The latest Redmonk Language Rankings are out. These rankings are published twice a year, and the top three positions in the June 2018 rankings remain unchanged from last time: JavaScript at #1, Java at #2, and Python at #3. The Redmonk rankings are based on Github repositories (as a proxy for developer activity) and StackOverflow activity (as a proxy for user discussion), as shown in the chart below.

Compared to two quarters ago, R has dropped 2 places to #14. But as Stephen O'Grady notes, this ranking volatility is typical:

R is essentially a case study at this point for why we recommend against over-reacting to any particular quarter’s performance. R has dropped two spots previously, only to bounce back a quarter or two later. Its domain specific nature means that it is never likely to compete for the very top spots on this ranking, but it remains dominant and broadly used within its area of expertise.

You can see the complete rankings list along with discussion of the languages covered in at the Redmonk blog linked below.

Tecosystems: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2018

Microsoft's Project Natick is investigating the feasibility of housing data centers (like those to power Azure) in submerged pressure vessels, with the goal of putting computational services near the demand, powered by renewable energy. That's awesome in its own right, but the Project Natick team also recently installed live underwater cams to view the pilot data center in the North Sea. Apparently, it attracts a lot of fish! I've been waiting to get a clear view of the data center for the screenshot below, but it's always swarmed by fish. Click on the image for a live camera -- you might get a better view than I did.

That's all from the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week!

HDInsight enterprise customers work with some of the most sensitive data in the world. They want to be able to lock down access to this data at the networking layer as well. However, while service endpoints have been available in Azure data sources, HDInsight customers couldn’t leverage this additional layer of security for their big data pipelines due to the lack of interoperability between HDInsight and other data stores. As we have recently announced, HDInsight is now excited to support service endpoints for Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL databases and Azure Cosmos DB.

With this enhanced level of security at the networking layer, customers can now lock down their big data storage accounts to their specified Virtual Networks (VNETs) and still use HDInsight clusters seamlessly to access and process that data.

In the rest of this post we will explore how to enable service endpoints and point out important HDInsight configurations for Azure Blob Storage, Azure SQL DB, and Azure CosmosDB.

Azure Blob Storage

When using Azure Blob Storage with HDInsight, you can configure selected VNETs on a blob storage firewall settings. This will ensure that only traffic from those subnets can access this storage account.

It is important to check the "Allow trusted Microsoft services to access this storage account." This will ensure that HDInsight service will have access to storage accounts and provision the cluster in a seamless manner.

If the storage account is in a different subscription than the HDInsight cluster, please make sure that HDInsight resource provider is registered with the storage subscription. To learn more on how to register or re-register resource providers on a subscription, see additional resource providers and types. If HDInsight resource provider is not registered properly you might get this error message, which can be solved by registration of the resource provider.

NOTE: HDInsight cluster must be deployed into one of the subnets allowed in the blob storage firewall or the VNETs must be peered. This will ensure that the traffic from cluster VMs can reach the storage.

Azure SQL DB

If you are using an external SQL DB for Hive or Oozie metastore, you can configure service endpoints. “Allow access to Azure services” is not a required step from HDInsight point of view, since accessing these databases will happen after the cluster is created and the VMs are injected to the VNET.

NOTE: HDInsight cluster must be deployed into one of the subnets allowed in the SQL DB firewall or the VNETs must be peered. This will ensure that the traffic from cluster VMs can reach the SQL DB.

Azure Cosmos DB

If you are using the spark connector for Azure Cosmos DB you can enable service endpoints in Cosmos DB firewall settings and seamlessly connect to it from HDInsight cluster.

NOTE: HDInsight cluster must be deployed into one of the VNETs allowed in the Cosmos DB firewall or the VNETs must be peered. This will ensure that the traffic from cluster VMs can reach the SQL DB.

Try HDInsight now

We hope you take full advantage of today’s announcements and we are excited to see what you will build with Azure HDInsight. Read the developer guide and follow the quick start guide to learn more about implementing these pipelines and architectures on Azure HDInsight. Stay up-to-date on the latest Azure HDInsight news and features by following us on Twitter #HDInsight and @AzureHDInsight. For questions and feedback, please reach out to AskHDInsight@microsoft.com.

About HDInsight

Azure HDInsight is Microsoft’s premium managed offering for running open source workloads on Azure. Today, we are excited to announce several new capabilities across a wide range of OSS frameworks.

Azure HDInsight powers some of the top customer’s mission critical applications ranging in a wide variety of sectors including, manufacturing, retail education, nonprofit, government, healthcare, media, banking, telecommunication, insurance and many more industries ranging in use cases from ETL to Data Warehousing, from Machine Learning to IoT and many more.

This blog post was co-authored by Devki Trivedi, Serena Davis, and Pascal Habineza.

The Cosmos DB Explorer Interns are excited to release a reference solution that utilizes the Azure Cosmos DB Change Feed feature (+ Azure Functions, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, Power BI). This solution features a hands-on lab that guides users through the entire pipeline: from uploading data onto Cosmos DB to implementing a Change Feed trigger to visualizing that data in a meaningful way on Power BI.

With this reference solution, businesses can:

• Track sales and site activity in real time 
• Manipulate data to see only the metrics useful to them
• Choose specific time windows for data to be processed

The Cosmos DB Change Feed provides an automatic mechanism for getting a continuous and incremental feed of modified or inserted records from Cosmos DB. A few of its most popular use cases include:

1. Triggering microservices and functions within an event-driven architecture
2. Replicating data to secondary data stores
3. Real-time data processing

This reference solution focuses on real-time data processing, specifically to fit the needs of e-commerce companies. For example, while an e-commerce company may currently track the most popular products purchased, it may want to improve its advertising and pricing strategies by identifying products that are commonly being viewed and added to customers' carts, but never purchased. The business may want to know its hourly, daily, and weekly revenue. Such metrics can help the business develop its advertising, inventory investment, and user experience strategies. Using this solution, businesses can customize these metrics to meet their needs and can observe them in real time using the Change Feed.
  
This reference solution models the above activities for interactivity and explains the process of deploying Azure resources. While it focuses on real-time data processing within the context of e-commerce, it remains applicable to many different domains.
  
The result of this solution deployment is a dashboard as pictured below that updates in real time. Users can analyze business performance using metrics customizable to their requirements on the dashboard.

 
The pipeline below illustrates how the solution processes shoppers' data from data generation to real-time data visualization with Power BI – all using Microsoft Azure!

As data is created by online shoppers, it is processed and written to Cosmos DB. These data events are stored for future use. As this is happening, the Change Feed begins to takes over. For every instance of interaction, when a new event is created and pushed into Cosmos DB, the Change Feed adds that event to its records. Whenever the Change Feed adds an event, it triggers an Azure Function. The function iterates through each inserted document and sends it into the Azure Event Hub through an Event Hub client. Next, Azure Stream Analytics is responsible for building meaningful metrics by querying the data from Event Hub and sending the results to Power BI for user visualization.

Watch Visualizing Real-Time Data Analysis with Cosmos DB Change Feed and check out our change feed lab to learn how your business can build an application to extract insightful metrics from your data in real time.

Thoughts? Please send us your feedback.

You can accelerate your cloud migration using intelligent migration assessment services like Azure Migrate. Azure Migrate is a generally available service, offered at no additional charge, that helps you plan your migration to Azure. 

Azure Migrate discovers servers in your on-premises environment and assesses each discovered server’s readiness to run as an IaaS VM in Azure. In addition to Azure readiness, it helps you identify the right VM size in Azure after considering the utilization history of the on-premises VM. Azure Migrate also provides cost analysis for running the on-premises VMs in Azure. Additionally, if you have legacy applications, identifying the servers that constitute your application can become very complex. Azure Migrate helps you visualize dependencies of your on-premises VMs, so you can create high-confidence move groups and ensure that you are not leaving anything behind when you are moving to Azure.

Azure Migrate currently supports discovery and assessment of VMware virtualized Windows and Linux VMs; support for Hyper-V will be enabled in future.

When it comes to migration planning, every organization is unique and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each organization will have its own needs and in this blog post, I am going to talk about some of the new features added in Azure Migrate that can help you effectively plan your migration to cloud, based on your own needs.

Here is a summary of the features recently enabled in Azure Migrate allowing you to customize the assessments to meet your migration needs.

• Reserved Instances (RI): Azure Migrate now allows you to plan migration to Azure with your virtual machines running in Azure VM Reserved Instances (RIs). Azure Migrate will model the cost advantages of RIs in the assessments. You can customize your assessment to include use of RIs by editing the assessment settings.
• VM series: The Azure Migrate assessment provides a new control to specify the VM series to be used for size recommendations. Each VM series in Azure is designed for a certain kind of workload, for example, if you have a production workload which is IO intensive, you may not want to move the VMs to the A-series VMs in Azure, which are more suitable for entry level workloads. Using Azure Migrate, you can now apply your organization preferences and get recommendations based on your choices for the selected VM series.
• Storage type: Many organizations want to move their VMs to VM sizes in Azure that provide a single instance VM SLA of > 99.9 percent. You can achieve the same if all disks attached to the VM are premium disks. If you have such SLA requirements, you can use the storage type property in an assessment and specify premium disks as your storage type to ensure that the VM size recommendations are done accordingly.
• VM uptime: Not all workloads need to run 24x7 on the cloud. For example, if you have Dev-Test VMs that you only run 10 hours a day and only five days a week, you can now use the VM uptime property in assessment to specify the uptime details of the VMs and the cost estimation of running the VMs in Azure will be done accordingly.
• Azure Government: If you are planning to migrate your workloads to the Azure Government cloud, you can now use Azure Migrate to plan your migrations for Azure Government as a target location. In addition to Azure Government, Azure Migrate already supports more than 30 different regions as assessment target location.
• Windows Server 2008 (32-bit & 64-bit): If you have Windows Server 2008 VMs in your environment, you can now leverage the option to get free extended security updates by migrating these VMs to Azure. Azure Migrate will now help you identify such VMs as Azure ready VMs which can be migrated to Azure using Azure Site Recovery.

With the enhanced features, Azure Migrate provides you a lot of power and flexibility to customize your migration plan based on your own requirements. Learn more about how you can customize assessments using Azure Migrate.

Once you are ready with your migration plan, you can use services like Azure Site Recovery and Database Migration Service to migrate your workloads to Azure. Use the Azure migration center to learn when to use these services in your selected migration strategy.

We are continuously improving Azure Migrate based on the feedback that we have been receiving from all of you. If you have any ideas or see any gaps in Azure Migrate, we would love to hear it from you. Use our UserVoice forum to post your ideas and learn about the roadmap.

So, what are your waiting for, get started with Azure Migrate to begin your datacenter transformation journey!

Lenovo has launched a brand-new addition to its ThinkPad mobile workstation portfolio—the ThinkPad P1. Lenovo’s thinnest, lightest, and sleekest mobile workstation, the ThinkPad P1 gives users the style they want and the performance they need.

No company better combines high performance with beauty better than luxury sports car manufacturer, Aston Martin. For them, the ThinkPad P1 represents not only an opportunity to increase productivity, but to also work with a high quality and performing product within a fast-paced environment.

“At Aston Martin, we are committed to a high standard of excellence with a drive to push to the next level,” said Neil Jarvis, director of IT and Innovation at Aston Martin. “We see the expression of similar values in the creation of the new ThinkPad P1. Whether it’s our creative team benefiting from the professional graphics and stunning display, or our executive team looking for an ultra-thin and light system with a touch of style, the ThinkPad P1 is the right fit for a variety of users across our company.”

The ThinkPad P1 provides users with a premium experience—both in look and feel and superior construction and components. With a signature black finish, glass touchpad, and seamless keyboard, the ThinkPad P1 has the high-end design to deliver the ultimate out-of-box experience.

This attention to detail goes even further with the ThinkPad P1 power supply. Customers know a bulky power supply runs counter to a thin and light workstation. To address this, Lenovo reduced the weight by 35 percent to ensure the ThinkPad P1 meets every requirement in the thin and light category.

Here are some other features of this mobile workstation:

• Certified for key ISV applications, featuring 8th Gen Intel Xeon and Core processors, including support for the Core i9 CPU, ECC memory support, and speeds up to 4.6 GHz.
• Boosted performance with the latest NVIDIA Quadro P1000 and P2000 professional graphics cards.
• A 15-inch, 4K UHD display, representing 100 percent of the Adobe color gamut, as well as a touchscreen and IR camera standard.
• 4 TB of M.2 PCIe premier storage and 64 GB of memory at 2667 MHz.

With more than 25 years of experience developing top commercial laptops, ThinkPad P1 design engineers chose the best features from the ThinkPad portfolio to maximize power, performance, and premium design from top to bottom.

“When we set out to create the ThinkPad P1, we knew our challenge was to build a mobile workstation that would carry the legacy of professional power and reliability of our ThinkPad portfolio, but also meet our customer’s need for a thin, light, and sleek design,” says Rob Herman, general manager of Workstations at Lenovo. “Whether you are looking for power, the lightest mobile workstation around, or sleek and slim tech-envy, the ThinkPad P1 delivers on all counts, period.”

Lenovo is also introducing its new ThinkPad P72. Purpose-built for users looking for top-of-the-line power and performance, it is the ideal choice for users in the oil and gas, automotive, and financial industries. A true desktop replacement, its 17-inch chassis includes the latest 8th Gen Intel Xeon and Core processors, and the most powerful NVIDIA Quadro graphics—up to P5200—to tackle the most demanding workflows with ease. With up to 6 TB of storage, 128 GB of memory, and 16 GB of Intel Optane memory, users have vast amounts of compute power to handle immense data sets.

Lenovo is committed to understanding its customers’ evolving needs and daily demands of their workflows and workloads. With the introduction of the ThinkPad P1 and the ThinkPad P72, Lenovo is addressing two very distinct and unique groups of customer needs.

Both will be available at the end of August 2018. The ThinkPad P1 starts at $1,949 and the ThinkPad P72 starts at $1,799. Learn more about the ThinkPad P1 and the ThinkPad P72.

The post New Lenovo ThinkPad P1 mobile workstation combines style and power appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Containers encapsulate the runtime environment of an application: the file system, environment settings, and virtualized OS are bundled into a package. Docker containers have changed the way we think about build and test environments since they were introduced five years ago.

Visual Studio’s setup and install expert, Heath Stewart, blogs regularly about how to install the Visual Studio Build Tools in a Windows Docker Container. Recently he explained why you won’t find a container image for build tools. Basically, any install that has a workload installed that you aren’t using is going to be bigger than you want. You should tailor an install for your needs. So here we are going to show how to create and use an MSVC Docker container.

The first step is to install Docker Community Edition. If you don’t have Hyper-V enabled, the installer will prompt you to enable it and reboot. After it is installed you need to switch to . The official documentation on how to Install Build Tools into a Container walks through this in much more detail. If you refer to that, stop at step 5 and read the following instructions for creating an MSVC Docker container.

Remember that the VS Build Tools are licensed as a supplement to your existing Visual Studio license. Any images built with these tools should be for your personal use or for use in your organization in accordance with your existing Visual Studio and Windows licenses. Please don’t share these images on a public Docker hub.

Visual Studio Build Tools Dockerfiles

To help you get started in creating Dockerfiles tailored for your needs we have VS Build Tools Dockerfile samples available. Clone that repository locally. There you will find a directory for native-desktop that contains the files we will use as our starting point. If you open that Dockerfile you will see the following line within.

--add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools --includeRecommended 

That line adds the VCTools workload and additional recommended components that today include CMake and the current Windows SDK. This is a smaller installation than our other sample that includes support for building managed and native projects. To learn more about how you can find the components you need see our additional workloads and components documentation.

Open PowerShell in the native-desktop directory or this repo and build the Docker image.

docker build -t buildtools2017native:latest -m 2GB .

The first time you build the image it will pull down the windowsservercore image, download the build tools, and install them into a local container image.

When this is done you can see the images available locally.

docker images
REPOSITORY                 TAG                            IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
Buildtools2017native       latest                         4ff1cd971254   3 minutes ago   14.9GB
Buildtools2017             latest                         325048ba2240   4 hours ago     22.4GB
microsoft/dotnet-framework 3.5-sdk-windowsservercore-1709 7d89a4baf66c   3 weeks ago     13.2GB

While our buildtoolsmsvc image is large, it is significantly smaller than the VS Build Tools image that includes managed support. Note that these image sizes include the base image so they can be deceiving in terms of actual disk space used.

Trying it all out

Let’s test out our build tools container using a simple little program. Create a new Windows Console Application project in Visual Studio. Add iostream and write out a hello world message as so.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
  cout << "I was built in a container..." << endl;
}

We are going to want to deploy this in a future post to a Windows Nano Server container so change the platform target to x64. Go to your project properties and under C/C++ change the Debug Information Format to C7 compatible.

Now we are going to create a build container for our project. Note this line in the Dockerfile we used to create our buildtoolsmsvc image.

ENTRYPOINT C:BuildToolsCommon7ToolsVsDevCmd.bat &&

The && in that line allows us to pass parameters in when we create a container using this image. Here we will use that to pass in the msbuild command with the options necessary to build our solution. When we start our container for the first time we will map our local source into a directory in the container using the -v option. We will also give the container a name using –name to remember what it is for later. That also makes it easier to run again as we update our source code.

docker run -v C:sourceConsoleApplication1:c:ConsoleApplication1 --name ConsoleApplication1 buildtoolsmsvc msbuild c:ConsoleApplication1ConsoleApplication1.sln /p:Configuration=Debug /p:Platform=x64

This will spin up a container, use msbuild to build our solution, then exit, and stop the container. You should see output from this process as it runs. Since we mapped to our local volume you will find the build output under your solution directory under x64Debug. You can run ConsoleApplication1.exe from there and you’ll see the output

I was built in a container...

As you change your sources you can run the container again by running this command (omit the -a attach option if you don’t need to see the output from within the container).

docker start -a ConsoleApplication1

Conclusion

This has gotten us a working MSVC toolset in an isolated, easy-to-use Docker container. You can now spin up additional containers for different projects using the approach outlined above. The disk space used by additional containers using the same base image is miniscule compared to spinning up VMs to get isolated build environments.

In a future post we’ll cover how to take the build output from this process, run it in a container, then attach to the process in the container and debug it.

If you are using containers or doing cloud development with C++ we would love to hear from you. We wouldd appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to take our C++ cloud and container development survey. This will help us focus on topics that are important to you on the blog and in the form of product improvements.

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. From July 1 to 15, 97 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Virtual Machines

Web Applications

Consulting Services

Now in preview

Announcing the public preview of Windows Container Support in Azure App Service - Windows Server Containers in Web App are now available in public preview. Azure App Service provides pre-defined application stacks on Windows like ASP.NET or Node.js, running on IIS. The preconfigured Windows environment locks down the operating system from administrative access, software installations, changes to the global assembly cache, and so on. If your application requires more access than the preconfigured environment allows, you can deploy a custom Windows container instead. Azure App Service caches several parent images to reduce start-up time.

New Azure #CosmosDB JavaScript SDK 2.0 now in public preview - Version 2.0 RC of the JavaScript SDK for SQL API is now available in public preview, which is also open source and available via NPM. For the SQL API, we support a JavaScript SDK to enable development against Azure Cosmos DB from JavaScript and Node.js projects. Version 2.0 of the SDK is written completely in TypeScript, and we’ve redesigned the object model and added support for promises.

Now generally available

Announcing general availability of Azure SQL Database reserved capacity - Azure SQL Database reserved capacity is generally available and is now available for single and elastic pool databases. Customers with active Software Assurance can save up to 55 percent using Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server with the new vCore-based purchasing model in SQL Database. With support for reserved capacity on single databases and elastic pools, you can unlock even more savings when you combine your Azure Hybrid Benefit with reserved capacity pricing to save even more. SQL Database reserved capacity pricing is scoped to either a single subscription or shared. SQL Database reserved capacity is initially available to single databases and elastic pools, with managed instance support coming later.

Linux on Azure App Service Environment now generally available - Linux on Azure App Service Environment (ASE) combines the features from App Service on Linux and App Service Environment. Take advantage of deploying Linux and containerized apps in an App Service Environment, which is ideal for deploying applications into a VNet for secure network access or apps running at a high scale. With Linux on ASE, you can deploy your Linux web applications into an Azure virtual network (VNet) by bringing your own custom container, or just bring your code by using one of our built-in images. Effective July 30, 2018, Linux and containerized apps deployed in an App Service Environment have returned to regular App Service on Linux and App Service Environment pricing. Linux on ASE is now available in all App Service on Linux’s 20+ regions/countries.

Also generally available

• General availability: Azure Automation in Korea Central and West US 2 regions

The Azure Podcast

News and updates

Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure - Proof-of-Authority, is more suitable for permissioned networks where all consensus participants are known and reputable. Without the need for mining, Proof-of-Authority is more efficient while still retaining Byzantine fault tolerance. From the Azure portal, you can provision a fully configured blockchain network topology in minutes, using Microsoft Azure compute, networking, and storage services across the globe. Rather than spending hours building out and configuring the infrastructure, we have automated these time-consuming pieces to allow you to focus on building out your scenarios and applications. You are only charged for the underlying infrastructure resources consumed, such as compute, storage, and networking. There are no incremental charges for the solution itself. This solution also comes with Azure Monitor to track node and network statistics.

Security Bulletin for August 2018 - Microsoft is aware of a temporary denial of service (DoS) vulnerability (CVE-2018-5390) affecting the Linux Kernel. Virtual Machines running Linux may be vulnerable. The Azure Host platform remains secure from this vulnerability. We are working with various Linux distributions to ensure that they address this security issue.

Speech Devices SDK and Dev Kits news (August 2018) - Speech Devices SDK v0.5.0 is now available for download. See this post for details on how to access it. Note that the Speech Devices SDK consumes the Speech SDK, so be sure to use the latest version of the Speech Devices SDK and its matching sample app. This SDK only supports Java at this time. The microphone array dev kits from our hardware provider Roobo went on sale recently. This post also has details on how to order, but delivery is currently only available to the USA and China.

New locations for Azure CDN now available - Azure CDN provides a world class platform to let you reduce load times, save bandwidth, and speed responsiveness across your businesses diverse workflows. Azure CDN from Microsoft enables Azure customers to use and deliver content from the same global CDN network leveraged by Microsoft properties such as Office 365, Skype, Bing, OneDrive, Windows, and Xbox. Eight additional point-of presence (POP) locations include three new countries to our global coverage.

Azure Data Factory Visual tools now supports GitHub integration - You can now integrate your Azure Data Factory (ADF) with GitHub. The ADF visual authoring integration with GitHub allows you to collaborate with other developers, do source control, versioning of your data factory assets (pipelines, datasets, linked services, triggers, and more). ADF-GitHub integration allows you to use either public Github or GitHub Enterprise depending on your requirements. You can use OAuth authentication to login to your GitHub account.

Enhance security and simplify network integration with Extension Host on Azure Stack - We’re bringing the Extension Host solution to Azure Stack so that only have to open one port (443). This solution is already available on Azure, allowing all requests to be funneled through one port, reducing the ports that need to be opened on the firewall, and allowing customers to communicate with these end points via proxy servers. In its first release, the User and Admin portal default extensions have moved to this model, thereby reducing the number of ports from 27 to one. Over time, additional services such as the SQL and MySQL providers will also be changed to use the Extension Host model. Note that Extension Host requires two wildcard SSL certificates, one for the Admin portal and one for the Tenant portal. The Azure Stack Readiness Checker tool will validate these certificates.

Additional news and updates

• Review summarized test results in VSTS Sprint 138 Update
• .NET Framework 4.7.2 update coming to Azure App Service apps

Azure Friday

Technical content and training

The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure eBook - August update is now available - There's a new and updated Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure eBook from the team of Michael Crump (@mbcrump) and Barry Luijbregts (@azurebarry). Featuring extensive updates since the last update, the new eBook is designed to help you get up to speed with Azure in the shortest time possible and includes practical real-world scenarios. In addition to the PDF, this version is also available in EPUB and Mobi editions, so be sure to click the text link under the cover image for all 3 formats.

Azure HDInsight Interactive Query: Ten tools to analyze big data faster - Customers use HDInsight Interactive Query (also called Hive LLAP, or Low Latency Analytical Processing) to query data stored in Azure storage & Azure Data Lake Storage in super-fast manner. Interactive query makes it easy for developers and data scientist to work with the big data using BI tools they love the most. HDInsight Interactive Query supports several tools to access big data, which are cataloged in this blog post.

Getting started with IoT: driving business action through analytics and automation - Whether you're dealing with real-time or historical data, or you need to automate a function, Azure IoT has the tools to meet your needs. Learn which Azure IoT offerings can best support your use case whether you need to do near real-time or historical data analysis. Either way, be sure to explore the Building IoT solutions with Azure: A Developer's Guide, which is linked to from this post.

Now Available: Azure Sphere technical documentation - Azure Sphere documentation covers a range of topics from architecture, key concepts, developing applications, and deploying those applications over-the-air to devices in the field. Also included is a QuickStart guide, tutorials and a selection of best practices – all of which will help you rapidly get up and running with your dev kits. Check this post for links to the docs and to order a dev kit today.

How Microsoft drives exabyte analytics on the world’s largest YARN cluster - YARN is known to scale to thousands of nodes, but what happens when you need to tens of thousands of nodes? The Cloud & Information Service at Microsoft is a highly specialized team of experts that work on applied research and science initiatives focusing on data processing and distributed systems. This blog post explains how CISL and the Microsoft Big Data team met the challenge of complex scale and resource management – and ended up implementing the world's largest YARN cluster to drive its exabyte-sized analytics.

Learn how to orchestrate serverless functions by scraping APIs in 8 minutes - In this post, Maxime Rouiller explains how he retrieves metadata from over 900 samples in the Azure Samples GitHub repo to validate their last commit date. He refactors a local console application built using the Octokit library into a fan-out/fan-in durable function that orchestrates obtaining the list of samples and then collecting the metadata from each sample in parallel using Azure Functions.

Azure tips & tricks

Events

Microsoft Ignite – now with more code - Ignite 2018 is going to have more developer-focused content than ever before. If you're a developer, check out why you should be heading to Orlando in September.

Microsoft Azure at SIGGRAPH 2018 - Microsoft is at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver, BC, Canada this week. If you're there, come learn more about Azure’s intelligent cloud solutions that produce actionable insights, accelerate media delivery, and inspire your team to deliver new experiences. Join Microsoft in Booth 620 to learn how Microsoft Azure and our partners—including Avid, Nimble Collective and Teradici—can help you transform your media workflows and audience experiences.

IoT In Action webinar series: Agriculture - Join Microsoft’s IoT In Action Agriculture Webinar to learn how we’ve enabled precision farming through FarmBeats and partnerships with solution integrators. We believe that collected and predicted data, coupled with the farmer’s knowledge about the farm, can help increase farm productivity and help reduce costs. You won’t want to miss learning how Microsoft’s FarmBeats project is building several unique solutions and using machine learning to solve problems via combination of various data from low-cost sensors, drones and vision.

Service Fabric Community Q&A 27th Edition - The Service Fabric team will be holding their 27^th monthly community Q&A call on Thursday, August 16 at 4pm Pacific Time. Their teammates in Denmark and India will host a Q&A earlier that day at 1130 UTC to accommodate other time zones.

Twitter AMA with the App Service Team #AppServiceAMA!! - The Azure App service team will host a special Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Twitter, Wednesday, August 22, 2018 from 9am to 11am Pacific Time. You can tweet to @AzureSupport with #AppServiceAMA with your questions about the service.

The IoT Show

Customers and partners

Enhance your DevSecOps practices with Azure Security Center’s newest playbooks - Cloud-hosted workloads offer excellent scalability, ease of deployment, and pre-secured infrastructure for your workloads. However, the workloads themselves may still be susceptible to attack by cybercriminals. Avyan Consulting partnered with the Azure Security Center team to build attack simulation playbooks for demonstration and training purposes. Azure administrators may use these playbooks to deploy fully operational web and Compute workloads, security management tools such as Azure Security Center & Web App Firewalls (WAFs), and SQL threat protection. These tools work with Cloudneeti from Avyan Consulting to provide rich compliance views across Azure resources.

Industries

Accelerate healthcare initiatives with Azure UK NHS blueprints - To rapidly acquire new capabilities and implement new solutions, healthcare IT and developers can now take advantage of industry-specific Azure Blueprints. These are packages that include reference architectures, guidance, how-to guides and other documentation, and may also include executable code and sample test data built around a key use case of interest to healthcare organizations. Blueprints also contain components to support privacy, security, and compliance initiatives, including threat models, security controls, responsibility matrices, and compliance audit reports. This post focuses on four new blueprints created to support UK National Health Service (NHS) cloud initiatives, as well as an existing blueprint for AI in healthcare that includes HIPAA and HITRUST compliance support, which can be used worldwide with suitable customization.

A Cloud Guru's This Week in Azure

An issue with serializing/deserializing a CultureAwareComparer was discovered with .NET Framework 4.7.1. This issue was resolved earlier this year, with the May 2018 Preview of Quality Rollup. We recently learned that some applications continue to experience this issue. The changes made to .NET Framework 4.7.1 were also integrated into .NET Framework 4.6 and later servicing releases. As a result, this advisory applies to .NET Framework 4.6 and later versions.

This advisory is provided so that developers can correctly diagnose this issue and be aware of our guidance. We will continue to update this issue and dotnet/announcements #81 as we have new information to share.

Guidance

This guidance only applies to customers that have experienced this issue.

We intend to release an update for .NET Framework 4.6 and later releases that resolves this issue within the next month. When that happens, you must deploy the .NET Framework update for this issue to all .NET Framework 4.6+ machines that communicate via serialized objects. After doing that, cross-machine serialization will work as expected.

Please consult your software vendor to understand if this impacts the software you are using.

Technical Context

In the May 2018 Preview of Quality Rollup, we made a change to the internal type CultureAwareComparer to implement ISerializable. We made the change in order to address issue with serializing/deserializing a CultureAwareComparer.

The issue reported was that a type that contains an instance of CultureAwareComparer was not able to correctly serialize and deserialize across different versions of the .NET Framework. There are a few types in .NET Framework that do this, the most commonly impacted one being the Dictionary<TKey, TValue> type.

The change to implement the ISerializable interface had unintended side effects when exchanging this type across different machines. We have had a small number of reports from customers who have been affected.

A common, but not unique way, of exchanging objects across machines is to use WCF in conjunction with a serializer. One of the common serializers being DataContractSerializer. The side-effect of the change prevented data serialized on systems where the type implements ISerializable to correctly deserialize of systems where the type does NOT implement ISerializable. The same is true of the opposite case, that systems where the type does not implement ISerializable will not correctly deserialize data from systems where the type does implement ISerializable.

We have an updated fix that we intend to release within the next month that will remove the implementation of the ISerializable interface on the type and use a different internal mechanism for ensuring the cross-version serialization continues to work as expected. This change addresses the break experienced with WCF.

The upcoming fix will remove the implementation of the ISerializable interface on the type and use a different mechanism for ensuring the cross-version serialization of that type continues to work. This change addresses the break experienced with WCF.

Symptoms

An application that is affected by this issue will most likely crash when trying to deserialize an object. It may print or log an error message similar to the following one:

The formatter threw an exception while trying to deserialize the message: 
There was an error while trying to deserialize parameter . The InnerException message was ''EndElement' 'Comparer' from namespace '' is not expected. Expecting element '_compareInfo'.'.  Please see InnerException for more details.

Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for applications running in Azure and on-premises. Using ASR, you can reduce application downtime during IT interruptions, without compromising compliance. ASR provides comprehensive coverage for on-premises applications across Linux, Windows, VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, and physical servers.

Azure Site Recovery now powers Veritas Backup Exec Instant Cloud Recovery (ICR) with Backup Exec 20.2 release. With ICR, Backup Exec users can easily configure continuous replication for on-premises virtual machines to Azure for a quick failover in case of a disruption on-premises. Backup Exec customers can minimize Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for business-critical applications realizing the benefits of Azure as dynamic disaster recovery platform using ICR.

Instant Cloud Recovery requires an Azure subscription and supports VMware and Hyper-V Virtual Machines. ICR provides a summary view, monitoring, replication health details, and key actions directly from the familiar Backup Exec console. You can go to Azure portal for advanced monitoring and failover operations.

Backup Exec Instant Cloud Recovery to Azure is available in all Azure regions where ASR is available. Get started by downloading the Backup Exec 20.2 trial version.

Related links and additional content

• Veritas Backup Exec 20.2 Insant Cloud Recovery announcement blog post
• What's new in Veritas Backup Exec 20.2
• Backup Exec Instant Cloud Recovery documentation
• Azure Site Recovery documentation for VMware virtual machines
• Azure Site Recovery documentation for Hyper-V virtual machines

Containers allow developers to package up an application with all the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one image. This is especially useful for C++ cross-platform development – with containers you can choose to target a platform that runs on a completely different operating system than your developer machine. And even if they are running on the same OS, the container technology ensures that the application will run on any other machines regardless of any customized settings that machine might have that could differ from the machine used for writing and testing the code.

Docker is a very popular container platform that makes it easy to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers, and whether you are a seasoned Docker developer or just getting started, Visual Studio Code has great support for working with Docker containers inside the editor.

In this blog post, we are going to walk through how to create a Docker image for C++, start Docker containers, and build and run a C++ “HelloWorld” app in the container using Visual Studio Code.

Install tools

First, let’s get the tools you would need in this walkthrough:

1. Install Docker on your machine: for Mac, for Windows, or for Linux.
2. Install Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/.
3. Docker support for VS Code is provided by an extension. To install the Docker extension, open the Extensions view in VS Code and search for docker to filter the results. Select the Microsoft Docker extension, click on Install, and reload VS Code when completed.

Get our C++ “HelloWorld” app ready

Let’s first work on a C++ “HelloWorld” app, which we’re going to build and run in a Docker container later in this walkthrough. First, create a new folder on your disk and open it in VS Code. Then add a new file named Test.cpp in the folder. Your VS Code window should look like this:

Now let’s put the following content into the Test.cpp file. Save the file and we are done here.

#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char const *argv[])
{
  std::cout << "Hello Docker container!" << std::endl;
  return 0;
}

Build a Docker image for C++ development

With Docker, you can build images by specifying the step by step commands needed to build the image in a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile is just a text file that contains the build instructions.

1. Create a Dockerfile. The VS Code Docker extension provides a command for adding a Dockerfile to your workspace. With the folder that we created in the previous section opened in VS Code, in the Command Palette (F1), select command Docker: Add Docker files to Workspace to generate Dockerfile, docker-compose.yml, docker-compose.debug.yml, and .dockerignore files for your workspace type.

You will be prompted with a list of platforms or languages you could target. In this walkthrough, let’s choose Other from the list, which will give us a generic Dockerfile from which we can build our C++ specific image.

2. Add build instructions to the Dockerfile. Now we are going to edit the generated Dockerfile with instructions for how the Docker image should be built. The Docker extension enables a great experience for editing Dockerfile by providing auto-completion suggestions, snippets, QuickInfo, and linting for the Docker commands.

In the following sections, we will describe how to build a C++ development environment with GCC and Clang as the compiler. Depending on which compiler you choose, you only need to follow one of the two sections (2.1 or 2.2).

2.1 Build a Docker image for a Clang environment

For building a C++ development environment with the Clang compiler, let’s copy the following content into the Dockerfile, which installs Clang on top of a base Ubuntu image.

# Get the base Ubuntu image from Docker Hub
FROM ubuntu:latest

# Update apps on the base image
RUN apt-get -y update && apt-get install -y

# Install the Clang compiler
RUN apt-get -y install clang

# Copy the current folder which contains C++ source code to the Docker image under /usr/src
COPY . /usr/src/dockertest1

# Specify the working directory
WORKDIR /usr/src/dockertest1

# Use Clang to compile the Test.cpp source file
RUN clang++ -o Test Test.cpp

# Run the output program from the previous step
CMD ["./Test"]

2.1 Build a Docker image for a GCC environment

You can follow similar steps as above to build an image that installs GCC instead of Clang. Or, you could use a base image that has GCC pre-installed to simplify the steps. Let’s copy the following into the Dockerfile to use an image pre-installed with GCC:

# Get the GCC preinstalled image from Docker Hub
FROM gcc:4.9

# Copy the current folder which contains C++ source code to the Docker image under /usr/src
COPY . /usr/src/dockertest1

# Specify the working directory
WORKDIR /usr/src/dockertest1

# Use GCC to compile the Test.cpp source file
RUN g++ -o Test Test.cpp

# Run the program output from the previous step
CMD ["./Test"]

3. Build the Docker image. Now that we have the build instructions in the Dockerfile, we can go ahead build the Docker image. Docker: Build Image is one of the Docker commands the Docker extension provides in the Command Palette.

Another way to invoke the Docker Build command is to right click on the Dockerfile itself in the VS Code Explorer window and select Build Image.

You will then get a prompt asking for the name and version to tag the image.

While the build is in progress, you can see in the VS Code Terminal window how each step specified in the Dockerfile is being executed by Docker. See the following screenshot as an example.

Once completed, you can find the built image under the Images node in the Docker tab in VS Code. The following screenshot shows the image we just built appearing at the top of the image list.

One thing to note is that our base image “Ubuntu:latest” is also in the list. This means it could be reused as the base for other images to be built on top of, with only the image difference stored, which is a huge disk space saving compared with spinning up multiple full VMs.

Run Docker containers

Now that we have an image, let’s try to run it. There’re two ways to run an image using the Docker extension.  Run will execute the image and run the default CMD you specified above. In this case we will Run Interactive which will execute the CMD but also give us an interactive terminal which we can use to see what is going on inside the running container.

In the Docker:Explorer window, we see the container we just started is running:

In the Terminal window, we can see the default CMD we specified in the Dockerfile, which is to run our Test app (CMD [“./Test”]), has been executed by Docker and we got the output just as expected.

Wrap-up

In this blog post, we walked through step by step for how to use the VS Code Docker extension to build Docker images, start Docker containers, and build and run C++ programs in the container. In a future post we’ll cover how to attach to a process in the container and debug it. If you have any suggestions for future topics regarding using C++ with containers, please let us know by leaving comments below.

Also, if you are using containers or doing cloud development with C++ we would love to hear from you. If you could take a few minutes to take our C++ cloud and container development survey, it will help us focus on topics that are important to you on the blog and in the form of product improvements.

We have released the 15.8 update to Visual Studio 2017. You will see a notification in Visual Studio within the next few days, or you can download the new installer from visualstudio.com.

In this post, we're going to look at some of the new features we have added for Python developers: IntelliSense with type shed definitions, faster debugging, and support for Python 3.7. For a list of all changes in this release, check out the Visual Studio release notes.

Faster debugging, on by default

We first released a preview of our ptvsd 4.0 debug engine in the 15.7 release of Visual Studio, in the 15.8 release this is now the default, offering faster and more reliable debugging for all users.

If you encounter issues with the new debug engine, you can revert back to the previous debug engine by selecting Use legacy debugger from Tools > Options > Python > Debugging.

Richer IntelliSense

We are continuing to make improvements to IntelliSense for Python in Visual Studio 2017. In this release you will notice completions that are faster, more reliable, and have better understanding of the surrounding code, and tooltips with more focused and useful information. Go To Definition and Find All References are better at taking you to the module a value was imported from, and Python packages that include type annotations will provide richer completions. These changes were made as part of our ongoing effort to make our Python analysis from Visual Studio available as an independent Microsoft Python Language Server.

As an example, below shows improved tooltips with richer information when hovering over the os module in 15.8 compared to 15.7:

We have also added initial support for using typeshed definitions to provide more completions for places where our static analysis is unable to infer complete information. We are still working through some known issues with this though, so results may be limited and expect to see better support for typeshed in future releases.

Support for Python 3.7

We have updated our Visual Studio so that all of our features work with Python 3.7, which was recently released. Most functionality of Visual Studio works with Python 3.7 in the 15.7 release, and in the 15.8 release we made specific fixes so that debug attach, profiling, and mixed-mode (cross-language) debugging features work with Python 3.7.

Give Feedback

Be sure to download the latest version of Visual Studio and try out the above improvements. If you encounter any issues, please use the Report a Problem tool to let us know (this can be found under Help, Send Feedback) or continue to use our GitHub page. Follow our Python blog to make sure you hear about our updates first, and thank you for using Visual Studio!

Today, we are releasing the August 2018 Security and Quality Rollup.

Security

CVE-2018-8360 – Windows Information Disclosure Vulnerability

This update resolves an information disclosure vulnerability in Microsoft .NET Framework that could allow an attacker to access information in multi-tenant environments. The vulnerability is caused when .NET Framework is used in high-load/high-density network connections in which content from one stream can blend into another stream.

To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker who can access one tenant in a high-load/high-density environment could potentially trigger multi-tenanted data exposure from one customer to another.

This security update addresses the vulnerability by correcting the way that .NET Framework handles high-load/high-density network connections.

CVE-2018-8360

Quality and Reliability

This release contains the following quality and reliability improvements.

CLR

• Applications that rely on COM components were failing to load or run correctly because of “access denied”, “class not registered”, or “internal failure occurred for unknown reasons” errors described in 4345913 and Blog Advisory.  [651528]

Note: Additional information on these improvements is not available. The VSTS bug number provided with each improvement is a unique ID that you can give Microsoft Customer Support, include in StackOverflow comments or use in web searches.

Getting the Update

The Security and Quality Rollup is available via Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services, Microsoft Update Catalog, and Docker.

Microsoft Update Catalog

You can get the update via the Microsoft Update Catalog. For Windows 10, .NET Framework updates are part of the Windows 10 Monthly Rollup.

The following table is for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016+.

The following table is for earlier Windows and Windows Server versions.

Docker Images

We are updating the following .NET Framework Docker images for today’s release:

• microsoft/aspnet
• microsoft/dotnet-framework
• microsoft/dotnet-framework-samples

Note: Look at the “Tags” view in each repository to see the updated Docker image tags.

Previous Monthly Rollups

The last few .NET Framework Monthly updates are listed below for your convenience:

• July 2018 Update
• June 2018 Security and Quality Rollup
• May 2018 Security and Quality Rollup
• February 2018 Security and Quality Rollup

Microsoft R Open 3.5.1 has been released, combining the latest R language engine with multi-processor performance and tools for managing R packages reproducibly. You can download Microsoft R Open 3.5.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux from MRAN now. Microsoft R Open is 100% compatible with all R scripts and packages, and works with all your favorite R interfaces and development environments.

This update brings a number of minor fixes to the R language engine from the R core team. It also makes available a host of new R packages contributed by the community, including packages for downloading financial data, connecting with analytics systems, applying machine learning algorithms and statistical models, and many more. New R packages are released every day, and you can access packages released after the 1 August 2018 CRAN snapshot used by MRO 3.5.1 using the checkpoint package.

We hope you find Microsoft R Open useful, and if you have any comments or questions please visit the Microsoft R Open forum. You can follow the development of Microsoft R Open at the MRO Github repository. To download Microsoft R Open, simply follow the link below.

MRAN: Download Microsoft R Open

Today we are releasing Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8. In this version we have focused on productivity, performance and bug fixes. There are many new features you‘ll find useful, but in this post, I’ll underscore the highlights you may be most interested in. For the complete list of all the updates in today’s release, check out the Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 release notes and list of bugs submitted by you that are fixed. If you prefer to first try these updates without installing the release, check out the Visual Studio images in Azure.

A couple of notable additions to try:

• Multi-caret editing improvements
• Faster git branch switching
• Faster unit test execution
• TypeScript 3.0 support

Read on for more details.

Productivity

This release adds notable productivity and debugging enhancers.

Multi-caret editing. Editing multiple locations in a file, simultaneously, is now easy. Start by creating insertion points and selections at multiple locations in a file with multiple caret support. This will then allow you to add, edit, or delete text in multiple places simultaneously.

• Insert carets with Ctrl + Alt + LeftMouseClick
• Add a selection and caret at next location that matches current selection with Shift + Alt + Ins.
• See Edit > Multiple Carets for full list of actions.

Contextual Navigation. You can now access a contextual navigation menu with the shortcut Alt + `.

New keybinding profiles for Visual Studio Code and ReSharper (Visual Studio). Speaking of shortcuts, you can now keep your keybindings consistent with two new keyboard profiles: Visual Studio Code and ReSharper (Visual Studio). You can find these schemes under Tools > Options > General > Keyboard and the top drop-down menu.

New commands and improvements to the Go To All window:

• Go to Enclosing Block (Ctrl + Alt + UpArrow) allows you to quickly navigate up to the beginning of the enclosing code block.
• Go to Next/Previous Issue (Alt + PgUp/PgDn) allows you to skip to the next/previous issue (error, squiggle, lightbulb).
• Go to Member (Ctrl + T, M) is now scoped to the file by default. You can change the default back to solution by toggling the Scope to Current Document (Ctrl + Alt + C).

And… more refactorings and quick actions using Ctrl + . or Alt + Enter:

• Invert If enables you to invert your logic in if-else statements. Place your cursor in the if keyword to trigger this refactoring.
• Add parameter from method callsite allows you to add a parameter to a method by adding an argument to a method callsite and triggering Quick Actions and Refactorings.
• Remove unnecessary parentheses removes parentheses around binary operators that are not essential for compilation. You can configure this style rule through Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Code Style > General or .editorconfig:
  • dotnet_style_parentheses_in_arithmetic_binary_operators
  • dotnet_style_parentheses_in_relational_binary_operators
  • dotnet_style_parentheses_in_other_binary_operators
  • dotnet_style_parentheses_in_other_operators
• Use ternary conditionals in assignments and return statements can also be configured as a style rule in Tools > Options > … or through .editorconfig:
  • dotnet_style_prefer_conditional_expression_over_assignment
  • dotnet_style_prefer_conditional_expression_over_return

Select develop vs Debug instance of Visual Studio. When you have more than one instance of Visual Studio 2017 installed, you can now select which instance to deploy your extension to when debugging. That way you can, for example, develop in Visual Studio release channel while debugging in the preview channel.

Performance

In this release we have continued to focus on performance and have made significant improvements in many areas.

Git branch checkout and branch switching. Git branch checkout and branch switching for C#, VB, and C++ projects is much faster for large solutions since solution reload is no longer required.

Option to not reopen docs from previous session. We got feedback on how in some cases when Visual Studio reopened documents from previous sessions it wasn’t required, and that it would cause perf delays. So in this release we added an option to disable reopening documents that were open in the previous session. You can toggle this option in Tools > Options > Projects > Solutions > General.

Test performance. We significantly improved performance when running a few tests in a large solution with multiple test projects. In our lab, a solution with over 10,000 MSTests executed a single test up to 82% faster!

CPU Usage Tools performance improvements. We have a few notable improvements to highlight regarding the CPU Usage Tool. The CPU Usage tool in the Performance Profiler (ALT-F2) can now start in a paused state, which means that it will not collect any CPU usage sample stack data until it is specifically enabled. This makes the resultant amount of data much smaller to collect and analyze, in turn making your performance investigations more efficient. Once you start the target application, a monitoring display will show the CPU utilization graph and will allow you to control the CPU profiling and enable/disable sample data collection as many times as you like.

.NET Object Allocation Tracking Tool. The .NET Object Allocation Tracking Tool joins the family of tools available from the Performance Profiler (ALT-F2). Invoking this tool for a performance profiler session causes the collection of a stack trace for every .NET object allocation that occurs in the target application. This stack data is analyzed along with object type and size information to reveal details of the memory activity of your application. You can quickly determine the allocation patterns in your code and identify anomalies as well. In addition, for Garbage Collection events, you can easily determine which objects were collected and which were retained, quickly determining object types which dominate the memory usage of your application. This is especially useful for API writers to help minimize allocations. While your test application is executing, the Performance Profiler displays a monitoring view with a line graph of Live Objects (count), as well as an Object Delta (% change) bar graph.

C++ Development

C++11 standards conformance. A new, experimental, token-based preprocessor that conforms to C++11 standards (including C99 preprocessor features), enabled with /experimental:preprocessor switch. This will be controlled with macro _MSVC_TRADITIONAL, which will be defined to 1 when using the traditional preprocessor and 0 when using the new experimental standards conformant preprocessor.

CMake. Adding configurations to CMakeSettings.json is now as simple as selecting a template.

C++ Just My Code. C++ Just My Code debugging enables you now to step-over code from system or 3rd party C++ libraries in addition to collapsing those calls in the call-stack window. You get to control this behavior for any C++ libraries when your code is compiled with /JMC (the default for Debug configurations) and the non-user libraries paths are specified in a .natjmc file. If the system library calls into user-code, when you step in, the debugger will skip all system code and will stop on the first line of user-code callback.

Code analysis experience. Code analysis can now run in the background when files are opened or saved, and results will be displayed in the error list and as green squiggles in the editor. You can enable the new, in-progress features under Tools > Options > Text Editor > C++ > Experimental > Code Analysis.

F# 4.5 and F# Tools for Visual Studio

F# language version 4.5. In this release we are introducing the F# language version 4.5. This also corresponds with the new 4.5.x family of FSharp.Core (the F# core library). With this come many improvements to the F# compiler. You can read the specs for each of these changes in the F# RFC repository.

F# Tools for Visual Studio. Some notable improvements include IntelliSense performance, transactional brace completion, an experimental CodeLens implementation, and may bug fixes contributed by the community. A community-driven effort to analyze and improve IntelliSense performance for very large files was contributed by Vasily Kirichenko, Steffen Forkmann, and Gauthier Segay. IntelliSense in very large files (10k+ lines of code) is roughly twice as fast now. Automatic, transactional brace completion is now available for (), [], {}, [||], and [<>] brace pairs. We did this work in collaboration with Gibran Rosa. There is now an experimental CodeLens implementation, contributed by Victor Peter Rouven Müller. You can turn it on in Options > Text Editor > F# > Code Lens. Check out the release notes to see the many other bug fixes and improvements to F# Tools for Visual Studio with this release.

JavaScript and TypeScript Tooling

TypeScript 3.0. This version of Visual Studio includes TypeScript 3.0 by default.

Support for the Vue.js library has been improved, and in particular support for .vue files, also known as “single file components”. If the Node.js workload is installed, there will now be “Basic Vue.js Web Application” templates under the “JavaScript / Node.js” or “TypeScript / Node.js” paths in the New Project dialog. The below shows an example of editing TypeScript code inside a script block in a .vue file.

ESLint support. ESLint support has been reimplemented in this release. So, Visual Studio will now lint JavaScript files as you edit. ESLint has been updated to use ESLint 4 by default, but if your project has a local installation of ESLint, it will use that version instead. You can easi;y disable ESLint globally in VS by unchecking the “Enable ESLint” setting in the “Tools / Options” dialog in the location shown below.

Check out the TypeScript 3.0 release announcement for all the details.

Visual Studio Web Tools

Library Manager. Library Manager is a new feature included in Visual Studio 2017. It helps you manage client-side libraries in your web projects.

Single project Docker Container. We added a new single project Docker container experience for ASP.NET Core web projects. This supplements the existing Docker Compose-based container tooling and provides a simpler, easier way to create, debug, and build Docker containers right from Visual Studio.

Mobile Development for Android

Support for Google Android Emulator. This release adds support for the Google Android emulator that is compatible with Hyper-V when running on the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. This enables you to use Google’s Android emulator side-by-side with other Hyper-V based technologies, including Hyper-V virtual machines, Docker tooling, the HoloLens emulator, and more. Mobile app developers who use Hyper-V now have access to a fast Android emulator that always supports the latest Android APIs, works with Google Play Services out of the box, and supports all features of the Android emulator, including camera, geolocation, and Quick Boot.

Xamarin.Android Designer. We made significant improvements to the designer experience for Xamarin.Android. The highlight being, a split-view editor was introduced which allows you to create, edit, and preview your layouts at the same time

.NET and ASP.NET

.NET Core SDK 2.1.400. Visual Studio 15.8 includes .NET Core SDK 2.1.400. New SDK features include added NUnit templates, added support for signed global tools, and improved help text for better clarity

ASP.NET .NET Framework Secrets Support. For ASP.NET, .NET Framework projects that target .NET Framework 4.7.1 or higher, you can now open and store secrets you do not want in your source code in usersecrets.xml by right clicking on the project and selecting “Managed User Secrets”.

.NET Framework 4.7.2. Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 now offers the .NET Framework 4.7.2 development tools to all supported platforms with the 4.7.2 runtime included. The .NET Framework 4.7.2 offers several new features and improvements as well as numerous reliability, stability, security, and performance fixes. You can find more details about the .NET Framework 4.7.2 in these articles:

• .NET Framework 4.7.2 RTM Blog
• .NET Framework 4.7.2 release notes
• Known issues in the .NET Framework 4.7.2
• Application Compatibility in the .NET Framework 4.7.2
• API Changes

Share Your Feedback

As always, we want to know what you think. Please install Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 and share your thoughts and concerns.

Please let us know any issues you have via the Report a Problem tool in Visual Studio. You can track your issues in Visual Studio Developer Community where you can ask questions and find answers. You can also engage with us and other Visual Studio developers through our new Gitter community (requires GitHub account), make a product suggestion through UserVoice, or get free installation help through Live Chat Support.

Thanks,

John

John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio @JohnMont John is responsible for product design and customer success for all of Visual Studio, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, and .NET. John has been at Microsoft for 17 years, working in developer technologies the whole time.

All of us have creative ideas – ideas that can improve our lives and the lives of thousands, perhaps even millions of others. But how often do we act on turning those ideas into a reality? Most of the time, we do not believe in our ideas strongly enough to pursue them. Other times we feel like we lack a platform to build out our idea or showcase it. Most good ideas don’t go beyond those initial creative thoughts in our head.

If you’re a professional working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), or an aspiring AI developer or just someone who is passionate about AI and machine learning, Microsoft is excited to offer you an opportunity to transform your most creative ideas into reality. Join the Microsoft AI Idea Challenge Contest today for a chance to win exciting prizes and get your project featured in Microsoft’s AI.lab showcase. Check out the rules, terms and conditions of the contest and then dive right in!

The challenge

The Microsoft AI Idea Challenge is seeking breakthrough AI solutions from developers, data scientists, professionals and students, and preferably developed on the Microsoft AI platform and services. The challenge gives you a platform to freely share AI models and applications, so they are reusable and easily accessible. The ideas you submit are judged on the parameters shown in the figure below – essentially half the weight is for the originality of your idea, 20 percent for the feasibility of your solution, and 30 percent for the complexity (i.e. level of sophistication) of your implementation.

 
The Microsoft AI Challenge is accepting submissions between now and October 12, 2018.

To qualify for the competition, individuals or teams are required to submit a working AI model, test dataset, a demo app and a demo video that can be a maximum of three minutes long. We encourage you to register early and upload your projects soon, so that you can begin to plan and build out your solution and turn in the rest of your materials on time. We are looking for solutions across the whole spectrum of use cases – to be inspired, take a look at some of the examples at AI.lab.

Prizes

The winners of the first three places in the contest will respectively receive a Surface Book 2, a DJI Drone, and an Xbox One X.

We hope that’s motivation to get you started today – good luck!

Tara