As expected, the Microsoft Connect 2017 Keynote was excellent again this year with many new service and feature announcements from a diverse set of talented presenters. The keynotes and most sessions are available for on-demand viewing, which I highly recommend. But, if you don’t have the time, this blog post is your quick cheat sheet of the most notable announcements from the keynote.

Notice I’ve also provided the minute marks where these features/announcements were discussed in the keynote if you want to hear it from the horses mouth.

Microsoft introduced a new feature called Visual Studio Live Share which will allows developers to easily share live coding sessions with other developers across both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. The feature supports remote solution traversal, shared cursors and shared debugging. The only bad part its still in a private preview and not open to the general public yet. You can signup to join the preview but its unclear who/when will be accepted. This

.NET Embedding (0:33)

.NET Embedding enables you to write new C#/.NET code and leverage it in existing mobile iOS and Android mobile applications. The embedding tool creates libraries from .NET code that can be referenced by other platform

Visual Studio App Center (0:38)

The Visual Studio App Center allows you to continuously build, test and manage both iOS and Android mobile apps. Microsoft has made several acquisitions over the years to provide the individual components of this service and they are finally consolidating them all under a single platform.

Visual Studio Connected Environment for AKS (0:49)

Scott Hanselman demoed new tooling support inside of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to speed up the feedback loop for developers to gain confidence in their code before checking it in through tight integrations with Azure Container Service (AKS). AKS is Microsoft managed Kubernetes service which is supported in both Azure and Azure Stack.

VS/Code both support running/debugging containers fluidly directly in AKS. This feels like a localhost debugging session but its all in the cloud. This means developers don’t have to worry with creating a local Kubernetes instance. They have a managed Kubernetes service in the cloud at their disposal.

DevOps with VSTS

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is used by Microsoft internally for their largest code bases, so you know it can scale. VSTS itself is even built using VSTS. Now they are announcing even more great features, including:

A new Gates (1:10) feature automates safety into your pipelines by monitoring application health after a deployment to ensure the deployment was completed successfully.

Azure DevOps Projects (1:13) makes creating .NET, Java, Node, Python and PHP application in Azure along with build/release pipelines automatically in minutes, all for free.

SQL Operations Studio (1:21)

SQL Operations Studio is a cross platform SQL management tool built on top of Visual Studio Code. My colleague, Samir Behara, wrote a great introductory post of this new offering. My favorite feature so far is the Explain feature which provides query analytics details:

Azure Database Migration Service (1:26)

The Azure Database Migration Service is a tool for migrating databases into Azure with support for Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and SQL Server. It can even handle multi-terabyte databases.

MariaDB on Azure (1:30)

Microsoft announced they are joining the MariaDB Foundation as a platinum member and adding full database support for MariaDB in Azure. MariaDB is fork of the MySQL relational database intended to always remain free under the GNU GPL.

Azure Databricks (1:36)

Azure Databricks is a Apache Spark analytics platform in Azure which was built in coordination with the Databricks team. Databricks makes Spark easier to use and more collaborative for data scientists. This includes debug support for easier troubleshooting.

Microsoft loves Developers!

Scott Guthrie started the keynote with their goal of building great tools and services to support:

In closing, Scott reiterated how much Microsoft loves Developers and will continue to support them going forward in the best ways possible!

I hope you found this post valuable. If so or you think I missed a key announcement please leave a comment below.