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Release Notes - April 2018

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This post was written by Dan Fernandez, Principal Group Program Manager in the Cloud + AI Division.

Last week in Seattle, Washington was the //build/ conference (with hundreds of free session recordings now available), where we launched several new and improved products and services as well as new docs.microsoft.com experiences. Read below for details!

New Documentation launched at //build/

Below is just a sampling of documentation for new and improved products and services we released!

Xamarin

Windows

Go to this post for a full list of Windows updates

New API Reference

Azure Machine Learning

Azure CosmosDB

Azure Cognitive Services

Azure Services

Microsoft BotBuilder

Migrated Documentation

We want to make sure that all Microsoft technical documentation is available on docs.microsoft.com - to achieve that, we are working on migrating content over from MSDN to the new site. Here are some of the highlights of what migrated in the past month:

Contributor Highlights

We are excited to continue the trend we started last month of highlighting our community contributors. Whether they provide feedback, fix links, typos or write entire new articles or samples - all contributors are extremely important to making docs.microsoft.com what it is today. We appreciate all of them!

Sarah Dutkiewicz

Sarah Dutkiewicz

Sarah is a first-time contributor to docs and has helped us identify broken links and capitalization issues! Sarah can be found on GitHub, Twitter and her blog.

Petr Kulikov

Petr worked on a revision of our string interpolation quickstart, making sure that we use correct wording and a simplified approach that would make the tutorial more accessible! Petr can be found on GitHub.

Steve Gordon

Steve Gordon

Steve worked on a massive addition to our ASP.NET documentation, making sure that we have great samples for the HttpClientFactory documentation. Steve can be found on GitHub, Twitter and his very own website!

Adam Gross

Adam Gross

Adam just made his first contribution to our SCCM documentation, fixing some unexpected line endings, and fixing some general considerations, making our documentation more accurate! Adam is on GitHub, Twitter and his blog.

New Site Experiences

REST Experience Improvements

We're always on a mission to make API documentation easy to understand and try. Following this goal, we've added two brand new REST API experiences made possible by standardizing on Swagger for REST service descriptions.

  • The preview version of the REST API Browser--an easy way to search and discover REST APIs developed by Microsoft.
  • REST Try It--an interactive experience allowing you to try REST APIs directly in your favorite web browser.

REST Try It demo running on docs.microsoft.com

If you haven't read our official announcement yet, make sure to head over to our previous blog post, where we share the details about the new experiences and learn how you can get to know our REST APIs easier!

Hands-On Labs

We want to make learning as easy as possible for you, so this month we've launched the new Hands-On Labs experience on docs.microsoft.com, allowing you to try new technologies quickly and with step-by-step guidance. Try one of our labs today:

There are two ways in which you can take advantage of the new functionality:

Use your local computer

This way, you stay on docs.microsoft.com and just follow the instructions given to you:

Hands-On Labs in action

User a virtual machine

Have us provision an environment for you in your Azure subscription, in which you can experiment and learn:

Hands-On Labs in action

Footnotes

There are more things planned for this year, and we are excited for you to see them!

In the meantime, make sure to follow our blog and Twitter account for the latest updates. If you have any feature suggestions or ideas, don't forget to open a new issue on GitHub.

Dreaming of making the world better for developers? Join our team!