Azure Functions Support Highlights Visual Studio for Mac 7.6 Release -- Visual Studio Magazine

Azure Functions Support Highlights Visual Studio for Mac 7.6 Release

By David Ramel
08/21/2018

The latest update for Visual Studio for Mac focuses on improving code editor reliability, IDE performance and working with Azure Functions.

The improved support for Azure Functions in v7.6 is a nod toward cloud developers targeting event-driven, "serverless" computing apps, with server provisioning and management being taken care of automatically.

That's even easier with new templates that cloud developers can now use in the IDE to get a jump-start on creating Azure Functions projects. They handle functionality such as configuring access rights, connection strings and other configuration binding properties.

Also, the new release allows Mac-based developers to easily publish functions to the Azure Portal. "To publish a function, simply right-click on the project name and select Publish > Publish to Azure. You’ll then be able to publish to an existing Azure App Service or use the publishing wizard to create a new one," Microsoft's Dominic Nahous said in an Aug. 20 blog post.

In improving the reliability of the code editor, Nahous said several issues were fixed, including IntelliSense for F# developers, JavaScript syntax highlighting and cases where tooltips and IntelliSense red "squiggles" persisted when they should have disappeared.

On the IDE improvement front, Nahous said, "One of the top reported bugs in previous releases has been performance issues in the editor. Having a fast and reliable code editor is a fundamental part of any IDE and an important part of any developer’s workflow, so we’ve made some improvements in this area."

He listed those as:

Improved tag-based classification for C# with PR #4740 by reusing existing Visual Studio for Windows code, which should improve typing performance in the editor.
Support for no-op restore of NuGet packages when opening a solution. This change speeds up NuGet restores on solution load.

More information on these and other fixes/improvements can be found in the Visual Studio for Mac 7.6 release notes.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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