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Feeling unInspired? We can't help much with that, but there is a new .NET 5 preview and an Azure DevOps roadmap

One more to go until Satya Claus delivers the first RC, children!

Slipping under the (un)Inspire radar this week was an update to .NET 5 and a peek at where Microsoft plans to take Azure DevOps.

Never did no Arm

Microsoft emitted Preview 7 of .NET 5.0 yesterday and admitted that finishing Arm64 support was proving more time-consuming than it had hoped, a pain for those enduring Windows on Arm devices and dreaming of more native support. Single file apps were also taking a little longer to complete.

Richard Lander, program manager on the .NET team, assured that both were on track for the final preview release, Preview 8, ahead of a pair of "go-live"-licensed Release Candidates and the final version.

Other than some fiddling with the JSON API and exposing more Garbage Collection monitoring, Preview 7 is more about dealing with bugs and buffing the quality halo; the gang is "largely done with feature development," according to Lander.

Visual Studio 16.7 is needed to play with this latest cut of Microsoft's open-source framework, and it is also supported on Visual Studio for Mac. The C# extension is needed to use it with Visual Studio Code.

Azure DevOps spells out how 2020 will end

While some might ponder if an asteroid strike is the only on-brand way of ending 2020, the Azure DevOps team begged to differ with the publication of what users of Microsoft's DevOps tools had to look forward to in the latter part of the year.

First up is the general availability of Elastic self-hosted agent pools for Azure pipelines. Currently in public preview, the tech is aimed at customers that want hosted elasticity, but don't fancy handing everything off to Microsoft to take care of. In this instance, Azure Pipelines deals with the agents, according to specifications set by the customer, and the agents use the customer's own Azure subscription.

During Q3, the team plans to add scheduling to the scale-up operation and roll out elastic agents that will run on a Kubernetes cluster. It will also expose some extra background logs.

The team also wants to move Delivery Plans from being an extension into the core Azure Boards product. A minimum of 25 team backlogs will be supported on a single delivery plan and work items will span iteration boundaries. Going forward, a condensed view is on the way for large plans and a "dependency tracking experience" over work items with predecessor and successor link types is due.

Azure Artifacts will see some love as Upstream sources with Universal Packages finally make it from Preview to General Availability (by the end of September) and the revamped persona-based Test Plans page becomes the default experience for users. The new page will introduce new capabilities, including copying or cloning plans and test cases, importing test suites and, helpfully, view linked items. ®

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