[Azure] News for Developers, January 2021

Technical / February 1, 2021 / Jasper / 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.

• Azure Health Bot helps healthcare organizations to quickly develop conversational healthcare experiences. (link)
• An Azure Public IP can now be upgraded from Basic to Standard SKU in place, while retaining the IP address. (link)
• You can now manage your CosmosDB instances using the Az.CosmosDB PowerShell module. (link)
• Also in CosmosDB, you can now use the LIKE query keyword with the SQL API. (link)
• And lastly with CosmosDB, there is now Availability Zone support with single-region write support. (link)
• For detailed usage analysis of your web application, Application Insights now supports automatic tracking of click events. (link)
• Azure Storage supports copying blobs over private endpoints. (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 3. (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.8 is now available (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 180 & 181 in Azure DevOps:

• YAML Pipelines now support the Manual Validation task which can be used to pause a YAML pipeline mid-stage. (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