Digest for November 2022

News

Ian Griffiths and Ed Freeman were out at VS Live! in Orlando in November. Ian was presenting a series of talks covering "High Performance .NET JSON Serialization with Code Generation", "Cosmos DB: Performance and Consistency at Global Scale", "Reaqtor - High Volume Event Processing with Rx's Big Brother" and took part in a Panel Discussion: "Navigating the Great Resignation". Together Ian and Ed ran a full day workshop "Modern Data DevOps in the Azure Cloud" with a focus on Azure Synapse Analytics.

This was Ed's first time presenting at a conference, and by all accounts he did an amazing job. Well done Ed!

Talks

We published two new talks in November, both covering different aspects of a Power BI report we've been working on internally for several months which uses open data published by the World Bank to explore global trends in wealth & health. This report has been published to the Power BI community data stories gallery.

Data Storytelling with Power BI: The World Bank World Health and Wealth Report

This talk walks through the report. It is an example of how technology, data and visual design can be combined to engage people and turn data into actionable insights.

The report captures many of the techniques we use when we develop analytics for our clients. We find that design concepts such as branding, accessibility and persona driven user journeys are key to enabling the report to have the impact intended.

Accessible Data Storytelling with Power BI: Design Concepts and Accessible Colours

The talk walks through the report from a visual design perspective. Red–green color blindness affects up to 1 in 12 males (8%) and 1 in 200 females (0.5%). It reinforces how important concepts such as branding, accessibility, visual design, colour palette choice. interactivity and page layout are to allowing users to engage successfully with a report.

Blog Posts

This month much of our focus went into producing the content for the Modern Data DevOp talk for VS Live in Orlando, but we did still manage to produce a number of insightful posts:

Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI & Power Platform

Big Data LDN: highlights and how to survive your first data conference

Eli Gascon reflects on her first in-person conference, and offers several useful tips.

DevOps, Cloud Native & Azure

Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Migration of the existing test environment

Jonathan George continues his series documenting moving an internal application from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps. This post covers moving resources to a region where Azure Container Apps is supported.

Adventures in Dapr: Episode 4 - Containerising with Visual Studio

In this post James Dawson looks at how you can use Visual Studio Docker Compose tooling to containerise the Dapr application.

In Defence of Squash Commits

Ian Griffiths argues the case for using Squash Commits with Git: Encapsulation is a powerful tool. Squash commits provide a way to encapsulate Git commit history.

.NET

An Overview of the Corvus.Extensions Library

Corvus.Extensions is an open-source repository that provides a collection of useful helper extension methods to .NET types. This post provides a spotlight on the repository.

Culture

Retrospecting on my first year at endjin

Liam reflects on the past 12 months of his software engineering apprenticeship, and how these learnings will influence his plans for his second year.

Newsletters

We publish two free weekly email newsletters:?Azure Weekly?on a Sunday, and?Power BI Weekly?on a Tuesday. Here's your chance to catch up with all the updates and announcements!

Azure Weekly

Issue 394: 6th November 2022

• Data mesh: A perspective on using Azure Synapse Analytics to build data products
• Big Data LDN highlights and how to survive your first data conference
• Prepare for holiday shopping season with Azure Load Testing
• Chaos Engineering for Cloud native Apps
• Build a globally resilient architecture with Azure Load Balancer
• General Availability of Multivariate Anomaly Detection
• Detecting Anomalies in IoT Telemetry with Azure Synapse Analytics
• Confidential Computing with Serverless Functions
• Azure App Service announces more ways to save on compute costs
• .NET Interactive Notebooks is now Polyglot Notebooks!

Issue 395: 13th November 2022

• .NET 7.0 GA & Day Zero Azure PaaS support
• Automated Key Rotation Generally Available on Azure?#KeyVault?Managed HSM
• Automatically rotate the password of a service principal
• Generally available: Increasing Azure?#SynapseAnalytics?Spark performance up to 77%
• Synapse Spark Delta Time Travel.
• Azure Monitor Workspace, Managed Prometheus and Prometheus via?#Bicep
• Find an item in an array of objects in Azure bicep.
• Adventures in?#Dapr: Episode 4 - Containerising with?#VisualStudio?
• Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello?#AzureContainerApps: Migration of the existing test environment with Polyglot Notebooks
• #CosmosDB: Performance and Consistency at Global Scale &?Modern Data DevOps in the Azure Cloud workshop at?#VSLive! Orlando

Issue 396: 20th November 2022

• SQL Server 2022 is now GA
• Azure Synapse Link for SQL is GA
• Azure SQL trigger for Azure Functions in Public Preview
• Use GitHub Codespaces for Azure PowerShell Function apps
• Introducing more ways to deploy Azure Container Apps
• Dev Tunnels in Visual Studio for?ASP.NET?Core projects in Public Preview
• Getting started with Open Telemetry and Azure Data Explorer
• Utilizing Zero Trust architecture principles for External Identities
• Azure AD Claims with Static Web Apps and Azure Functions
• Build your own Azure retirements email alerts service using Java, Azure Functions and Communication Services

Issue 397: 27th November 2022

• Cross Subscription Restore for Azure Virtual Machines
• Securing?#PaaS?services with virtual networks and restricting public access
• #AKS?Workload Identity Revisited
• Introducing a better way to integrate?#AzureAD?with API Management
• Use dev tunnels in?#VisualStudio?to debug your web APIs
• publishing docker images to?#GitHub?Container Registry ghcr
• In Defence of Squash Commits
• Accessible?#DataStorytelling: World Bank Heath and Wealth Report

Power BI Weekly

Issue 184: 29th November 2022

• Developing Large Power BI Datasets
• Partitioning and Detail Tables
• 100% Axis Control in Power BI
• Planning Power BI Projects.
• Accessible Data Storytelling: World Bank Heath and Wealth Report
• A walkthrough of the World Health and Wealth Data Story
• Custom Report Design: An Array of Design Concepts and Accessible Colours for Power BI

Issue 183: 22nd November 2022

• Support for paginated reports in Power BI Pro
• New cache refresh settings available in Power BI Premium
• New Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium automated migration tool.
• Horizontal fusion feature in DAX
• Measure Selection in Power BI
• Why You Should Defragment Your Fact Tables If You're Using Incremental Refresh In Power BI Premium

Issue 182: 8th November 2022

• Save a copy of a report & Collapse navigation pane in Organizational App
• Unleash your Dynamics 365 Data with Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI
• Version 1.0 of Bravo for Power BI tool
• Use Canva to Create an Interactive Power BI Virtual Assistant
• Big Data LDN: highlights and how to survive your first data conference

Issue 181: 1st November 2022

• Improvements to chart sharing and copy as image
• Power BI Ideas site improvement updates
• October release of the On-premises data gateway
• Talk: Do Those Numbers Look Right?
• Look at automatic partition maintenance by Power BI Service for datasets with Incremental Refresh
• New DAX functions: TOCSV and TOJSON