Microsoft Build 2021 recap by BlueSoft Azure .NET App Development Team

Microsoft Build is the most important conference for developers in the Microsoft ecosystem. This year again the conference was held fully online. The BlueSoft team is always keen to be on the cutting edge of new technologies and new features in products that we use to develop our clients/partners’ solutions – Azure or .NET. 

We have prepared a list of the most interesting new announcements which we believe will help us bring better applications and services to the market. 

Azure application services – developers love using Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Azure because they easy, intuitive and fun to work with. The most popular are Azure App Services which allow you to host your web applications, APIs, Azure Functions which give you serverless capabilities for your code, or Azure Logic Apps which streamline workflow creation. 

With this announcement, you will now be able to run those services wherever you want to utilize a Kubernetes cluster connected through Azure Arc. So, no matter if you want to use Azure natively, other cloud vendors, or even run the same services on-premises you will be able to do it and have a unified deployment and execution environments. [Learn more] 

App Service Managed Certificates hits GA – as App Service has already been discussed let’s continue with this path and mention a great improvement which wen Generally Available during a build. With this feature, you can cover your apex and sub-domains with no additional cost and forget about ever needing to worry about certificates expire, renewing them, etc. This is a great feature if you want to limit your “ops” work and just focus on the application development. [Learn more]  

Azure Cosmos DB new features – Azure Cosmos DB is a NO-SQL database that is widely used while developing modern cloud applications with .NET and other languages. It also received a set of new features where two are the most interesting for us: 

• Azure Cosmos DB Serverless – this feature allows you to run your database in a serverless fashion meaning that you only pay for the actual work that the database has done. In conjunction with Azure Functions and their serverless, approach you can create a super cost-efficient application or service which will be able to scale up and down based on your usage needs. [Learn more] 
• Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache (preview) – having a cache in front of your data store allows you to optimize your performance and your costs. With this feature, you can now have an integrated cache in your Azure Cosmos DB which is in memory so if you for example have a query that is often executed and resources intensive or your workload is read-heavy in general turning on such cache will greatly improve your performance and lower your database cost. [Learn more] 

Visual Studio and .NET – this all wouldn’t be possible with great tooling and frameworks which allow developers to create amazing applications. Visual Studio and .NET also got their fair share announcements during Build 2021 

• Visual Studio 2019 16.10 hits GA – with this release, Microsoft focused on improving what is very important in today’s modern application development which is better Git support. Also, they have focused on new improvements in performance troubleshooting of your application which is always a great addition. [Learn more] 
• .NET 6 Preview 4 – Microsoft is well on its journey to having one platform for building applications. They started with .NET 5 which out today in GA. But .NET 6 just received a new preview out and we can’t wait to play with all the great new improvements and features. GA for .NET 6 is planned for November during Microsoft’s .NET Conf 2021. .NET 6 is very important in our view because it will be a LTS (Long Time Support) version of .NET which will love to use in our projects. [Learn more] 
• Visual Studio 2022 – Microsoft has also announced what’s coming up for Visual Studio in the future and the new version which will be the 2022 version. One of the most interesting and longtime requested features of new Visual Studio is that it is going to be the first 64bit version of Visual Studio which means that we can expect a much better performance especially with large projects and solutions and finally fully utilize the CPU architecture that we all have in our computers. [Learn more] 

Thank you for spending the time with us going through the selective Build 2021 announcements for Azure and .NET development. 

If you would like to talk to about your .NET and/or Azure Application Development needs feel free to reach to: 

• Marcin Styliński – Head of Azure Cloud Solutions – marcin.stylinski@bluesoft.com 
• Tomasz Wiśniewski – Lead Azure App Development Architect – tomasz.wisniewski@bluesoft.com