Azure Weekly

Issue #269 - 5th April 2020

This week Microsoft have made a couple of announcements around how they are supporting those who are now working remotely:

Firstly, Azure DevTest discounts are now available. Azure DevTestLabs provide a way to easily provision, manage and de-provision Azure VMs. They have also announced that they will be Optimizing for stability during the global health pandemic, and halting feature releases for Azure DevOps for the time being. Alongside this, Gary Ciampa has shared an example of enabling remote workers with Azure Windows Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. And, on a less practical note, Em Lazer-Walker has written a post about How YOU Can Use Computer Vision to Avoid Touching Your Face!

Here at endjin, Jess Panni has released our Office 365 Wardley Mapping Templates (we use this technique to help senior stakeholders understand the benefits/tradeoffs of adopting various Azure services), and shows how to use them. 

And Jon George has written a series of blogs on Integration Testing Azure Functions with SpecFlow and C# - this is based on our real-world experiences of Azure Functions over the last few years:

• An Introduction
• Using step bindings to start Functions
• Using hooks to start Functions
• Controlling your Functions with additional configuration
• Using Corvus.SpecFlow.Extensions in a build pipeline

Bill Zack got in contact to highlight that Microsoft MVP Tim Warner's Nashville Microsoft Azure Users Group presentation on "How to Get and Stay Current with Microsoft Azure" - is now available on YouTube (and, of course Azure Weekly gets a mention!).