Azure Weekly

Issue 334: 1st August 2021

I returned from two weeks' holiday on Friday, where I had been vaguely successful at having a "digital detox" to discover the sad news that Abel Wang had died. I would look forward to finding new content from Abel for the newsletter; it was always engaging, informative and enjoyable to watch. My thoughts go to his family, friends, and colleagues. There's been a huge outpouring on social media, which just goes to show the positive impact he had in our community and beyond. He will be missed. RIP Abel.

This week, the Azure Updates Team have announced that immutable storage with versioning for Blob Storage is now in public preview. Also on the Azure blog, the team also discusses optimize your cloud spend with Azure and Kristen Hicks describes advancing your financial services strategy with Azure sustainability.

On the Dev blog, April Edwards compares Azure Static Web Apps, Azure WebApps and Azure Blob Storage Static Sites. On Visual Studio Magazine, David Ramel discusses how Microsoft is replacing Xamarin Toolkits with New .NET MAUI alternatives. Elsewhere, Hayley Ding describes how to import an Azure Function App to Azure API Management programmatically, and Dennes Torres runs through how to query blob storage with SQL using Azure Synapse.

Issue 333: 22nd July 2021

This week is a bumper edition covering the last two weeks of content. So probably worth getting a drink and settling in!

The updates team have made a few exciting announcements:

• Insights and workbooks for Azure Cosmos DB now in general availability
• Session and cache provider using Azure Cosmos DB in general availability
• Azure AD authentication for Application Insights
• Azure Service Bus support for large messages
• New Application Insights standard test for synthetic monitoring (public preview)
• Call recording in public preview for Azure Communication Services
• Migrate your Azure Data Lake Storage from Gen1 to Gen2 using the Azure Portal (limited preview)
• Azure Firewall Premium general availability
• Azure Blob storage - Container Soft Delete generally available

Also on the Azure blog, Daniel Coelho runs through how to accelerate big data analytics with the Spark 3.0 connector for SQL Server.

Elsewhere, Lionel Pénuchot discusses how to partition Stream Analytics output and query it with serverless Synapse SQL. Jakub Szymaszek highlights that Always Encrypted with secure enclaves is now generally available in Azure SQL Database. Kevin Chant runs through using Azure Test Plans for Data Platform deployments.

Thomas Maurer highlights the new Inside Azure for IT program - which provides best practices and tips from the experts and allows you to get the most of of your hybrid cloud environments. Martin Brandl runs through how to approve requests for Azure AD roles in Azure Priveliged Identity Management. Pete Bernard describes building the next smart city with Azure Percept. Katya Trishina introduces the new Azure Communication Services Call Diagnostics feature for web applications.

Jianlei Shen highlights the new support for setting custom metadata when writing to Blob/ADLS Gen2. And finally, Harshada Hole introduces an exciting new feature of VS 2022: debug code with force run to cursor!

Issue 332: 11th July 2021

Let's kick off this week with a number of interesting web-technology related posts; first build a real-time whiteboard application with Azure Web PubSub, the .NET Rocks! Podcast focuses on Azure APIs with Jeff Richter, Wassim Chegham shares 10 Things To Know About Azure Static Web Apps and Mark Heath examines Azure Durable Functions Dependency Injection.

In IoT there are two interesting learning resources: A New Free Curriculum: IoT for Beginners and JulyOT 2021 - 31 Days of Learning for everyone interested in the Internet of Things.

In the world of Cloud Native tech, Andreas Helland shows how to build a Cloud Native Lab at Home, and Feng Xue delves into Upgrading AKS version with blue-green deployment - Part 1 and Part 2

And to finish, the Azure Podcast covers Safe Deployment Practices and Richie Costleigh talks about Advancing resiliency threat modeling for large distributed systems.

Issue 331: 4th July 2021

This week the Azure Updates Team have announced the Ingestion Client for Azure Speech. And, on a related note, on Azure Tips and Tricks, Michael Crump walks through how to perform opinion mining with Azure Cognitive Services.

John Reilly runs through how we can use C# 9 with in-process Azure Functions running on .NET Core 3.1.

Mark Russinovich describes project Gandalf - an end-to-end, continuous monitoring system which the Azure Compute Insights team have developed to enable safe deployment.. And, on the Dev blog, Dante Gagne asks the community to vote for how we can make Visual Studio even more accessible!

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