[Azure] News for Developers, Jun 2021

Technical / July 8, 2021 / 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.

The pandemic something makes me lose track of things a little bit, but last month was BUILD month! That traditionally means: lots of news to report.

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.

• Ok, maybe not really Azure, but the API Portal is based on API Managements developer portal and lets you use an OpenAPI spec to quickly generate documentation for your API. (link)
• You can now use Resource Health to monitor the status of your Azure SQL Managed Instance. (link)
• For those who love free (I’m Dutch so I know what I’m talking about…) there are now 5 more FREE offerings in Azure these include: Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Key Vault, Azure Logic Apps, and the Encoding feature of Azure Media Services. (link)
• You might not need this daily, but when you do… Azure Maps Elevation Service has you covered with elevation data from Earths pole to pole. (link)
• Also for maps, Android developers can now leverage the Android SDK for Maps. (link)
• Azure Blobs now have the ability to add index tags to them, in order to find what you need without the need to a secondary catalog in – for instance – table storage. (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 16.10 is out there (link) and the preview version is 16.11 preview 1. (link)
• For those who want to test the early bits, you can now also take Visual Studio 2022 for a spin! You can download Preview 1 here: (link)
• Visual Studio 2019 for Mac version 8.10 is now available (link)
• When you’re into productivity, check out these latest updates from the Roslyn team. These include features like removing unused packages from projects (w00p) and visually editing an .editorconfig file within Studio. (link)
• If performance of your code is something you need instead, check out these updates to the .NET Object Allocation tool in VS. (link)

And these updates were part of sprint 188 in Azure DevOps:

• Closing the gap between traditional release pipelines and YAML pipelines, you can now retain a (build)pipeline you consume by policy, which is one of the things yaml pipelines were still lacking. (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