MPN Partner of the Year Awards are presented each year at the Microsoft Inspire Conference based on a self-nominating process by partners. Winners are celebrated at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, Nevada from July 15-19, 2018.
Recognition, prestige, and opportunity for all Microsoft partners
Partners, this is your opportunity to vie for awards that can showcase your solutions built on Microsoft technologies to benefit our mutual customers.
How Partner of the Year Awards benefit partners
Receiving a Partner of the Year Award positions your company for new business opportunities, generates positive press coverage, and can lead to even greater market recognition.
Winners are highlighted and recognized by their peers during Microsoft Inspire 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada and are also invited to exclusive celebrations during the conference.
The Partner of the Year Awards nomination tool is open now until April 17, 2018, at 11:59 P.M. Pacific time. Get started.
Review the 2018 Partner of the Year Award guidelines
Familiarize yourself with the complete Microsoft 2018 Partner of the Year Award guidelines (PDF). Preparing all of your answers and supporting documents now definitely makes it easier to upload your final entry.
Download the Guidance from the Judges (PDF) document for tips and tricks about how to create a winning awards nomination.
Review these helpful tips on how to create an award-winning entry
Here are some terrific words of wisdom on creating an award-winning entry (PDF) that judges want to read and that tells your organization’s story.
2018 Partner of the Year Awards official rules
The Partner of the Year Awards program is a skill-based contest with the objective to recognize the best solution(s). We encourage you to closely read through the 2018 official rules (PDF) for the program prior to submitting your entry.
Check out the newest release for the Event Processor Host library!
Want to update your clients to the new version, the NuGet package can be found at https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Azure.EventHubs.Processor/2.0.1
Event Processor Host is an intelligent agent that simplifies receiving events from Event Hubs by managing persistent checkpoints and parallel receives.
New to Event Hubs and want to learn to stream and process events or know more about the service. These articles provide a great reference,
What is new for the release? https://github.com/Azure/azure-event-hubs-dotnet/releases/tag/v2.0.1
We added dependency changes to support NewtonSoft.Json version 10.0.3
We also added a bug fix - A lease might have empty offset stored if there are no events on the partitions. This could result in host initialization failures. This has been fixed.
Try this new library and let us know what you think!
Today, a user can sign in to Lifecycle Services (LCS) using a Microsoft Account (MSA) (such as Live or Hotmail), and without purchasing a Support plan or subscription, create a Prospective presales project to try LCS features or set up demo environments. The Prospective presales project option is available for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Dynamics CRM, and Dynamics NAV products.
Starting April 15, 2018, any new users who sign in to LCS using an MSA account that is not associated with a CustomerSource or PartnerSource support plan or not holding any subscriptions, will be unable to access LCS. Any existing users with previously created Prospective presales projects who also fall into this category, will not be able to sign in to these projects or LCS.
To avoid interruptions, we recommend that you sign in to LCS and download or transfer your project and project data to another user before April 15. After that date, you will not have access to the project or the data. Note that this only impacts users who sign in with a Microsoft account. If you are an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) user, you can continue to view and create Prospective presales projects.
Initial Update: Wednesday, 14 March 2018 04:55 UTC
We are aware of issues within Application Insights and are actively investigating. Some customers may experience Data Access Issue in Azure Portal. The following data types are affected: Availability,Customer Event,Dependency,Exception,Metric,Page Load,Page View,Performance Counter,Request,Trace.
Work Around: None
Next Update: Before 03/14 07:00 UTC
We are working hard to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience. -suneel
Nearly 285 million people around the world suffer from some form of visual impairment. Recent medical data indicates that nearly 70% of these cases could have been prevented with early detection and screening. Today, eyecare is set to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help millions of people to predict and reduce the loss of vision.
Refractive errors, such as near-sightedness (myopia) and farsightedness (hyperopia), are some of the most common visual impairments in the world. Myopia is relatively more prevalent and affects a younger cohort. Children and young adults tend to develop signs of myopia early on. If left untreated, myopia could become pathological. Pathological myopia can alter the shape and globe of the eye, leading to acute vision loss.
Although hyperopia isn’t as common as myopia in young children, severe cases could have an equally detrimental effect. High degrees of hyperopia are associated with sensory and visual motor problems that may result in serious visual impairments.
Is a global visual impairment epidemic on the horizon?
Visual impairments and refractive errors have become a global health issue in recent years. The rate of impairments continues to increase. Studies suggest that 2.5 billion people could suffer from myopia by 2020 and the number is expected to increase to 5 billion by 2050.
“Uncorrected refractive error is the leading cause of visual impairment and one of the major causes of blindness in the world,” says Dr. G.N. Rao, Founder and Chair, L V Prasad Eye Institute.
The magnitude of the problem appears to be on the rise all over the world as per the currently available data. To prevent blindness from turning into a global epidemic, eyecare providers need better tools to monitor cases and detect the ones with a higher risk of turning severe.
AI-driven healthcare network is tackling the challenge
At Microsoft, we are committed to leveraging machine learning and cloud technology to address this rising global concern. MINE, now part of Microsoft AI Network for Healthcare, is a global network of eyecare providers and academic institutions.
“The utility of artificial intelligence is that it can make these associations and integrate data within seconds or minutes, whereas it would take humans years to aggregate all that data and find patterns within it. While research papers have an N of 30 patients, AI-powered technology can help report on an N of a billion patients,” says Dr. Ranya Habash, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and a MINE partner.
Microsoft in partnership with LVPEI, has developed a machine learning approach for prediction and progression of refractive error in children and young adults. The objective is to combine anonymous medical records and therapy data from the above healthcare providers and train cutting-edge machine learning models to predict the progression of refractive errors over a two-year period. With AI and cloud computing, monitoring and predictive analysis can be delivered on a much larger scale.
The Microsoft model is currently integrated and being validated in EMR systems at 174 centers of LVPEI in India. The model was trained on a data set of 335,799 instances from 176,037 patients aged between 0 and 25 years to predict the progression of refractive errors for a period of two years. The specialty of this model is that it predicts the refractive error for a two-year period considering a person’s medical history, eye condition and gender. Accuracy measures showed that the model proved statistically accurate and provided optimal results when used to predict cases of myopia that could become more severe and cause physical changes to the eye’s sphere and cylinder. High myopia can cause blindness for which there exists no effective restorative treatment currently. In this context, the machine learning model that predicts the refractive error will be critical in identifying patients at risk of developing high myopia, when integrated into clinical practice.
“Technological tools allowing predictive analytics and application of artificial intelligence to arrive at these insights for doctors will be of immense help in developing strategies to control the problem. L V Prasad Eye Institute’s partnership with Microsoft will help pave the path for this progress,” Dr. G.N. Rao believes.
When expanded, this program should help eyecare providers, to closely monitor cases of myopia, find the patients who are at high risk of eventual blindness and implement anti-myopia strategies and remedies to prevent loss of vision. This should help bring down the rate of blindness across the world.
The MINE work was presented by Raghu Gullapalli, Executive Director of Emerging Technologies, L V Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) of India and Dr. Ranya Habash, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Bascom Palmer Eye Institute; (USA) – recently at HIMSS 2018 - one of the world’s largest health IT conference in Las Vegas.
The work is expected to contribute to refractive error monitoring, application of various available anti-myopia strategies, assessment of response to interventions and prognostication of risk for various refractive errors, especially high myopia. In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Government of Telangana has agreed to screen children for visual impairments using AI as part of the Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram program under the National Health Mission.
Paving the way for predictive healthcare
Our progress with MINE has encouraged us to create the Microsoft AI Network for Healthcare. Under this new, broader program, a similar AI network is being developed for Cardiology.
AI networks for healthcare are part of our mission to empower everyone, everywhere through the power of technology. These networks are a testament to the power of human collaboration and technology to improve people’s lives. With the help of our partners in academia and medical services, we can create powerful models that can predict the progression of serious ailments. When this model is integrated into the existing medical infrastructure, we hope to improve the well-being of billions of people across the world.
Prashant Gupta is the Director – Microsoft Cloud Division and Lead – AI Network for Healthcare at Microsoft India.
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is new data service in Azure cloud that exposes fully-managed SQL Server Instance that is hosted in Azure cloud and placed in customer VNET. Here you can see some of the key new features that are available in Managed Instance.
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is fully-managed SQL Server instance that is running in Azure cloud. This service started public preview in March 2018. Managed Instance has many instance-level features that are not available in classic Database as a Service model, such as SQL Agent, CLR, etc.
In this short demo you can see what is Managed Instance, and some key features that are enabled:
Microsoft announced today that its researchers have developed an AI machine translation system that can translate with the same accuracy as a human from Chinese to English.
To validate the results, the researchers used an industry standard test set of news stories (newstest2017)to compare human and machine translationresults.
To further ensure accuracy of the evaluation, the team also hired bilingual human evaluators who compared the results against a different set of human-produced translations.
This week marks the first anniversary of #MicrosoftTeams, growing significantly in both new capabilities and customer usage. A game changer in the Education market, based on feedback from educators, new capabilities are continually added on a regular basis to make Microsoft Teams an even more powerful hub for teamwork. Here’s a summary of the main updates that were introduced in February:
Communicate more effectively with new chat functionality
Share chat history – Often, conversations start with one person and then reach a moment where you need to add one or more people. To help you continue the conversation easily, you can share the chat history when you add somebody to a chat and decide how much history you want to share.
Hyperlink custom text in messages
@mentions somebody in a chat – In addition to being able to @mention somebody in a channel conversation, you can now also do so in a 1:1 conversation or a group chat. When you type @ before their name, the person will receive a notification in their activity feed making it easier for you to get someone’s attention.
Mute a chat – In addition to hiding or leaving a chat, you can now also mute a chat. This feature lets you put a temporary hold on notifications for a particular chat. Don't worry—you'll still receive new messages; you just won't be alerted.
Mute a chat to put a temporary hold on notifications
Quick reply to a chat message from notifications – You can now respond to an incoming chat message directly from the toast notification. Simply click on “Reply” when the notification pops up and type your response. The reply will be limited to text-only and 1,000 characters. This functionality is available for the Windows and Mac apps.
Hyperlink custom text in messages
Restore a deleted channel – If you have deleted a channel by mistake, you can now restore any channel you deleted up to 21 days. Simply click Manage team and then open the Channels tab to see and restore deleted channels. By default, any member of the team can restore a channel. If you want to restrict deleting and restoring channels to team owners only, you can change this in the team’s settings.Restore a deleted channel directly in the Teams UI
Collaborate more effectively
Include information from Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) in your conversations – Now you can have a conversation about VSTS work items right in a channel or chat without the need to include a screenshot or a hyperlink to the information – in the same way that you can add an emoji or GIF. To get started, go to the Store in Teams and install it for yourself or for a team. You’ll then see VSTS as an option to choose from when you click on “…” at the bottom of the compose box. Read the full blog post for details
Include information from VSTS in your conversations
New features available on Teams iOS & Android apps
New chat functionality - Share chat history, @mentions in chat, mute chat, quick reply from notifications are all available on iOS and Android as well.
Share chat history (left) and Mute chat (right) on mobile
Share content from other apps into Teams – You can share text, photos, and files from other apps into Teams on both iOS and Android apps now. You can select a chat or channel to post the shared content into.
Sharing an image into a channel on Teams app on iOS
You can now create a team on mobile – Simply tap on the “Manage teams” icon on the Teams tab and then the “+” icon to create a new team. You can then add members to the team and promote them to owners.
1st step: click on the manage icon
2nd step: click on the "+" icon
3rd step: add a name and description
PSTN calling and voicemail – PSTN calling and voicemail are now also available on mobile for Enterprise Voice licensed customers.
Meetings on mobile – You can mute other participants on mobile now. Also, external users invited to a Teams meeting can now join via the mobile apps too.
Learn how customers are using Teams
“Everyone has a voice, and I believe everyone deserves to be heard,” says Esam Baboukhan, computer science and e-learning instructor at the City of Westminster College in London. But how do you make sure everyone can use their voice, especially when they don’t speak aloud?
Watch how Baboukhan, a Microsoft Innovative Education Expert, and his student, Kabir, who has a hearing impairment, face this challenge head on using Microsoft Teams and Office 365.
Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Microsoft Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.
Работаете ли вы в большой корпорации, решая реальные проблемы миграции существующих приложений в облако или стартап, ищущий инновационные технологические способы решения новых задач, контейнеризация и технологии кластеризации – критически важные навыки для разработчиков.
OpenHack собирает вместе разнообразных разработчиков для изучения возможностей реализации определённых микросервисных и/или контейнероориентированных сценариев для Azure Container Services (AKS), Azure Container Instances и Service Fabric в течение трёх дней полного погружения в структурированный набор практических работа в виде последовательных заданий для работы в командах.
Присоединяйтесь к нам на три дня заполненных практическим изучением микросервисных и/или контейнероориентированных сценариев для Azure Container Services (AKS), Azure Container Instances и Service Fabric в командах с другими разработчиками.
Во время OpenHack:
Вы получите доступ к самым последним технологиям Microsoft.
Будете решать усложняющиеся структурированные задачи, предназначенные для получения вами знаний для использования Azure Container Services (AKS), Azure Container Instances и Service Fabric в ваших рабочих задачах.
Общение с другими разработчиками, работающих как в крупных компаниях, так и в инновационных стартапах, а также инженерами Microsoft, включая Виктора Цыкунова, Александра Шаповала, Дариуша Поровски, Марека Лани, Стаса Павлова, Ите Рихтера и других.
Получите ответы на ваши вопросы по реальным проектам и задачам во время решения задач от экспертов от Microsoft и сообщества.
В дополнение к основанной на заданиях обучающей части воркшопа, будет доступно ограниченное количество 1:1 сессий c экспертами Microsoft по вашим реальным проектам.
Initial Update: Wednesday, 14 March 2018 12:51 UTC
We are aware of issues within ODS service and are actively investigating. Some customers may experience issues while accessing azure log analytics and issues related to alerting in Log analytics service.
Work Around: <none or details>
Next Update: Before 03/14 02:45 UTC
We are working hard to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience. -suneel
The first two
parts of the series discussed the bad things that can happen
if you cherry-pick a change that is subsequently modified.
If you're lucky,
you get a merge conflict.
If you're not lucky,
your modification is simply ignored.
If only there were a way to do a partial merge instead of a cherry-pick,
the problems could have been avoided.
It turns out that git does support partial merges.
It's just that nobody talks about it that way.
You create a partial merge by doing full merge with a custom
merge base.
At the start of our saga,
we have a commit tree like this:
apple
apple
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A
←
M1
master
︎
F1
feature
apple
From a common ancestor A,
commit F1 happens on the feature branch,
and commit M1 happens on the master branch.
Now you realize that you need to apply a fix to both branches.
You don't want to merge the entire feature branch into the master branch,
because that would also pick up commit F1.
Here's the trick:
Create a third branch and merge it into both the master and feature
branches.
apple
berry
M1
← ← ←
M2
master
apple
︎
berry
︎
A
← ← ←
P
patch
︎
︎
F1
← ← ←
F2
feature
apple
berry
We created a new branch called patch based on the common ancestor
commit A, and committed our fix to the patch branch as commit P.
We then merged commit P into the master branch, and also into the
feature branch,
producing commits M2 and F2, respectively.
As before, work continues on both the master and feature branches,
and eventually the root cause of the problem is determined,
and the patch is reverted in the feature branch and a proper fix applied.
apple
berry
berry
M1
← ← ←
M2
←
M3
master
apple
︎
berry
︎
A
← ← ←
P
patch
︎
︎
F1
← ← ←
F2
←
F3
feature
apple
berry
apple
On the master branch, commit M3 does additional work
unrelated to our patch.
Meanwhile, in our feature branch, we figure out the proper fix
and commit it as F3.
Commit F3 changes the line back to apple (undoing our patch)
as well as containing the proper fix.
Eventually,
it comes time to merge the feature branch to the master branch.
The merge chooses commit P as the merge base,
since it is the most recent common ancestor.
The commits involved in the three-way merge are
P (the base), M3 (the head of the master branch)
and F3 (the head of the feature branch).
Let's erase all the other commits, since they don't
participate in the merge.
berry
M3
master
berry
︎
P
︎
F3
feature
apple
There is no change to the line in question in the master branch
relative to the merge base,
but in the feature branch, berry changed to apple.
Therefore, the merge result will have apple.
apple
berry
berry
apple
M1
← ← ←
M2
←
M3
← ← ←
M4
master
apple
︎
berry
︎
︎
A
← ← ←
P
patch
︎
︎
F1
← ← ←
F2
←
F3
feature
apple
berry
apple
But wait, what about the changes in commits M1 and F1?
They were bypassed by commit P, weren't they?
Are those changes going to be lost?
Nope, those changes will be merged in just fine
because they are also present in M3 and F3.
This is the same situation you run into in normal
day-to-day operation
when you merge from the master to the feature branch periodically
while you work on your feature:
X
←
X1
←
X2
←
X3
←
X4
←
X5
master
︎
︎
︎
T1
←
T2
←
T3
←
T4
←
T5
feature
In the above diagram
(a brand new diagram unrelated to the previous diagrams),
you created a feature branch from the master branch at some commit X.
Work continues in the master branch as commits X1, X2, and so on.
Simultaneously, work continues in the feature branch as commits
T1, T2, and so on.
But every so often, the feature branch takes a merge from the master
branch,
so that the two don't drift too far out of sync.
Suppose you are now ready to merge the feature branch back to the master
branch.
The last time the feature branch merged from the master branch
was when it merged commit X4, resulting in commit T5 on the feature
branch.
This makes commit X4 the merge base.
Are you worried that this upcoming merge will
throw away the changes in commits
T1 through T4, since the merge base commit X4 post-dates them?
No, you aren't,
because you know that the changes in T1 through T4 are also present in T5,
and they will go into the master branch as part of the merge.
Okay, back to our original story.
Creating the patch branch and merging it into both the master
and feature branches preserves the connection between the two
commits in the respective branches,
and in particular identifies them as being two manifestations
of the
same underlying change (namely, commit P).
The resulting merge of the two branches recognizes this
relationship and doesn't double-apply the change.
Basically, the patch branch converts what was originally a cherry-pick
into a merge.
It was the cherry-pick that was the source of all the problems,
and the fix is to
get rid of the cherry-pick and use
merges instead.
The temporary patch branch gives us our partial merge.
That's the basic idea.
There are still a lot of questions to answer,
such as "How do I find the correct merge base?",
"What if I pick the wrong merge base?",
"What if I need to perform two cherry-picks?",
or "What if I already did the cherry-pick; can I somehow
repair the damage and prevent the future merge conflict or ABA problem?"
We'll start delving into them next time.
Recently the Product Group released a migration guide to move from Adxstudio v7 Portals to Portal Capabilities for Dynamics 365. That announcement with a link to the guide can be found here. On the heels of that announcement I wanted to share my experience with doing an in-place upgrade of ADX 7.x to Dynamics Portals 8.x. The guide itself covers several migration options including reimplementation both self-hosted or Microsoft hosted as well as an in-place upgrade both self-hosted or Microsoft hosted. I won’t go through the details of the process since it is very well covered in the guide, but I’ll point out some of the findings as a result of going through the process.
Cleanup Prior to Upgrading
It is worthwhile to do a little housekeeping prior to starting the upgrade process. You may have artifacts that are no longer being used and this would be a good opportunity to address those items. The upgrade process will “split” each of the existing web pages into 2 pages – a root page and a localized content page. The issue that arises is that even inactive web pages will get split and will result in an inactive root page with an active content page. This will result in unexplained “404 not found” errors on the upgraded portal and potentially navigation links that are normally not visible due to Access Control Rules being now visible. If there are inactive web pages that can’t be removed prior to the upgrade, an advanced find can be used post upgrade to find inactive root pages that have an active content page. Those content pages should also be deactivated.
Images that had a space in the partial URL were no longer rendered after the upgrade, so it may be worth while to search through the child files and update the partial URLs so there are no spaces prior to the upgrade process. Remember to update the related link to the file wherever it is being used.
Uninstalling ADX Solutions
Having ADX 7.x solutions deployed alongside Dynamics Portal 8.x solutions is not supported (and would not work anyway for the most part) so part of the upgrade process will include uninstalling the ADX solutions. Depending on what ADX portal package was originally deployed as well as what productivity packs were also deployed, it’s possible to have 20+ ADX solutions in Dynamics 365. As you can imagine removing these with all the interdependencies can become quite challenging. Fortunately there are 2 utilities that can help.
Determining Installation Order
FetchXML can be used to retrieve the installation order of the ADX solutions. Ordering the results in descending order of the installedon field will yield the correct uninstall order of the ADX solutions. Use the FetchXML statement below, replacing “orgname”, and “x” for the version numbers to reflect your organization to retrieve the ordered list. (I’ll give credit to the below information from here)
There may still be situations where a lingering dependency is blocking the solution from being removed (e.g. maybe an ADX field is being used in a workflow, etc.). The Dependency Checker tool is useful for identifying the exact dependency (or dependencies) that needs to be addressed in order to remove the solution. Use the following URL below replacing the “organization url” to reflect your organization and the “objectid” of the solution attempting to be removed. You can use the list of solutions from the above FetchXML statement to get the object id of the solutions.
As part of tightening up security on the portal, executing FetchXML now requires entity permissions on any entity that is part of the fetch statement. At least the Read privilege needs to exist on the entity. No errors will result after the upgrade as an indication, the fetch will result in no records so the liquid template will not work as expected (e.g. – if there is logic looping through results, etc.).
SMS for Two-Factor Authentication
Twilio support (and SMS in general) has been dropped with Dynamics Portals. The Product Group is moving more towards external authentication/identity providers and this may be the opportunity to start investigating that path if your application is leveraging local authentication with 2FA enabled. Email is still an option for sending the security code.
Web Templates - new reference to Website Record
Web Templates are a common way to store JavaScript functions as well as Liquid Template code. Web Templates now have a reference to a Web Site record. This will initially be missing after the upgrade has completed which results in “not found” errors anywhere the web templates are being referenced. Simply updating the Web Template records lookup to the Web Site record will resolve this.
CSS Class Differences
There are a few changes to the CSS classes that are being used throughout the Portal. Sub-grids is an example that comes to mind immediately. Depending on how much custom theming was done to the original portal, it may be necessary to make changes to your CSS to reflect the differences in the upgraded portal. If you entries in the various Custom CSS areas, now may be a good opportunity to consolidate those into a single file and use that as a child file of the root page.
“Failed” Portal Provisioning
When I went through the last step of provisioning the portal against my Dynamics 365 instance the provisioning did not actually fail with an error, it just never seemed to complete and the portal itself would display the “getting things ready” page. I’m fortunate enough to have access to the product group and we were able to determine what was happening. This is touched on in the migration guide, but I’ll offer some insight below.
At two stages of the upgrade process you will be deploying portals solutions to your Dynamics 365 instance. The first time this is done to upgrade your existing portals artifacts to their 8.x counterparts. The last time this is done is to provision the Dynamics portal against your Dynamics 365 instance (which will most likely further upgrade any already installed portal 8.x solutions and possibly deploy some new ones). As you are choosing the portal package to deploy in each of these steps, you should be consistent with the original ADX portal type that was deployed. This is important because the package that was originally chosen when first configuring the ADX portal will dictate what the ID is of your Website record and when you do the final upgrade step of provisioning the Dynamics portal against your instance if the GUID of the package chosen during provisioning does not match the ID of the existing Website record, the provisioning process will always appear to be still provisioning.
The provisioning process should create a record under Settings –> Portals –> Settings named PackageImportComplete. The value for this record needs to match the ID of the portal package you selected to provision. If the Website Copy tool was used against the ADX portal, it’s possible that the object of your Website record will not match one of the standard IDs. This (having a non-standard Website id) may or may not impact the creation of the PackageImportComplete record. If the PackageImportComplete record is missing you will need to create it and set the proper value based on the portal package that was selected. If the record does exist and the value does not contain the proper value based on the portal package selected, update the record with the correct value. The portal package values are:
Our DevOps team continues to investigate issues with slow queries in the Western Europe region. Root cause is not fully understood at this time, though current investigation is targeting database workload. Customers may have started seeing issues at 12:20 UTC We currently have no estimated time for resolution.
Next Update: Before Wednesday, March 14th 2018 16:15 UTC
Sincerely, Brett
Initial Update: Wednesday, March 14th 2018 13:13 UTC
We're investigating Performance Degradation in West Europe.
We are experiencing an increase in slow queries with VSTS services in this region.
Next Update: Before Wednesday, March 14th 2018 13:45 UTC
We will be holding our 22nd monthly community Q&A call Thursday, March 15 at 10 AM Pacific Time. In addition, we will also be holding the call at 4 PM Pacific Time this Thursday, March 15th to accommodate folks in other time zones.
Next week, the world’s largest professional game industry event kicks off in San Francisco: Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018. We’re incredibly excited to engage with all developers at the event looking to join the growing community of more than half a million monthly active developers building great games with Visual Studio today. Microsoft experts will be at the event and are looking forward to have great conversations with you. Here’s an overview of where you can find us.
Expo booth and theater sessions
Visual Studio experts will be present in the main Microsoft booth in the South Tower Lobby, together with experts from Azure, Mixer, PlayFab, Windows, and others. Come talk to us about:
How Visual Studio Team Services can help you share code, plan, build, and ship games with unlimited private Git repositories, cloud-hosted build agents, Agile planning tools and Kanban boards and much more.
Leveraging Visual Studio App Center to automate testing your games on real Android and iOS devices, distribute to testers and app stores, and monitoring real-world usage.
Located just outside the South Hall entrance, you will find experts to talk to about all these topics, as well as amazing experiences from Microsoft to participate in. You will also be able to join 20-minute theater sessions here, covering a wide range of hot topics.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s great session content from various Microsoft teams, access to experts across Xbox, Azure, and PlayFab, and much more to help you build great games with the help of our technology.
To learn more about all the different ways you can interact with Microsoft at GDC 2018, take a look at our Microsoft @ GDC page. There you will also find a PDF version of this information, so you can keep it with you on paper or your phone for easy reference.
We hope to see you at the event and look forward to talking with you all! And if you can't make it to the event, be sure to follow @VisualStudio for the latest from GDC 2018 and beyond.
Azure SQL Managed Instance is fully managed SQL Server instance hosted in Azure cloud and placed in your Azure Virtual Network. In this post, I will explain how you can prepare network environment for Managed Instance.
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is a new data service currently in public preview. It is a dedicated resource placed in customer's Virtual Network, and currently one of the biggest issue that we are hitting in preview is configuration of Virtual Networks that is not compliant to the requirements. This problem usually delays provisioning and can make instance unavailable if a network admin cut-off Managed Instance from Azure Management Service using some network rule. This is possible because you own the Virtual Network where we are placing Managed Instance, and you can customize access rules on your network. As a result, some configuration may cause problems during Managed Instance deployment.
Although the networks requirements are documented, I will summarize the most important things that you need to be aware when you prepare Virtual Network for Managed Instance. Configuring network environment has the following steps:
Configure Virtual Network where Managed Instance will be placed.
Create Route table that will enable Managed Instance to communicate with Azure Management Service.
Optionally create dedicated subnet for Managed Instance (or use default one that is created when the Virtual Networks is created)
Assign the Route table to the subnet.
Double-check that you have not added something that might cause the problem.
If you follow these steps, I believe that you will be able to create and use your Managed Instance without any issue. Otherwise, some incorrect settings in your environment may block Managed Instance deployment or make it unavailable.
1. Virtual network configuration
Managed Instance is your dedicated resource that is placed in Azure Virtual network with assigned private IP address. Before you create Managed Instance, you need to create Azure Virtual network using Azure portal, PowerShell, or Azure CLI.
If you are using Azure portal, make sure that you use Resource Manager ake sure that Service Endpoints option is Disabled in Creating Virtual Network Blade (this is default option so don't change it).
If you want to have only one subnet in your Virtual Network (Virtual Network blade will enable you to define first subnet called default), you need to know that Managed Instance subnet can have between 16 and 256 addresses. Therefore, use subnet masks /28 to /24 when defining your subnet IP ranges for default subnet. If you know how many instances you will have make sure that you have at least 2 addresses per instance + 5 system addresses in the default subnet.
2. Create Route table
The second prerequisite is to create Route table that will allow Managed Instance to communicate with the Azure Management Service. This is required because Managed Instance is placed in your private Virtual Network, and if it cannot communicate with Azure service that manages it it will became inaccessible.
The route table contains a set of rules, called routes, that specifies how packets sent from Managed Instance should be routed in the virtual network. Route table is associated to subnets where Managed Instances are deployed, and each packet leaving a subnet is handled based on the associated route table. A subnet can only be associated to a single route table. There are no additional charges for creating route tables in Microsoft Azure.
Go to Azure portal, add new resource "Route table", and once it is created for to Routes blade and add a route "0.0.0.0/0 Next Hop Internet route". This route will enable Managed Instances that are placed in your Virtual Network to communicate to Azure Management Service that manages the instance. Without this, the Managed Instance cannot be deployed.
This is the current requirement in public preview, and it will be changed in future. Some networking policies are restrictive and we will relax them.
Once you configure your route table it should look like:
3. Create additional subnet for Managed Instance (optional)
Managed Instance is deployed in your subnet, so you need to create it before you provision Managed Instance. If you want to put instances in default subnet and if you have not changed default route, then you can skip this step.
Subnet is dedicated to Managed Instance and cannot contain any other resource (i.e. Azure VMs should not be placed in that subnet.)
Subnet must have at least 16 addresses, 5 addresses are reserved for Azure internal services, while you would need 2 addresses for every Managed Instance that you put in the subnet. This is important to plan because once you put Managed Instance in your subnet, you cannot change the size of the subnet.
4. Configure subnet
The subnet (default one or new) must have a User Route Table (UDR) with 0.0.0.0/0 Next Hop Internet as the only route assigned to it. If you have created you route table with 0.0.0.0/0 Next Hop Internet route, you can assign it to the subnet where you will place Managed Instance.
Find your subnet using Azure portal, go to details and make sure that:
You have a Managed Instance Route table assigned to the subnet
There should be no Networks Security Groups in your subnet.
There should be no service-endpoint in your subnet.
There are no other resources in subnet.
Your subnet should look like:
5. Checklist
Finally, make sure that you have not accidentally added something that can break Managed Instance deployment or make the instance unavailable. Here are some quick rules that you need to check:
Virtual Network should have Service Endpoints disabled
Subnet must have between 16 and 256 IP addresses (masks from /28 to /24)
There should be no other resources in your Managed Instance subnet.
Subnet must have route with 0.0.0.0/0 Next hop internet
Subnet must not have any Network Security Group
Subnet must not have any service endpoint
Once you have configured everything, you can use Azure portal to create new Managed Instance, and assign the Virtual Network/subnet that you have created.
This is the simplest way to configure your network with new clean network, route table and subnet. If you are expert for networking and you want to customize your Virtual Network or subnets, or to use some existing Virtual Networks or subnets to place Managed Instances there you can find detailed instructions how to configure infrastructure on Azure documentation. If you want to have custom DNS make sure that you readConfiguring a Custom DNS article.
Summary
Configuring and troubleshooting issues in network configuration is one of the biggest problem in the process of deployed Managed instance. If you are not sure how to configure Virtual Network or if you need a quick check-list, make sure that you follow advices in this article.
Some of the recommendations and constraint described in this post will be changed during public preview because we are relaxing network requirements. However, steps in this post will enable you to get your Managed Instance without major issues.
Microsoft hat heute eine starke Erweiterung Ihrer Azure Rechenzentren in Europa bekannt gegeben. Es wurden zwei neue Azure Regionen in der Schweiz angekündigt, zwei weitere Regionen in Deutschland und die Inbetriebnahme der beiden fertiggestellten Regionen in Frankreich. Die beiden zusätzlichen Regionen in Deutschland werden, anders als die existierenden, Teil der internationalen Azure Rechenzentren sein. Eine dedizierte Datenspeicherung in Deutschland ist möglich aber auch die Nutzung der Skalierbarkeit und Ausfalsssicherheit im Zusammenspiel mit Irland, den Niederlanden, Frankreich und bald auch der Schweiz.
Neben Europa wurden auch zwei Regionen in den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten angekündigt.
To ensure Visual Studio App Center is as easy as possible to use, we've created a more direct feedback channel for building and publishing product documentation based on the great feedback we receive from you, our users. Open sourcing our product documentation is a natural extension of our App Center philosophy, which is open API, open source SDKs, and an open source CLI. Our public document repository also enables us to integrate with a feedback system based on GitHub issues.
Providing Feedback
If you have product feedback or questions for us, including how to use or configure an App Center capability, click the Give product feedback button. You’ll be taken to the App Center Help Center page, where you can click the chat icon in the lower right corner of the page to provide feedback or ask questions.
Our team of dedicated support engineers will answer your question as quickly as possible. In many cases, your feedback triggers our product team to make an update to the docs, further clarifying the material to help future readers. With feedback or product feature suggestions, the support team passes information to the product’s Program Managers for their review, helping us deliver a better product for you and all our customers
If something isn’t clear in the docs, or you think the docs need additional content or an adjustment to increase the page’s usefulness, click Sign in to give documentation feedback. You’ll be asked to log in using your GitHub account, where you’ll be able to add your comments to the particular docs page you’re viewing. When you submit your comment, we’ll review it, respond, and, if needed, make an update to the docs.
Be Part of the Process
App Center docs publish through a public GitHub repository so that you can make updates to the docs yourself as well. If you’ve worked through a process in App Center and want to update the docs to clarify something based on what you learned, simply fork the repo, make your changes, and submit them to us through the Pull Request process. We’ll review your proposed changes and merge them in if appropriate.
TL;DR: Ways to Get Help with App Center
In the App Center dashboard, click the chat icon in the lower right corner of the page. This connects you with a dedicated support team waiting to answer your questions. You can also access this chat feature through the App Center Help Center.
Through the App Center docs, you have access to detailed information about how to use every feature of the product, our SDK, and our APIs.
The App Center Help Center hosts a multitude of tips, tricks, and tidbits to help you make better use of App Center.
As you can see, you’ve got many resources and feedback options for App Center. We invite you to use the feedback process to let us know when you see areas of improvement and help us deliver a better product.
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