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.
Originally posted on The Frog Pond of Technology: A peer of mine recently asked about how I manage local code (projects, solutions, Git repos, etc.) that may or may not be synced to a cloud repository (GitHub, Azure DevOps, etc.) Since I previously blogged about How I Blog – Updated 2018 and I’m a fan…
Architecture diagrams are a great way to communicate your design, deployment, topology or simply to be used for training decks, documentation, books and videos.
When it comes to Azure icons there are a few resources available to you, but keep in mind that Microsoft reserves the right to not allow certain uses of these symbols, stop their use, or ask for their removal from use regardless of the source.
Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set – SVG
This package contains a set of symbols/icons to visually represent resources for Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies. Once downloaded, you can drag and drop the SVG files into PowerPoint or Visio and other tools that accept SVG format, and you don’t need to import anything into Visio.
The latest version at the time of this post is v2019.9.11 and was updated September 19, 2019 and only contains SVG image files now.
If you’re familiar with draw.io (soon to be renamed to diagrams.net), then your in luck as there is an icon pack for Microsoft Azure cloud resources. These are the same images that were originally created by Microsoft.
With the Amazing Icon Downloader extension for Chrome or the new Microsoft Edge (chromium based), you can easily find and download SVG icons from the Azure portal.
When you’re in the Azure portal the extension will activate and automatically show you all the icons present for the view your in. As you will see some of the icons are named and so are easy to search for, however other icons have the following naming convention FxSymbol0-097 for example.
The icons are designed to be simple so that you can easily incorporate them in your diagrams and put them in your whitepapers, presentations, datasheets, posters, or any technical material.
Until recently I mostly used the Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set. Although it seems to be updated on a yearly basis, I find it still lags in keeping up with the changes happening in Azure. Since I like using the current Azure icons, I prefer using the Amazing Icon Downloader as I’m usually in the Azure Portal working with a particular resource and its quick to just grab that icon.
If you know of any other resources please let me know and I’ll update this list.
This week Azure DevOps finally rolled out one of their most requested feature, a dark theme. I use dark theme for just about any app that supports it, so this is a welcome addition to Azure DevOps. Keep in mind that this is just a preview and is still being refined.
To switch to Dark theme, go to your Azure DevOps portal and click on your user dropdown menu in the top right corner. Then click on Theme menu item.
The theme options pane will then be displayed. Click on the Dark (preview) option to switch to the dark theme.
Voila! DevOps in Dark theme.
Switching to dark theme is a personal choice and is not something that is forced across your organization, which is nice. I recommend you give it a try and see for yourself.
DevOps is a culture and practice that unifies people, processes and tools across development and operations groups that aims to help deliver software faster and more reliably.
In this e-book from from O’Reilly, you get a practical guide for improving collaboration across teams, promoting efficient use of tools, and using the concepts of DevOps to work more effectively. You’ll also:
Explore the foundations and four pillars of effective DevOps: Collaboration, affinity, tools, and scaling.
Get an overview of DevOps, including the evolution, foundational terminology, and concepts.
Understand common misconceptions about DevOps and anti-patterns used in the practice.
See what it looks like to make effective changes in your organization using a DevOps mindset.
Download the e-book from here. This book was published on August 31, 2018.
Today’s keynote by Joe Belfiore was focused on Multi-sense + Multi-device for Microsoft 365, which is Windows, Office and EMS
Announcements
Fluent Design System updates.
UWP XAML Islands, which lets you incorporate UWP into WinForms, WPF and Win32 applications. This also means you can start to bring in the Fluent Design System into these UI frameworks.
Windows UI Library, which brings native platform controls as NuGet packages instead of being tied to the OS version. This will work from the Windows Anniversary Update and newer.
.NET Core 3.0, which will support side-by-side runtimes, along with support for WinForms, WPF and UWP.
MSIX, which is dubbed the best technology for installing applications on Windows. This inherits the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) features, works across Enterprise or Store distributions, and supports all Windows applications.
New developer revenue sharing model. Developers will get 85% when their app is found in the Microsoft store, and 95% when you provide your customers to your app in the Microsoft store.
Microsoft Launcher on Android will support Timeline for cross-device application launching. On iOS this will be supported through Microsoft Edge.
A new “Your Phone” experience coming soon to Windows 10 that enables you to see your connected phone text messages, photos and notifications and then interact with them without having to use your phone. Really neat experience – now if only they support Windows Mobile 10
Microsoft Sets was officially shown and demonstrated how it can be used for an easier way to organize your work and allow you to get back to work where you left off when ready. This means not having to have 25+ tabs open in Chrome or Edge. Nice!
Adaptive Cards is being added to Microsoft 365, which will enable developers to create rich interactive content within conversations. They demonstrated a GitHub Adaptive Card for Outlook (365) where you could comment and close an issue. Another example shown was paying for your invoice from an email.
There was a lot of buzz for Microsoft Graph, which is core to the Microsoft 365 platform. Microsoft Graph helps developers connect the dots between people, schedules, conversations, and content within the Microsoft cloud.
Cortana and Alexa start speaking to one another. Sometime in the future you will be able to access your Alexa device through Windows 10 and likewise on an Amazon Echo you will ne able to speak to Cortana.
This is my first attendance at the annual Microsoft Build conference taking place in Seattle, WA. I have to tell you that so far I’m not disappointed. Here are some of the highlights from today’s events:
Azure is becoming the world’s computer: Azure | Azure Stack | Azure IoT Edge | Azure Sphere.
Azure IoT Edge runtime which runs on Windows or Linux is now being open sourced.
Microsoft showed off Cortana and Alexa integration which was pretty cool.
New Azure AI infrastructure announced: Project Brainwave which is a real-time AI on cloud and edge devices.
Announced Project Kinect for Azure, an Azure AI-enabled edge device.
Visual Studio Live Share is now generally available. This provides real-time collaborative development, shared debugging, independent views and works across Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (Windows, Mac and Linux).
Azure Event Grid is getting new improvements like dead lettering (DLQ) and custom retry policies. Event Grid is also adding new event publishers for Azure Media Services and Azure Container Registry, and new event handlers for Storage Queue and Relay Hybrid Connections. Finally Azure Event Grid is providing an alternative form of endpoint validation. Event Grid provides reliable event delivery at massive scale (millions of events per second), and it eliminates long polling and hammer polling, and the associated costs of latency.
Azure Cosmos had some interesting updates like the new multi-master write support. It also provides API support for MongoDB, SQL, Table Storage, Gremlin Graph, Spark, and Casandra.
Azure Search now integrates Azure Cognitive Services to provide built-in enrichment of content using AI models, and it enables immersive search experiences over any data.
The Fluent Design System which Microsoft first debuted at Build 2017, is expanding beyond Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and will be available for Windows Forms, WPF and native Win32 applications.
Windows Timeline is coming to iOS and Android.
Azure Functions updates: Durable Functions reaches general availability, and Azure Functions now leverages the App Service Diagnostics.
.NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8 announced were announced, and .NET Core 3.0 is coming to desktop development (awesome!)
Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7 and the next update version 15.8 preview 1 were released.
Visual Studio App Center integration with GitHub.
Visual Studio IntelliCode announced, which brings you the next generation of developer productivity by providing AI-assisted development.
This already feels like a lot but really it’s just scratching the surface. I’m looking forward to what is announced today in the keynote followed by more technical workshops and sessions.
The Flying Maverick 