Am reviewing the Azure updates announced at the Build Conference.
There’s a preview of Cloud Shell, available here……
Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed, multi-model database. With the click of a button, Azure Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure’s geographic regions. More info here…
Came across this contest in my twitter feed,
#FuelMyAwesome Microsoft wants to know What Gets You In the Code Zone?
What fuels your awesome? What favorite snack or music or ritual gets you cranking out that beautiful code? It’s easy to let us know, and there are prizes involved. Just jump on Twitter and tweet to @Azure.
More details here…
Over the years, applications can keep growing, as features get added, to the point that they become quite difficult to manage, and any new change requires a lot of resources both time and people to make that change.
The standard design pattern of choice seems to be a monolithic architecture where the components are all one deployable unit for example with Enterprise Java you could have a single war or ear file. There is good tooling support, it is easy to code, build and deploy. However, if you need to make even a small change you build/deploy entire application. It’s harder to scale and maintain, particularly as technologies evolve.
So here is where Microservice architecture comes in, which by definition is a method for developing smaller, modular, light weight, independently deployable services, which provide communication through a well defined API. They can be developed and deployed independently, and the technology can updated easily as they are smaller. One of the issue with having multiple services make up an application means synchronizing and managing the flow of data, and configuration/deployment is more complicated.
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. RESTful services with JSON data-interchange format, allow the development of the services.
The Microsoft Build 2017 conference started today, and it goes through to May 12th, in Seattle, WA. I tried to catch a few sessions during the day live as possible. Satya Nadela, CEO of Microsoft kicked off the conference with the Mission of Microsoft, which is Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Some cool demos (Cortana Skills kit) in the keynote, on how AI can help in protecting work spaces. Also, information on Azure, particularly database which is constructed from ground up.
Some interesting announcements/points made, C# popularity growing, and the fastest growing language is typescript. Visual Studio 2017 15.2 and Preview announced at show with support full stack Python development, Azure functions, data science and analytics and unity, gaming. VS side by side install supported.
Another Windows 10 is coming – fall creators update – with new design language for developers – Fluent Design Systems that supports responsive cross-device user experiences. Windows improvements such as, Clipboard allows text to copy from one device and paste into phone no matter the phone manufacturer. Microsoft Graph – can access data on devices, Pick Up Where you left off and OneDrive Files on demand to access files without downloading them. The next version of Windows (Redstone 3) is being tested by insider program members.
Focus on Containers, Azure, Unity (simulation 3D/2D gaming). There’s also Windows Mixed reality headsets, which are available for purchase.
We are in process of moving from our current source code version control tool – Subversion to Git for all our new development. We will continue to use subversion for our previous versions of software. The subversion client that we use is TortoiseSVN. Prior to Subversion we had used Sourcesafe, which we will still use for legacy product releases. Subversion was easier to learn, but Git seems to provide more flexibility and is faster.
Git can be downloaded from GitHub and other links. One of the key benefits of Git is how de-centralized it is compared to Subversion. One can be working in their local repository and commit later once there is connectivity with the source repository. Git is a little problematic for storing large binary files.
VS 2017 has Git support, which means you can do a lot without leaving the IDE. However, I’ve found some things are easier with Git BASH – command line utility. Things like removing files or for moving files from Subversion to Git while preserving the history.
VS 2017, Git and VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services – Microsoft’s streamlined, cloud-hosted version of Team Foundation Server ) is currently our development platform.
Every organization goes through a cycle of reviewing and updating applications that have become dated and harder to maintain. There are many new competing technologies for building responsive web applications, both on the client and server side. A number of javascript frameworks are open source and free, and primarily for building Single Page Applications.
Looking at the some of the dominant players and frameworks – Google has AngularJS, Facebook has ReactJS, and then there is Vue (which takes the best of Angular, React), Ember.js, Meteor.js, Knockout.js, Polymer to name a few.
So how do you determine, the right framework for your organization. Here are some factors we considered,
Whew, I just passed the PMP exam on my first try. I am glad I was able to achieve my goal.
I have been a member of PMI® organization for a few years now and Just made the decision to take the PMP exam by end of this year. PMP is most popular industry recognized certification in the area of Project Management. Over the years, I have had to manage various areas of a project right from establishing goals to covering constraints and risks. All of which go to covering the total 4500 hours of unique experience needed to qualify for the exam. Additionally, with 35 hours of training by any R.E.P (Registered Education Provider of PMI®), I can qualify to take the 200 question exam.
It’s been a while since I’ve taken an exam, so I’m trying to do some meticulous planning, beginning with reviewing the PMBok guide and breaking it into manageable chunks.
We began on a journey on a cloud-based integration platform primarily to have greater flexibility and improve deployment speed to market, connect disparate systems across different environments.
Microsoft just announced that .NET Core will be open source, including the runtime as well as the framework libraries. .NET Core is a modular development stack that is the foundation of all future .NET platforms It’s already used by ASP.NET 5 and .NET Native. As a .NET developer one was able to build & run code on more than just Windows for a while now, including Linux, MacOS, iOs and Android, however the code base was different on different platforms. The best way to build a cross-platform stack is to build a single stack, in a collaborative manner, and the best way to do exactly that is by open sourcing it.