Azure Functions Updates
April 30, 2017
New Release of Azure Functions
A new release of Azure Functions is now available, version 1.0.10917. The main things in this release are:
- Application Insights integration (Preview)
- Native TypeScript support (preview)
- Improvements to binding extensibility for binding authors
- JavaScript transpiler API/extension model
- Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
New Experience for Azure Functions
The Azure Functions portal was also completely re-vamped with a new UI experience. Some of the improvements are:
- A dedicated browse blade for Function Apps.
- A tree view that allows viewing and managing multiple Function Apps
- Filters on subscription and app name, as well as an option to scope the view to just one app
- One-click access to all App Service platform features
- A convenient way to manage features that have already been configured
- Overall UI enhancements to be more consistent with the rest of the Azure portal
You can read more about the portal changes in the announcement blog.
Enjoy!
References
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/appserviceteam/2017/05/01/april-2017-app-service-update/
Azure Functions now with Application Insights integration
April 30, 2017
Earlier this month Azure Functions was updated to have direct integration with Application Insights and is currently only available on the “beta” version of Azure Functions. At this time it’s recommended to only try this out in non-production Azure Function apps until it’s a more stable release.
Getting Started
Before we can enable Azure Function Application Insights integration, we will need to setup an Application Insights instance. If you already have one skip to the next step.
- Create an Application Insights instance and Application Type should be General. Once your Application Insights is setup, copy the instrumentation key which we’ll need in the next step.
- Next you will need to update your Azure Function Application Settings to configure your function to run under the “beta” version and then to set your Application Insights Instrumentation Key.
- Now go to Application Settings and then update App Setting “FUNCTIONS_EXTENSION_VERSION” from “~1” to “beta” and then add a new key named “APPINSIGHTS_INSTRUMENTATIONKEY” and set the value to the Application Insights Instrumentation key you copied in step 1. Now click Save to update your Azure Function.
Once this is done, your Application Insights instance will start collecting telemetry from your Azure Function without any code changes.
Using Application Insights
Going to your Application Insights, you can start to see some metrics showing up on the overview blade:
Live Metrics Stream
You can get a lot more insights to real-time telemetry from the Live Metrics Stream to see what’s happening right now: 
Analytics
Another great resource of Application Insights is the Analytics portal, which provides you the ability to write your own custom queries. 
Alerts
The previous two options are great to see what is happening or what happened historically, but Alerts will tell you what’s happening. I suggest you checkout Alerts from the Application Insights blade, where you can define alerts based on a wide array of metrics.
Summary
You can now add Application Insights to your Azure Functions with minimal effort, which is a powerful tool for monitoring your applications. Keep in mind that this is currently only available in the “beta” version of Azure Functions, but is something that should be coming to the production release in the near future now that it’s been merged into the develop branch on github.
Enjoy!
References
Azure Functions integration with Application Insights
Azure Functions now has direct integration with Application Insights
Using Azure Storage Queues from .NET
April 30, 2017
Azure Storage Queues provide an easy to implement messaging communication mechanism for reliably passing messages to/from different components of a single application or multiple applications. Storage Queues have an HTTP/HTTPS API to allow for support of any development platform; however, Microsoft does provide a .NET SDK to make it even easier to implement from C# or other .NET languages.
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Quick Post – Azure Services Overview
April 10, 2017
There is a saying “Can’t see the forest for the trees” this could also apply to Azure and its provided services. I haven’t seen a good overview of Azure and the offered services until today. While browsing the internet, I bumped into this site here http://azureplatform.azurewebsites.net/en-us/ . 
It is an interactive site which shows the single services in each category and provides links to more information like updates, pricing, SLA, documentation etc. 
I love this page and I highly recommend to explore and bookmarking it! It is even available in German :).
The other day I hosted a FREE Webinar with Opsgility that provides an Introduction to Azure for Developers. In this webinar I went over an introduction to what IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are. Then I dove into the Azure Portal and showed how to create IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) VMs with Windows and Linux, as well as how to remote into those VMs with Remote Desktop and SSH; respectively. I also went into deploying a Web Application into an Azure Web App PaaS (Platform as a Service) service directly from within the Visual Studio IDE, and I even showed how you can easily deploy a website directly from Github into an Azure Web App as well! I also discussed Azure SQL Database (“Database as a Service”), as well as a few additional services and features.
I encourage you to watch the entire webinar recording to see the whole demo…
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Top 10 Tricks to Save Money with Azure Virtual Machines
April 9, 2017
This post contains 10 tips and tricks you can use to save money on your Virtual Machines (VMs) running in the Microsoft Azure cloud. The cost analysis of the cloud can be scary at first, and it’s actually one of the reasons companies are shy to start adopting the cloud. Once you know these tricks you’ll feel confident that you won’t overspend and go broke in Microsoft Azure.
Some of these tips are almost secrets, as they aren’t really talked about anywhere. I know these from my years of experience working with Microsoft Azure and getting to know many of the ins and outs of the platform. So, read below, and benefit from my years of Azure experience in just a few minutes.
Using these tips will certainly help you save your company or organization money, and will likely impress your boss!
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Azure Functions Visual Studio Tools Preview
March 16, 2017
The serverless computing realm of cloud computing has been growing in interest and functionality lately. Recently, Azure Functions reached General Availability and an eagerly anticipated v1.0 release. Microsoft has not stopped there, in fact they just recently released a Preview of the new Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions. These tools bring Azure Functions support into the Visual Studio IDE!
Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions Preview
The new Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions is currently in a Preview release state. As a result, the tools aren’t fully complete yet, and as with any Preview release it can be expected that things may / will change a bit before the final release. All preview releases can be expected to have some rough spots, bugs, and limitations. That being stated…
The requirements to install the Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions are:
- You must be running Visual Studio 2015…
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