[Azure] News for Developers, Jul 2021
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.
- Where you could already soft delete a blob, you can now soft delete a container in Azure Storage as well. (link)
- There were several updates for API Management, including the ability to publish your API’s specifically for use with the Power Platform. (link)
- Azure Monitor Insights and Workbook features are now available for use with Cosmos DB. (link)
- On the topic of Cosmos DB, you can now use Cosmos DB as a session state and cache provider from the .NET SDK. (link)
- Using Java or NodeJS? Know that integration of Application Insights with Azure App Service is now available for those use cases too. (link)
- Azure Arc lets companies distribute their workloads over multiple cloud providers. These capabilities now include support for Azure SQL. (link)
- If you’re a Stream Analytics user, you might be interested to know that there’s now VS Code extensions for stream analytics. (link)
- The Azure Web Application Firewall now supports geomatch custom rules (link) and offers bot protection. (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 2 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:
- You can now restrict PAT scope and lifetime via Azure AD tenant policy. (link)
- It was previously not possible to retain a pipeline after it was consumed by another pipeline configured for retention. This has been fixed. (link)
- In Azure Pipelines, you can use exclusive lock checks to control which stages can deploy things onto protected resources. There’s now a setting which lets you control the lock behavior to support sequential deployments rather than latest only. (link)
- There’s a change in the .NET SDK preinstallation policy for Microsoft-hosted and MacOS agents. This might impact you if you’re using those. Check out the details in the link. (link)
- Changes to the PublishBuildArtifacts and DownloadBuildArtifacts tasks might impact your network requirements (firewalls). Check out the details in the link. (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!
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