News For Dev-ops

Developers cherish nothing more than the environments they use every day to build apps. These environments have to be configured just right, with the tools they need for day-to-day tasks, and even the details like the size of the point mouse. One thing is certain, when you don’t have enough flexibility and control over their environment, it impacts how effective they can be. This challenge becomes more apparent when you have to build applications that run on Linux systems because managing multiple environments across different operating systems can quickly become a bottleneck. Sometimes you require access to a fully-fledged version of Linux to do their work. They might need tools and frameworks optimized to run on Linux, or they may need to build an app that will actually run on a Linux system (a .NET 8 Web Api running In Azure Container Apps for instance). Fortunately, when you are building applications on Windows have access to fully-fledged version of Linux via Windows Subsystem for...

AWS re:Post launches re:Post Agent, a generative AI-powered assistant that's designed to enhance customer interactions by offering intelligent and near real-time responses on re:Post. re:Post Agent provides the first response to questions in the re:Post community. Cloud developers can now get general technical guidance faster to successfully build and operate their cloud workloads. With re:Post Agent, you have a generative AI companion augmented by the community that expands the available AWS knowledge. Community experts can earn points to build their reputation status by reviewing answers from re:Post Agent. Visit AWS re:Post to collaborate with re:Post Agent and experience the power of generative AI-driven technical guidance. Post Updated on September 30, 2024 at 10:45PM

Join us in-person at Unreal Fest Seattle 2024 with an in-depth look at how Visual Studio and GitHub Copilot can help modernize your Unreal Engine game development. Session Title: Modernizing Game Development with Visual Studio and AI Session Info: October 3rd, 2024, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM Pacific Time | Room 445 Abstract: Join Microsoft to learn how Visual Studio can speed up your iteration cycle from start to finish. Discover productivity tools for optimizing class structure memory layout; identify and rectify build issues with Build Insights integration; and explore performance enhancements. We'll also cover advanced Unreal Engine integrations such as Blueprint references and directly editing your uproject. Lastly, get an in-depth look at the latest advancements of GitHub Copilot, regardless of your source control system. In this session, you will discover how Visual Studio can enhance your productivity and efficiency throughout your development process. We look forward to seeing yo...

In my earlier discussion of pulling a single item from a C++ parameter pack by its index , I noted that with the Pack Indexing proposal, you would be able to write this to pull an item from a parameter pack while preserving its reference category. template<int index, typename...Args> void example(Args&&... args) { auto&& arg = (Args...[index]&&)args...[index]; using Arg = Args...[index]&&; } Why did I need to apply the (Args...[index]&&) cast ? Why can't I just write this: auto&& arg = args...[index]; or possibly decltype(auto) arg = args...[index]; Well, when you write the name of a variable, the result is an lvalue reference, even if the variable is an rvalue reference . Watch: struct S { S(S&); // construct from lvalue S(S&&); // construct from rvalue }; void whathappens(S&& s) { S t = s; // which will it use? } Try it out in your favorite compiler. This code construc...

Ever wished to assess your code's performance without repeatedly choosing the target process or executable for each instrumentation profiling session? If so, you're among many developers who find this task cumbersome and prone to errors, especially when profiling the same target repeatedly. We understand your frustration and have a solution: Visual Studio 2022 introduces a new feature that addresses this issue. The instrumentation tool now remembers your target selection across runs, providing a seamless experience and enhancing the continuity of your profiling sessions. With this improvement, you can maintain your specified target across multiple instrumentation runs, eliminating the need for repetitive selection tasks. This means you can focus more on analyzing the performance data and optimizing your code, rather than wasting time and effort on setting up the profiling session. How does it work? To use this feature, you need to have Visual Studio installed and the Performa...

AWS CodePipeline V2 type pipelines introduces pipeline variable check as a new rule that customers can use in their stage level condition to gate a pipeline execution. You can use this rule with any condition that is evaluated before entering the stage, before exiting a stage - when all actions in the stage have completed successfully, or when any action in the stage has failed. With the variable check rule, you can evaluate a pipeline parameter or an output variable from a prior action in the pipeline against a threshold, to determine if the condition will succeed or fail. For example, you can check if an output variable from a CodeBuild action is a certain value to determine if the pipeline execution should enter a stage. To learn more about using the variable check rule in stage level conditions in your pipeline, visit our documentation . For more information about AWS CodePipeline, visit our product page . The stage level conditions feature is available in all regions where AWS ...

A customer reported that they were getting crashes while destructing a std::map . Here's the point of the crash: eax=245bd25c ebx=00004d33 ecx=31feece4 edx=00c40000 esi=00000000 edi=31feece4 eip=563397db esp=245bd250 ebp=245bd268 iopl=0 nv up ei ng nz na pe nc cs=0023 ss=002b ds=002b es=002b fs=0053 gs=002b efl=00010286 contoso!std::_Tree<⟦...⟧>::~_Tree+0x2b: 563397db cmp byte ptr [esi+0Dh],0 ds:002b:0000000d=?? 0:054> k9 ChildEBP RetAddr (Inline) -------- contoso!std::_Tree_val<⟦...⟧>::_Erase_tree [xtree @ 1073] (Inline) -------- contoso!std::_Tree_val<⟦...⟧>::_Erase_head+0x5 [xtree @ 1073] 245bd268 56338313 contoso!std::_Tree<⟦...⟧>::~_Tree+0x2b [xtree @ 1073] 245bd290 56362695 contoso!Contoso::IdCollection::~IdCollection+0x163 245bd2b4 564c8510 contoso!Contoso::LogEntry::~LogEntry+0xd5 245bd2e0 5691a999 contoso!Contoso::LogEntries::Cleanup+0x90 (Inline) -------- con...

We are thrilled to announce that Microsoft Semantic Kernel Python Kernel has reached an incredible milestone of 1,000,000 downloads ! This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support and enthusiasm of our community. We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to every developer, contributor, and user who has embraced the Python Kernel, providing valuable feedback and contributing through PRs on our GitHub repo .   Since the announcement of our 1.0 version in May 2024, we have witnessed remarkable growth in the usage of Semantic Kernel. Your dedication to innovation and collaboration has propelled us forward, driving usage and enhancing our capabilities in exciting ways. Together, we are bridging the chasm between AI technologies and application development, fostering seamless integrations across our .NET and Java counterparts to create scalable AI applications that deliver real ROI.   We are also excited to highlight a few new features for the Python K...

September was a productive month for Azure Boards, and we’re excited to share some of the new features coming your way. Area and Iteration Level Fields Area and iteration level fields have been crucial for querying or displaying results based on their specific levels: (Root) Level 1 / Level 2 / Level 3 / etc. Previously limited to a few organizations, these fields are now available to all Azure DevOps organizations using New Boards Hub . You can use them in queries and display them as backlog columns, but they are not supported in style rules, swim lane rules, card fields, and delivery plan fields. Permanently delete attachments In some cases, simply removing an attachment from a work item may not fully resolve security risks, especially if the file is flagged as malicious. Shared links to the attachment could still be accessible across other work items, comments, or external channels. To address this, we added a feature that allows users with "Permanently delete work items...

PromptFlow Serve: Benchmark Result Analysis My team have been developing a relatively complex PromptFlow application for the last few months and as a part of getting it ready for production scale, did performance testing and optimisations. This blog post summarises our finding from doing performance testing of various runner options of promptflow-serve and our recommendations. Test Scenario Before testing the entire application, we created a sample flow that mimicked part of our real flow. It contained a fan-out and fan-in flow to replicate LLM nodes like guardrails running in parallelly and a final node that does an API call to an external dependency. This API call was made to a mock HTTP API . A synthetic delay was added to each of the parallel nodes to replicate LLM calls. The harness contained these components: A mock HTTP API that acts as a service used by your PromptFlow flow. The following PromptFlow flows that are hosted using pf-serve . Synchronous flow hosted using WSG...

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8g instances and Amazon EC2 M8g instances. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 30% better performance over Graviton3-based instances. C8g instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads, such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning inference, and ad serving. M8g instances are built for general-purpose workloads, such as application servers, microservices, gaming servers, midsize data stores, and caching fleets. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System . AWS Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 instances deliver the best performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2. These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPU (up to 48xlarge) and memory than Graviton3-based instances. They are available i...

We are excited to announce a significant enhancement to Azure Cosmos DB, bringing substantial cost savings and performance improvements to our users. The new binary encoding feature is now available for new containers and will soon be available for existing ones. What is Binary Encoding? Binary encoding converts JSON or other text-based data formats into a compact binary representation. Instead of storing data as human-readable text, it stores it as a sequence of bytes, which takes up less space and can be processed more quickly by computers. Key Benefits Storage Savings: With binary encoding, you can expect an average 20% reduction in documents size, but up to 70% for large documents with a substantial number of nested objects and arrays. This means you can store more data without increasing your storage. Enhanced Performance for Large Queries: The new binary encoding feature is especially beneficial for queries with aggregations or those that return large result sets, where ...

As we near the end of September, we bring you the latest edition of our monthly developer update, summarizing the latest news and developments in the ever-evolving world of Microsoft Entra. This month we cover significant roll outs designed to enhance both security and user experience. From the general availability of Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID, which offers advanced protection against identity fraud, to new public previews like passkey authentication for Android apps. You’ll find key information about these developments in this blog post as well as links to further guidance, helping you integrate these updates into your applications. Let’s dive in! What went Generally Available since August 2024? Face Check with Microsoft Entra Verified ID:  This new feature adds a critical layer of trust by matching a user’s real-time selfie and the photo on their Verified ID, which is usually from a trusted source, such as a passport or driver’s license. Sensitive identity dat...

Do you feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of breakpoints in your Visual Studio project? Wish you could categorize and toggle them on and off with ease? The new breakpoint group feature in Visual Studio 2022 is here to transform your debugging experience. Breakpoint groups allow you to create custom collections of breakpoints and apply various actions to them. For example, you can enable or disable all breakpoints in a group or set conditions and actions for them or even make the whole group dependent on other breakpoints. But that's not all. You can also mark the selected breakpoint group as the default , ensuring all newly added breakpoints are automatically included in that group. This enhancement simplifies the management and organization of breakpoints, providing seamless debugging when investigating multiple issues. Recap: Breakpoint groups To create a breakpoint group, right-click on any breakpoint in the Breakpoints window and select Add to Group > New Group . You can...