Welcome to the desert that is  the news of the post-Build world.   If you saw a last week's show, David covered   all the Azure news that happened at Build. So this  week we are left with not much, really. However,   I have been to the spare clouds bin and  found some goodies for you. I'm Lars Klint,   you're watching Azure This Week. And first up is  a special little dish I cooked up just for you.   I'm a developer at heart, and I  love building things in the cloud.  

I am only as effective and productive  as the tools I use though. Therefore,   in absence of any significant Azure news,  I have put together my top five developer   tools for Azure. Now, number five is the Azure  Storage Explorer. Storage on Azure is cheap,   secure, redundant, and an integral part of  most of Azure solutions in some way. However,   managing the files, blobs and queues through the  Portal, CLI, PowerShell, or APIs is difficult at   times, downright frustrating most of the time. The  Azure storage Explorer is a free tool that...   The Azure Storage Explorer is a free tool that you  install, and then it works like Windows Explorer   for all your Azure storage. So keep sane,  use it. Number four. Number four is Postman,  

which is not exclusively used for Azure, but  for any web endpoint that you want to test.   It is often used for testing APIs, which is  also why it's so good with Azure. By manually   building the request for an API endpoint, you can  test authentication, parameters, return values,   and much more. When building a solution that uses  Azure APIs, you need to test them all the time,   whether those are native Azure APIs or  your own built on top. Postman makes this   process so much easier and more manageable. Now, have you used Cosmos DB yet? If you have,  

then you might be aware of a few pitfalls.  One is managing the databases, collections   and items in your instance. Another could be  getting any sense of how much it's going to cost   to run your solution. Now, both can be answered  to some extent by using my number three,   the Cosmos DB Emulator. A local running instance  on your machine that doesn't cost anything.   However, it will indicate cost for running your  collections on Cosmos DB. And that's neat.  

Okay. My second favorite, number two,  dev tool on Azure is Application Insights   which provides performance management  and live monitoring of your application.   Now it will automatically detect performance  anomalies. It'll help you diagnose issues,   and let you dive really deep into the bowels of  the platform, if you need to. It's extensible,   integrates with a bunch of tools, gives  you telemetry, and just makes the testing   and debugging part of your project so  much more enjoyable. Yes, it will.  

Okay. It might not be a surprise, but might number  one is Visual Studio Code. Yep. Without a doubt,   the number one developer IDE for tons of projects.  VS Code is free, lightweight, feature rich,   and crazy extensible. So give it a go. Every month A Cloud Guru has a number of   totally free courses, which change over time. This  month is Azure month. So we have a bunch of Azure   courses free for you, including: Introduction  to Governance and Compliance on Azure,   Azure Active Directory Deep Dive,  Introduction to Azure Resource Manager,   Intro to serverless on Azure, and Azure Storage  Deep Dive. Yeah, like we talked about before.  

A free account is genuinely free as well. No  credit card needed, just content delivered.   All right. Let's move on to the  trickle of this week's Azure news.   Special drawer here. All right.  Let's see what we got. Hmm.   Azure ExpressRoute IPv6 Support  for Global Reach. Hmm, no. Oh,   updates for resource configuration changes.  It's a bit boring. Oh, here's a good one. Uh,  

yeah. Right. If you use Azure Virtual Desktop  to give users access to enterprise data   and applications from, well, pretty much  anywhere, setting up the infrastructure   for this can be tricky. Especially when it  comes to making sure everything is secure.   That's why Microsoft has produced a bunch  of virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI,   security best practices to help you out. The 17  page ebook includes areas such as conditional   access, multifactor authentication, audit logs,  endpoint security, and application restrictions.   Of course, Microsoft wants you to buy into their  virtual desktop world, but tools and documentation   like this does mean they help you out  where possible to make that transition   smoother. And if you do use VDI let me know,  in the comments, if this is of use to you.  

That's the news for this week. There really  wasn't anything a... I can't speak now.   That is the news for this week. There really  wasn't anything interesting announced as Build,   well, took care of that. So I hope  you could use my top five dev tools   in any case. Let me know which you would have  put on your top five as well. So next week, the   show is having a bit of a break as a bunch of us  gather for a very special event in San Francisco.  

But much more about that on both the ACG and  Pluralsight channels in the coming weeks.   We'll see you in the cloud. Keep  being awesome Cloud Gurus.