 Hello and welcome back to another episode of AZ Update. I'm Anthony Bartolo joined by Sarah Lean and producer Pierre. Sarah, how's it going? I'm good, thanks. How you doing, Antony? Good, good. Wow, it was a very busy week. Andrew McCollum on the chat says it best. Busy week for Microsoft people. Yes, it was more busier than I expected it to be. I wasn't going to be that involved in build and just, hey, can you come do this? Can you come do that? 100% awesome to support and help. What about yourself? I actually enjoyed it because everybody else was busy with build. So I got a time to actually do some study and do some other work. So I really enjoyed it as well. But so it's been busy for me in other ways this week. Listen, I understand build is a developer conference. And it was very humbling to be asked, can you participate here? Can you help out with this? Technically, you and I, we cover the IT Pro audience. But from time to time we get asked to do things we're on the other side of the rope as well. And I learned a lot, I'll be honest, in terms of Microsoft build. But what I was really appreciative of was the inclusion that was put forth in respect to when new services were announced and launched, it wasn't just directed towards the developer. There was a ton of executives and a ton of engineers that were sharing the new services that were being launched. We're talking about how the partnership between the developer and the IT Pro would benefit from ex-service. Everything from GitHub Actions to the package manager to system internal tools to Arc. There was a lot of talk around Arc this past week. And it was interesting to see, yes, build is directed towards developers but it was inclusive of all aspects that support the businesses and the organization from a technical standpoint to participate. Even the Fusion development platform or Power Apps, as we know it, there was a lot of discussion around that enablement, not just for developers, for low code, no code individuals, but also IT professionals to participate in Fusion apps. And the Toyota example and how they work with ProDevs to build out the solution on behalf of the organization to understand inventory levels for the vehicles at specific dealerships. What were your thoughts in terms of all the announcements and everything that went on? I think a lot of it didn't apply to me because I'm not a developer, but picking through the bones of like the book of news that's on screen right now, the link there, there were some bits and pieces that were quite interesting. I think we'll probably talk about some of them, but like things like the Windows package manager, things like WSL, so the Windows subsets and for Linux got some updates. What else was there? There's like certificate announcements and what we're doing with app service. Obviously you said the ARC stuff. So there was pockets of news, like I think they announced like the Visual Studio 2022 version or something and all these funky bits of code and how it loads faster and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like whoosh, goes right over my head because I don't use the big Visual Studio, I use like Visual Studio code and stuff like that. But yeah, it's fun to see some of this stuff because it's integrating more and more into our jobs and what we're doing. Like I never thought I would be using GitHub. That's when I store all my code. That's my, you know, I GitHub actions, I have that kind of stuff. I'm building a new website for the user group and it's gonna be built on GitHub and GitHub actions and stuff like that. So there's stuff that I necessarily never thought I would touch, but I now touch because there's parts of it I can use and make my life easier. So I'm excited about the stuff that makes a difference to me, Anthony. The other stuff, it's like whoosh, that looks cool. Well, let's cover one thing quickly. We're gonna call it an audible because it really fired up on social today. The whole Windows Package Manager announcement was made, actually was on the second day of build that was talked about. Producer Pierre wasn't aware of this being available. What is Windows Package Manager? So I'm gonna, Mark it, no, probably gonna hate me, but if you've ever used Chocolatey as a package manager, Windows Package Manager is the equivalent to Chocolatey. Now, whether it is an actual equivalent, whether one's better, one's lesser, I have no idea about that. If you've ever used Chocolatey, think of Windows Package Manager or the command line that we use is winget. So you might be familiar of it there, you've never heard of the name, but it helps you install your tools. So I think the example you've got on screen here is installing power tools. So you issue that command winget install power tools. It downloads the latest version for you for wherever it thinks the source is, installs it for you and it's there. You don't have to go off to your browser, search in your favorite search engine for power tools, find the download, download it, extract it, install it. You don't have to do any of that. It's a single command line install. And yeah, I think you can even do the upgrades. So if you wanna do a big upgrade of all your packages, you think it's been six months since I installed all these things, there's probably updates. You're about to do a big command and it will go back to all those sources, find those sources and if you've got a newer version, it will put that down on to you. So it's, yeah, it's a package manager. It basically helps you install your software and keep it up to date or install things and do that kind of stuff without you having to do it all yourself. So it's a great time saver from that point of view. I think that's the best way of subscribing it, Anthony. That makes sense. Yeah, 100% and thank you. That was awesome. So to get the Windows package manager is inside of the Windows Insider. So you'd have to have Windows Insider installed on your machine in order to gain access to it. Can call it up in PowerShell, can call it up in Windows Terminal. It's a great tool to check out. It caused a lot of interest on social and what's interesting is that it wasn't a big explosion during build. It actually happened after which I found peculiar but definitely wanted to talk about it on the show. The other thing I wanted to quickly chat about was Scott Hanselman's keynote. Now, always entertaining. Last year's build, it was him in his home office and he would have the connection with different people. This time around it was at the studios in Redmond and he had his team around him and special guests. It was nice to see Able Wang join the team and talk about it. What was everybody's thoughts? And I wanna pose this question to everybody that's in the chat room as well. What did everybody think if you saw Scott Hanselman's keynote? What did you think about the keynote? How did you, you know, how did that, was there any learnings from that keynote? Did you, what did you take away from it? We're very curious because, you know, Ignite, we start planning for Ignite right after build is done. And, you know, it's something that a lot of people said, hey, this was really great. This was entertaining. And some others said, you know, I prefer to get my information this way, right? I think our team thought it was pretty cool, the way that was set up and the way that they portrayed it. But we definitely wanna hear from, you know, everybody here, what did you think? Did you enjoy the segment? Because it's something that we're looking at in terms of, hey, if this works, then maybe we can do more of this. And they're fun to do, but we wanna make sure that the right amount of information that needs to be shared out is also shared out. And that's something that we wanna take into consideration as well. So we're asking for your feedback. If you haven't watched the Scott Hanselman keynote yet, you can go to mybuild.microsoft.com. It's on-demand, available on-demand, and you can watch it there. It's also available on YouTube, I believe, under Microsoft Developer, if you look that up. We're intrigued in terms of your thoughts, in terms of what you thought of the keynote. What did you, did you see the keynote, Sarah? I haven't watched all of it. I've saw snippets of it. I think it's interesting playing with these types of keynote events. Obviously Scott did it last year and he's done it slightly different again this year. I think it's nice. The virtual events aren't perfect, right? But they give us the chance to play with these. And I think, was it Ignite last year? We saw Brad Anderson and was it Panos, sit on the stage and just talk to each other and have a conversation. And that was really well received because it was a bit informal, but it's still educated you. So I think they're nice to play with these formats. It would be interesting to see if they're actually landing as an educational point of view or if they're just a fun thing that people are like, oh, that's pretty cool. Me so scared to do some weird things and stuff like that and slag off everybody. But yeah, it's nice to play with these formats and see what's landing and keeping people engaged in a virtual world. Because I think we're all bored of virtual events to a certain degree nowadays. You know what? And that's the thing, we're learning as we go. This is something that's unprecedented in regards to this pandemic and the ability to work and to interact with everybody. I really appreciated the effort put forth in terms of the entertainment value. The, my biggest thing is, was there enough information the way it was shared that resonated with enough people, right? And that's the big question that's out there right now and love to hear feedback. Because you know, our team would love to do something like that, but we want to make sure it's something that our audience would be interested in, right? To do something like that. Let's get started with the news and Sarah, you're up first. Cool. So this is a slightly bit of old news, I think that we announced way back in December or at the start of the year about certifications. So I think at the start of the year, we announced that you could freely renew your Microsoft certifications. So primarily your Azure certifications for free after you'd sat them. What was bundled in amongst that announcement was that going forward, so from end of June this year, if you set a brand new Microsoft exam or a role-based exam, it's only going to be valid for one year. So you'll need to set a renewal and a year's time after that certification has been set. And I think there was a lot of negativity maybe around some of this. People were saying this isn't something that's fun because we'd want to be setting certifications every year, but I think it also forces us as IT professionals or developers to be keeping up to date with all of the technology that changes. We've just saw build happen. There's going to be a bunch of new things happening. And if we're not staying up to date with all of that, we're going to be not as inactive as we can be and we're going to be using technology that isn't being able to be as fast and efficient and as good as we can be for our organization. So yes, it's going to force us to maybe do more exams and do more certifications, but it's going to keep us on that right course to being up to date with what's happening in the IT industry and hopefully employable by future employers. And this isn't a game changer in terms of what you're doing because yes, you do have to pay for that brand new certificate, but it's a free renewal after that. So it's not like it's a money making scheme. I think some people are seeing it as that. So it's just one to be aware of. It's not a scaremongering thing or anything like that, but it's just to be aware of because I actually hadn't seen this in the news at the start of the year. So it kind of caught me out of date. I was like, why is this only valid for a year? And then I dug in and that's, we had announced it. So I just wanted to highlight it, that it's something to be mindful of if you're sitting exams later on this year as well. So yeah. I know you've got a few exams coming up, Anthony, haven't you? I started studying for them. Steven Inns actually puts up a good point. He's watching on Facebook. We need more time and hard to recertify without time to study, right? This is the challenge. How much time is enough time? Is it one year, is it two year? Microsoft is currently testing with the one year. The biggest thing right now is how quickly the services change based on the feedback that our customers are telling us in regards to this needs to be added, this needs to be removed and what have you and the way that we work is changing so rapidly. The whole concept of edge computing was, not even a year ago and we've gone so quickly in implementation and what have you, we have to change the way that we did things from a security perspective, from a deployment perspective. This all has to be taking into consideration when you're doing a deployment of architecture. How long is it before you achieve that certification to make yourself part of that equation? Especially with IT pros saying, we wanna be out of the cost center, we wanna be part of the forward movement of an organization, it's challenging, right? And from the certification perspective, the one year renewal enforces that you're continuously kept keeping up to date with the services. It doesn't mean that you're implementing them, right? And you're not implementing them for the sake of implementing them unless your organization actually needs it. But it's to keep in mind what's available and where you can move forward with that to ensure that you have that understanding that the service will actually make our organization that much more efficient or that much more responsive. The timepiece is tricky, right? So Microsoft is currently running with the one year. If you don't feel that one year is enough time, definitely provide your feedback. And that's the thing, Microsoft is listening. So provide your feedback if you want a two year or a longer cycle for that type of certification. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, time is always precious, but yeah, it's worth investing in, I think some of these certifications for sure. So next up is the news around Windows sys internal tools. This is, you know, that was announced by Mark Rosinovich in terms of the updates itself. In regards to the updates that were announced at build, we're looking at new aspects of process monitor, giving it dark mode. A lot of people love dark mode. So that was a big of interest to a lot of people. Sysmon actually now has the ability to begin with and not end with in terms of your callouts. You have TCP view, I got updates for the inquiry, sorry, the endpoint query tool. And then process manager also received updates around advanced processes and DLL handling. So this was an interesting one because this was announced on day one. And a lot of people, this for me, in terms of all the news that went on, in terms of the spike was a huge spike on Twitter and on Reddit in terms of interest. And what was interesting was the feedback that was provided back was, yeah, there are still aspects of the tools that still need updates and people were sounding off in regards to that. But one person went out and said, hey, you know, good on Microsoft to continue on with this product because it's a tool that is still being mildly used. And if you provide your feedback, Microsoft is actually listening. And a lot of the changes that were added in respect to this, and you can see there's a plethora of changes that are added over time in regards to everything that's being provided in terms of feedback for the tool. You don't hear about internal tools that often, but when you do into the feedback is what motivates us to make the updates or Mark Rosinovic's team to make the updates as required. And so, you know, a lot of people are sounding off in the chat. Andrew McCollum just sounded off. Love, you know, assist internal tools. They make our lives easier. There's something that you add to your day-to-day activities. Sarah, have you used assist internal tools before? Yeah, I think Process Explorer, I think was the one I used back in the day when we were trying to find out what was hogging everybody's resources or if there was malware and stuff like that. And actually this week I used one of the tools. So I used this, I think it's CPU stress where you can emulate kind of the CPU because I was building a demo and I needed to fake that the CPU was actually doing something from a demo. So they're great from there. And I think it's fun because I think this was a side project that Mark brought into Microsoft. And the fact that it's now like an official tool almost and it's still being updated and still generating a lot of interest is pretty fun. It's, there's always something in that new toolbox that you'll find that you can use. So yeah, it's good to see it's still being there. What's interesting is, like you said, it was a side project for Mark who brought this into the play. The amount of people that use this tool and it's not just IT professionals, the developers as well, taking advantage of this tool to ensure that organizations are up to spec as required, testing out processes, testing out bottlenecks. It's a huge thing. If you ever get to see Mark was in which deliver a session on it. And he goes through like, I know, Sarah, you almost missed your flight because you're watching the session. I remember that story. It's the big thing with this, it's a passion of Mark's, right? It's not just building the tool for the sake of building a tool. He really believes in this internal tools. He really believes in what was accomplished by this. And so when you provide your feedback, he's listening, him and his team are always listening. So definitely provide your feedback and provide your insights in terms of how to make the tool better or what else is needed. Cause the team is always listening in terms of your suggestions. All right, Sarah, you're up next. So I'm talking about certificates again, this time within the Azure App Service. So we now have free certificates within the Azure App Service. Now this was announced, I think at some point last year as a preview service, but it went GA this week. So it's now fully productionized and you can use this. So basically, now you get a free certificate. So when you spin up your Azure App Service and you add your custom domain, you get a free certificate from Microsoft to like, to cure that domain, that custom domain. Previously you obviously had to buy the certificate, import it, do all that kind of good stuff. But we now have it free. This is a kind of exciting announcement cause we saw, was it two weeks ago, Azure static web apps come out in GA and have the same feature. So you get a free certificate with Azure static apps and you also get it with the Azure App Service. Now there are some caveats around what it does support and what it doesn't support. So it doesn't support wild card certificates. You can't export the certificate. And there's some weird thing that is saying that it doesn't support it if the root domain is attached to traffic manager. And if you've been watching the show a few weeks ago, I did stuff with traffic manager. So I'm now gonna rebuild that demo to find out why I don't get a certificate and what the nuances around all of that is. So this is pretty cool because how many of us use like Azure static web apps or Azure App Service for a side project and we end up not having it certified because we don't can't afford the certificate or we don't wanna pay for it because we're all cheap. This is pretty cool because it gives you that certificate. And I think the certificate is coming from DigiCert. So it's coming from an external provider. It's not something Microsoft are necessarily providing straight to you. So yeah, it's pretty cool. It's nice to see that there's a free portion inside of App Service. So it's included in the plan. And I think you have to have anything above B1 in the Windows plan gets the certificate as well. So yeah, pretty cool to see extra value being added to these services as well. What do you think, Anthony? Well, this is the thing. This is big news. A lot of organizations don't deploy certificates because of cost, right? They don't see the value in cost and IT is always asked to cut costs. So if they're gonna come forward and say, hey, we need to do certificates for security sake, it's gonna cost X. It's immediately being blocked out because oh, we don't have the budget for that, right? So now there's no excuse. Now there's the aspect of adding the certificates to your applications for free. That's so long as you're on the appropriate level. Now that cost issue goes out the door and it provides that opportunity for IT to focus more on the advantages of this so that if there is more requirements for certificates and there is a need to have an actual investment in certificates, you now have the ability to make that case, right? You have that ability to go forward and ask, this is the reason why and this is the levels that we need to adhere to that at. Shall we continue? Yes. Next up, this was talked about a lot, in terms of Azure Arc, the amount of times I heard the whole Azure Arc premise in terms of what's being made available, the ability now to run your Azure apps on premises through Azure Arc. So Azure Arc would set up your resource in terms of where you wanna run your applications. This is huge because this now enables you to run your apps as required where required for ISO certification. We saw this numerous times for specific industries. I can only have data that resides X and most times what we've seen is the data would reside on premises, the compute would reside in cloud or on premises in the whole hybrid model. Now you even have that much more choice in terms of where your resources reside and your compute resides through Azure Arc and that type of enablement and the app service package that enables that allows you to have that on-premises capability if required, right? This is something to look into in terms of where you're hosting your applications based on your need. We hear you loud and clear. Cloud is not the end-all, be-all for everything. We wanna make sure that for those organizations that have that requirement of an on-premises implementation, but you still require cloud services, you have that choice of picking and choosing as required. What did you think of the announcement, Sarah? I was a bit confused when I read this at first because I was like, we can run app service and functions anywhere. Like, what? And then I saw that it was through the Azure Arc service and I was like, oh, okay. This is starting to make a bit more sense, but I'll be honest, I wanna play with it or have a go with it and try and deploy it to see what it actually does and what the caveats are and stuff like that. It sounds very cool on the face of it, being able to extend Azure away from Azure to the platform that you want it to be in. So yeah, it's exciting, confusing and we'll see what happens with it, but yeah. The other piece of that is the whole Kubernetes environment being made available through Azure Arc as well. So again, your app service running in Kubernetes managed through Azure Arc. It's that one single pane of glass that seamlessly understands what your needs are in terms of resources requirements. And when you're deploying your applications to your resources through Arc, Arc choosing as your requirements that you had set forth where certain aspects of your application should run, right? So it's taking away a lot of the guesswork, ensuring that your guidelines or your necessities around your certs are taken into consideration and running the applications accordingly. I'm interested to see and learn more about this down the road. I know Thomas Maher on our team has been doing a lot of work with this as well, but definitely a lot of us are interested to do our own demos and labs to see where this will go. I'm very excited for this because this is something that it's providing choice for organizations where to run their applications. Let's say hi to everybody in the chat room, shall we? Really quickly, so we have Rabbit Jr. that's out there. Hello, sir, all the way from South Africa. Andrew McCollum is always joining us today. Paul Jensen coming to us from Canada. A lot of you on the chat room talking about the build conference and what you thought was engaging and entertaining a lot of talk about the system internal tools that's on there as well. Let us know again about the Scott Hanselman keynote and what you thought and that it wasn't great for you. Is there some things you make suggestions to? We're definitely interested to hear more about that. Events, so we just finished build and rightfully so there's not gonna be that many events available, but there are a couple that are out there right now. So there's one currently in Toronto, which is the six steps to modernizing your data warehouse in the cloud. This is coming up on June the 8th and I'll just put it up on the screen. There we go. It's coming up on June the 8th for you to participate. This is completely free and it's completely virtual. And as we've said in the past, if you're anywhere in the world, all you do is click on the URL link and you too can join this conference. Even though it's in Toronto, you can come in and participate. Also, Hello World is alive today and it will continue on in its schedule next week. I do know that they're having a break on Monday in the US, it's Memorial Day. So a lot of the people are off that day. We in Canada had Victoria Day last Monday. So all the holidays now for the summertime is coming up in North America. And so they'll have a break on Monday, but they'll resume normal schedule on the Tuesday. So that's coming up as well. Last but not least, the Microsoft module of the week. This week we went with the governance route. And the reason we went with the governance route was a lot of talk about the new services that were being made available. Sparked a lot of interest from a lot of developers that support organizations in terms of, okay, what are the next steps? How do I deploy? How do I do this? And a lot of people in IT just immediately got nervous and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. What do you mean you wanna deploy this in midst of our organization? Hold on a second. Governance is that strategy that allows IT departments and organizations to set up the guidelines for developers to become self-sufficient in the deployment of these services and these tools. And the ability to control where these services and tools are being deployed. If you've not looked into this, it's not a technology. It's more of a best practice. It's more of a terminology in terms of what you're doing on behalf of your organization. Do check this out. It's a great baseline to understand the concepts around governance and what that means for your organization when you're deploying these tools so that you're making developers or empowering developers to have the ability to deploy said services based on the guidelines required by your organization. Governance is not just run by IT. It's run by the organization as a whole and requires the buy-in from the business decision maker as well as the developer alongside the IT professionals. But it's something where if it's put into practice that emits your organization, makes a lot of people happy, empowers a lot of people to do the things that they need to do, but keeps into the guidelines. We call it running with scissors. Running with scissors appropriately is something that governance is. Sarah, thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. Governance is something that isn't just an IT function. Like you said, everybody needs to get involved in it. The business stakeholder, the finance team, everybody needs to be a part of this. It shouldn't just be the IT department saying no or putting shackles on everybody and stopping them doing things. It's about building that good, resilient, consistent environment and staying on that right path because let's face it, none of us want to sit in front of an auditor and explain why we've got a server name that is out of sync with everything else and as ports are open and data's flowing out and stuff like that, none of us want to have to deal with that. So building the good governance strategy kind of helps you avoid those conversations with your auditor and your boss as well. So. Sarah is another quick show. A lot of information on this one. If people want to get a whole of you, what's the best way to get a whole of you? You can find me on Twitter at Techie Lass. And if you want to get a whole of Pierre, you can do so on Twitter as well at Wired Canuck. And if you want to get a whole of me for some reason, you can get me on Twitter as well at Wired As Life. Sarah, thank you very much for being on the show again. Producer Pierre, thank you very much for your efforts and everybody have a great long weekend and we'll talk to you next week.