[Azure] News for Developers, December 2020

Technical / January 13, 2021 / Jasper Siegmund / 0

Happy new year everyone! This one is a bit late, sorry for that. There wasn’t much to miss though, december is traditionally a slow month. Enjoy!

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.

• Azure Digital Twins is now GA. This service, targeted mainly towards IoT solutions enables you to build a digital representative (clone) of its twin in the real world. (link)
• Are you still evaluating Azure? Or for some other reason using a free account? You might be interested to know that the following offerings now also have a free tier: Service Bus, VPN Gateway, Load Balancer, Container Registry, Archive Storage, as well as increased free amounts of Cosmos DB. (link)
• If your app uses RabbitMQ for messaging, know that Azure Functions now offers RabbitMQ Bindings for Azure Functions. (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 16.8 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.9 preview 2. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.8 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 178 & 179 in Azure DevOps:

• Removed items are no longer shown on the Work Items page! (link)
• The new Azure Test Plans page has gone GA. (link)
• There have been some UI tweaks to optimize space usage in different parts of the product. (link)
• YAML pipelines now support integration with ServiceNow change management. (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