Welcome to the desert that is the news of the post-Build world.
If you saw a last week's show, David covered
all the Azure news that happened at Build. So this week we are left with not much, really. However,
I have been to the spare clouds bin and found some goodies for you. I'm Lars Klint,
you're watching Azure This Week. And first up is a special little dish I cooked up just for you.
I'm a developer at heart, and I love building things in the cloud.
I am only as effective and productive as the tools I use though. Therefore,
in absence of any significant Azure news, I have put together my top five developer
tools for Azure. Now, number five is the Azure Storage Explorer. Storage on Azure is cheap,
secure, redundant, and an integral part of most of Azure solutions in some way. However,
managing the files, blobs and queues through the Portal, CLI, PowerShell, or APIs is difficult at
times, downright frustrating most of the time. The Azure storage Explorer is a free tool that...
The Azure Storage Explorer is a free tool that you install, and then it works like Windows Explorer
for all your Azure storage. So keep sane, use it. Number four. Number four is Postman,
which is not exclusively used for Azure, but for any web endpoint that you want to test.
It is often used for testing APIs, which is also why it's so good with Azure. By manually
building the request for an API endpoint, you can test authentication, parameters, return values,
and much more. When building a solution that uses Azure APIs, you need to test them all the time,
whether those are native Azure APIs or your own built on top. Postman makes this
process so much easier and more manageable. Now, have you used Cosmos DB yet? If you have,
then you might be aware of a few pitfalls. One is managing the databases, collections
and items in your instance. Another could be getting any sense of how much it's going to cost
to run your solution. Now, both can be answered to some extent by using my number three,
the Cosmos DB Emulator. A local running instance on your machine that doesn't cost anything.
However, it will indicate cost for running your collections on Cosmos DB. And that's neat.
Okay. My second favorite, number two, dev tool on Azure is Application Insights
which provides performance management and live monitoring of your application.
Now it will automatically detect performance anomalies. It'll help you diagnose issues,
and let you dive really deep into the bowels of the platform, if you need to. It's extensible,
integrates with a bunch of tools, gives you telemetry, and just makes the testing
and debugging part of your project so much more enjoyable. Yes, it will.
Okay. It might not be a surprise, but might number one is Visual Studio Code. Yep. Without a doubt,
the number one developer IDE for tons of projects. VS Code is free, lightweight, feature rich,
and crazy extensible. So give it a go. Every month A Cloud Guru has a number of
totally free courses, which change over time. This month is Azure month. So we have a bunch of Azure
courses free for you, including: Introduction to Governance and Compliance on Azure,
Azure Active Directory Deep Dive, Introduction to Azure Resource Manager,
Intro to serverless on Azure, and Azure Storage Deep Dive. Yeah, like we talked about before.
A free account is genuinely free as well. No credit card needed, just content delivered.
All right. Let's move on to the trickle of this week's Azure news.
Special drawer here. All right. Let's see what we got. Hmm.
Azure ExpressRoute IPv6 Support for Global Reach. Hmm, no. Oh,
updates for resource configuration changes. It's a bit boring. Oh, here's a good one. Uh,
yeah. Right. If you use Azure Virtual Desktop to give users access to enterprise data
and applications from, well, pretty much anywhere, setting up the infrastructure
for this can be tricky. Especially when it comes to making sure everything is secure.
That's why Microsoft has produced a bunch of virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI,
security best practices to help you out. The 17 page ebook includes areas such as conditional
access, multifactor authentication, audit logs, endpoint security, and application restrictions.
Of course, Microsoft wants you to buy into their virtual desktop world, but tools and documentation
like this does mean they help you out where possible to make that transition
smoother. And if you do use VDI let me know, in the comments, if this is of use to you.
That's the news for this week. There really wasn't anything a... I can't speak now.
That is the news for this week. There really wasn't anything interesting announced as Build,
well, took care of that. So I hope you could use my top five dev tools
in any case. Let me know which you would have put on your top five as well. So next week, the
show is having a bit of a break as a bunch of us gather for a very special event in San Francisco.
But much more about that on both the ACG and Pluralsight channels in the coming weeks.
We'll see you in the cloud. Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.