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AI takes center stage at Microsoft Build as we welcome developers, engineers and IT pros to our annual developer conference, May 23-25. Explore the latest code and application development innovations and gain insights from peers and experts from around the world. Whether joining online for free or in person, here’s your guide to all things coming from Surface. We’ll dive deep into how Surface devices enable AI for smarter collaboration and explore how neural processing units (NPUs) bring advanced technology to our Surface Pro 9 with 5G. There’s no better time to check out all the latest Surface devices. Click the sessions below to add them to your sc…

Written by Yuval Perry (Azure Firewall Product Manager) Office 365 customers are looking for the best cloud connectivity experience at scale to achieve end-to-end connectivity through the most optimized route possible. Traffic from the organization’s network to the required Office 365 endpoints should be managed and secured, which could be a time-consuming ongoing task. With the recent announcement of Azure Firewall integration with Office 365, you can now easily manage this traffic and leverage the firewall’s security features to secure it. Office 365 endpoints requirements are built of hundreds of FQDNs and IP addresses, split across multiple Office 365 se…

The latest version of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) [Version 17.6 GA] was released in May 2023. In this episode of Data Exposed with Anna Hoffman and Subhojit Basak, they’ll highlight the latest features that are being added to SSDT and give a sneak peek on the features coming next. Resources: SSDT Documentation Visual Studio Documentation and Release Notes View/share our latest episodes on Microsoft Learn and ! Continue reading...

Code Optimizations: A New AI-Based Service for .NET Performance Optimization We are thrilled to announce that Code Optimizations (previously known as Optimization Insights) is now available in public preview! This new AI-based service can identify performance issues and offer recommendations specifically tailored for .NET applications and cloud services. What is Code Optimizations? Code Optimizations is a service within Application Insights that continuously analyzes profiler traces from your application or cloud service and provides insights and recommendations on how to improve its performance. Code Optimizations can help you identify and solve a wid…

We recently announced the confidential containers with Azure Container Instances (ACI) as a serverless platform for running your container workloads in an Azure confidential computing trusted execution environment (TEE). Because this innovation happens at the platform layer it’s as simple as ‘lifting & shifting’ an existing container from on-premises, or another container platform and deploying it into Azure Container Instances (ACI) using a Confidential Computing SKU. In this blog we’ll look at a simple example of deploying a community provided Minecraft server container from Geoff Bourne (“itzg” on GitHub) onto confidential containers on ACI using simp…

Join us for Microsoft Build, May 23-25, 2023— where developers, engineers, IT professionals, and app creators will gather to hear Microsoft leaders share exciting announcements and reveal the latest tech that will launch the next wave of innovation. You are invited to participate in Q&A sessions with Microsoft technology leaders and experts, learn about new trends and insights, reconnect with colleagues, and interact with our vibrant community. You won’t want to miss updates about Microsoft products and technologies, including what’s in store for Microsoft Learn and the enhancements we are bringing that will help you build skills that open doors to new opportun…

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 95 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below: Get it now in our marketplace [attachment=40415:name] Browser-Based Kali Linux: Access Kali Linux in a graphical user interface (GUI) via your browser from anywhere with this virtual machine from TechLatest. It comes with over 2,500 pre-installed security tools that can be used for ethical hacking and doesn’t require a virtual network controller (VNC). [attachment=40416:name] EuroLinux 8.7: EuroLinux is a professional operating system developed from the Red Hat Enterpr…

This blog content is compiled by @Ahetejaz from Azure DevOps CSS support team. He helped a customer in implementing Code Coverage report as part of Pipeline execution summary page in Azure DevOps Service. Below screenshot shows the code coverage report published in pipeline summary page: Steps to generate code coverage: - Create .NET Core application using Visual Studio. - From NuGet package download ‘coverlet.msbuild’. Coverage tool can create coverage file required by either Jacoco or Cobertura. Jacoco or Cobertura can populate the data to code coverage tab in Azure Pipeline run (refer above screenshot). ‘coverlet.msbuild’…

The familiar concept of Data Virtualization in SQL Managed Instance offers capability to read remote Parquet or CSV files through OPENROWSET or External Tables, which you could join with local data. With Create External Table As Select (CETAS) functionality for Azure SQL Managed Instance, Generally available as of 18th May 2023, you can now export local data from your Managed Instance as Parquet or CSV files to Azure Storage accounts and query this data as an External Table. There are two main scenarios facilitated by this functionality: Offloading the data from local storage of SQL Managed Instance to cheaper external storage, to reduce costs, when offloaded…

This blog content is compiled by @Ahetejaz from Azure DevOps CSS support team. Recently, he helped a customer in making a TestCase Readonly in Inherited Process. Requirement: Azure DevOps Services (inherited Process Template): Test cases to be made read only. Other work item types should be editable. Scenario: Generally, test cases move from "Design", "Ready" and "Closed" state. In Design state, tester will construct the test case and will move it to Ready state once the construction is completed. At this point, team may want to freeze the test case from further editing and admin would like to make it read only. 1. Make sure to have access to modify proce…

Looking to learn more about Azure DevOps and how to build a CI/CD pipeline with it? I am organizing a virtual workshop building and deploying a sentiment analysis web app using Azure DevOps. About the session In this session, I will explore how to use Azure DevOps Pipeline to deploy a sentiment analysis project. I will cover how to use Azure DevOps pipeline to create a CI/CD pipeline for the creation of Azure infrastructures using bicep, tag and push a docker image to Azure Container Registry and deploy Sentiment analysis app to Azure web apps for containers. By the end of the session, you will have hands-on experience with using the Azure DevOps Pipeline…

In October 2021 we announced the support of Azure Site Recovery to protect virtual machines (VM) workloads on Azure Stack HCI. Based on customer feedback, we have improved the ASR agent deployment experience and now we are excited to announce the Public Preview of the new ASR agent deployment experience as an Arc extension. What is Azure Site Recovery (ASR)? ASR is an Azure service that helps ensure business continuity by keeping business apps and workloads running during outages. ASR replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines from a primary site to a secondary location. When an outage occurs at your primary site, you fail over to a secondary…

Full credit to: Samuel Partee, Principal Applied AI Engineer, Redis Kyle Teegarden, Senior Product Manager, Azure Cache for Redis Introduction Imagine that you are a vehicle maintenance technician and a classic convertible just rolled into your shop. You’re about to tighten a few bolts in the engine when you realize you have no idea what the torque specification is. In the past, you had to spend hours digging up the right manual and finding the right page. But today, you have access to a semantic answer engine that is loaded with maintenance manuals for every car produced in the last fifty years. A simple query rapidly pulls up the correct page in th…

Migrating users from one database platform to another can be a challenging task. In this article, we will discuss the process of migrating users from AWS RDS MySQL or AWS RDS Aurora MySQL to Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server. We will cover the steps involved in exporting user data from AWS RDS MySQL by Percona Toolkit, which is a is a collection of advanced open-source command-line tools supporting MySQL and other open-source databases. Then we could import the users and privileges output statements into Azure Database for MySQL, as well as any considerations and best practices to keep in mind during the migration process. By the end of this article, you will hav…

There are many cases where you need to operationalize inference routines that can be decomposed into multiple independent steps. What is more, many times some of these steps need to be exactly the same thing that was done during training. Take the following example into account. It displays a simple yet typical scenario for training machine learning models. It contains a preprocessing step that performs data transformations. However, as part of the preprocessing some parameters are learnt, like the normalization coefficients. As a consequence of this design, the model the next step trains can’t work on raw data, but only on preprocessed data. If you are thin…

On 31 May 2023, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will reach the end of standard support. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) was released on 23 April 2018, introducing improved UEFI Secure Boot and broader Kernel Livepatch coverage for enhanced security on Azure. You can continue to use your existing virtual machines, however, security, feature, and maintenance updates will no longer be provided by Canonical and may leave your systems vulnerable. Recommended action: It’s important to act before 31 May 2023 to ensure you’re on a supported operating system. Microsoft recommends either migrating to the next Ubuntu LTS release or upgrading to Ubuntu Pro to gain access to extended…

Listening holistically to your employees is like seeing the big picture in high definition - it reveals the hidden nuances, the interconnectedness, and the underlying themes that empower organizations to create truly meaningful employee experiences. On May 11, 2023, Viva Glint’s @Avneeta_Solanki led the first part of our Learn about Holistic Listening customer event, partnering with Raphael Andrade Nunes Freire and @CaribayGarcia to share their expertise on how to understand the employee experience from a truly holistic perspective. The speakers shared guiding principles for combining survey and system data, offered practical suggestions for getting organizations …

Following on from my previous blog post covering SSL Termination and NGINX, in this post we will expand our deployment to also now include user authentication of a new web app. As with every article in this series this has been driven by customer use cases. In this instance the customer desired having a development web application on a public domain but ring fenced to only allow access to authenticated users from Azure AD. Before we dive deeper into the use case and implementation its important to understand the various components if unfamiliar. I will speak about benefits of certain technologies as I go through but it is worth taking a quick look at these l…

Recently I have noticed an increase in questions from customers pertaining to different security practices for AKS deployments. I have decided to create a series of blogs covering some of the common ways to increase cluster security. I have plans for blog posts regarding Azure AD user authentication on micro services, utilizing Open Service Mesh and Network Policies to implement internal cluster networking security and the different options regarding metrics, alerting and telemetry for AKS clusters. Today however I will start by discussing using Azure Front Door, Private Link Service and NGINX Ingress Controller to create a secure ingress to private back end servic…

Microsoft Build is just around the corner and we can’t wait to share the latest advancements from Azure Communication Services with the developer community next week. We are excited to reconnect with in-person attendees in Seattle and engage online with attendees from around the world. Be sure to Register for Microsoft Build 2023 if you haven’t done so already. Below is the lineup of sessions that will showcase the upcoming releases from Azure Communication Services, along with samples, demos, and how-to manuals for building effective and efficient communication experiences. If you are a developer in the communication space, make sure to add these to you…

A banner image with the text: "Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Help secure your email and Microsoft Teams with advanced protection against phishing, business email compromise, ransomware, and other threats." The Microsoft 365 commercial support team resolves customer support cases and provides support to help you be successful and realize the full potential and value of your purchase. Our support services extend across the entire lifecycle and include pre-sales, onboarding and deployment, usage and management, accounts and billing, and break-fix support. We also spend a considerable amount of time working to improve the supportability of Microsoft 365 services to re…

Microsoft has been on a journey to harness the power of artificial intelligence to help security teams scale more effectively. Microsoft 365 Defender correlates millions of signals across endpoints, identities, emails, collaboration tools, and SaaS apps to identify active attacks and compromised assets in an organization’s environment. Last year, we introduced automatic attack disruption, which uses these correlated insights and powerful AI models to stop some of the most sophisticated attack techniques while in progress to limit lateral movement and damage. Today, we are excited to announce the expansion of automatic attack disruption to include adversary-in-the…

Today we’re going to share with you some new guidance for configuring Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to meet the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Level 1 and Level 2 requirements. Identity continues to be the most common way bad actors get through cyber defenses. Therefore, identity controls are one of the most fundamental aspects of CMMC and this post is going to focus on Azure AD as a way of meeting CMMC's identity requirements. Azure AD is Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service that helps your employees sign in and access resources in your organization. Azure AD also provides a range of security features tha…

Azure Stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) is a virtualisation host that runs on-premise on validated partner hardware. AKS Hybrid is an on-premise implementation of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) orchestrator which automates running containerised applications at scale and runs on the Stack HCI platform. Together they provide a solution for hosting highly available workloads on-premise. Azure Arc is a cloud based control plane which can be used for managing on-premise AKS Hybrid instances. Introduction Sometimes high availability is the top business priority. There are situations where even the high availability provided in the cloud by redundant system…

Azure Storage to disable anonymous access and cross-tenant replication on new storage accounts by default Beginning August 2023, Azure storage will begin phased roll out of changes that disables anonymous access and cross tenant replication for all new storage accounts by default, to align with best practices for security and reduce the risk of data exfiltration. Existing storage accounts will not be impacted by this change. This change will be made to all Azure clouds. Azure storage gives the ability to configure anonymous access to storage accounts or containers. Anonymous access to containers is already disabled by default to ensure customer data is no…