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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

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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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Read More

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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

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First of all I’d like to start by wishing everyone a very happy 2018! 2017 was a great year and I’m sure that 2018 will also have some great new things to come! Traditionally December doesn’t bring us that much news so this edition is a little shorter than what you’re used to.

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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Read More

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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Read More

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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

Where the previous edition featured a lot of stuff due to Ignite, things are a bit slow for this one. But still, some good news came from Redmond!

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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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

The Ignite 2017 conference took place this month. And as always with the bigger Microsoft conferences: there was news, lots of it. So this months list is a little bit longer than usual!

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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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

 

App Service specific updates

Here are some important updates from the world of Azure App Services:

• The Azure Functions UI now features a tabbed interface. (link)
• Also from the Azure Functions world, the Tools for Visual Studio 2017 Update 3 are now available. And even better: you get them as part of the update, no manual installation required! (link)
• Have you tried turning it off and on again? With Proactive Auto Heal, your webapps will auto restart when they’re in a bad state (memory leak for instance). It does this by monitoring the memory and request time. Note that is now is on by default, but you can opt-out. (link)
• It’s now very easy to choose a Docker image from Azure Container Registry for Continuous Deployment schemes. (link)

The app services team now keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo!  And you can find a monthly update on their blog as well.

 

Visual Studio (Team Services)

Everything slows down in summertime, right? Well not in the world of VSTS! These are just the cherries from the huge list of updates!

• Creating Wiki pages is now in public preview. Wiki’s support markdown (like other pages) and can be very useful to create documentation for instance. (link)
• Search for and recreating deleted branches. Makes you wonder what the definition of “delete” is, but hey… we’ve all needed this one at one time. (link)
• A new version of the dotnet (2.x) build task supports authenticated package sources. There were also changes in the behavior when it cannot find a project file (now fails) and to specifying an explicit output path. (link)
• The marketplace now features an extensions for Ansible support. (link)
• Running Web Tests from the test hub, you can now capture screenshots of desktop apps. (link)
• A new work items hub allows filtering work based on: Assigned to me, Following, Mentioned, My activity, Recently created. (link)
• In a “if this, than that” style you can now create work item rules to automate things even more. (link)
• w00t! Support for Git Forks is on the way! (link)
• The new Release Editor experience is now the default for everyone, but can still be disabled by an admin. (link)
• A release task can now be conditional based on the requirement that you set. (link)
• The new user management experience helps adding new users, managing users and adding them to Projects and Teams. (link)

Check out https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/articles/news/2017/aug-04-team-services and https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/articles/news/2017/aug-28-team-services for the complete overview!

 

Azure

Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:

• If you are looking at blockchain (as we are at mStack), check out Microsofts new Coco framework for building enterprise blockchain networks. (link)
• Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.3 has been officially released. Highlighted features include: (link)
  • A lot of work on the accessibility side, including debugging features and text adornments.
  • Several fixes to provide more stability.
  • Included support for Azure Functions.
  • Broad Azure sign-in support (Government, Sovereign cloud and Azure Stack).
  • Improved Container support.
  • Continous Delivery Tools now included by default.
• .NET Core 2.0 was also officially released! (link) Highlights include:
  • Live Unit Testing during coding
  • Refering to .NET Core / .NET Standard libraries without the need to add interop packages. They’re still needed but VS includes them automatically now.
  • Supported in Visual Studio for Mac.
• Talking about Visual Studio for Mac, that team released version 7.1 of their product to the public. (link)
• Azure Event Grid (in preview) allows the routing of infrastructure and application level events to all kinds of components within Azure. Allows you to hook into events like “someone was added to my Azure subscription”. And it’s serverless! (link)

That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!

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. Now this is based on my personal feeds and my personal opinion, so you might miss things or see things which in your opinion do not matter. Feel free to leave and comment below and I’ll see what I can do for the next edition. And honestly, this is more a personal reference than anything else so having actual readers would already be awesome 🙂 Enjoy!

 

App Services updates

Here are some important updates from the world of Azure App Services:

• .NET 4.7 is now supported on Azure App Service. For more information about what 4.7 brings for you, check out this post.
• .NET Core 2.0 Preview 2 also rolled out to Azure App Service. For more information about that release, click here.
• Durable Functions are on App Service now. These are built on the Durable Task Framework which allows writing long running workflows using async/await operations. For Functions, this brings us a way to facilitate longer running processes on Functions, which was not possible previously. Check out this post for more information.
• NodeJS versions have been updated to include v4.8.4, v6.11.1, v7.10.1 and v8.1.4 along with the corresponding NPM packages. These updates provide a fix for a known vulnerability.
• Azure App Service Environment (ASE) v2 has been released. Most important changes include scaling based on the App Service Plan (managing worker pools is no longer required). The creation process is now integrated into the Create new App Service Plan experience, increasing the visibility. And the new ASE can scale to bigger, which is of course better 😉 Check out the blog post here.
  
• A preview of App Service Domains makes it easier to combine Azure DNS hosted domain names with your app service instances. A few of the benefits include: subdomain management, automatic renewals and free cancellation within 5 days. That post is over here.

The app services team now keeps track of their updates in blog posts and in this github repo!  And you can find a monthly update on their blog as well.

Visual Studio (Team Services)

From the world of Visual Studio team services:

• There’s a new editor for release definitions and an updated workflow for pull requests. The editor I already used myself and it’s a pretty sweet visual representation of the release flow in your application. Check it out!
• Upon completion of a pull request, you can now automatically mark all linked workitems as Done. Get it done!
• Also in the PR department: a policy now allows an automatic reset of reviewer votes when new code is being pushed.
• Personal favorite: you can now view the original diff of a file once a code update has been pushed. This makes it a lot easier to check out changes to the code which you commented on previously.
• Multiple updates to task groups include: versioning (draft), references and import/export of a task group.

Check out https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/articles/news/2017/jul-14-team-services for the complete overview.

 

Other

Here’s all the stuff that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:

• John Papa (yes, the one and only) released Azure Function Tools for Visual Studio Code which allows you to use TypeScript within your Azure Functions. Download it from the marketplace here.
• For all of you Angular folks out there, Angular version 4.2 is now available.
• In the “services that might come in handy one day” department; Microsoft Stream has been made generally available. Stream offers powerful video streaming services combined with intelligent stuff like automatic captioning, face detection and other AI features. Click here for more.

That’s it for this month, see you next month for another round of Azure news!