Issue 324: 16th May 2021
This week, the updates team have announced that Azure Health Bot has added eight new regions with additional language support, including India to support pandemic response. Alongside this, Stuart Kwan highlights that Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) is now available in public preview.
Daria Grigoriu walks through how to develop production-scale modern web apps quickly with the newly GA Azure Static Web Apps. And Erin Zefkeles discusses the fluent new look for the Azure icon.
On the endjin blog, James Broome has written a great post on how to test Azure Synapse notebooks and Carmel Eve runs through How to use Azure Synapse SQL Serverless to connect Data Lake and Power BI.
Finally, Barbara Forbes has written an excellent post on how to use Bicep AND ARM Template specs with Azure DevOps.
Issue 323: 9th May 2021
This week, the updates team have announced that ARM Template Specs are now generally available. And, usefully, Barbara Forbes runs through how to get started with Azure ARM Template specs. Alongside this, the team have announced that append blob support is now generally available in Azure Data Lake Store.
On Channel 9, Rachel Kang and James Montemagno discuss building Accessible Mobile Apps. And finally, Lee Stott discusses teaching Azure to prepare students for the future.
Issue 322: 2nd May 2021
There were two big announcements this week, firstly a new service, Azure Web PubSub, which you can read more about in the following article: Easily build real-time apps with WebSockets and Azure Web PubSub — now in preview. Although it looks similar to Azure SignalR, it's targetted at lower-level, cross platform, websocket based usecases. Next Microsoft has made another acquisition, this time Kinvolk, to accelerate container-optimized innovation.
In the analytics space, James Serra has a chalk & talk session on the Modern Data Warehouse, the Data Exposed show covers the Benefits of Intelligent Query Processing, and Machine Learning on Azure SQL Managed Instance is generally available.
There's an exciting new feature in Azure AD: preview of embed Azure AD B2C sign-in interface in an iframe, which can be useful for SPA scenarios. There's also a good article about gaining insights into the Azure Virtual Network flows in Azure Network Security Hygiene with Traffic Analytics.
Finally, at a slightly higher level, on the Azure Enablement show a good conversation about evaluating financial considerations during your cloud adoption journey and finally a story about Microsoft is partnering with the UK government and SeeAbility to support people with disabilities to find jobs, skill up support workers and tackle social isolation.
Issue 321: 25th April 2021
This week, the updates team have announced that the (API Management) open source API Portal now generally available - a place to publish your API documentation, for free!
Also on the Azure blog, the team highlights that Azure Trivia is back, with a new Azure-themed trivia question every week. And Erin Chapple discusses how Microsoft is bringing Azure supercomputing to UK Met Office.
On the Visual Studio blog, Amanda Silver announces the first public preview of Visual Studio 2022! And, in line with this, David Ramel discusses the yop 10 feature requests for the new release.
Diego Colombo has taken part in a livestream about all things Jupyter Notebooks and C#, definitely worth a watch! .NET Interactive is a technology which we are hugely invested in here at endjin, and we're extremely excited to see how the project progresses over the next few months (especially with an exciting announcement that we'll be sharing more about soon!).
Another project which we're huge fans of is Azure Bicep. And this week Justin Yoo discusses how the latest version of Azure Bicep is ready for your production workloads. This week I've been using Bicep as part of a project we're working on, and I have to say that I'm constantly impressed by the usability (especially when compared to ARM!).
Finally, Thursday was Earth Day 2021, and in honour of this Frank Boucher highlights a livestream: Hello World, Hello Earth. Here the team cover the Earth Day Cloud Skills Challenge, discuss visual green tech, and explore a Minecraft sustainable city!
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