I’m happy to announce a Highlights from Microsoft Build 2021 digital event next Thursday, July 15. Please join me and other local experts as we look to provide key insights from the event that will help you expand your skillset, find technical solutions, and innovate for the challenges of tomorrow.
This month I received an exciting email from Microsoft that I was re-awarded for a fourth year now for the 2021 – 2022 Microsoft Most Valuable (MVP) award in Azure. Receiving the Microsoft MVP award is both a humbling and an exciting experience. It means you’re a member of a select group of experts of just over 3,000 MVPs from around the world, but I like to think of it as doing something I’m passionate about with other like minded individuals, having fun and always having something new to learn and share with the community.
The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft. All of us at Microsoft recognize and appreciate Callon’s extraordinary contributions and want to take this opportunity to share our appreciation with you.
The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award Team Microsoft Corporation
Since becoming a Microsoft MVP, I’ve learned a lot about the community and continued to share my passion, knowledge and experience within the community around Architecture and Development in Azure, Serverless, and DevOps technologies. I also keep a keen eye on what’s happening on the data technologies like Cosmos DB and Azure SQL.
Once again the MVP Summit back in March was virtual due to COVID-19, but with a little luck I’m hoping for an in person experience in 2022. This is an amazing experience to connect with the product teams and MVPs from around the world – even if it was virtually this year.
If you’re interested in learning about the Microsoft MVP program and seeing what it takes to become a Microsoft MVP, or how to get awarded, I encourage you to take a look at the Microsoft MVP website and also the following article on “How to become a Microsoft MVP” where they explain some of the details of the program.
To wrap up this post I would like to congratulate all the other newly awarded, or renewed Microsoft MVP’s all over the world! You truly are an amazing community and I’m truly humbled and honored to be part of this group.
In this episode of Azure Friday, David Fowler and Liangying Wei join Scott Hanselman to show how to build real-time applications with WebSockets and Azure Web PubSub, a fully managed service that supports native and serverless WebSockets.
What is the Book of News? The Microsoft Build 2021 Book of News is your guide to the key news items that are announced at Build 2021.
As expected there is a lot of focus on Azure and AI, followed by Microsoft 365, Security, Windows, and Edge & Bing. This year the book of news is interactive instead of being a PDF.
Some of my favorite announcements
Azure Cloud Native and Application Platform
Running Azure app services being able to run on Kubernetes clusters anywhere with Azure Arc
Native support for WebSocket APIs in Azure API Management is now in preview
Azure Communication Services, the first fully managed communication platform offering from a major cloud provider, has new intelligent features and functionality to complete customers’ end-to-end communication experiences
Azure Logic Apps is now updated with new hosting options, improved performance and developer workflows
Durable Functions, an extension to Azure Functions that lets users write serverless workflows, now supports PowerShell
Azure Cosmos DB
With the introduction of the partial document update for Azure Cosmos DB, developers can modify specific fields or properties within a document without requiring a full document read and replace
Azure Cosmos DB serverless is now generally available for all APIs (Core, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin and Table)
Azure Cosmos DB Linux emulator is now in preview
Azure Cosmos DB expanded free tier is now generally available
Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache is now in preview
Always Encrypted for Azure Cosmos DB is now in preview
Azure Cosmos DB role-based access control (RBAC) is now generally available
Microsoft Ignite starts today and runs until March 4. Once again this is a virtual event and registration will remain open during the duration of the event. You can register at https://register.ignite.microsoft.com/
As typical Microsoft provides a Book of News for the event. What is the Book of News? The Microsoft Ignite 2021 Book of News is your guide to the key news items that are announced at Ignite 2021.
If you missed out on Microsoft Ignite 2020 or want to quickly see what was announced, checkout the Microsoft Ignite 2020 Book of News for what was announced at that event.
In this episode of Azure Friday, Jimmy Campbell is back to show Scott Hanselman how to use App Configuration for feature management. Traditionally, shipping a new application feature requires a complete redeployment of the application itself, and testing a feature often requires multiple deployments of the application. Now you can use feature flags in App Configuration to grant early access to new app functionality in production.
In this episode of Azure Friday, Jeremy Likness shows Scott Hanselman how to use Entity Framework (EF) Core with Azure SQL DB and Azure Cosmos DB. EF Core is a lightweight, extensible, open source, and cross-platform version of the popular Entity Framework data access technology.
[0:00:00]– Overview [0:01:43]– Using Entity Framework Core with Azure SQL DB (existing) [0:10:23]– Sidebar: Resolving a demo hiccup [0:15:07]– Using Entity Framework Core with Azure Cosmos DB (new) [0:22:09]– Wrap-up
The Flying Maverick 