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October Surprise: Azure Developer Updates
Fresh from Ignite, the Azure teams have been on a DevOps-heavy kick with a number of new tools for managing Azure services.
- By Michael Domingo
- 10/13/2016
Microsoft introduced quite a few services at its IT-heavy Ignite event in Atlanta a few weeks ago, but there were a few targeting developers and DevOps who are tasked with managing Azure services that are just now seeing daylight:
Azure Management Libraries for Java Beta 3: Beta 3 follows a developer preview released back in July, with this version providing support for virtual machine extensions and scale sets, Java key vaults, VM parallel creation, and load balancers. Details here.
Azure Management Libraries for .NET Preview: Similar to the one for Java, the .NET preview introduces an Azure class for creating/interacting with Azure resources; capability to create (via Define()...Create() method chain) and update (Update()...Apply()) VMs; and supports IntelliSense. More info here.
Azure App Service: The fully managed service for building apps targeting any device that was introduced back in early 2015 provides a preview of features for supporting native Linux as an alternative from Windows when developing from the Node.js and PHP stacks. A comprehensive overview is here.
App Service Mobile Apps .NET Client SDK 3.0.1: The point release for these SDKs, which provides for a way to connect ASP.NET apps to mobile clients, resolves some issues for those working with native Android, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.Forms Android that used SQLitePC dependencies, and also unifies Azure Mobile Client SDK 3.0.1 here and the version for connecting to locally stored SQLite store here.
Azure SQL Database: Temporal tables, which can be used to track historical changes to data (along with a retention policy for managing that historical data gathered from temporal tables) is now generally available. More here.
Azure Stream Analytics: Fully managed cloud analytics service now provides query testing from the new management interface located at http://portal.azure.com. (Noteworthy: Any new services will be introduced to the new portal as the old management interface at https://manage.windowsazure.com is retired by the end of the year.)
Azure PowerShell 3.0.0: This update for managing assets via cmdlets in Azure Resource Manager and Azure Service Management mainly includes a slew of improvements and fixes, as well as some significant breaking changes in a subset of the Data Lake Store, ApiManagement, and Network cmdlets. More here.
The best source for Azure development tools progress is the Azure Developer blog.
Have you come across any interesting links, or does your company have a new or updated product or service targeted at Visual Studio or .NET developers? Tell me about it at [email protected].
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.