Over 90 percent of companies surveyed in this report say they are using cloud in a meaningful way, including 42 percent reporting a cloud-first or cloud-only strategy. The cloud is now mainstream, but that doesnt mean it isnt still growing and changing. Now that weve entered 2017, its time to look forward. Big changes will continue to challenge and excite us as we move toward a more connected and efficient world. Whats on the horizon for hybrid cloud? Here are a few of the biggest trends emerging this year.

Hybrid cloud becomes the standard for enterprises

The industry is already trending this way, according to Gartner. In 2016, even major public cloud players changed strategy to embrace some of the benefits of a truly hybrid model. It is no longer a transitional state. Today, 91 percent of IT workers believe hybrid cloud will remain the approach of their organization five years from now. Thats because there is still a very real need to maintain data and applications on-premises, whether its for compliance or simply because its not worth it to move. Its also clear that there are massive benefits to extending certain workloads to the cloud. This dynamic isnt going anywhere. As businesses realize this, and the relative ease of getting started, hybrid becomes the clear option.

Rapid industry expansion continues

More vendors, more services, and more niche solutions will flood the industry than ever before, creating a muddy and inconsistent marketplace. The average organization already uses dozens of different solutions. Many feel those offerings, while they may be great at their specific tasks, dont successfully work with other solutions in play. This has created more work when the promise was efficiency. So while point solutions will continue to multiply, there very well could be a movement towards a larger, holistic and more consistent approach to hybrid cloud.

Greater focus on holistic management

As cloud deployments continue to get more complex, IT teams are often finding it difficult to keep control and visibility across multiple clouds and platforms. A solution that provides consistency is needed. In the ideal situation, you would be able to configure, monitor workloads, and surface security issues in a single interface. If you are in the process of going hybrid or thinking about it, this will quickly become one of the biggest items on your wish list.

While much of the industry is still tackling this important issue, Microsoft Operations Management Suite is already here. It offers a single, visual dashboard to help you streamline operations management and security across on-premises and cloud platforms. Learn more about Microsoft Operations Management Suite through this video overview.

Built-in security in cloud offerings

In the current environment, you have multiple different solutions for your datacenter and cloud services, and then you have security solutions to protect them. With each of them operating a slightly different way and using a slightly different language, it can introduce vulnerabilities.

The trend in 2017 will be an increasingly unified experience. You will always want and need extra layers of security, but you will begin to see more built directly into solutions. At Microsoft, its already happening.

Final thoughtsPrepare your business for hybrid

If you are in the process of evaluating a hybrid environment, a great place to start is Windows Server 2016. It takes all of the learnings from Microsoft Azure and builds it into your on-premises datacenter operating system. It provides added layers of security and new, streamlined deployments options. It also perfectly sets you up for a transition to hybrid cloud when you are ready.

Get The Ultimate Guide to Windows Server 2016 and see if its right for you.

We’re constantly pursuing the latest innovations to help your team create powerful diagrams. That pursuit continues with several recently released updates for Microsoft Visio Pro for Office 365, including robust database reverse engineering capabilities and new third-party content that meets various industry standards. With these updates, you can visualize your work in exciting and meaningful ways, boosting efficiencies and helping your team make informed decisions with confidence.

Visualize database structures from source data

Visio’s database reverse engineering tool allows you to create a visual representation of a database from its source data. Visio can connect to a number of database solutions, including SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle, to create a real-time illustration of that database, which updates in Visio as the underlying information changes. This kind of reverse engineering helps you drill into specific database elements, like tables and views, to better understand how they relate to one another—all without showing the actual source data.

Using an intuitive wizard, you can select the source database and specific elements to include in the visual, giving you full control over the resulting diagram. In addition to tables and views, you can also incorporate stored procedures and specific table objects, like primary keys, indexes and triggers. Best of all, the database diagram updates when the source information changes, helping ensure everyone has access to the latest data.

Quickly launch a reverse engineering template from the home screen.

Users across industries can benefit from this feature. Healthcare is a perfect example—hospitals store huge amounts of patient data in secure databases. Using reverse engineering in Visio, IT and business analysts can build diagrams that explain the relationship between patient data and healthcare history, including prescriptions, insurance, appointments and more.

You can download the Visio Pro for Office 365 add-in for database reverse engineering here.

Download templates for industry-specific diagrams

You can now access authorized third-party content directly from within Visio Pro for Office 365 for your specialized diagramming needs. Fifty templates and 100 sample diagrams have been developed with trusted partners, including several that meet industry-specific standards.

Business processes

Trisotech has developed a set of templates to help you create diagrams that conform to accepted business standards, including case management models using Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN), professional process models with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), and business decisions and rules using Decision Model and Notation (DMN). “The availability of these new CMMN, BPMN and DMN templates, along with various samples, will help promote the adoption of recognized standards by business users in Visio, and therefore help our customers standardize their process design,” says Denis Gagné, CEO of Trisotech.

Design the process for a customer quote request using templates from Trisotech.

Software development and engineering

Programmers and engineers can benefit from templates that meet industry-wide standards, such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.5 for designing software logic flow and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) compliance for creating electrical diagrams. Of these, we recently added three new templates for UML 2.5 to help system architects, software engineers and software developers create diagrams of software-based systems and business processes. The UML diagrams help streamline software development and maintenance. They accurately represent the software’s behavior and structure in a format both technical and non-technical project team members can understand. The three new templates enable you to create:

• Component diagrams showing components, ports and interfaces and the relationships among them.
• Deployment diagrams illustrating the deployment architecture of software artifacts to nodes.
• Communication diagrams highlighting the interactions between lifelines that use sequenced messages in a free-form arrangement.

Easily create UML-verified communication diagrams.

IT

Industry-proven NetZoom capabilities from Altima Technologies enable IT professionals to leverage data center templates and sample diagrams available directly from within Visio. “NetZoom Visio Stencils is the largest single-source collection of fully detailed, and regularly updated, manufacturer-specific device stencils for IT, A/V, security, network and data centers. The Visio Content Store integration brings the stencil library to the entire Visio community, worldwide,” says Jacquie Staggs, general manager of services at Altima Technologies, Inc.

Develop main and local branch diagrams using NetZoom stencils.

Education

Map shapes historically have been some of the most popular pieces of educational content in Visio. Teachers and students can now use maps from Visio Guy in the classroom to learn about the locations of states and territories and interact with them easily in the diagram.

Interact with maps from Visio Guy.

Transform the classroom with Visio

Visio Pro for Office 365 is bringing more than 20 templates and 20 sample diagrams that span core education, education planning, games, sports and hobbies. The core education templates for the classroom cover many subjects, including algebra, chemistry and physics. Great visual illustrations bring the subject matter to life for educators and students, enabling better comprehension and accelerated learning.

We are also excited to introduce education templates focused on extracurricular activities like music, sports and gaming. With these templates, you can easily create fun diagrams leveraging the smart shapes in Visio Pro for Office 365 to foster learning in these subjects.

We’ve only just begun incorporating third-party content into Visio. Subscribe to Visio Pro for Office 365 to stay up to date with the latest and greatest of Visio. Also, visit our UserVoice to submit suggestions for new products, and follow us on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for the latest Visio news.

For developers and partners, get in touch and submit your shapes, templates or solutions today!

—The Visio team

The post Visualize work in powerful new ways appeared first on Office Blogs.

Speedline Solutions, developer of restaurant point of sale and enterprise management software, uses Bing Maps to power their visual dispatch system Speedline LiveMaps.

Delivery performance is tightly coupled with a restaurant’s profit margin, and Speedline LiveMaps utilizes capabilities such as real-time traffic data, routing and visual analytics to help their clients increase operational efficiency and profitability.

“Bing Maps provides the best balance for our clients today in mapping quality, functionality, and cost,” says Jennifer Wiebe, Speedline Solutions Marketing Manager.

Below is Q&A with the Speedline Solutions team about how they are using mapping in their solution and why they have chosen Bing Maps:

How do you use Bing Maps in your solution?

Bing Maps for Enterprise provides live map and traffic data to our visual dispatch system for restaurants, SpeedLine LiveMaps. Pizza and delivery restaurant chains use SpeedLine point of sale software solutions to manage everything from employee scheduling and time tracking to inventory to enterprise reporting. But a key component of the system is delivery dispatch.

The live data from Bing Maps makes it possible for restaurant operators to define delivery zones in LiveMaps, track associated delivery fees by zone, and dispatch drivers effectively to speed up delivery times.

Operators save money by reimbursing mileage based on best route in current traffic, rather than depending on driver-reported odometer readings. They can dispatch orders more efficiently (and deliver them faster) with a map interface that makes it easy to group nearby deliveries.

An interactive dispatch station lets expeditors dispatch deliveries efficiently. A big TV screen on the wall provides a live-updating digital version of the traditional delivery area wall map for drivers, expeditors, and restaurant managers.

And restaurant guests are happier because with the data from Bing Maps, LiveMaps can provide accurate ETAs based not only on order volume in the kitchen, but on current traffic en route as each order is dispatched.

In addition to the route mapping capabilities, LiveMaps with Bing Maps gives restaurant operators heat map views of important data for visual analytics. Delivery slowdowns, driver performance, and local sales trends come to life with visual map analytics.

Delivery is expanding rapidly in the restaurant world, and tools that drive more profitable delivery are high value. That’s why more than three-quarters of new SpeedLine clients add LiveMaps with data provided by Bing Maps for Enterprise to control delivery efficiency in their restaurant operations.

What are some of the benefits you and your clients are seeing?

Our clients tell us their delivery operations are more efficient and profitable using SpeedLine LiveMaps with Bing Maps. Below are a few examples of comments we have received from our clients:

“We love that we can map the deliveries to group the orders together for faster delivery times."

“Staff can just look at the TV and see which deliveries are in the same direction to send them out."

“Tracking delivery locations on a simple and interactive map makes all the difference.”

• Overall, our restaurant operator clients are benefitting from:
• Improved dispatch efficiency for deliveries, with instant visibility into customer locations and delivery stats on a large screen in the kitchen. This allows drivers to handle more deliveries.
• Simplified training for delivery drivers and expeditors.
• Fewer late deliveries, with drivers able to handle deliveries more efficiently.
• Lower lifetime cost for delivery mapping: with no ongoing cost for map upgrades, restaurant operators save thousands of dollars over the life of the system.
• Increased revenue through consistent, accurate delivery zones and fees—including the option to draw—and redraw—delivery zones on a map, much more accurately reflecting real delivery costs than traditional zones defined by a set radius from the store.
• Easy auditing of reported driver mileage versus “best route” mileage for coaching and accountability—and for savings in mileage reimbursement to drivers.
• Reduced labor costs due to accurate tracking of on-road time for drivers—particularly important in operations where drivers are paid a lower tipped rate while on the road, and a higher rate in-store.

Why Bing Maps?

The first release of LiveMaps used an open source map data provider. While it worked well in some areas, data quality was poor in others. After evaluating the options on the market, the move to Bing Maps for Enterprise made sense for our client base.

LiveMaps with Bing Maps has been a highly successful new product release for SpeedLine. Bing Maps provides the best balance for our clients today in mapping quality, functionality, and cost.

For more information about the Bing Maps for Enterprise solutions, go to https://www.microsoft.com/maps.

• Maps APIs
• Mobile Asset Management
• Licensing Options

In episode 119 of the Office 365 Developer Podcast, Richard diZerega and Andrew Coates are joined by Kirk Evans to discuss how Office and SharePoint developers can expand their Azure skills.

Download the podcast.

Weekly updates

• Building a community and platform for Microsoft Teams by Office Developer
• Attach debugger from the task pane by Office Developer
• Build Remote Advisor solutions with Skype for Business by Office Developer
• Using SharePoint Framework (SPFx) with Angular 2 by Sahil Malik
• What’s Next for the SharePoint Framework? by Andrew Connell
• All you never wanted to know about Exchange Online, Azure AD and Office 365 group creation by Mikael Svenson
• Google Chrome Person by Google Chrome
• Rencore TechTalks EP3 by Rencore
• How to create SharePoint Enterprise Wiki pages with CSOM by Robin Guldenpfennig

Show notes

• Kirk Evans Blog
• Kirk Evans Twitter

Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS is available on iTunes or search for it at “Office 365 Developer Podcast” or add directly with the RSS feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast.

About Kirk Evans

Kirk is a Principal Program Manager for AzureCAT at Microsoft where he helps some of Microsoft’s largest customers deliver solutions in Azure. Kirk is a popular blogger and speaker at conferences and trainings around the world. Prior to his work in Auzre, Kirk was a SharePoint Premier Field Engineer and certified SharePoint Master. Kirk lives with in Dallas, Texas and is the biggest Georgia Bulldogs fan in the state. You can find more of Kirk’s publications on his blog and twitter.

About the hosts

Richard is a software engineer in Microsoft’s Developer Experience (DX) group, where he helps developers and software vendors maximize their use of Microsoft cloud services in Office 365 and Azure. Richard has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting Office-centric solutions, many that span Microsoft’s diverse technology portfolio. He is a passionate technology evangelist and a frequent speaker at worldwide conferences, trainings and events. Richard is highly active in the Office 365 community, popular blogger at aka.ms/richdizz and can be found on Twitter at @richdizz. Richard is born, raised and based in Dallas, TX, but works on a worldwide team based in Redmond. Richard is an avid builder of things (BoT), musician and lightning-fast runner.

A Civil Engineer by training and a software developer by profession, Andrew Coates has been a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft since early 2004, teaching, learning and sharing coding techniques. During that time, he’s focused on .NET development on the desktop, in the cloud, on the web, on mobile devices and most recently for Office. Andrew has a number of apps in various stores and generally has far too much fun doing his job to honestly be able to call it work. Andrew lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife and two almost-grown-up children.

Useful links

• Office 365 Developer Center
• Office 365 main blog
• dev.office.com blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• FlipBoard
• Slack channel

StackOverflow

• http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev
• http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev
• http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev

Yammer Office 365 Technical Network

• O365 Dev Podcast
• O365 Dev Apps Model
• O365 Dev Tools
• O365 Dev APIs
• O365 Dev Migration to App Model
• O365 Dev Links
• UserVoice

The post Episode 119 on expanding Azure skills with Kirk Evans—Office 365 Developer Podcast appeared first on Office Blogs.

The past year has come with significant updates to our SharePoint user experiences, such as modern team sites, document libraries and pages. These modern experiences feature simple and powerful web parts that are responsive, easy to use and mobile-ready. By customizing web parts on a page, team members can build tailored sites that feature the most relevant content and tools for their team. In addition to a rich set of web parts available within SharePoint, developers can also create completely new web parts. We’re modernizing our developer surface to keep pace with rapidly changing techniques and technologies used in the broader industry. SharePoint Framework lets developers take advantage of up-to-date practices, tools and libraries to help them build more engaging, mobile-ready web parts at a rapid pace.

Today, we’re proud to announce the general availability of SharePoint Framework—allowing developers and administrators to build and deploy parts that are used by Office 365 users in their production environments.

What is the SharePoint Framework?

Our partners, customers and independent developers have created innovative solutions using SharePoint’s page and web part model, which was largely implemented in .NET and, like many content and collaboration systems, was designed and matured in the server-rendered era. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a page and web part model that provides full support for client-side SharePoint development, easy integration with SharePoint data and support for open source tooling. With the SharePoint Framework, you can use modern web technologies and tools in your preferred development environment to build productive experiences and apps on SharePoint that are responsive and mobile-ready from day one!

For more details, be sure to check out our full blog post announcing the SharePoint Framework last May.

Product momentum

Since the SharePoint Framework Developer Preview was released in August, we’ve seen substantial community excitement and contributions. At Microsoft Ignite, SharePoint Framework was one of the top discussed items on Twitter among Microsoft technologies at the event. Community contributions to the evolving SharePoint Framework have been strong, with dozens of blog posts around tools and techniques from the community exploring various facets and techniques of building parts. Over 30 code samples are now live in our GitHub repository for code samples—many of which were built by the community. We also have a showcase of parts created by partners—many created a few short weeks after initial release.

The React-Multipage (Poll) web part—one of over 30 sample web parts developers can begin using.

During the developer preview period, the SharePoint Framework itself evolved quickly based on feedback. Over the span of three months, six distinct updates to the framework were made, including many features and fixes based on developer feedback from the community. Examples include improved initial start size and making facets of our build process more customizable and consistent.

What’s next?

The SharePoint Framework General Availability release tools are now available. Over the next week and beyond, the SharePoint Framework General Availability release will be rolled out to Office 365 tenancies. After this, we’ll continue to iterate on the SharePoint Framework, making fixes and improvements based on community feedback. Now that we’ve reached general availability, ensuring continued compatibility across versions will be our focus. We’re also working on the next legs of our product roadmap, including on-premises support and new development scenarios—so stay tuned for new SharePoint Framework extensions and capabilities.

How to get started

Developers can learn more about building web parts and custom solutions with the SharePoint Framework at the Office Dev Center, leveraging code samples from our GitHub repository, and by watching these related sessions from Microsoft Ignite:

• Introduction to the SharePoint Framework
• Learn about PnP and the new SharePoint Framework
• Build client-side web parts for Microsoft SharePoint
• See how we’re making SharePoint’s front end/UX modern, responsive and open

Administrators and site owners can now use and deploy SharePoint Framework web parts to their production environments. They can learn more on governing and deploying SharePoint Framework components in this article.

We—and a lot of #SPFx developers—can’t wait to see SharePoint Framework web parts in the hands of users!

The post SharePoint Framework reaches general availability—build and deploy engaging web parts today appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today we’re announcing the public preview of Lumagate’s Windows Server OS monitoring solution for Operations Management Suite (OMS). With OMS Insight & Analytics, you can monitor workloads across any Windows Server and Linux source by using out-of-the-box solutions and visualizations. Now with the Windows Server OS solution, you can see the health and performance of all your Windows Server workloads in a single dashboard view.

This new solution helps you:

• Easily identify and solve performance issues
• See rich Windows Server metrics in an easy-to-digest visual format
• Troubleshoot Windows Server applications
• Monitor Azure virtual machines, virtual machines in other clouds, or on-premises virtual machines

For more information and configuration options, see the Lumagate blog post, here: http://www.lumagate.com/news/monitoring-windows-os-with-lumagate-and-oms

The full documentation for the solution is here: https://github.com/Lumagate/WindowsServerOSSolutionDocs

You can find it in the Azure Marketplace under the Monitoring + Management section or by searching for “Windows Server OS Monitoring” or “Lumagate”.  Go grab it and deploy it in your Log Analytics workspace at no additional cost.

Vroom. Vroom.

You know what that sound is?

Rubber hitting the pavement and NASCAR ® in all its glory.

The DAYTONA 500 is on this weekend and Bing is a finely-tuned, heavy-horsepower search engine to help you stay in the race. Bing search results for NASCAR topics give you the lowdown on the teams, drivers, standings, schedule, latest news, and more for the first Sprint Cup Series.

Who do you have taking the race? We feel pretty good about who Bing predicts.

As NASCAR season progresses we’re looking to bring NASCAR fans and newcomers the latest information and predictions for all the races so make checking in with Bing part of your NASCAR routine.

– The Bing Team

NASCAR® and its marks are trademarks of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc

Previously, I blogged about how I created PowerShell GitHub Dashboard using Azure Functions to run a PowerShell script and didn’t use PowerShell Modules as I didn’t find an easy way to do it with Azure Functions.  Stefan informed me that you can easily do it using FTP!  Today, I’m publishing a guest blog post that Stefan authored that walks you through how to use PowerShell Modules in Azure Functions!

Steve Lee published a couple of blog posts about how he created a PowerShell Open Source Community Dashboard in PowerBi. In his last blog post he explained how he used PowerShell, Azure StorageTable, Azure Function and PowerBi to create the Dashboard.

In his solution, the Azure Function is executing a PowerShell script which calls the Github REST APIs and stores the result in an Azure StorageTable, finally queried by PowerBI.

Azure Functions and especially PowerShell Azure Functions are something I’m interested in for the last couple of weeks. I already wrote a blog post called “PowerShell Azure Functions lesson learned“. If you are just starting to explore PowerShell Azure Functions I would highly recommend to look.

In his blog post Steve mentions that within Azure Functions you only can run a PowerShell script and that you cannot use PowerShell modules within your PowerShell Azure Function. Well that’s not correct, there is a way to use PowerShell Modules within your PowerShell Azure Function.

In this blog post I’ll explain how you could start using PowerShell Modules in Azure Functions. I’ve to give credit to David O’Brien for introducing PowerShell Azure Functions to me.

Which PowerShell Modules are available with a PowerShell Azure Function?

First you need to create an Azure Function. On the Github page about Azure Functions you can find all the info to get started.

After creating your PowerShell Azure Function, you can start exploring the current available PowerShell Modules just like you would do on your local machine.

Let first start with retrieving the currently installed PowerShell Modules in Azure Functions by outputting the result to the log window in Azure Functions. We are also interested in the locations of the PowerShell Modules.

Copy above PowerShell code into the run.ps1 Azure Function and click on Run.

If we expand the log window we see that the following PowerShell Modules are installed.

I prefer to see the output result in my PowerShell ISE so I often use the following code in my Azure Function.

You can now call your Azure Function from the PowerShell ISE with the following PowerShell script.

This results in the following.

The next step is checking the Environment variable PSModulePath to find out where all the PowerShell Modules are stored.

Where can we store our own PowerShell Modules?

Well because Function apps are built on App Service, all the deployment options available to standard web apps are also available for function apps The App Service has a deployment option to configure deployment credentials.

Remark: When you configure a FTP/Deployment username and password this applies to all your Web Apps within your Microsoft Azure Account.

To upload PowerShell Modules via FTP we need to configure the Function App Settings.

Select Function app settings -> Go to App Service Settings to configure the Deployment credentials.

Next select in the App Service settings for the Azure Function Deployment Credentials.

Enter a FTP/deployment username and password.

Now you are ready to connect via a FTP client to your Azure Function (Web App).

You can find the FTP Hostname in your Azure Portal.

Connect via FTP Client to Azure Function Web App

Open your favorite FTP Client and connect to the FTP endpoint. I’m using Filezilla as my favorite FTP client.

Copy and past host, username from App Service overview page on the Azure Portal and click on Quickconnect.

After connecting via FTP we can create a new Module folder under wwwroot\HttpTriggerPowerShellDemo (or your name of your Azure Function). Create a new directory called Modules.

After the creation of the Modules directory we can upload our PowerShell Module(s) to this remote directory. Make sure you have first downloaded your module to your local system. We are going to upload my favorite PowerShell Module Wunderlist.

Drag and drop the local Wunderlist module to the remote Modules folder.

You have now uploaded the Wunderlist module to your Azure Function.

How can we start using this module in our Azure Function?

First we can check if we can load the module and return the help from one of the Functions in the Module.

Use the following code in your Azure Function:

Result:

To get my Wunderlist Module working you need to also configure a ClientId and AccessToken. For more information you can check the following blog post Using Wunderlist Module in Azure Automation–Part 2. Long story short, you need to store the ClientID and AccessToken as Environment variables using the Web App Settings.

Go to Function App Settings and click on Configure app settings.

Add ClientID and AccessToken variables in the Application settings. Don’t forget to Save the new settings.

We can now use these Environment variables in our Azure Function without any extra configuration needed.

As a final test, we are going to test if we can create a new Wunderlist Task from our Azure Function.

By using a HTTP Post method with a body value as input for our Function we can do some more advanced Azure Function activities.

Use the following code in your Azure Function:

Hope you have now learned how to use your “own” PowerShell modules within your PowerShell Azure Functions.

Stefan Stranger
Secure Infrastructure Consultant
Microsoft

After feedback on the VSSetup PowerShell module to query Visual Studio 2017 and related products, I’m pleased to say that a native, single-file executable is available on GitHub: vswhere. The VSSetup PowerShell module is also available on GitHub and provides a number of benefits for PowerShell scripts, but build tools and CMake and deployment scripts wanted a simple executable they could redistribute without spawning PowerShell.

You can enumerate instances with optional demands on which products, workloads, and components; and on which versions you require. Results can be printed in a variety of formats – currently colon-delimited plain text and JSON. If the query API isn’t registered, rather than erring no instances are assumed to be installed and results are empty, e.g. an empty array for JSON.

Example

In a batch build script you could, for example, find MSBuild 15.0 by finding the latest, newest instance with MSBuild installed.

@echo off

set pre=Microsoft.VisualStudio.Product.
set ids=%pre%Community %pre%Professional %pre%Enterprise %pre%BuildTools

for /f "usebackq tokens=1* delims=: " %%i in (`vswhere -latest -products %ids% -requires Microsoft.Component.MSBuild -version [15.0,16.0)`) do (
  if /i "%%i"=="installationPath" set InstallDir=%%j
)

if exist "%InstallDir%\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe" (
  "%InstallDir%\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe" %*
)

You can find more examples in our wiki.

Usage

Current usage follows.

Visual Studio Locator, version 1.0.14-beta
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Usage: vswhere.exe [options]

Options:
  -all           Finds all instances regardless if they are complete.
  -products arg  One or more products to find. Defaults to Community, Professional, and Enterprise.
  -requires arg  One or more workloads or components required when finding instances.
  -version arg   A version range for instances to find. Example: [15.0,16.0) will find versions 15.*.
  -latest        Return only the newest version and last installed.
  -format arg    Return information about instances found in a format described below.
  -nologo        Do not show logo information. Some formats noted below will not show a logo anyway.
  -?, -h, -help  Display this help message.

Formats:
  json           Colon-delimited properties in separate blocks for each instance (default).
  text           An array of JSON objects for each instance (no logo).

Download the latest from our release page and give us feedback on what common tasks you would like supported. Please also consider contributing examples to the wiki.

MSTest V2 has crossed 100K downloads. It has been but just a few months since we shipped it on NuGet. Over this course of time, you have reported issues and given us feedback, and we have tried to address them as fast as we can, refreshing the bits at a feverish pace. We are now at a stage where, as of v1.1.11 MSTest V2 has shed the pre-release tag.
Thank you for your support.

The following posts detail the MSTest V2 evolution until now:
Announcing MSTest Framework support for .NET Core RC2 / ASP.NET Core RC2
Taking the MSTest Framework forward with “MSTest V2”
Announcing MSTest V2 Framework support for .NET Core 1.0 RTM

I will summarize it again:
MSTest V2 sets the direction for how we intend to evolve the MSTest framework. The evolution will be informed by your feedback. Here are a few you told us about that we have addressed:
(1) Uniform app-platform support – this is a converged implementation that offers uniform app-platform support across desktop, Store, and UWP, ASP.NET Core 1.0, and .NET Core 1.0.
(2) Uniform DataRow support, for all MSTest based test projects.
(3) Ability to place the TestCategory attribute at the level of a class or assembly.
(4) Uniform, single end-user extensibility mechanism.
(5) Delivered as a NuGet package.
(6) Supported in the Create Unit Tests wizard (Visual Studio 2017 Preview 4 onwards)
(7) Supported in the Create IntelliTest wizard (Visual Studio 2017 Preview 4 onwards)
(8) Supported in the relevant in-box unit test project templates (Visual Studio 2017 Preview 4 onwards)
(9) Over the past several refreshes of the bits on NuGet, we also havefixedseveralissuesyoureported (these links call out a few, but there are many more we fixed).

So, what is ahead?
Thank you for asking. We are working on your ask here: make MSTest framework open source.
We want to unlock collaborative innovation! We are getting ready to go open source.
You would have already seen that mentioned in the VSTest OSS announcement post, and in our VSTS features timeline.

In the meantime, keep your feedback coming. We are listening.

Summary: Microsoft Operations Management Suite Network Performance Monitor (NPM) has moved from preview mode to generally available status.

Hi folks, Abhave Sharma from the OMS team here. A few months ago we announced NPM in public preview. Since then, we’ve seen lots of users monitor their networks over the past few months and, working with customers, we’ve gathered a lot of great feedback. If you’ve been paying close attention over the past few weeks, you’ve seen a bunch of new additions to NPM. While we’re not done working to make NPM best in class, we’re ready and eager for everyone to get their hands on it.

Here’s a video that shows the GA announcement of Linux Management with Operations Management Suite:

What’s changed since you first released the public preview?

A lot! In addition to a host of bug fixes, here are some of the new improvements:

ICMP-based tests: NPM now offers you a choice between Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and TCP protocols to execute synthetic transactions that calculate network performance metrics, such as packet loss and link latency. This helps in cases where ICMP probing is needed. First, some intermediate nodes do not respond to TCP probes, for example, typically network devices. We can infer their existence based on the hop count of subsequent probes. Second, aggressive firewall configurations might be more restrictive to TCP-based probes than to diagnostic ICMP measurements, and firewall configurations might block the TCP reset packets that are needed to discover that probes have reached their destinations. Both limitations can also apply in the inverse, where ICMP probes are passively discarded by intermediate nodes or firewalls, where TCP probes would otherwise be permitted. This post provides guidance on selection of the right protocol for your environment.

Network state recorder: NPM now lets you view the state of the network at any point in the past. To investigate a network connectivity incident that a user might have encountered last Friday night, select the date and time, and NPM returns the connectivity, loss, and latency status at that instant. You can also choose to enable or disable auto-refresh of any page while viewing the state. A bar, which is at the top of the page, shows the time for which the state snapshot is being displayed.

Updated topology map: We have enhanced the interactive topology map by improving its look and feel, enabling the filtering of paths by health status (for example, paths with a high loss), and adding advanced search capabilities. We’ve also added mechanisms to simplify viewing network topologies. You can use the slider control to hide the intermediate hops, which is especially useful when the details of the path through the core of the Internet aren’t of much concern to you.

Improved alert management: NPM now takes advantage of the alert management capabilities in OMS. Users can now get email-based alerts, in addition to the existing alerts within NPM.  Alerts can also be used to trigger remedial actions via runbooks or integrate with existing service management solutions by using webhooks. You can directly integrate your monitoring rules with OMS Alert Management by simply clicking Create Alert for the required monitoring rule. An alert rule will automatically be created. The cool thing is that the search query and other required parameters are automatically filled in. You can click Manage Alert to edit the alert settings.

Windows desktop support: NPM agents can now run on Windows desktops/client operating systems (Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, and Windows 7), in addition to the previously supported Windows Server operating systems.

Search: Improvements in search enable quicker drill-down to the specific network and subnets that may be faulty, thereby enabling faster identification and remediation.

Wow, that’s a lot! Does this mean you’re done working on NPM?

Not at all! Network monitoring is a fundamental piece of IT operations, which means we’re constantly going to be improving the capabilities of NPM. Particularly, over the next few months, you’ll see us move aggressively to introduce a bunch of capabilities to provide a more cohesive network monitoring story.

I would like to try this immediately!

You can find detailed instructions about how to get started with Network Performance Monitor and monitor Azure, AWS, and on-premises networks using NPM.

Get a free Microsoft Operations Management Suite (#MSOMS) subscription so that you can start using NPM. You can also get a free subscription for Microsoft Azure. I invite you to follow the Microsoft IT Management Twitter and the Microsoft OMS Facebook site. You can also try a fully hydrated demo environment.

How can I give you guys feedback?

There are a few different routes to give feedback:

• UserVoice: Post ideas for new OMS Network Performance Monitor features to work on. Visit the OMS UserVoice page.
• Join our cohort: We’re always interested in having new customers join our cohorts to get early access to new features and help us improve NPM going forward. If you are interested in joining our cohorts, simply fill out this quick survey.

Abhave Sharma
Program Manager
Microsoft Operations Management Team

The System Center Management Pack for TFS 2017 is now available.

I apologize this took longer than usual.  It will, of course, also work with the imminent TFS 2017 Update 1 release.

Please let us know if you have any feedback.

Brian