Welcome back to another episode of This Week on Channel 9, I'm your host Christina Warren,
senior cloud developer advocate.
Last week, I was in London -- and as I said in the last episode, I DID try to get an episode
recorded, but it didn't work out, so we'll be covering any of the big things we missed
last week as well.
That said, I DID get a GitHub t-shirt, and as I promised last episode, I'm wearing it.
Alright, let's get into this week's latest dev news.
First up, and this happened last week, Azure Kubernetes Service, AKA AKS, has reached general
availability and is also available in five new regions, including Australia East, UK
South, West US, West US 2, and North Europe.
AKS is Azure's managed Kubernetes service and it's a great way for developers to manage
their container-based solutions without having to have lots of Kubernetes expertise.
Brendan Burns, the co-founders of Kubernetes, did an interview with Stella from the Microsoft
Open Source team about AKS and what's next for Kubernetes that's worth a read.
The June 13th episode of Azure Friday also covers the AKS GA news.
Links to everything is in the show notes.
Speaking of Kubernetes, the lastest episode of the IoT show right here on Channel 9 -- and
our Microsoft Developer YouTube page -- is all about Kubernetes integration with Azure
IoT Edge.
And since we just covered Kubernetes, we might as well talk about containers in general,
where we've got a couple of stories worth visiting.
First up, Jimmy Bogard wrote a great blog post about containers and how they can be
used to craft a build environment.
Jimmy's post is really focused on how containers can be used in the continuous integration
part of the build environment.
This post is focused on using containers as part of a local build environment, but a future
post will look at using containers in a hosted build environment.
A hosted build environment sounds a lot like a cloud and cloud means Azure right?
Well, this is my attempt at an awkward segue to introduce Scott Hanselman's post on how
to cheaply deploy containers to Azure.
Scott even created a 21 minute video, showing the entire process.
And how cheap is cheap?
Well if you use the B1 - basic tier -- it'll run about $33 USD a month, but will be able
to run several containers.
Of course, you can always scale up if you need more, but the goal of the post was to
be cheap.
Over on the .NET blog, Rich Lander posted an update on using .NET and Docker together,
timed around DockerCon 2018.
Rich's post offers a great overview of how .NET developers can try out Docker, developing
in container, using ASP.NET and HTTPS, and lots more.
Rich also has a great blog post about staying up-to-date with .NET container images.
The .NET team pushes updates to its container images to Docker Hub multiple times a month,
ensuring that everytime a dev pulls a .NET image, they are getting the latest updates.
Microsoft maintains the .NET images and they are built using official images from the Docker
team.
This makes it possible to offer .NET Core on multiple Linux distros, as an example.
Windows Server images are also available.
Anyway, this is a good post for users who are unfamiliar with the update process across
.NET images.
And speaking of .NET, that's a perfect segue because this week, Microsoft announced that
.NET Core 2.0 will reach end of life on September 1, 2018.
.NET Core 2.0 was not a long-term support release, so it gets updates just 90 days after
the next .NET Core release, which was .NET Core 2.1.
If you haven't already upgraded to .NET Core 2.1, you need to start planning for it now.
Links to migration guides for .NET Core and ASP.NET Core are in a blog post linked in
the show notes.
Also, for anyone curious, .NET Core 2.1 will be a long-term support release, which means
it will be supported with patches for 3 years.
In other .NET news, Matt Warren -- again, no relation, we checked -- has a post on his
blog about various tools you can use for exploring .NET internals.
Most of the tools listed are single-use tools, and they're open source to boot, so that's
cool.
Thanks Matt, for this great post.
Shifting from .NET a bit, the Xamarin team has a good blog post about how to support
iOS 11 and the iPhone X in Xamarin.iOS apps.
This tutorial is important b/c Apple has indicated that beginning in July 2018, all apps submitted
to the App Store must be built with the iOS 11 SDK and support the iPhone X's Super Retina
display -- and I guess the notch too.
If you've got an older Xamarin.iOS app and you want to submit updates, you'll want to
be sure you're updated.
The post has a great collection of resources, so check it out.
For Python fans out there, the visual studio blog has a guide for getting started using
Microsoft's Python developer tools that are availalbe in visual studio, visual studio
code, Azure, and more.
And now it's time for my pick of the week, and since I was gone for two weeks, I have
two picks.
The first is a great history lesson from El Reg (that's The Register) on the 25th anniversary
of the PDF, AKA the portable document format.
It's a very fun read and the Microsoft angle is that Office 365 is getting integrated PDF
services via a partnership with Adobe Document Cloud.
But honestly, even without that news, read the history of the PDF.
It's fun.
My second pick of the week is one of the coolest toy partnerships I've seen in years.
The American Girl line of dolls now has an Xbox One S gaming set, which basically means
that all American Girl dolls can become gamers, complete with gaming headset, gaming chair,
and Xbox One S, and games.
I had an American Girl doll when I was little -- Molly, the girl from WWII -- and used to
obsess over the catalogs of tiny, very expensive, accessories.
What I'm trying to say is that 9 year old me is trying to covince the me that is in
my 30s that I need to buy this.
Well, that does it for me.
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Let me know your favorite American Girl doll in the comments!
See you next week!