to the Azure Portal itself. (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 16.7 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.8 preview 3. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.7 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 173 & 174 in Azure DevOps:

• Scale-set agents are now available to scale your CI/CD needs. (link)
• If you have sufficient permissions, you can now schedule your pipeline job to run next, bumping it to next up in the job queue. (link)
• The Test and Feedback extension for Test Plans is now available in the Microsoft Edge store. (link)
• You can now use the comment field in a PR to automatically update the status of workitems. (link)
• Due to popular request, you can now add the Parent field to both the child and parent cards on the Task Board. (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