News
Azure Data Lakes Tools for Visual Studio Code Now in Preview
The ability to embrace U-SQL jobs via authoring, scripting, extensibility via the VSCode environment and using C# is the key to this tooling preview.
- By Michael Domingo
- 11/17/2016
Visual Studio Code is jumping into the Big Data pool, with a new offering that allows for working directly with the Azure Data Lake Store. The springboard is Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio Code, which is now in preview; it was one of a number of other Azure offering announced at Microsoft's Connect(); event this week.
Azure Data Lake Store is Microsoft's Azure-based service for analyzing gobs of unstructured data. U-SQL debuted over a year ago as a means to be able to connect queries made to ADLS to a programming language that developers find more familiar -- specifically, C#.
"By extending VSCode, leveraging the Azure Data Lake Java SDK for U-SQL job submission, and integrating with the Azure portal for job monitoring, the tools provide a cross-platform IDE," writes Jenny Jiang, a program manager on Microsoft's Big Data team, in a blog post. "Users can run it smoothly in Window, Linux and Mac."
ADL Tools for VSCode supports U-SQL language authoring, scripting, and extensibility with C#. U-SQL extensibility is enabled using custom code either by using registered custom code assemblies (which is done via the Register Assembly command) or code-behind capabilities.
ADL Tools for VSCode can be use to "process any type of data, integrate with your custom code, as well as efficiently scale to any size of data," Jiang notes.
The new tooling also integrates with Azure Data Lake Analytics, which means U-SQL job submissions can be done through ADLA, with job output to ADLS or Azure Blob Storage.
The preview is available now via the VSCode Extension repository or in the VSCode Marketplace. To run it, it requires VSCode and JRE 1.8.x, Mono 4.2.x (for Linux and Mac), and .Net Core (for Linux and Mac).
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.