Welcome to issue 493 of the Azure Weekly Newsletter. This week saw dotnetconf 2024 to celebrate the release of Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 and .NET 9, which is also available on Azure App Service. While .NET 9.0 is a Standard Term Support (STS) release - with support and patches for 18 months, you may think that there's no ROI in upgrading. However, we released two benchmarks this week that show significant performance improvements: How .NET 9.0 boosted JSON Schema performance by 32%, and How .NET 9.0 boosted AIS.NET performance by 9%, which has double in performance since .NET Core 3.1 - with no code changes required. That's a significant ROI for adopting .NET. While November marks the launch of .NET 9, .NET 6.0 reached end of LTS on Nov 12, with .NET 8.0 becoming the only LTS version, so you'll need to update your Azure Apps - Upgrading Logic Apps standard to .NET 8.
It was also KubeCon North America 2024, and there's a great highlight post What's new with Microsoft in open-source and Kubernetes at KubeCon, and another celebrating Dapr's Graduation at the CNCF.
Other articles of note this week: The Future of AI: Generative AI for...Time Series Forecasting A Look at Nixtla TimeGEN-1, and Getting Started with New AutoGen Core API: A Step-by-Step Guide for Developers, and Accelerating pathogen identification by using Snakemake on Azure, and Store and access your Iceberg data in OneLake using Snowflake and shortcuts, and a great Azure Storage Actions Deep Dive.
Last week the newsletter contained a number of broken links, due to having to use a workaround to get the Microsoft Tech Community RSS feed to work after the site "upgrade". I've fixed them all on the web version of the newsletter.