What's New in Azure SDKs: Identity Goes GA and More -- Visual Studio Magazine

What's New in Azure SDKs: Identity Goes GA and More

By David Ramel
08/19/2020

Microsoft's latest monthly updates to its Azure SDKs for cloud computing include many new features, updates and fixes, highlighted by Azure Identity graduating to general availability (GA).

For the Identity library, first previewed in June 2019, the GA release features new developer credential types, logging enhancements, proactive token refresh, and authority host support, said Microsoft's Jon Gallant in an Aug. 18 SDK roundup announcement.

"In this release, we have added support for more environments and developer platforms, without compromising the simplicity of the DefaultAzureCredential class," said Jianghao Lu, senior software engineer, in his own Aug. 18 blog post about Identity. "It's now easier than ever to authenticate your cloud application on your local workstation, with your choice of IDE or developer tool. When the application is deployed to Azure, you are given more control and insights on how your application is authenticated."

The DefaultAzureCredential class previously supported reading credentials from environment variables, Managed Identity, Windows shared token cache, and interactively in the browser (for .NET and Python), in that order, Lu said.

New environments include:

IntelliJ (Java only)
Visual Studio (.NET only)
Visual Studio Code
Azure CLI

Other environments received updates, specific to platform/language.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Default Azure Credential Flow *(source: Microsoft).*

Other release highlights listed by Gallant include:

Azure Cognitive Search SDK for .NET added FieldBuilder to help easily build a search index from a model type.
The Azure SDK for Java added ObjectSerializer and JsonSerializer APIs to support pluggable serialization within SDKs. See more about that and other changes in the release notes.
Added support for Key Vault service version 7.1 for Keys, Secrets, and Certificates. See more about that (and the aforementioned FieldBuilder) in the .NET release notes, and also in the Java release notes.

The Azure SDK for JavaScript, in addition to Identity and Azure Key Vault going GA, sees updates to Core libraries, Azure Event Hubs and Azure Form Recognizer, while Azure Service Bus was introduced in preview. See more in the release notes for that SDK.

The Azure SDK for Python sees Storage features going GA and updates to App Configuration, Identity, Text Analytics, Key Vault and Cosmos DB, with previews for Service Bus, Form Recognizer and Search. See more in the release notes for that SDK.

Fore additional information about everything above and much more, links to packages, code, and docs can be found on the Azure SDK Releases page.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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