The Day 1 Keynote for Microsoft Build 2017 was a great mix of developer inspirations and new technology releases.
The inspiration piece ranged from large fortune 500 companies leveraging Azure all the way to a researcher building a watch-like device that helped a woman with Parkinsons write her own name for the first time in years; I highly recommend watching the video and see what a difference a small device has made in this woman’s life.
Here’s a quick list of what new tools/features were announced at the keynote:
Azure Cloud Shell: From the Azure portal, you can now access a bash command line (by clicking the “>_” icon at the top of the screen. This is a full featured bash interface that is running in a container on Azure. There is no need to install anything on the machine you are using to access the portal. This includes durable storage for files that will be available from wherever you access the portal. The shell comes with the Azure CLI already installed, your user logged in, and access to all subscription your current account has. In the future, Microsoft will add PowerShell as an option in addition to bash.
Azure Mobile Portal: Now you can access your Azure resources wherever you go. The app is available for both Android and iOS. As and added bonus, this app also has the aforementioned Azure Cloud Shell in it!
Visual Studio Snapshot Debugging for Azure: This feature inside Visual Studio 2017 allows you to connect to running applications in Azure and debug them. Unlike standard debugging, a snapshot of the application state is used for debugging. This means a developer can debug issues in the production environment without impacting user experience!
Visual Studio for Mac: This is now in general availability status. Anyone who has a current license for Visual Studio now has Visual Studio for Mac as part of their license. Functionality includes first-class support for Azure integration.
Azure Database Migration Service: A new tool from Microsoft that makes migrating from SQL Server to Azure SQL PaaS with virtually no down time.
New Relation Database PaaS offerings: Microsoft announced both MySQL and PostgreSQL are now available as PaaS services. This means you can use these databases in Azure and not have to worry about high availability, security, and software updates. All existing applications and tools that work with MySQL and PostgreSQL will work with the new PaaS offering with no change other than the connection string itself!
Cosmos Database: This new offering supports multiple models, such as MongoDB, DocumentDB, etc. RDBMs don’t appear to be supported. This service allows turnkey scale out for each of these models. The SLA for this service not only includes up-time guarantee, but also response time guarantees. With a few simple clicks in the Azure portal, you can scale out your databases to multiple regions, and even during scale-out, your databases continue to be available.
Visual Studio 2017 Azure Function Tooling: Tooling for Azure functions in VS2017 has been released.
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