PASS Summit v.20

PASS Summit is the largest conference for technical professionals who leverage the Microsoft Data Platform. The 20th summit, which took place in Seattle last week, played host to a number of Azure-related announcements.

Harness the future with the ultimate hybrid platform for data and AI

Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Azure Data, gave the Day 1 keynote at PASS Summit v.20. In this post, he provides an overview of his keynote, including how hybrid connects all your data and enables comprehensive AI and analytics. Microsoft’s consistent data platform across on-premises and cloud connects all your data and makes intelligence over all your data possible.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse introduces new productivity and security capabilities

John Macintyre shares an overview of what's new SQL Data Warehouse features, including enhanced workload management, row-level security, best-in-class development tools and insights, and advancements that make Azure a great platform for all analytics.

Row-Level Security is now supported for Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Announces the general availability of Row-Level Security (RLS) for Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, an additional capability for managing security for sensitive data. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a fast, flexible, and secure cloud data warehouse tuned for running complex queries fast and across petabytes of data. It is available now in all Azure regions at no additional charge.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides frictionless development using SQL Server Data Tools

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is now in preview (registration required). With SSDT, database project support enables a first-class enterprise-grade development experience for modern data warehouses. Check data warehouse scripts into source control and leverage Microsoft Azure DevOps within Visual Studio. Apply and deploy changes using features such as schema compare and publish, all within a single tool.

Static Data Masking for Azure SQL Database and SQL Server

Announces the public preview release of Static Data Masking, which is a data protection feature that helps organizations create a sanitized copy of their databases where all sensitive information has been altered in a way that makes the copy sharable with non-production users. Static Data Masking, which ships with SQL Server Management Studio 18.0, can be used for a variety of uses cases, including development and testing.

Announcing: Preview of Machine Learning Services with R support in Azure SQL Database

Machine Learning Services with support for R is now available for public preview (registration required) on Azure SQL Database. This preview functionality is initially available in a limited number of regions in US, Asia Europe, and Australia with additional regions being added later. During the preview, Machine Learning Services with R is not supported for production usage. Python language support will be added in a future update.

Automatically discover workload insights for advanced performance tuning directly in Azure portal

Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides a built-in holistic management experience by having a tight integration with Azure Advisor and Azure Monitor. These two services are immediately configured by default for SQL Data Warehouse to automatically deliver you workload insights at no additional cost. You no longer must leave the data warehouse overview blade to access Azure Monitor metrics when monitoring usage, or validating and applying data warehouse recommendations. There are additional advanced performance recommendations through Azure Advisor, including: adaptive cache, table distribution, and Tempdb.

Workload insights into SQL Data Warehouse delivered through Microsoft Azure Monitor diagnostic logs

Azure SQL Data Warehouse now enables enhanced insights into analytical workloads by integrating directly with Microsoft Azure Monitor diagnostic logs. This new capability enables developers to analyze workload behavior over an extended time period and make informed decisions on query optimization or capacity management. Azure Monitor diagnostic logs is an external logging process, which provides additional insights into your data warehouse workload.

Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for MySQL at PASS SUMMIT!

This post simply highlights three PASS Summit sessions for learning more about Azure SQL Database and migrating your SQL Server databases without changing your apps, as well as the choice of OSS databases delivered as a fully managed service.

Now in preview

Cognitive Services – Bing Local Business Search now available in public preview

Bing Local Business Search API on Cognitive Services is now available in public preview. Bing Local Business Search API enables users to easily find local business information within your applications, given an area of interest. The public preview of Bing Local Business Search API enables scenarios such as calling, navigation, and mapping using contact details, latitude/longitude, and other entity metadata.

Also in preview

• Upcoming Azure Sphere 18.11 release

• Azure Policy now audits applications installed inside virtual machines

Now generally available

Secure incoming traffic to HDInsight clusters in a virtual network with private endpoint

Private endpoints for HDInsight clusters deployed in a virtual network are now generally available. This feature enables enterprises to better isolate access to their HDInsight clusters from the public internet and enhance their security at the networking layer. HDInsight is available in 27 public regions and Azure Government Clouds in the United States and Germany.

Announcing the general availability of Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka

Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka is now generally available. With Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka, you get the best of both worlds—the ecosystem and tools of Kafka, along with Azure’s security and global scale. Event Hubs for Kafka also enables you to unlock the capabilities of the Kafka ecosystem more easily.

Also generally available

• Azure IoT Edge 1.0.4 release
• Azure Container Instances now available in Canada Central
• Azure API Management update November 8

News and updates

Run your LOB applications with PostgreSQL powered by the plv8 extension

The plv8 extension for PostgreSQL is now enabled in all generally available regions of Microsoft Azure Database for PostgreSQL. plv8 is a popular community extension that unlocks new scenarios and possibilities, it also enables developers to write their functions in JavaScript which can be called from SQL. xTuple has an extensive step-by-step guide for installing and configuring PostgreSQL for running the xTuple PostBooks desktop client. With the managed Azure Database for PostgreSQL service, you can get up and running with the xTuple ERP + CRM platform in a few minutes.

Microsoft Azure portal November 2018 update

In October, the Azure portal team started posting monthly updates to help you discover everything that is new in the portal. This month, they introduced a new way for you to switch between different Azure accounts without having to log-off and log-in again, or working with multiple browser tabs. We’ve also made enhancements to the way you find what you need in the Azure Marketplace, to the management experience for Site Recovery, Access Control, and database services.

Automating SAP deployments in Microsoft Azure using Terraform and Ansible

Quickstart Templates rarely go beyond “playground” systems or proof-of-concepts; they are too rigid and offer too little flexibility to map real-life business and technical requirements. The SAP on Microsoft Azure Engineering team broke down SAP deployments in Azure to the most granular level to offer “building blocks” for a truly customizable, yet easy-to-use experience.

Mission critical performance with Ultra SSD for SQL Server on Azure VM

We recently published the test findings from running TPC-E profile test workloads on premium storage configuration options. We continued this testing by including Ultra SSD, which is the new storage offering available on Microsoft Azure for mission-critical workloads with sub-millisecond latencies at high throughput. This post summarizes the details and our findings. Spoiler alert - a typical SQL Server will gain significant throughput on Ultra SSD compared to Premium Storage driven by the latency differences.

The November release of Azure Data Studio is now available

The November release of Azure Data Studio (formerly known as SQL Operations Studio) is now available. Azure Data Studio is a new cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. In this release, the emphasis was on fixing customer issues and adding and improving existing extensions.

Azure shows

Episode 254 - DevCon 4 | The Azure Podcast

Cale Teeter, who was in Prague for DevCon 4, gives us a first-hand update on the latest that Microsoft is bringing to the Blockchain space in Azure.

Build real-time LiveOps into games with PlayFab | Azure Friday

Modern games require more powerful development tools, global and flexible multiplayer support, and new revenue models. PlayFab is a complete back-end platform for live games and a powerful way for independent studios to get started. Boost revenue, engagement, and retention—while cutting costs—with game services, real-time analytics, and LiveOps.

Getting started with Azure Digital Twins | IoT Show

We recently announced the public preview of Azure Digital Twins, a new platform for comprehensive digital models and spatially aware solutions that can be applied to any physical environment. Lyrana Hughes joins Olivier Bloch on the IoT Show to demonstrate how to use Azure Digital Twins to connect people, places, and things, and to build IoT solutions with spatial intelligence.

IoT Show Episode 100!! | IoT Show

We can't believe it's already been 100 episodes. We are having so much fun putting the IoT Show together, we hope you are enjoying it as much. Thanks for watching!

Build a Bot in Minutes with QnA Maker | AI Show

In this episode we are exploring how quick and easy it is to create a chatbot that can answer top-of-mind questions for employees or customers. Leveraging QnA Maker we will build a bot in minutes from a FAQ website and even add some personality to our bot.

How to build a movie review app with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions | Azure Makers Series

Learn how to mash three free Azure services together – Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Functions, and Azure AD B2C – and create a movie review app using Xamarin.Forms! Give your logged-in users premium reviews, access to exclusive content, and more.

Technical content

Best practices for alerting on metrics with Azure Database for MySQL monitoring

There are various metrics available for you in Microsoft Azure Database for MySQL to get insights on the behavior of the server. You can also set alerts on these metrics using the Azure portal or Azure CLI. This post provides some example best practices on how you can use monitoring data on your MySQL server, and areas you can consider improving based on these various metrics.

The same info is available for Azure Database for MySQL monitoring, too.

Leverage Azure Security Center to detect when compromised Linux machines attack

This post discusses some recent instances where attacks against a sophisticated hybrid Linux honeypot service (a decoy system to lure cyber attackers) originated from IPs within customer machines. In each case, malicious behavior on those compromised customer VMs had already resulted in alerts being raised through Azure Security Center. Analysis of these attacks yielded greater insight into the attacker’s behavior. This fed further detection development, allowing us to surface more attack behavior to customers earlier, and provide a more complete view of the attack end to end. Microsoft has several physical infrastructure and operational controls in place to help protect the Azure platform, and we have over 3,500 cybersecurity experts at Microsoft to help protect, detect, and respond at any time to security threats against our infrastructure and services.

The importance of Azure Stack for DevOps

An organization that implements a hybrid cloud strategy will need a consistent DevOps model across both an on-premises and public cloud. Microsoft Azure Stack extends Azure cloud services and capabilities to the on-premises environment, which is why it is so valuable for DevOps. Azure Stack and Azure give you the ability to stand up a hybrid continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline to land and move workloads on either an on-premises or public cloud.

The smart way to a smarter city: Three critical considerations

The concept of smart buildings is generating lots of excitement, but what does the transformation to intelligent cities look like at ground level for those in charge of making it happen? This post is the first in a series of three illustrating how Internet of Things technology can change urban areas for the better—for those who run them and those who live in them. First up, a rundown on the three most common barriers to adoption for administrators embarking on the journey to a smarter city.

Tips and tricks for migrating on-premises Hadoop infrastructure to Azure HDInsight

Many of our customers migrate workloads to HDInsight from on-premises due to its enterprise-grade capabilities and support for open source workloads such as Hive, Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, HBase, Phoenix, Storm, and R. This six-part guide takes you through the migration process and shows you not only how to move your Hadoop workloads to Azure HDInsight, but also shares best practices on how to optimize your architecture, infrastructure, storage, and more. This guide was written in collaboration with the Azure Customer Advisory team based on a wealth of experience from helping many customers with Hadoop migrations.

Additional technical content

• Azure Functions: Choosing between queues and event hubs
• Trying out Jenkins X on Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS)

Azure Tips & Tricks

How to renew or revoke Azure Functions keys | Azure Tips & Tricks

Learn how to quickly renew or revoke Azure Functions keys using the Azure portal. When working with HTTP triggers with Azure Functions, you are provided with a set of keys that you could use to authorize who can and can't access your functions.

How to easily work with JSON with Azure Logic Apps | Azure Tips & Tricks

Learn how to create a JSON Schema that can be used in Azure Logic Apps. You will also learn a few tools that will help you generate sample JSON data to validate your JSON payloads.

Azure DevOps

Talking Azure DevOps at the Microsoft Ignite Event 2018 - Episode 010 | The Azure DevOps Podcast

This episode Jeffrey brings you a live recording from the Microsoft Ignite event. Today, he’s talking with several people, including Greg Leonardo, Josh Gaverick, Rob Richardson, and Colin Dembovsky. Tune in to hear highlights from each of the guest’s panels, what they have enjoyed learning about at the conference, their insights on various topics in the Azure space, their day-to-day work and projects outside of the conference, and their predictions on the future of Azure!

Customers and partners

IoT for Smart Cities: New partnerships for Azure Maps and Azure Digital Twins

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that we will invest $5 billion in IoT over the next four years. This year alone we announced many exciting additions to our IoT portfolio, including Azure Maps and Azure Digital Twins. This post announces strategic partnerships across both platforms and solutions built by Azure IoT partners to further help cities meet their ambitions of becoming Smarter Cities.

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 24

The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs – certified and optimized to run on Azure. Find, try, purchase, and provision applications & services from hundreds of leading software providers. You can also connect with Gold and Silver Microsoft Cloud Competency partners to help your adoption of Azure. In the first half of October we published 31 new offers.

Azure This Week - 9 November 2018 | A Cloud Guru

This time on Azure This Week, Lars talks about the public preview of live data local testing in Azure Stream Analytics, the availability of Azure SignalR Service, and Microsoft Ignite - The Tour.

Recently at the Microsoft Experiences18 conference in Paris, we shared that Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft Dynamics have been granted a Health Data Hosting (HDS) certification. This makes Microsoft the first major cloud provider capable of meeting the strict standards of storing and processing health data for data centers located in France, and under the new certification process that began in June 2018.

This validates the very high level of safety and protection that Microsoft can offer to French healthcare entities, who will be able to rely on the Microsoft cloud to deploy the applications and health services of tomorrow. These applications and health services will also be in compliance with the current regulations on data protection and privacy.

With the HDS certification, health providers in France will not only be able to take advantage of the efficiencies of the cloud, but will also be empowered to innovate with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and mixed reality. Both have the potential to transform the delivery of health services.

Trust is essential when health information is held and shared in the public cloud. The privacy of health-related information is critical. Microsoft takes a holistic defense-in-depth approach to security ensuring that confidential information is protected, stored, and managed securely while in compliance with all regulations and laws.

The Hébergeurs de Données de Santé or Health Data Hosting (HDS) certification is required for entities hosting the personal health data governed by French laws and collected for occasions such as prevention, diagnosis, care, social, and medico-social follow-up activities on behalf of third parties. This includes data controllers and the patients themselves. The British Standards Institution (BSI) conducted the audit of Microsoft data centers in France and certified their compliance with the HDS standard.

Azure France includes France Central region based in Paris, and France South region in Marseille. France Central now offers three availability zones for increased availability, resiliency, and business continuity. The Paris region is one of the first Azure regions to benefit from the implementation of availability zones and 99.99 percent availability of service.

The HDS certification builds on Azure’s growing list of health compliance offerings, including:

• Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) Common Security Framework (CSF)
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Minimum Acceptable Risk Standards for Exchanges (MARS-E) 2.0 Framework
• NEN 7510:2011 Netherlands standards for control over patient health
• National Health Service (NHS) Information Governance (IG) Toolkit in the UK

Learn more about Microsoft’s compliance offerings by visiting the Microsoft Trust Center. You can also learn more about the benefits of Azure on the Azure for health page.

Over the years, we’ve learned that sharing the evolution of Visual Studio, with you – our users – early and often helps us to deliver the best possible experience for our community. We’re excited to share today that, as part of the development of Visual Studio 2019, we’ve been looking to refresh our theme, update our product icon and splash screens, and help you get to your code faster. I’d like to walk you through our thinking behind the changes and show off the resulting user experience that you’ll encounter every day. By leaving a comment below or suggesting a feature (or reporting a bug!) in Developer Community, you have a chance to provide input into the design of the product, early in the process.

Updating our product icon

Visual Studio 2017 icon (left) and the new Visual Studio 2019 icon (right)

The first change you might notice is the refresh of our product and preview icons. We work on improving our icons for each release of Visual Studio so that you can quickly spot which version of Visual Studio you’re opening and using. We caught some usability issues around the style of the icon in the early stages of releasing Visual Studio 2017 and we’re focused on addressing these issues for Visual Studio 2019.

One thing that came up was that the current icon’s flat style rendered it almost invisible against a background with a similar color. By adopting the Fluent Design System approach to depth, lighting, and materials, we’ve visually enhanced the icon so that it’s much more visible against a variety of backgrounds.

The new Visual Studio 2019 icon in the taskbar and start menu

We’re always learning about new situations and environments where the Visual Studio logo might appear. We keep improving its legibility, reducing the chance that it will get lost on a similar-colored background.

The Visual Studio 2019 release icon (left) next to the Visual Studio 2019 Preview icon (right)

Another challenge we faced was the difference between a Preview and final RTM version of Visual Studio. Our product icon is the obvious way for us to be able to communicate this difference, but this proved difficult with the Visual Studio 2017 icon set. For Visual Studio 2017, the icon was designed to be a part of the large Visual Studio Family. The method we used was to align all our icons with a consistent “ribbon” down the right side. However, this left less space for the identifying mark that distinguished the apps from one another.

For Visual Studio 2019, we started by removing any extra parts of the icon. We wanted to focus on the most recognizable element of the Visual Studio logo: namely, the infinity loop

We increased the size of the infinity loop, which gave us more room and opportunity to show the difference between the Preview and Release icons. We’ve also taken a bolder approach to how we represent the Preview. By breaking the icon shape in a few places, we’ve maintained the overall shape of the Visual Studio icon. But we’re showing a distinct and accessible difference at the same time, suggesting a complete (if not production-ready) preview.

We’re working on a similar approach for the new Visual Studio for Mac icon that will debut in forthcoming Previews.

Easier to launch your code

start window for Visual Studio for Mac (left) and Visual Studio (right)

Through research and observation, we identified opportunities to simplify the choices that you must make during the most crucial steps of getting started with Visual Studio. We realized we needed to remove what we call “off-ramps” from the experience and provide you with the best paths forward to your code.

Whether you’re new to Visual Studio or a seasoned Visual Studio developer, the new start window gives you rapid access to the most common ways that developers access their code: cloning or checking out code, opening a project or solution, opening a local folder on PC, and creating a new project.

We know how important the list of recent projects and folders from the current IDE Start Page in Visual Studio 2017 is for you (more than 90 percent of you who use the Start Page also use the recent project lists), so we made sure to maintain its position as a focal point in the experience.

You’ll also find a new, streamlined, Git-first workflow that lets you clone public Git repos with just a few clicks.

Finally, we also reimagined the experience of creating a new project, with a new list of the most popular templates and improved search and filter capabilities. With the new design and step-by-step approach for selecting a template and configuring it, we believe that we have made it less overwhelming so that you can focus on a single decision at a time. You will also be able to explore other languages, platforms, and project types that Visual Studio supports and eventually be able to install them right from there.

A refreshed blue theme

The refreshed blue theme (left) next to the current blue theme (right)

One of the most noticeable visual impacts you may see when you run Visual Studio 2019 is our updated blue theme. More than half of you use the blue theme, but it’s looked the same since Visual studio 2012. We focused our changes around a desire to declutter the Visual Studio UI. By softening the edges around our icon buttons and toolbars, as well as tool-windows, we can bring forward the focus of what you’re working on. We’ve made small changes across the whole UI, which add up to a cleaner interface while still meeting our accessibility standards. We started with the blue theme so that we can get these updates in front of you, learn from your feedback, and then apply it across our other themes.

Productivity at your fingertips

The current commanding space (top) and the simplified version for Visual Studio 2019 (bottom)

Looking for opportunities to broaden the focus of the code and remove clutter, we started with the vertical space. By removing the title bar, we took the opportunity to reassess the uppermost layout of Visual Studio without drastically changing your workflow. We have moved the search UI to increase discoverability. With the upcoming preview releases and updates, you’ll find that search in Visual Studio 2019 is more powerful and accurate.

We now have a focused location for team collaboration using Live Share in the title bar. Grouped together close to the user account signed in to Visual Studio, it’s now easier to see who you’re collaborating with. This is built into all editions of Visual Studio. We’ve also taken the time to clean up the default iconography to align it better with Windows.

These small changes allow us to reclaim vital space in the IDE … allowing for larger tool windows, more space for your code, and faster access … to the tools and commands that matter to you.

Noticeable notifications

The new location, style, and icon for notifications for Visual Studio 2019. Coming in future Previews.

Early next year, one of our Preview releases will include an update to the notifications UI. Through conversations with you, we’ve heard that the current notifications location, icon, and states have been unclear to you for some time. To tackle this, we’re moving the entry point for notifications to the status bar at the bottom of the IDE. This new position avoids disruptive UI breaking your concentration, but sets us up for displaying messages from a variety of different services (from the status of a Live Share to a Pull Request comment) in the future. We’re also updating the icon from a flag to a bell, based on your comments.

An ongoing conversation

We’re excited to share these changes that we’ve been working on with you, and we’d love to hear your thoughts about our new designs, so please leave a comment below. You can also suggest a feature or file a bug in our Developer Community. We want to make Visual Studio better with every update and your feedback is critical.

Jamie Young, Group Principal Design Manager @jamiedyoung Jamie runs the Design Team in the Developer Tools Division of Microsoft. He has been designing all sorts of things for over 15 years and has built up an unhealthy interest in complex problems, which sits well with his current job.

Keeping up with the pace of change in Microsoft Azure can be challenging. Every week there are more than 50 pull requests against the Azure Representational State Transfer (REST) API. Over the past 6 months, we’ve been building the AI-powered extension, Azure Aladdin, to help make using Azure easier. The first interface was a Microsoft docs extension that provided users content recommendations.

Today we are excited to offer the next interface to the Aladdin knowledge base, an experimental Azure Command-line interface (CLI) extension that provides insight and examples based on how other user have seen success using Microsoft Azure.

Install the Azure CLI "Find" extension

We’ve made it straightforward to install experimental extensions in Azure CLI. If you want to install the new “Find” extension, run the following command:

For users of the Azure Cloud Shell, any extension installed will persist between sessions. Below we’re going to examine some of the capabilities of this new extension.

Explains CLI commands

For some features and previews, such as Azure Web App for Containers, there may only be auto-generated reference content without examples.

Shows common commands in a group

The extension can also break down complex groups, such as Azure Monitor (az monitor), and provide the most common commands used:

Help find commands

With more than 2,300 commands, it can be hard to find the right one. This extension replaces the existing Azure CLI "Find" command search capability with one powered by the knowledge base. Today, we provide a simple text search ordered by popularity with an example for each result but expect to see improvements over time.

Examples, always up-to-date

When building tools for software development, reference documentation continues to be one of the most challenging areas to get right. Good reference documentation needs to be simple enough to allow beginners access, yet technical enough to enable professionals to support niche scenarios. Having up-to-date examples is key to providing good reference documentation.

By using the knowledge base and applying machine learning to generate examples, we’re able to ensure quality examples across our Azure management products and documentation. For example, creating a VM with "az vm create" offers 53 unique parameters used in hundreds of different ways. 

Today, only 42 percent of CLI commands have examples. Over the coming months, we will be integrating Aladdin-generated examples into the Azure CLI documentation, with a goal to reach 95 percent of all commands that come with usage examples.

How does this work?

To serve examples and related documentation, our robot is consulting a new knowledge base, called the Aladdin Knowledge Base. Aladdin is built by compiling information from many sources including our own documentation, code, and usage data, as well as Azure-related GitHub issues. This knowledge base is a continuation of our previous experiment, the Aladdin Doc Helper Chrome extension.

“az find” consults this knowledge base to create the most relevant examples for each CLI command. If you’re one of the first few to learn a new command or service, you might not know it, but you are contributing by adding new entries to the knowledge base and helping make others successful. Each time Azure is used in a new way, our system incorporates that usage, along with docs.microsoft.com content to generate example ‘guide-posts’ to help future users along the way. It tracks the success of users who view our examples, a topic worthy of its own post and using the results to fine tune examples and recommendations. Our knowledge base is agnostic to any specific tool. In the future, we intend to create a  similar help module for Azure PowerShell that utilizes the same knowledge base.

This service is built entirely on Azure resources! Behind the scenes, we employ an Azure Search Service customized for our retrieval task and utilize Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) to allow our robots to understand humans.

Help us improve with your feedback

Help us make the tools that you love and use every day even better. How can you help? Provide feedback. With each Find result, you can provide feedback to let us know when Aladdin is useful, has lost its way or is giving bad advice. These reports are used to identify incorrect or out-of-date examples. Our robot will incorporate your feedback and will improve the quality and accuracy of examples, especially those related to uncommon scenarios.

What’s next?

Our goal is to integrate this extension into the Azure CLI as a core feature. However, we’re also investigating some additional features:

• Personalization - Customize examples based on your profile, resources, and defaults.

• Keep up to date - The cloud changes fast, we’ll help you keep aware of services and features that are important to you.

• Migration information - When you are ready to migrate to a new feature or service, we will make sure you know your options, based on others who have previously migrated to Azure.

• Try this next - As you get more comfortable with the CLI, we’ll help you scale your solutions by showing you how others have scaled from where you are now.

We will continue to improve the Azure Aladdin knowledge base and offer more experiences and tools for managing Azure. If you have any suggestions or ideas, we encourage you to share with the team by sending an email to aladdindoc@microsoft.com.

This post is co-authored by Anil Kumble, Founder, Spektacom Technologies.

While Cricket is an old sport with a dedicated following of fans across the globe, the game has been revolutionized in the 21st century with the advent of Twenty20 format resulting in a massive growth of interest in the game and fan following worldwide. This has led to an increase in competition as well as a desire among professionals and amateurs likewise, to improve the quality of their game.

As the popularity of the game increased, innovative methods of improving batting techniques evolved. This has also resulted in a need for data-driven assistance for players to assess their quality of game. Spektacom was born with the idea of using non-intrusive sensor technology on cricket bat to harness and power the convergence of data from sticker of “power bats” with insights driven from cloud-powered data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Learn more on AI Lab.

Before we highlight how Spektacom built the solution using Microsoft AI, here are some important questions we must answer first.

What is the key area of differentiation that technology can create for sport as an industry?

During the last several years, the industry has realized the value of data across almost every sport and found ways to not only collect it, but also to organize it.

Data – when harnessed strategically with the help of intelligent technologies such as machine learning and predictive analytics – is helping teams, leagues, and governing bodies transform their respective sports by driving insights and enabling better decision making across three key areas of their business:

• Fan engagement and management
• Team and player performance
• Team operations and logistics

However, it’s important to note that while collecting and analyzing data has become a minimum requirement in the sports industry, it’s not enough to drive future success. Deriving intelligent insights is critical, combined with the ability to put those insights to best use.

What impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on cricket or any other sport?

For many professional sports teams and governing bodies, what led to past successes won’t necessarily lead to future victories. The things that gave teams a competitive advantage have now become table stakes. People are consuming sports in new ways and fans have come to expect highly personalized experiences – the sports content they want, when and where they want it.

AI is transforming the way sports are played, teams are managed, and businesses are run. Teamed with machine learning and other aspects like chatbots, AI will help improve many aspects of sports.

The impact that Spektacom’s power bat will have on the game?

This technology will help:

• Enhance fan experience and engagement with the sport.
• Broadcasters to use insights for further derivations.
• Grassroots players and budding cricketers to increase their technical efficiency.
• Coaches to provide more intensely focused guidance to players.
• Professional cricketers to enhance performance.

Overall, it will change the face of cricket as we know it because prior to this, there was no objective analytics available on a batsman’s performance.

Now that we know that how technology can transform and differentiate the industry of cricket and sports with AI. Let’s talk about the solution which Spektacom built with Microsoft.

The solution

Introducing ‘power bats,’ an innovative sensor-powered sticker that measures the quality of a player’s shot by capturing data and analyzing impact characteristics through wireless sensor technology and cloud analytics. This unique non-intrusive sensor platform weighing less than 5 grams is stuck behind the bat as a sticker to measure the quality, speed, twist, and swing of the bat and the power transferred from the ball to bat at impact. These parameters are used to compute the quality of the shot to help professional as well as amateur players, coaches, and all stakeholders involved in the game to help improve a player’s performance with data-driven feedback. The data from the power bats is analyzed with powerful AI models developed in Azure and transferred to the edge for continuous feedback to the player.

In the case of a professional game, the sticker communicates using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with an edge device called Stump box that is buried behind the wicket. The data from the stump box is transferred and analyzed in Azure and shot characteristics are provided to broadcasters in real-time. Given that cricket stadiums have wireless access restrictions and stringent security requirements, to ensure secure communication between bat, edge device and Microsoft Azure, Stump Box has been powered by Microsoft Azure Sphere based hardware platform. In the case of amateur player scenario, the smart bat pairs with Spektacom mobile app to transfer and analyze sticker data in Azure. The solution is powered by Azure Sphere (Stump box), Azure IoT Hub, Azure Event Hub, Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure ML 2.0.

We hope this post helps you get started with AI and motivates you to become an AI developer.

To learn more, visit AI Lab.

Tara

Special thanks to Graham Neray and the MongoDB team for their contribution to this blog post. 

We’re excited to share that teams can now use the global cloud database MongoDB Atlas for free on Microsoft Azure. The newly available free tier on Azure is known as the M0, and grants users 512 MB of storage which is ideal for learning MongoDB, prototyping, and early development.

This announcement is apart of our broader goal to give our customers immense choice and make it incredibly easy to get started on Azure for anyone in the world.

The Atlas free tier will run the latest version of MongoDB, one of the most popular databases on the planet. Like larger MongoDB Atlas cluster types, M0 clusters can grant users optimal security with end-to-end encryption, high availability, and fully managed upgrades. M0 clusters also enable faster development by allowing teams to perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations against their data right from their browsers via the built-in Data Explorer.

MongoDB Atlas on Azure is also tightly integrated with key Azure analytic offerings, including Power BI and Microsoft Azure Databricks.

At launch, the MongoDB Atlas free tier will be available in three Azure regions:

• East US (Virginia)
• East Asia (Hong Kong)
• West Europe (Netherlands)

Creating a free tier is easy. After signing up for MongoDB Atlas, select “Azure” as your cloud of choice and one of the regions above when building your first Atlas cluster.

Next, select “M0” in the cluster tier dropdown.

Then, give the cluster a name and hit the “Create Cluster” button. Your free MongoDB Atlas cluster will be deployed in minutes.

More and more we hear from our customers that building hybrid applications is necessary for their business. While Microsoft Azure continues to be the platform of choice for building applications, Azure Stack and Azure together enable building hybrid applications. The consistent experience across both makes it easy. You can use Azure services from anywhere, whether at the bottom of a mine, from inside a container on a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or from the top of Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Andes. Literally, you can run apps that you developed in Azure any place where traditional data centers don’t exist.

You can use Azure Stack close to your operations while using your favorite tools and programming language. Push your apps through dev, test, and into production with a single integrated DevOps pipeline.

Nothing illustrates the power of hybrid apps like the disaster relief prototype my team designed and implemented. This is a great demo of Azure services in a mobile deployment, disconnected in a remote environment. The solution supports data collection and decision making, and we can also see it being tested in areas such as healthcare.

Azure Stack offers capabilities today that make it easy for you to start developing your own hybrid solution. At the heart of using Azure services with Azure Stack are the Azure Resource Manager API profiles. API profiles provide you with the set of resource types and versions that are available across Azure and Azure Stack.

You can focus on creating code for your solution rather than researching which resource types, API versions, and clouds work together. Use API profiles to enable your code to work across the Azure clouds that support your specific profile.

API profiles are available in PowerShell, Microsoft Azure CLI, .NET, Java, Go, Ruby, and Python. You can create scripts and automation workflows that work across Azure anywhere.

Writing code is only part of developing a hybrid application. You also need tools to create your pipelines and to target Azure anywhere. Azure DevOps allows you to target Azure Stack.

Finally, you can find guidance on how to kickstart the development of hybrid apps. You can find tutorials on cross-cloud scaling, AI at the Edge, and others. You can also find the first installation of a technical guidance series, which includes sample apps that show the hybrid experience.

If you have not started yet, I highly encourage you to download the Azure Stack Developer Kit and review the resources listed in this blog post to get started. Be sure to keep an eye out for future articles about hybrid development! If there’s anything else you want to see, just let us know.

Visual Studio IntelliCode is a set of AI-assisted capabilities that aims to improve developer productivity with features like AI-assisted IntelliSense and statement completion, code formatting, and style rule inference. During SpringOne 2018, we announced that we will bring those productivity boosters to Java developers and now we’re happy to introduce AI-assisted IntelliSense to Java in the IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio Code.

IntelliCode saves you time by putting the most relevant suggestions at the top of your completion list. IntelliCode recommendations are based on thousands of open source projects on GitHub, each with over 100 stars, so it’s trained on most popular usage patterns and practices. When combined with the context of your code, the completion list is tailored to promote those practices.

Check out the animation below to see IntelliCode for Java in action.

You may have noticed that IntelliCode provides most relevant IntelliSense recommendations based on your current code context, especially within conditional blocks. IntelliCode works well with popular Java libraries and frameworks like Java SE platform and Spring framework. It will help you whether you are doing monolithic or modern microservices architecture.

Exploring and managing your Java project

You speak, we listen. Some of the most frequent feedback requests we received from developers on Visual Studio Code are the lack of a package view, dependency management and project creation. Thus, we’ve built a new extension to provide those features – Java Dependencies.

See below for package and dependency view.

And create a simple Java project.

Spring Tool 4 available for Visual Studio Code

During SpringOne 2018, Pivotal announced the release of their brand new Spring Tool 4 built on top of the Language Server Protocol developed by Visual Studio Code team, and it’s now available for Visual Studio Code, Eclipse and Atom. Pivotal and Microsoft presented sessions to promote that during both SpringOne and Oracle Code One.

Along with Spring Initializr and Spring Boot Dashboard, now you can easily create new Spring Boot applications, navigate your source code, have smart code editing, see runtime live information in your editor and manage your running application, all within Visual Studio Code.

View the recording of Hacking Spring Boot Applications Using Visual Studio Code to learn more.

More improvements for Java in Visual Studio Code

There’s also lots of additional new features added to our Java on Visual Studio Code extension lineup, including

Debugger for Java

1. Use code lens to run Java program in a much simpler way.
2. Add support for Logpoints.
3. Add a troubleshooting page for common errors.
4. Support starting without debugging.
5. Add new user settings java.debug.settings.enableRunDebugCodeLens to enable/disable Run|Debug Code Lenses on main methods #464 (Thank you Thad House!)
6. Add Italian translation for extension configuration #463 (Thank you Julien Russo!)

Tomcat

1. Support right click on exploded WAR folder to run it directory Tomcat Server
2. Support right click on exploded WAR folder to debug it directory on Tomcat Server
3. Add command “Generate WAR Package from Current Folder”

Maven

1. Supported to fast re-run maven command from history. Added entry for historical commands in context menu.
2. Supported to trigger maven command from command palette.
3. Supported to hide Maven explorer view by default. #51
4. Started to use a separate terminal for each root folder. #68
5. Supported to update explorer automatically when workspace folders change.

With the help from Language Support for Java by Red Hat, we now have better support for newer versions of Java (9, 10, and 11), better integrations with the editor (outline, go to implementation), more code actions (convert var to type and vice versa, convert to lambda expression) and various other enhancements.

Provide feedback

Your feedback and suggestions are especially important to us and will help shape our products in future. Please help us by taking this survey to share your thoughts!

Try it out

Please don’t hesitate to have a try on using Visual Studio Code for your Java development and let us know your feelings! Visual Studio Code is a lightweight and performant code editor with great Java support especially for building microservices.

Install the Java Extension Pack which including Language Support for Java by Red Hat, Debugger for Java, Maven and Java Test Runner.

• Install IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio Code to try out the AI-assisted IntelliSense.
• Install other Java related extensions base on your needs, including
  • Checkout Tomcat and Jetty if you’re working with those technologies.
  • In case you’re working on Spring Boot, there’re also great support provided by Pivotal and Microsoft available on Visual Studio Code including Spring Boot Tools, Spring Initializr and Spring Boot Dashboard.
  • Java Dependencies provides you a package view of your Java project and helps you managing your dependencies.
  • Checkstyle could be handy when you need coherence code style especially cross multiple team members.
• Learn more about Java on Visual Studio Code.
• Explore our step by step Java Tutorials on Visual Studio Code.

Xiaokai He, Program Manager @XiaokaiHe Xiaokai is a program manager working on Java tools and services. He’s currently focusing on making Visual Studio Code great for Java developers, as well as supporting Java in various of Azure services.

Building C# 8.0

The next major version of C# is C# 8.0. It’s been in the works for quite some time, even as we built and shipped the minor releases C# 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3, and I’m quite excited about the new capabilities it will bring.

The current plan is that C# 8.0 will ship at the same time as .NET Core 3.0. However, the features will start to come alive with the previews of Visual Studio 2019 that we are working on. As those come out and you can start trying them out in earnest, we will provide a whole lot more detail about the individual features. The aim of this post is to give you an overview of what to expect, and a heads-up on where to expect it.

New features in C# 8.0

Here’s an overview of the most significant features slated for C# 8.0. There are a number of smaller improvements in the works as well, which will trickle out over the coming months.

Nullable reference types

The purpose of this feature is to help prevent the ubiquitous null reference exceptions that have riddled object-oriented programming for half a century now.

It stops you from putting null into ordinary reference types such as string – it makes those types non-nullable! It does so gently, with warnings, not errors. But on existing code there will be new warnings, so you have to opt in to using the feature (which you can do at the project, file or even source line level).

string s = null; // Warning: Assignment of null to non-nullable reference type

What if you do want null? Then you can use a nullable reference type, such as string?:

string? s = null; // Ok

When you try to use a nullable reference, you need to check it for null first. The compiler analyzes the flow of your code to see if a null value could make it to where you use it:

void M(string? s)
{
    Console.WriteLine(s.Length); // Warning: Possible null reference exception
    if (s != null)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(s.Length); // Ok: You won't get here if s is null
    }
}

The upshot is that C# lets you express your "nullable intent", and warns you when you don’t abide by it.

Async streams

The async/await feature of C# 5.0 lets you consume (and produce) asynchronous results in straightforward code, without callbacks:

async Task<int> GetBigResultAsync()
{
    var result = await GetResultAsync();
    if (result > 20) return result; 
    else return -1;
}

It is not so helpful if you want to consume (or produce) continuous streams of results, such as you might get from an IoT device or a cloud service. Async streams are there for that.

We introduce IAsyncEnumerable<T>, which is exactly what you’d expect; an asynchronous version of IEnumerable<T>. The language lets you await foreach over these to consume their elements, and yield return to them to produce elements.

async IAsyncEnumerable<int> GetBigResultsAsync()
{
    await foreach (var result in GetResultsAsync())
    {
        if (result > 20) yield return result; 
    }
}

Ranges and indices

We’re adding a type Index, which can be used for indexing. You can create one from an int that counts from the beginning, or with a prefix ^ operator that counts from the end:

Index i1 = 3;  // number 3 from beginning
Index i2 = ^4; // number 4 from end
int[] a = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 };
Console.WriteLine($"{a[i1]}, {a[i2]}); // "3, 6"

We’re also introducing a Range type, which consists of two Indexes, one for the start and one for the end, and can be written with a x..y range expression. You can then index with a Range in order to produce a slice:

var slice = a[i1..i2]; // { 3, 4, 5 }

Default implementations of interface members

Today, once you publish an interface it’s game over: you can’t add members to it without breaking all the existing implementers of it.

In C# 8.0 we let you provide a body for an interface member. Thus, if somebody doesn’t implement that member (perhaps because it wasn’t there yet when they wrote the code), they will just get the default implementation instead.

interface ILogger
{
    void Log(LogLevel level, string message);
    void Log(Exception ex) => Log(LogLevel.Error, ex.ToString()); // New overload
}

class ConsoleLogger : ILogger
{
    public void Log(LogLevel level, string message) { ... }
    // Log(Exception) gets default implementation
}

The ConsoleLogger class doesn’t have to implement the Log(Exception) overload of ILogger, because it is declared with a default implementation. Now you can add new members to existing public interfaces as long as you provide a default implementation for existing implementors to use.

Recursive patterns

We’re allowing patterns to contain other patterns:

IEnumerable<string> GetEnrollees()
{
    foreach (var p in People)
    {
        if (p is Student { Graduated: false, Name: string name }) yield return name;
    }
}

The pattern Student { Graduated: false, Name: string name } checks that the Person is a Student, then applies the constant pattern false to their Graduated property to see if they’re still enrolled, and the pattern string name to their Name property to get their name (if non-null). Thus, if p is a Student, has not graduated and has a non-null name, we yield return that name.

Switch expressions

Switch statements with patterns are quite powerful in C# 7.0, but can be cumbersome to write. Switch expressions are a "lightweight" version, where all the cases are expressions:

var area = figure switch 
{
    Line _      => 0,
    Rectangle r => r.Width * r.Height,
    Circle c    => c.Radius * 2.0 * Math.PI,
    _           => throw new UnknownFigureException(figure)
};

Target-typed new-expressions

In many cases, when you’re creating a new object, the type is already given from context. In those situations we’ll let you omit the type:

Point[] ps = { new (1, 4), new (3,-2), new (9, 5) }; // all Points

The implementation of this feature was contributed by a member of the community. Thank you!

Platform dependencies

Most of the C# 8.0 language features will run on any version of .NET. However, a few of them have platform dependencies.

Async streams, indexers and ranges all rely on new framework types that will be part of .NET Standard 2.1. As Immo describes in his post Announcing .NET Standard 2.1, .NET Core 3.0 as well as Xamarin, Unity and Mono will all implement .NET Standard 2.1, but .NET Framework 4.8 will not. This means that the types required to use these features won’t be available when you target C# 8.0 to .NET Framework 4.8.

As always, the C# compiler is quite lenient about the types it depends on. If it can find types with the right names and shapes, it is happy to target them.

Default interface member implementations rely on new runtime enhancements, and we will not make those in the .NET Runtime 4.8 either. So this feature simply will not work on .NET Framework 4.8 and on older versions of .NET.

The need to keep the runtime stable has prevented us from implementing new language features in it for more than a decade. With the side-by-side and open-source nature of the modern runtimes, we feel that we can responsibly evolve them again, and do language design with that in mind. Scott explained in his Update on .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8 that .NET Framework is going to see less innovation in the future, instead focusing on stability and reliability. Given that, we think it is better for it to miss out on some language features than for nobody to get them.

How can I learn more?

The C# language design process is open source, and takes place in the github.com/dotnet/csharplang) repo. It can be a bit overwhelming and chaotic if you don’t follow along regularly. The heartbeat of language design is the language design meetings, which are captured in the C# Language Design Notes.

About a year ago I wrote a post Introducing Nullable Reference Types in C#. It should still be an informative read.

You can also watch videos such as The future of C# from Microsoft Build 2018, or What’s Coming to C#? from .NET Conf 2018, which showcase several of the features.

Kathleen has a great post laying out the plans for Visual Basic in .NET Core 3.0.

As we start releasing the features as part of Visual Studio 2019 previews, we will also publish much more detail about the individual features.

Personally I can’t wait to get them into the hands of all of you!

Happy hacking,

Mads Torgersen, Design Lead for C#

Last week at the ODSC West conference, I was thrilled with the interest in my Using AI for Good workshop: it was wonderful to find a room full of data scientists eager to learn how data science and artificial intelligence can be used to help people and the planet. The workshop was focused around projects from the Microsoft AI for Good program. I've included some details about the projects below, and you can also check out the workshop slides and the accompanying  Jupyter Notebooks that demonstrate the underlying AI methods used in the projects. 

The projects were drawn from the AI for Earth, AI for Accessibility and AI for Humanitarian Action programs, respectively:

The iNaturalist app, which uses image recognition and species distribution models to help citizen scientists identify animal and plant species from photos, and submit their observations to the scientific community. The app is available for iOS and Android smartphones, and you can also try this web-based demo with a picture of an animal or plant. 

The Seeing AI app (available for iOS), which helps blind and vision-impaired people navigate the world around them. (This video, featuring creator Saqib Shaikh, demonstrates how the app works.) The app detects and describes people and transcribes signs and documents, and you can try out the underlying vision APIs using just a web browser. You can also use R to drive the vision APIs, as shown in this notebook demonstrating the "Describe Scene" feature in Seeing AI. 

The AirSim Project, which is used to simulate image data for vision system training using the 3-D Unreal Engine. One application is to train a drone to automatically perform search and rescue operation after a disaster, as described in this video. There, 3-D simulations were provided training data for the Custom Vision service, which you can try out yourself with R and this Jupyter Notebook. 

You can try out all of the aforementioned notebooks by cloning this Azure Notebooks library, or download them at the Github repository below and run them in your own Jupyter Notebooks instance.

Github (revodavid): AI for Good Workshop

Innovation in smart buildings has been increasing in recent years, catalyzed by the democratization of cloud, AI, and IoT. Our recent Azure Digital Twins announcement highlights Microsoft’s commitment to IoT innovation. Organizations benefit from virtually representing their physical environments to deliver on various IoT scenarios, including smart buildings. By gathering data from a broad variety of sensors and devices, organizations are able to more precisely understand and optimize the spaces they occupy, and alter them to best serve people’s needs. As compute power disseminates to every physical environment that people use, buildings have become top-of-mind in their potential to generate efficiency gains and occupant satisfaction. Making IoT accessible to any customer, regardless of size or background, heavily relies on our partners’ creativity and unique domain expertise. New revolutionary devices allow us to capture richer and more meaningful data, and create breakthrough smart building applications. We’re thrilled to share some of the work we are doing with View, a company that has reinvented something that hasn’t changed for centuries – the window.

View is on a mission to create delightful human environments

View believes human health and wellness should be central to smart buildings. That’s why they are on a mission to use dynamic glass to improve the human experience in buildings by making them more intelligent, more connected, and more personalized than ever before. View’s dynamic glass windows let in the optimal amount of natural light while preserving views, to significantly improve the wellbeing of building occupants, while simultaneously reducing building energy usage. Harvard Business Review just published a study identifying natural light as the #1 desired office perk. Another recent study found significant health benefits associated with View Dynamic Glass over regular windows, including greater than 50 percent reductions in eye strain, headaches, and drowsiness – all contributing to improved employee health and productivity.

View shares Microsoft’s vision – that by generating data and applying context to it, we can empower organizations to better analyze how building space is used and optimize it to serve peoples’ needs at every level — from employee health and productivity, to energy efficiency, to contextual personalization.

New partnership

Today we are thrilled to announce a new partnership with View and are excited at the prospect of working together to develop innovative applications for smart buildings. As part of this partnership, View will leverage their expertise in smart buildings and utilize multiple aspects of the Azure IoT platform to accelerate their solutions development. For example, View will leverage Azure Digital Twins for access control and other smart buildings applications, as well as Azure IoT Edge and Azure Sphere for its window and floor controller devices.

The first solution, View SmartProtect, is being announced today. View SmartProtect is a smart window-based, building security solution that automatically and instantaneously detects glass breakage. As soon as glass is broken on any window in a building, a signal is sent through Azure IoT to View’s SmartProtect application notifying the customer of the specific time, window, and location within a building where the glass break event occurred.

View SmartProtect is the first of several IoT solutions from View that aim to make buildings healthier, smarter, and more productive, with applications leveraging the Azure IoT platform. This is just a first step in bringing the next level of intelligence and personalization to building spaces. Through this partnership View customers will benefit from best-of-breed productivity solutions that are robust, secure, and scalable to meet future needs.

Boundless possibilities

The next leg of the journey will take a data-centric approach to optimizing a building space for each individual to maximize health and productivity, in a highly automated and effortless way. View will create an intelligent edge that includes interactive glass displays and sensor arrays with cameras, microphones, air quality sensors, and more into its window frames.

These “smart windows,” integrated with Azure IoT, Office 365, Cortana, and Dynamics 365 will enable spaces to better serve their occupants and empower people to interact with their environment in new ways. It is a showcase example of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge in action. Through ubiquitous distributed computing enabled by the public cloud and a continually expanding set of connected systems and devices – now including the windows and walls of your building – we will interact continually with our ambient environment in much richer ways. View provides a high density, powered, always-connected platform to enable several transformative applications.

For example, once occupants enter a smart building, the building could recognize that people are entering a space for the first time and tell them, “This space can be controlled by voice commands. Just tell me if you are too cold or too hot and I’ll adjust the environment to your preference.” This voice interaction could automatically adjust the tint of the windows, the HVAC levels, and the lighting conditions to create an optimal environment.

I’m excited by the possibilities of this partnership and look forward to seeing how Azure Digital Twins will empower View to offer solutions that improve occupants’ health and wellbeing. View’s innovation provides a new foundation for limitless smart building innovations. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Learn more

Learn more about Azure Digital Twins and View. If you’re coming to Smart City Expo Word Congress, be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth to see View preview SmartProtect, the industry's first smart window-based glass-break detection solution.

This blog post was authored by the Azure High Performance Computing Team.

Every year at Supercomputing, over 12,000 researchers and practitioners come together to push the state of the art in high-performance computing forward. This year is no exception, and we’re excited to join the global HPC community in Dallas, Texas next week.

In booth #3442, Microsoft will showcase the work we have done to address key cloud migration blockers including price performance, simple/performant file access for both MPI and massive-read workloads, and challenges for hybrid HPC enterprises managing across cloud and on-premises clusters.

Over the last year, we have worked to deliver the most complete set of integrated services and solutions to enable customers to get started faster, run HPC workloads cost-effectively, easily migrate or burst workloads to Azure with little risk, and start to control costs/access across the hybrid HPC enterprise. These capabilities are highly scalable, deeply integrated, and very efficient in price-performance and time-to-value.

Specifically, at our booth we’ll show off these Azure HPC solutions:

• Price-performant cloud infrastructure Virtual Machines: New releases of HPC Inifiniband interconnected VMs for leading price/performance and MPI scale:
  • HB VMs with AMD EPYC processors, 60 cores, and 4GB RAM per core (Learn more)
  • HC VMs with Intel Xeon Platinum processors, 44 cores, and 8GB RAM per core (Learn more | Sign up)

• Price Performant bare-metal HPC infrastructure: Cray CS Linux clusters, Cray XC supercomputers that are built to customer spec, and match on-premises cost for high-utilization workloads
• High-performance HPC storage: Cray ClusterStor file systems capable of feeding supercomputer-scale compute workloads, on the Azure Network
• Simplified HPC Cluster hybrid management: Azure CycleCloud for easy at-scale orchestration, access management, error-handling, and cost control with templates for traditional HPC clusters, parallel file systems, and common industry workloads
• Hybrid, performant file access: Avere on Azure leading low-latency, high-performance file caching for hybrid & cloud-only workloads
• Advanced Machine Learning capabilities: New NDv2 GPU VMs for the latest in scale-up AI training using NVidia NVLink technologies with a dense 8-way Volta GPU configuration (Learn more | Sign up)
• Simplified Remote Visualization: New NVv2 GPU VMs with GRID licensing included (Learn more | Sign up)
• Cloud Native HPC Workloads at Scale: Azure Batch cloud native job scheduling for HPC applications where Batch service manages the underlying cloud-scale complexity and you focus on your application needs.
• Preview the New “Sentinel” Cray in Azure: Cray and Microsoft are proud to announce the availability of Sentinel, the Cray in Azure invite-only preview system. If your organization needs considerable HPC capability, apply for a pilot on Sentinel to experience all of the above capabilities in Azure.

Microsoft also has considerable technical content this year, with presentations including:

• A Quantum Future of Computation invited talk session with Matthias Troyer on Thursday, November 15, 2018 from 8:30 AM – 9:15 AM Central Time.
• Panel Discussion: HPC in the Cloud Exhibitor Forum Session at the Intel Booth (D171) on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 from 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Central Time:
  • Track 1: 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM Central Time | Extending On-Premise HPC to the Cloud | Presenter: Gabriel Broner
  • Track 2: 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Central Time| Enabling HPC and Deep Learning Workloads at Extreme Scale in the Cloud | Presenter: Bill Bryce
  • Track 3: 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM Central Time | What Would You Do with a Million Cores of Compute Capacity? | Presenter: Ian Colle
• Applications of Deep Learning in Industry and Research Birds of a Feather Session on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 5:15 PM – 6:45 PM Central Time.
  • Session Leader: Lucas Wilson
  • Additional Session Leaders: Antonio Cisternino, Matthew Grover, and Alex Sutton
• Benchmarking Scientific Reconfigurable/FPGA Computing Birds of a Feather Session on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM Central Time.
• High Level Programming Languages for Quantum Computation Birds of a Feather Session on Tuesday, November 13, 2018 at 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM Central Time.
  • Session Leader: Torsten Hoefler
  • Additional Session Leader: Matthias Troyer
• “Reconfigurable Computing for HPC: Will It Make It This Time?” Panel Discussion on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Central Time.
  • Moderator: Franck Cappello
  • Panelists: Torsten Hoefler, Kentaro Sano, Maya Gokhale, Andrew Putnam, Kazutomo Yoshii, and Ronan Keryell

We’re also proud to be a sponsor of the Student Cluster Competition, which will include a cloud GPU access, along with tables at the Student Career Fair. We look forward to seeing you in Dallas this week!

On behalf of the entire Workbench team, thank you for your continued support and interest in Azure Blockchain Workbench. With every month’s release, our focus areas are driven by the topics you care about the most. Workbench 1.5.0 focuses on two key themes, making Workbench easier to deploy and simplifying the process of developing and testing your end to end blockchain solutions.

Whether you’re a new customer or upgrading your current deployment, we hope you like what we have built.

Deploy faster

The previous Workbench installation provided a lot of flexibility that most people didn’t need. We have streamlined the deployment template with default values and easier Azure Active Directory (AAD) integration. For advanced users, you still have customization options available within the template. For customers with higher scale needs, we also have newly published guidance on how to scale your deployment.

Develop and troubleshoot easier

You’ve told us that Workbench helps you build and deploy blockchain applications faster, but you would like more help with debugging issues in your contracts and your integration code. We’ve added guidance on how to use Application Insights to troubleshoot issues, added robust telemetry, and more targeted error messages to help you pinpoint issues faster.

As more people build out end to end solutions, we’ve identified some optimizations that we can make in our messaging API. In this release, we have updated the messaging format for ingress to make it more intuitive. We will follow up in the next month with an updated messaging format for egress.

These messaging API changes will require updates to your existing code. We’ve updated all our existing samples on GitHub to reflect the ingress message changes introduced in Workbench 1.5.0.

If you’re just getting started with Workbench, don’t forget that we have a robust set of samples available for you on GitHub which we are continually updating. 

For more details on other items in this release, please review the release notes on GitHub. You can stay up to date on Azure Blockchain by following us on Twitter @MSFTBlockchain. Please use our Blockchain UserVoice to provide feedback and suggest features or ideas for Workbench. Your input is helping make this a great service. We look forward to hearing from you.

We are pleased to announce the private preview of the Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in Azure China. With this announcement, Azure becomes the first cloud provider to provide a managed Kubernetes service within mainland China. As in the other regions where the service is available worldwide, AKS in China offers users a way to quickly and easily create a Kubernetes cluster on Azure infrastructure, then scale, upgrade, and monitor that cluster with a set of simple and intuitive tools.

If you have an Azure China account, creating a Kubernetes cluster in AKS is as simple as az aks create. Once the cluster is created, you can manage it in the Azure China portal, including scaling the cluster in and out, and upgrading to new Kubernetes versions.

When coupled with the Azure Container Registry, users now have the core tools to build and run large scale containerized applications in China. Over the coming months, we will enable other elements of the Azure container ecosystem, including Azure Container Instances and Azure Monitor for containers.

If you are interested in joining the private preview, please submit your contact details through the form at https://aka.ms/aks/chinapreview.

谢谢 (thank you!)

Sean

Is your business ready for the holiday season?

As we approach the holiday season and bring in thoughts of good cheers, many companies are faced with an elevated risk of cyber-attacks. What makes the holidays such an enticing time for hackers is the combination of an increase in traffic volume due to an uptick in eCommerce that helps disguise hackers from detection, and reduced staff. All of which makes this time of year too attractive for cyber-criminals to pass up.

In fact, security firms report a 150 percent increase in DDoS attacks in the months between summer and the end of the year. DDoS is becoming an unfortunate and inevitable addition to the holidays.

DDoS is an ever-growing problem, and the types of attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated. More importantly, DDoS attacks are often used as a “smokescreen,” masking more malicious and harmful infiltration of your resources. The technology to create DDoS attacks continues to increase in sophistication while the cost and ability to instigate these attacks get more and more accessible. Therefore, driving up the frequency and ease at which criminals can wreak havoc on businesses and users.

Readily available DDoS toolkits, botnet-for-hire services and an explosion of inadequately secured IoT devices, make every organization a potential target. No online network, application, service, or website is immune to the DDoS threat.

Azure offers solutions to protect your valuable digital assets from these cyber-attacks during the holidays and throughout the year. Azure DDoS Protection provides countermeasures against the most sophisticated DDoS threats. The service provides enhanced DDoS mitigation capabilities for your application and resources deployed in your virtual networks. Additionally, customers using Azure DDoS Protection has access to DDoS Rapid Response support to engage DDoS experts during an active attack. You can easily enable DDoS Protection for your resources to proactively protect against DDoS attacks!

Protect your applications against DDoS attacks in three steps:

1. Evaluate risks for your Azure applications. This is the time to understand the scope of your risk from a DDoS attack if you haven’t done so already.

a. If there are virtual networks with applications exposed over the public Internet, we strongly recommend enabling DDoS Protection on those virtual networks. Resources in a virtual network that requires protection against DDoS attacks are Application Gateway/WAF, Load Balancer, virtual machines, and Azure Firewall. Review “DDos Protection reference architectures” to get more details on reference architectures to protect resources in virtual networks against DDoS attacks.

i. This PowerShell script will iterate all VNets overall subscriptions to which a user has access, and will output two tables, VNets with DDoS Protection enabled and VNets with DDoS Protection disabled.

b. You must ensure your applications don’t have a single point of failure and can auto-scale as the traffic volume increases during the peak period. Refer to the fundamental best practices for building DDoS-resilient services in Azure for more details.

c. Use network security groups (NSGs) to block unwanted ports minimizing attack footprint of your applications.

2. Validate your assumptions. Planning and preparation are crucial to understanding how a system will perform during a DDoS attack. You should be proactive to defend against DDoS attacks and not wait for an attack to happen and then act.

a. It is essential that you understand the normal behavior of an application and prepare to act if the application is not behaving as expected during a DDoS attack. Have monitors configured for your business-critical applications that mimic client behavior, and notify you when relevant anomalies are detected. Refer to monitoring and diagnostics best practices to gain insights on the health of your application.

b. Azure Application Insights is an extensible application performance management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Use Application Insights to monitor your live web application. It automatically detects performance anomalies. It includes analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users do with your app. It's designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability.

c. Finally, test your assumptions about how your services will respond to an attack by generating traffic against your applications to simulate DDoS attack. Don’t wait for an actual attack to happen! We have partnered with Ixia, a Keysight company, to provide a self-service traffic generator (BreakingPoint Cloud) that allows Azure DDoS Protection customers to simulate DDoS test traffic against their Azure public endpoints.

3. Configure Alerts and Attack Analytics. Azure DDoS Protection identifies and mitigates DDoS attacks without any user intervention.

a. To get notified when there’s an active mitigation for a protected public IP, we recommend configuring an alert on the metric Under DDoS attack or not.

b. You can additionally choose to create alerts for the other DDoS metrics and configure attack analytics to understand the scale of the attack, traffic being dropped, and other details.

When to contact Microsoft support

• During a DDoS attack if you find that the performance of the protected resource is severely degraded, or the resource is not available. Review step 2 above on configuring monitors to detect resource availability and performance issues.
• You think your resource is under DDoS attack, but DDoS Protection service is not mitigating the attack effectively.
• You're planning a viral event that will significantly increase your network traffic.

For attacks that have a critical business impact, create a severity-A support ticket to engage DDoS Rapid Response team.

Developing applications that span multiple operating systems in .NET Core while working with Time Zone information can lead to unexpected results for developers not familiar with the differences in how operating systems manage Time Zones. In this post, we will explore those differences and the challenges they present.

Reproducing the issue

Suppose you are writing a console application in .NET Core and you want to get information about a specific Time Zone. You might write something like this

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    TimeZoneInfo tzi = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Central Standard Time");
    Console.WriteLine(tzi.DisplayName);
}

Running this on my Windows 10 development environment, I see the following output

(UTC-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada)

If I take that same block of code over to my Ubuntu 18.04 development environment and run it, I instead see the following exception being thrown

Exception has occurred: CLR/System.TimeZoneNotFoundException
An unhandled exception of type 'System.TimeZoneNotFoundException' occurred in System.Private.CoreLib.dll: 'The time zone ID 'Central Standard Time' was not found on the local computer.'

What’s going on here? Let’s spend a little time digging into that and see what exactly is happening.

Time Zone differences

Windows maintains its list of Time Zones in the Windows registry. You can find a list of those values here.

In contrast, Linux distributions use the Time Zone database curated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). You can find the latest copy of that database on IANA’s website. Here’s an example of what an IANA Time Zone looks like

America/New_York

The issue comes into play when you write your .NET Core code specifically using one of the two formats and then try to run the application on another operating system. Because the runtime is deferring the Time Zone management to the underlying operating system you will need to handle the differences if that scenario applies to you.

How can we work around this?

There is an open source project available on GitHub that addresses these differences. Head over and check out the source code contributed by the project developer and maintainer. You can grab the package via NuGet with the following command:

Install-Package TimeZoneConverter

Once you have it installed, you are able to work with different operating system Time Zone providers in a uniform way.

TimeZoneInfo tzi = TZConvert.GetTimeZoneInfo("Central Standard Time");
TimeZoneInfo tzi = TZConvert.GetTimeZoneInfo("America/New_York");

Time zone data changes every so often, so as noted in the project documentation – be sure to keep this package up to date.

Starting with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9, we’ve changed how the Visual Studio tooling for .NET consumes .NET Core SDKs. Prior to this change, installing a preview version of the .NET Core SDK would cause all Visual Studio tooling for .NET Core to use that SDK because it had a higher version.

We now have a compatibility check in the .NET Core SDK that allows for a given SDK to mark a minimum required Visual Studio version. This ensures that the Visual Studio tools for .NET Core will not try to use an SDK that requires a newer Visual Studio version.

For stable releases of Visual Studio, the tools will now default to consuming only the latest stable version of the SDK that is installed on your machine. If you install any preview SDKs, the tools will not consume them by default. You can change this setting in Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > .NET Core:

For preview releases of Visual Studio, the tools will continue to consume the latest preview version of the SDK that is installed on your machine by default. You cannot change the option to turn this off for preview releases of Visual Studio because they usually require a corresponding preview SDK to work correctly.

If you specify an SDK explicitly with a global.json file, the tooling will adhere to normal global.json rules.

These changes will make the use of .NET Core within Visual Studio more predictable.

Happy hacking!