Functioning Private Visual Studio Gallery via Azure Functions

Today’s project from Daniel Cazzulino is one that I thought kind of neat and different.

If you’re a Visual Studio user, you’ve been to the Visual Studio Gallery. You might have also wondered at one point how to create your own Gallery. But then you considered you’d have to spin up a VM somewhere, have to maintain it, etc.

What if you could create a “Serverless” Gallery? Say using the new cool that is Azure Functions?

That’s exactly what Daniel’s done and he shared the entire process and code with us!

Serverless custom Visual Studio gallery with Azure Functions

There are a few online services that offer custom VS galleries, but given that it’s just a plain Atom feed with some storage for the payloads, I figured it made for an excellent use case for Azure Functions.

The online Azure Functions code “editor” is extremely basic, more a textbox than an editor at the moment 🙂.

So I’d much rather create an actual .NET project, with unit tests and create a nuget package that I consume on one-liner functions instead 🙂

AzureFunctions.VisualStudioGallery

This package makes it trivial to create a custom Visual Studio gallery feed using plain Azure Blob Storage to persist the feed as well as automatically update it from VSIX payloads pushed to the same storage container.

The service requires two functions: one for updating the feed blob, and another for returning the feed to the users.

Feed Updating Function…

Feed Retrieving Function…

With that, you can now head over to the MSDN documentation on how to add a private Gallery to Visual Studio and try it out!

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Last Week on Channel 9: April 17th – April 23rd, 2017

Everyone is still heads down preparing for Build and the Channel 9 Studios are packed, our show hosts, author and producers were still able to bring you some great content. Here’s a select 24 of them….

Azure x-plat CLI 2.0 with Jason R. Shaver

We talk with Jason R Shaver about the new Azure CLI 2.0. PowerPoint is Turing complete and needs to be removed from the Apple app store. And I finally have quantifiable proof that Carl is a slacker! …

TWC9: Win Dev’s at Build, GA Cognitive Services, Linux Containers on Windows and more…

This week on Channel 9, Nikola and Vlad discuss the week’s top developer news, including;

[01:13]  Microsoft Cognitive Services – General availability for Face API, Computer Vision API and Content Moderator

96 – Baseball Mudslide Dotmatrix

It’s time for another LiveStream Episode of the Patch and Switch show!!! Two IT guys (Patch and Switch) who are talking about whatever comes up. Can you say Tangent! Ultimately it’s the Chat Room where everyone hangs out and contributes to the show, so make sure to load it up during the LiveStream! …

Data Science Virtual Machine – A Walkthrough of end-to-end Analytics Scenarios

This webinar focuses on demonstrating how the Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) in Microsoft Azure conveniently enables key end-to-end data analytics scenarios by providing users immediate access to a collection of the top data science and development tools of the industry, completely pre-configured, with worked out examples and sample code. …

Episode 228: Building Games with Service Fabric

In this episode Thiago Almeida and Etienne Margraff are joined by Mark Fussell, Principal Program Manager Lead working on Azure Service Fabric, and Haishi Bai, Senior Software Engineer on Azure. Mark and Haishi join us to go over demos and real world examples and architectures for running new and legacy games using Azure Service Fabric. …

Episode 466: Heather Downing on Alexa, Web API, and Azure

Heather Downing describes how she was able to call a Web API app hosted in Microsoft Azure from an Alexa service, so that it can be called from an Amazon Echo. Not only does it integrate services from competing vendors, but it is simple enough that her mother can use it. …

Azure Marketplace

Vybava Ramadoss joins Scott Hanselman to share the new interactive experience for the Azure Marketplace, which makes it easier to navigate the product catalog and find the right solution for your cloud application. Marketplace provides a rich catalog of thousands of products and solutions that range from open source and community software to enterprise applications that have been certified and optimized to run on Azure. …

Surface Dial app partners, Forza Racing Championship, and more

This Week on Windows:  just in time for the Windows 10 Creators Update we’ve got a host of new app partners for Surface Dial, Forza gets a new car pack and embarks on the 3rd season of its Racing Championship – all thanks to a Porsche partnership. Plus, we give you tips and tricks to getting the most out of Microsoft Edge. Specifics covered in this episode include the following: …

Azure Time Series Insights Overview

Learn about the capabilities Microsoft’s new Azure Time Series Insights service! …

Defining Logging Requirements

When and how to define security requirements for logging. …

Fukushima Daiichi – Six Years Later

Following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunamis off the northeastern coast of Japan, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant personnel encountered extraordinary challenges in managing the loss of electrical power, control, and instrumentation at the six reactors and seven spent fuel pools. Improvising responses in the face of harsh conditions; their actions likely reduced the severity of the damage but ultimately three reactor cores were severely damaged and substantial radioactivity was released into the environment…

Using Deep Learning to Understand Creative Language

Creative language – the sort found in novels, film, and comics – contains a wide range of linguistic phenomena, from phrasal and sentential syntactic complexity to high-level discourse structures such as narrative and character arcs. In this talk, I explore how we can use deep learning to understand, generate, and answer questions about creative language. I begin by presenting deep neural network models for two tasks involving creative language understanding: 1) modeling dynamic relationships between fictional characters in novels, for which our models achieve higher interpretability and accuracy than existing work; …

Visual Studio Code – April 2017 Update

In this episode Dmitry is joined by Sean McBreen, who will show us what’s new in Visual Studio Code, as new features ship monthly! Specifically in this video Sean will dive in and demo new capabilities such as: the interactive guide, UX themes extensibility, key binding and settings customization, enhancements to debugging experience, new code editor features such as drag-n-drop text, minimap, and an integrated terminal window. …

Snack Pack 10: Planet Xamarin – Community Blog Feed

Welcome to The Xamarin Show Snack Pack Edition. A Snack Pack is bite sized episode that is focused on a specific topic and covered in just a few minutes. Today, we take a look at Planet Xamarin, an open source blog aggregator for all of the amazing Xamarin developers around the globe blogging about Xamarin. …

Shared Project vs Portable Class Library (PCL)

This video will walk you through the differences between PCL and Shared Projects in Visual Studio. That covers #if conditional compilations and accessing libraries. …

Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking

To assess information seeking/retrieval processes and outcomes, goodness of various objects involved in search such as queries and documents are evaluated. This evaluation could lead to recommendations (e.g., related queries, potentially useful books, interesting movies) to improve success and satisfaction of information seeker. However, in many cases, it may be too late to use those recommendations to mend the damage already done. Can we predict if a search session or project is moving on a suboptimal trajectory before it’s too late and offer suggestions to fix that trajectory – …

Behind the Scenes: How FishAngler extended their mobile application using Azure Functions

FishAngler is a startup based in South Florida that has a cross-platform mobile app for fishermen to log and share their catches. The app seeks to increase the angler’s overall experience with the rollout of features that enable anglers to record, forecast, and increase their fishing skill level. The collection and segmentation of fishing data will pave the way for anglers to accurately target species like a pro.

Join Jerry Nixon and Joe Raio as they welcome Jonas Stawski, CTO of FishAngler, as they discuss how they replaced existing worker roles with Azure Functions to speed up development, reduce costs and simplify scalability while extended the apps existing functionality. …

Happy Birthday .NET with Robin Cole

In February we got together with many Microsoft alumni and current employees for a huge .NET Birthday bash. We spoke to Robin Cole, who joined Microsoft in 2005 working on many projects including Expression and Visual Studio. In this quick interview, she shares her thoughts on developers and designers and exciting future ahead. …

Synonyms in Azure Search

Back by popular demand is a man who needs no introduction (but we’ll give him one anyway) is Liam Cavanagh, Principal PM in Azure Search.

In this very quick but awesome demo Liam shows off the new Synonym capabilities in Azure Search. No slides, just pure demo, Liam shows off how Azure Search has implemented synonym search capabilities to improve your search experience. The case Liam makes is that many times, what people are searching for are not always an exact match to what you have in your content. Liam quickly demonstrates that by implementing a customized dictionary via analytics and synonyms, our search experience is much better and we are able to find much quicker the content we are looking for. …

Intro to TinyCLR OS

In this video I will explain about what is TinyCLR OS, how to deploy it to your dev board and how to create embedded app.
I also created a community project to port a gadgeteer modules driver to TinyCLR OS. …

Intro: IoT with Microsoft Azure

This is an introduction video about Azure IoT. Source code: https://github.com/Gravicode/AzureIoTSample

R is now in SQL Server!

In this episode, Justin Scott has a brief talk with Microsoft Senior data consultant, Brian Raymer about the new capability of running R scripts from within SQL Server. …

Global Azure Bootcamp 2017

Welcome to Global Azure Bootcamp! All around the world user groups and communities want to learn about Azure and Cloud Computing! On April 22, 2017, all communities will come together once again in the fifth great Global Azure Bootcamp event! Each user group will organize their own one day deep dive class on Azure the way they see fit and how it works for their members. The result is that thousands of people get to learn about Azure and join together online under the social hashtag #GlobalAzure! Join hundreds of other organizers to help out and be part of the experience! Check out the different locations worldwide! …

Working with Date and Time in PowerShell

In this video, we discuss Date and Time as it relates to PowerShell. Things like how to format the output, add and subtract time, use the cmdlets to edit time stamps on files, and to query the event log. All very useful foundational knowledge on your quest to become a PowerShell guru. …

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Microsoft’s customers and partners demonstrate digital impact and leadership at Hannover Messe 2017

Manufacturers are embracing what’s recognized as ‘Industry 4.0’ to redefine their businesses, even company cultures. They’re creating higher-quality products at lower costs. They’re building entirely new business models and service offerings. And most importantly, they’re conserving limited resources to bring their customers a more sustainable future. According to IDC, the intelligent factory is already a reality as 40 percent of operational processes will be self-healing and self-learning by 2022[1]. At Hannover … Read more »

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Next Week on Xbox: Upcoming Games, April 24 – 30

Welcome to Next Week on Xbox, where we cover the best games coming soon to Xbox One. Every week, the team at Xbox aims to deliver quality gaming content for you to enjoy on your favorite gaming console, and Xbox Wire will be here to let you know when you can play every new release hitting Xbox One. Whether you’re a fan of shooting, racing, or adventuring, there’s sure to be something for you to enjoy. So, without further delay, let’s preview the new games coming soon with Next Week on Xbox! Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 – April 25 Go… Continue reading Next Week on Xbox: Upcoming Games, April 24 – 30

TWC9: Win Dev’s at Build, GA Cognitive Services, Linux Containers on Windows and more… | This Week On Channel 9

This week on Channel 9, Nikola and Vlad discuss the week’s top developer news, including;

Picks of the Week!

Please leave a comment or email us at twc9@microsoft.com.

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This Week on Xbox: April 21

We know you’re busy and might miss out on a day (or three) of the exciting things we’re talking about on Xbox Wire every week. If you’ve got a few minutes, we can help remedy that. We’ve pared down the week’s news into one easy-to-digest article for all things Xbox! Or, if you’d rather watch than read, you can feast your eyes on our weekly video show below. Either way, be sure to come back every Friday to find out what’s happening This Week on Xbox! Console Launch Exclusive Cities: Skylines Xbox One Edition Available Now Today we’re excited to… Continue reading This Week on Xbox: April 21

ID@Xbox Celebrates the Release of More than 500 Games on Xbox One and Windows 10

A little more than three years ago, we took to the stage at Gamescom to unveil a brand-new program for Xbox One. Our goal was to make sure Xbox players have access to the best, most diverse collection of games by making sure we enabled developers of all shapes and sizes to self-publish their creations on Xbox One. Today, thanks to the efforts of independent developers from around the world and the fans who support them, we’re proud to reveal that after an amazing month of releases that included console exclusive Beep Games’ Voodoo Vince: Remastered, console launch exclusives Thimbleweed… Continue reading ID@Xbox Celebrates the Release of More than 500 Games on Xbox One and Windows 10

Tune in Next Week for Your First Look at Call of Duty: WWII

Next week, we’ll get our first look at the much-anticipated return to a historic setting in Call of Duty: WWII. The worldwide reveal will occur on Wednesday, April 26 at 10am PDT on callofduty.com/WWII. Developed by Sledgehammer Games, whose previous Call of Duty credits include 2011’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, players will return to the past in what will no doubt be one of the most-played shooters of the year on Xbox One. We’ll have more details to share with you soon about Call of Duty: WWII after the official reveal… Continue reading Tune in Next Week for Your First Look at Call of Duty: WWII