Episode 179 – Azure Static Web Apps != Azure Static Websites

- [Ben] Welcome to Episode 179 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on May 22 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, despite focusing on IT pros, Ben and Scott talk Build 2020 News, including Azure Static Web Apps, Microsoft List improvements to Teams and more.

- [Ben] Now we're supposed to come up with some intro, we've ruined it.

- [Scott] So...

- [Ben] So build was this week.

- [Scott] Build was this week. There was some fun stuff at Build.

- [Ben] What do you say about them apples? How about them List? Or how about them Static Websites and Azure App Services.

- [Scott] So those are actually pretty cool.

- [Ben] They are spun one up the other day.

- [Scott] Yeah?

- [Ben] There were some, cool Build stuff. So we figured, why not talk about cool Build stuff? Because that's what all the cool kids are doing right now, right?

- [Scott] There you go. Well, that's it. Why be trend setters when you can be trend followers?

- [Ben] Exactly. It's way more easier to be followers. It's a lot less work.

- [Scott] It is less work to be a follower. It's hard to gain followers.

- [Ben] Although we've managed to do a decent job I think!

- [Scott] There's always next week.

- [Ben] There is always next week. I'm sure we could bomb it pretty quick. Kinda like that thing with your grades, right? You fail one test and your grade like drops in half and then it takes forever to recover. I bet you could do the same thing with followers.

- [Scott] You could. Although I think grades are a little bit easier right now. I don't know how you're all handling it with homeschooling? But it seems like from what I've seen with my kids, and certainly my wife's school, they're kinda at the point where, I mean it's end of the year anyway. So, all grades were due last week that kinda thing. But it's really hit just that point where everybody has been doing this remote thing for a while, and you could have potentially had, like a month and a half to two months of a child that never showed up online, but they still turned in their work and did things, right? They never showed up to any of the online meetings or whatever it was. So what do you do like with those kids? They do the work, but was the meeting the participation? What does that look like? And how does that come through for grades? And it's a very interesting thing. So some of it's like, "They turned in the work. "Here's an A." Right.

- [Scott] "At least they opened it up, that's a B. "They didn't look at it, they didn't turn it in. "Well, still kinda put 'em through, so that's a C."

- [Ben] Yeah. So we've been talking to a bunch of our friends, 'cause we have friends in the neighborhood, friends from church, all of that, that their kids go to school and they're like, "I could never home-school." And, frankly, we don't envy them. Like the situation, you guys found yourselves in, is way more challenging than what we were in. Because my wife's been working with my kids all year, she knows exactly where they are, she has it all planned out, it doesn't really change anything. She's just continuing to work with them, and she knew exactly what place they all were and what they had to do to finish up and she can make sure there's the participation there 'cause she also wasn't working. Her work was her four kids and homeschooling, where you guys it's like, well we both still have to work, We have to try to help our kids keep learning, but yet we have absolutely no idea what our kids were necessarily doing in school or what the participation looked like. And you guys just kinda got thrown into the middle of it. That is like 100 times harder.

- [Scott] Yeah, but I think--

- [Ben] I will stick to my opinion.

- [Scott] Yeah, but I think compared to some households, like at least ours, we're pretty lucky. My wife's a teacher and she teaches grade school. So she's pretty close to the work that my kids are doing, 'cause I have one in grade school and one in middle school. Even for the middle schooler, 'cause my wife used to teach Middle School, she's got a lot of that kind of in her back pocket as well. So I've kind of made it through unscathed.

- [Ben] I'm sure with your wife being a teacher, my wife and I got a good kick out of this. Again, not even with our kids in school, the CDC's recommendations for when kids go back to school this fall?

- [Scott] No, what are their recommendations?

- [Ben] Talk about something else I'm gonna have to find--

- [Scott] Oh, are you talking about that Venn diagram? The 123?

- [Ben] No, like they literally CDC published a List of recommendations for going back to school. And it was absolutely absurd. Like you look through it and you're like, obviously the people that wrote this for the CDC have never been in a school before. It was like, no, I mean, it had things on there from their recommendations like, "No eating in the cafeteria. "Everybody eats lunch at their own desk. "All the hallways have to be one way hallways. "All the desks in the classrooms have to be at least "six feet apart." It was, here it is. I found it. I delayed enough while I was talking.

- [Scott] "Considerations For Schools."

- [Ben] Oh, this doesn't actually have the List though. I am going down that link rabbit trail of one link to the next link, but it stays in the same site, never actually gets you to the source. But yes, it is... Like you read through it and you're like, "Maybe you could get high schoolers to follow that?" But, like Grade school, Elementary school, I don't see how you can ever manage to do that in a school.

- [Scott] I think they'll have to come up with some interesting, like workarounds. And ultimately, they're gonna have to do things that businesses are doing too. Potentially considers staggered days, so, maybe, as child in a class where you might have gone five days a week, you might only go two days a week to that class in person, because they're staggering through the rest of the school or whatever it happens to be. And certainly a lot of that stuff will change with lunchtimes, where you do your work, how much you're at your desk versus just randomly roaming the halls and things like that. And then the consideration becomes, certainly age and things like that. You're probably not gonna get a, two year old to wear a mask all day. But once you're into some of those grade schoolers, and certainly up from there, it's not so much about, "Can they do it?" It's like, you're just gonna have to do it.

- [Ben] Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting. Maybe they can use Microsoft Lists to track everything that is going on.

- [Scott] Maybe they could use--

- [Ben] That was a terrible segue. How was that for a horrible segue?

- [Scott] Maybe they could use Microsoft. What is Microsoft List?

- [Ben] What is Microsoft List? So apparently, I thought Microsoft Lists were just an improvement on SharePoint Lists. You dropped a bombshell on me this morning, saying, "I watched a 20 minute YouTube video, "that is the source of all things truth, "and Microsoft Lists or not SharePoint Lists.

- [Scott] Well, that's not what I said. I said, "So Microsoft Lists are really just SharePoint Lists "when it's not telling anybody."

- [Ben] Oh, is that what it was?

- [Scott] That's what I said.

- [Ben] I misheard. I need more coffee.

- [Scott] Yeah, and there was pre-coffee, so.

- [Ben] That was pre-coffee? Okay. That makes sense, I get that. That yes, they're SharePoint Lists.

- [Scott] Except I think they announced it in a very confusing way, 'cause they don't really talk it. They talk about how it's the evolution of SharePoint Lists, but at no point do they actually say it's SharePoint on the back end, but then you start to go and look at the way things are created and you go, "Huh, that's interesting." Like, I got to create a new List and it asked me to pick a site to put that List in. And then all of a sudden, it's, "Hey, let's go use that List in SharePoint "or use it in Microsoft Teams, "and we're back to just a List," Which is cool. I've always thought Lists were very powerful things. And certainly it's better to have more functionality and more UI and things like that. I was a little confused when I saw an article on The Verge, about Microsoft Lists and it talks about how, "Hey, this is this great new thing." But it's not SharePoint anymore. And it's more like Airtable and I was like, "Hold on, dial it back."

- [Ben] Okay.

- [Scott] You read what the marketing folks gave you.

- [Ben] Right. I was gonna say, so the first problem here was you went to The Verge and do you read. Those two things, I went to the Microsoft website, and I looked at pictures. And I didn't get any of that because I looked at pictures. There was was like, "Oh, it's just new SharePoint Lists." So I missed all the dramatization around it, because I was just looking at pictures and like you said when you look at it, and when you're looking at the pictures and diving into it, it like to me I just kind of was like, "Oh, it's a SharePoint Lists." Because it has all the same buttons, it has all the same... It does have an updated look and feel and it has some new functionality. But if you've been doing SharePoint Lists for long enough, it's a SharePoint List With new lipstick on it.

- [Scott] Interesting, now that you've got Lists directly integrated into Teams, now Teams is not only your hub for chats and tasks and kinda yammer all the things they've been putting in there, now, it's also your hub for SharePoint Lists. So it's still working its way towards becoming the one interface for Office 365, Microsoft 365, whatever 365 workloads.

- [Ben] Yeah. So one thing that surprised me about this though, and we talked about it a little bit was I did, truth be told, I did go read some of the marchitecture, I went and looked at some of the tweets that people were saying, was how much it seemed to be inferring, and sometimes directly saying that this is a great place to track your tasks, kind of like to do lists Scott.

- [Scott] Just a little bit, right?

- [Ben] And maybe it's because nobody's using Planner and To Do, that they thought maybe they could do this, but it just further confused that whole aspect of everything for me. Between, what are they actually doing? And List you could always use to track tasks, there used to be a task list that you could use. I had clients that used it, and I thought they were trying to shy away from that and start like really improving the whole task management thing between OneNote and Planner and outlook and Project and To Do, and I know I'm missing at least one other place to track a task. And then they just kinda seemed to reintroduce this Microsoft List as, "Hey, a great place to track where you get things done. "We have rules, we have this new look and feel." I even saw some tweets from various people at Microsoft talking about how they use these new Lists to track everything their team is working on. And it just seemed to reconfuse the whole task thing. And then on top of all this, another announcement with this is we are now getting another app, we are getting a Lists app? So now you have a SharePoint app for pages, is essentially the only thing that's gonna be left in the SharePoint app, a Lists app for your Lists, in OneDrive for your files, all stored in SharePoint.

- [Scott] Yeah. Well, you're not supposed to notice SharePoint's there. It's a vehicle to deliver stuff to you. It's to necessary evil.

- [Ben] Yeah. But it is, I will say I like the look of it. And I'm glad to see, again, because I just looked at the pictures. That as you scroll down, one of the Lists does give you, it looks like now a modern calendar view, which I know modern SharePoint calendars were things people have been asking for. That being said, I kept telling them to go use Groups and Exchange Calendars and Shared Calendars because that seemed to be the way we were going with everything, but I might have to eat my words.

- [Scott] Yep.

- [Ben] And say, "SharePoint Calendars are getting a modern look and feel."

- [Scott] What's oldest, well, SharePoint Lists? Microsoft Lists. Not SharePoint List not SharePoint calendars, Microsoft Lists are getting a modern look and feel, which can then be surfaced inside of Teams, the mobile app and SharePoint.

- [Ben] Scott, I'm a SharePoint guy. You will never take the List out of SharePoint for me. They will always be SharePoint Lists.

- [Scott] I know. It's actually pretty cool, except some of the things. So just the Calendar, it's it's all based on a template, and they've got a bunch of nifty templates out there. But they built the whole, the List formatting rules. So all that stuff that you had to do in JSON to say, "If this column is yes, then make the whole row green. "If it's no make it red." Things like that. They built that whole rules engine directly into Lists. So now you can in a nice graphical UI, just go ahead and have a rule that says something like, "When a new item is created, go ahead and enter this name "automatically and then color this row in this way "and make this happen." They've done all that they have rules for sending status updates, based on some of this same conditions that you would use for List formatting, which is all really cool. And it's, yeah, it'll be nice when it comes out this Summer.

- [Ben] Yeah, it looks like they got a four main views. Now they have a list view, which is your typical one, a grid view, I don't know exactly what the grid view will look like. And then they have a gallery view and a calendar view. So your Calendar, your Lists are gonna be what you're used to. Gallery is similar to what used to get with like image thumbnails only, I almost say to me it looks more Instagrammy. It has a little bit more than just thumbnails where it kinda has like a picture at the top and then you can put columns underneath it. So the example they have is like a list of products, they have the product image and then some details about it; serial number, manufacturer, asset type, product. So it gives you a little bit of a gallery view, but you still have some of that enhanced metadata. It still does some of those, the formatting. Like you said, "Make it this color, if the value equals this. "Make it this color if it equals that." We want some of these, it looks like they've made some of 'em bold, some of 'em normal. So it gives you a little bit more flexibility and kinda that thumbnail view that we used to see with images.

- [Scott] Yes. Yeah, it's got some stuff going on. If you wanna see it in action, and not just in pictures, there is a great video on YouTube, from one of the program managers on the List team. It's about 17, 18 minutes long, but it goes through the entire flow. You get to see her walk through that motion of going into Teams, here's a List, creating one of those asset lists creating a new event itinerary List. So you do get to see some of those calendar views and things like that actually in movement. Which is pretty cool.

- [Ben] Yeah. And it looks like they're having a new Lists' home on the web. I'll have to go watch this YouTube video too, 'cause I haven't actually watched that yet. And how the navigation through all of these works. Especially given like you said that their insights. And the one thing I have not seen, for everybody that's going to ask, I don't think this changes your 5000 item view at all, because it's still just SharePoint Lists under the covers. And I did not see anything about them re-architecting the way the SQL queries work for these Lists to work around the 5000 view limit. Not 5000 view, 5000 items returned in a query limit, which is where your 5000 item list limit came from.

- [Scott] Yeah. So I haven't seen anything about limits that are in there. I also haven't seen anything about tying lists together and being able to do some of that referential stuff where you might go look up an item in another list that's out there. Although I imagined--

- [Ben] Oh, like the old lookup columns.

- [Scott] Yeah, but I imagine if it is just, a list, is a list, is a list, no matter where it's surfaced or what app it's surfaced in, then some of those things probably still exist as well.

- [Ben] Right, 'cause it really does, it's kinda what you said, it looks like they took a SharePoint List and they just re-skinned it. They took the JSON, some of the JSON stuff where a lot of these things you could already do in a List, it just took writing JSON. It looks like they took a lot of that and just modernized the whole List UI experience another level.

- [Scott] Yeah, which don't get me wrong, there's some stuff that certainly needed it.

- [Ben] Yes. Oh, yeah, I love the update. As much as we might make fun of some of it, I think it really is a good update. And there's lots of good stuff coming with the Lists, and I can't wait for them to hit my tenant so I can see what I can do. As IT professionals in the Cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or departments, start asking about a specific project or Teams Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information. Sifting through cluttered CSVs and a complex mess of metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend, ShareGate Overcast, lets you group resources into meaningful cost hubs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure. Whether it's by product, business unit, team, or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs. And it's only available in ShareGate Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/itpro So.

- [Scott] So.

- [Ben] Other announcements. I referenced one of them that I've already played with. Did you have any other ones? Or do you wanna talk about that one? The Static sites.

- [Scott] Let's talk about Static Web apps. That's probably, one that's relevant to most people, and especially folks who are living maybe in Azure land or SharePoint land, because you might be developing like a SPA or something for SharePoint, and now it could have a different place to live.

- [Ben] I must have been stuck in my head for a long time, 'cause when you set a SPA, I went like to go sitting on a beach somewhere with a drink and I've been trapped in my house for too long.

- [Scott] And a little Tiki umbrella in there and--

- [Ben] I need my spa days Scott.

- [Scott] It's all good.

- [Ben] But yes. So static sites in stature app service.

- [Scott] Hold on, yeah. These are Azure Static Web Apps.

- [Ben] Yes.

- [Scott] Not static sites. Static sites are something different.

- [Ben] Well, but isn't technically Hugo marketed as a static site?

- [Scott] Well, Hugo's an engine for building static sites.

- [Ben] For building static site.

- [Scott] But which you can host in, like you get at IO, or like Ghost or things like that, right?

- [Ben] True, so this isn't a static site, this is a place to host your static site?

- [Scott] Yes, but, I just wanna be careful that we make the distinction because there's static web apps, which is the new announcement. And that's the new preview service that exists out there. And there is also stills static website hosting, which is built directly into Azure Storage.

- [Ben] Yes.

- [Scott] That's an offering that still exists. So when you say static website, I think Azure Storage, but really what you're talking about is static web apps, which is the new thing.

- [Ben] Right. And you can host the same site in both places, if you so desire.

- [Scott] It depends.

- [Ben] Or somethings you can, okay, so some things you can host in both places.

- [Scott] Yes. So if you truly have a static site, then you're good, you're fine, you're ready to go. But if you have any type of Have dependency on say, back end code, so you're doing something server side, or you've got functions, integrations or things like that, then you're gonna want to potentially look at static web apps instead. And I think another driver to static web apps over something like Storage is, when I'm in Storage for me to create a static site in the Storage, I have to go ahead and upload those files myself. There's no concept today of web hooks or direct integration to like a source code repository. So when I check in my code, automatically builds and deploy for me, but static web apps is going to have that engine and does have that engine inside of it.

- [Ben] Right. Well and some of its built in. 'Cause I do know people that have done a whole CICD process using like GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps to automatically build like a Hugo's site in Azure Storage to do it that way.

- [Scott] Yes, but that's different--

- [Ben] It's possible, but it's not built in.

- [Scott] Right. That's different too, because they're using, in that case, they're the ones who are going over to their kinda their mechanism where they're storing that source code, and they're building everything out on that end. Versus just having a web hook over in web apps, which can pick that up for you through the deployment engine, and get it to where it needs to be. So they've done some interesting things with static web apps where you can have things like, one of the really cool things I saw is you can have a PR, and that PR, say you store all your code in GitHub, well, when a new PR comes in that's targeted against your master branch or whatever branch you wanna be against, you can actually have that PR staged directly into a deployment slot. So they'll go ahead and run up a full runtime environment, based on the code for that PR, and you can check it out in a live website. And then once you're ready to go and accept that PR, you can either do the swap, or have it go through the whole engine and build and deploy into prod. So a lot of the stuff that you had to figure out in the past with like, multiple build agents, multiple tasks, multiple steps, which, if you're using GitHub Actions, awesome actions are super powerful. But you go and you look at like the actions marketplace, and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of actions. And sometimes you look at an action, you're like, "I wanna deploy a website to Azure Web Apps." There's gonna be 50 different actions out there that let you do that. And some are from GitHub, some are from Microsoft, and the rest are community ones. And you don't know which one's the right one to use, 'cause they all have varying pieces of functionality. So to have it built directly into the engine is kinda nice.

- [Ben] And it's goofy 'cause it's, I would say it's sort of built into the engine. So I actually went and played with us for about an hour yesterday. 'Cause I've been playing with Hugo and I did do all of this in an hour. Which means it really is simple because, as an app developer, I did it in an hour. So I had a Hugo site that I was playing with in static websites, I was like, "I gotta go try this out in a new app service offering." And what it actually does is if you go... Like I went and took my To Go site and took the code and kinda manipulate it and played with it, it actually still does it all with Azure Actions, the differences, the app service builds the Azure Actions file for you.

- [Scott] You're talking about GitHub Actions.

- [Ben] GitHub actions, sorry, yes. It builds the GitHub Actions file for you. So you still just end up with a source code repository with your GitHub Actions in it, and then you can go in and manipulate those actions if you want to, but I didn't have to build it, the service built out my GitHub Actions for me.

- [Scott] Nor do you, like if you don't know GitHub Actions yet, that's a whole nother world that you would have to learn about. So to have it all built into the service again, like it's a super nicety, to you have that all there. And then, for better or worse, you are in first party actions, which like I said that GitHub Action marketplace is very wide and very broad. And you never know what you're gonna get when you pick a particular task.

- [Ben] Yes. And there are some articles out there. So I had to, for instance, I was doing Hugo. You do have to do some manipulation, of your GitHub Actions file to get it to work with Hugo. But Hugo is not the only one. So this also supports, like they're trying to use this too. 'Cause when you go build it, you can choose like an Angular app, or you can choose--

- [Scott] Angular, React of Angular, React view, or you can say, "No framework." And then, kinda--

- [Ben] Right. And then go do something like a Hugo or some of those other static website generators. And there's a bunch of documentation out there on how to do all those different ones already, so. Again, it was pretty simple.

- [Scott] You get good coverage.

- [Ben] I was impressed.

- [Scott] Yeah, I think one of the cool things they've done is, when you talk about this versus even static, static website hosting in Storage, is they've also built in API support with things like Azure Functions. So you can go ahead and have author your functions in Azure Functions, and this will take care of some of the wiring up of security for your functions. So how do you do user authentication or any type of our back to them along the way. It also automatically sets up routes for you within your web app. So it's got some limitations or constraints today, everything has to be at the slash API route. But other than that, you can route into multiple API's, multiple API's, then behind that. And then you're kinda like, "Up, open and ready to go." And they're gonna do the same thing. They're just generating those GitHub Actions through the workflow files, so you'll see those end up in your Git repository.

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- [Scott] No, I think folks should go, If you are doing any type of static site today, and you're going a little bit beyond static, and you're turning them more into SPAs that are driven by these kinda modern frameworks like Angular, React, things like that. And you've been tired of hosting your own websites, or manually wiring some of that stuff up into Azure App Service, I might go check that out and see if there's anything good in there for you.

- [Ben] Yeah.

- [Scott] It's pretty nifty. And then, you can still do local server development, all those kinds of things. Like they've got, the live server extension for Visual Studio Code, you can still use the Azure Functions extension and do local development of functions and things like that.

- [Ben] Yep. Absolutely. I've been toying around with the idea of putting my blog on a static site, up there. We'll see. It's just stuff to do.

- [Scott] Just one more thing for me to do. Nice and easy.

- [Ben] Yeah. And it always ends up taking the backseat to actual client work. So I was toying around with it and I'm like, "I don't have time to do this." And then, a month later I'll play around with it some more.

- [Scott] So what did you have to change? 'Cause you said in your Hugo site, that their documentation was wrong, what did you have to change?

- [Ben] So there is, now you're gonna make me pull up.

- [Scott] Did you go through the tutorial for Hugo on docs that Ms?

- [Ben] Yes. I went through that tutorial. So it was a line around, there was an actions check out at V1, that was in there by default that I had to switch to V2. And then I had to change--

- [Scott] But that's in the instructions?

- [Ben] That's in the instructions. So, yes. Everything in the instructions work. That was what I had to change.

- [Scott] I was gonna yell at you 'cause you went through, and the way you made it sound was like the instructions didn't work, and I don't see a PR out there from you or an issue.

- [Ben] No, there was one, they haven't fixed it yet. There is a PR out there for an issue I found, and there's a line that was, the indentation was wrong.

- [Scott] Welcome to YAML. Isn't that awesome?

- [Ben] Yes. So, and there is that PR down below where people were already talking about it. So I didn't bother submitting another one. But one of the lines that the documentation has you add, the indentation is wrong, I think they have uses indented and it's not supposed to be. But other than that indentation, the instructions that are out there, work. It's just that you just can't take a Hugo site and shove it up there without going through these instructions from Microsoft and changing those GitHub Actions to work with Hugo in static app service.

- [Scott] Gotcha.

- [Ben] Yes, that was it. Templates are coming to Teams. That was another announcement.

- [Scott] Templates are coming to Teams, yay. Something, something graph, yay.

- [Ben] Yeah, there's--

- [Scott] I mean, the new Graph Explorer came out.

- [Ben] I missed that one. That's Developry. I don't touch the graph, remember?

- [Scott] Oh.

- [Ben] Now Two's templates are pretty straightforward. They're coming out with some templates, so instead of just from scratch, they're gonna have some pre-built templates that looks like, Contoso event, like an event management, hospital management event, organize a store. But then obviously, like you inferred with the graph and stuff that's coming there, and even some of the UI stuff that's gonna be coming to Teams, you'll also be able to create your own templates.

- [Scott] Yes.

- [Ben] I don't know how that's different from creating a team based on another team. 'Cause I think that's there already, isn't it?

- [Scott] I think this formalizes it a little bit more. Well I was kinda confused by it as well. But I think if you think about, template creation as something that potentially extends beyond Teams, so more of a scaffolding mechanism. So a template is certainly one part of that. But as this ecosystem of products with Lists and Power BI and Power Apps, and all the other stuff kinda comes in line around it, how do you build that into a follow up like scaffolded deployment process, and then that stuff becomes a lot more important, right? It's not so much about clicking New Team and create from template in the UI, 'cause you need programmatic ways to make that happen.

- [Ben] Right. And to be fair, right now, if you create from you just have to go pick an existing team, you don't have predefined teams you can pick from, so this gives you the ability to, lock down those templates rather than having to pick from one of your existing 500 Teams or something like that. So, yeah. This is another good one that, I think has been needed for a while. Especially when it comes to governing Teams, making those Teams uniform. Although I don't get to write PowerShell scripts to do this as much, 'cause it'll be in the UI. Unless you wanna automate stuff.

- [Scott] You're still gonna need all that PowerShell, for exactly like you said, the Automation Components of it.

- [Ben] Yes, Graph Explorer? That was another one. You said there's a new version of Graph Explorer?

- [Scott] Yep. The latest version of Graph Explorer is coming, which is gonna be nice to see. There was a bunch of improvements to kinda the .NET story, they continue to work towards one .NET, things like that. You've got new Azure regions, just all sorts of stuff. So I'll put a link in the show notes to a nice recap that the folks over at Rencore did. And you can kinda go pick and choose what you wanna get out of there. 'Cause there's probably more than we could talk about here. It'd be fun to get somebody to talk on, to talk about Project Reunion.

- [Ben] I saw the announcement, and frankly, I haven't had any time to go look at it. What is Project Reunion?

- [Scott] Project Reunion is you have these different frameworks for developing applications on Windows today, you certainly have desktop app API's, You have UWP, and then you've got a bunch of different ways to deploy, like do you use when you I3? Is it a web view embedded in something? Are you doing MSI, MSI-X? Whatever it is, so now you're gonna have to this new kinda packaging mechanism to bring them all together, which would be kinda cool. And yeah, it'll be nifty nice.

- [Ben] I thought that was the point of UWP?

- [Scott] Yes, but nobody's building UWP apps. So, if nobody's building them, then they're gonna keep building them the way they are. You still wanna package them in modern formats and be able to distribute 'em across multi OS and things like that. So that's where like MSI-X and all that stuff came in. You've also got the new side loaded App Store. Have you've seen Winget yet?

- [Ben] No, remember I'm on a Mac. I quit playing with Windows a while ago.

- [Scott] All right. So if you use Homebrew, I imagine you use Homebrew.

- [Ben] Yes.

- [Scott] Right?

- [Ben] We definitely use Homebrew.

- [Scott] You've heard of Chocolatey? On Windows?

- [Ben] Yep.

- [Scott] Yep. So Microsoft is going to have their own package manager and kinda command line store for deployment. So that's gonna be called Winget. And you can go and just build it from GitHub today. Or if you're in the Windows Insider, you can get on board with it as well. But now you too can do those command line installations directly through Winget. So for something like, say PowerToys just came out, they just dropped, O.18.0 the other day, and it included the new run stuff, and all the stuff built on walks and everything else. You can just go into Winget and you say, "Hey, Winget search PowerToys." And then when you're ready to install, and you find the version you want, you say, "Winget install PowerToys." And then you're done. Just that one command line, and you're all set. There's no next, next, next through, 100 next buttons and frameworks and other things.

- [Ben] So Windows 10 is finally catching up to Mac OS is what you're saying.

- [Scott] Well, arguably, it's ahead. Because it's gonna be a first party thing. Apple does not have a--

- [Ben] We have Homebrew. They do not have a first party one no.

- [Scott] They've got the App Store, which you can kinda, sorta control from like bash scripts and things like that, but you don't want to.

- [Ben] Yes, 'cause Yeah, I do Homebrew for all of that stuff on mine, which is not first party.

- [Scott] I think I'm gonna play around with this one a little bit when it hits GA at least, because for me being on a Windows laptop, most of the time, I'm pretty used to kinda hitting that point where you just wanna wipe your laptop and get on with the new thing. So the way I do that today is with Chocolatey. When I was on OSX, or Mac OS, I used to do just Homebrew and keep like a big Homebrew script, play a big shell script just an adjust. And I do the same thing on Windows, but it's just using Chocolatey to do all those installs for me. So when I spin up a new computer, I hit the reset button come back in. It's not a long time to get back up and running, 'cause I just have to go grab that one script and then let it kinda run in the background, while it installs Chrome and VS Code, and all my extensions and all the other stuff that I need. So, I will happily convert that to WinGate once it comes out of GA.

- [Ben] Very cool. So should we keep talking? There was another interesting one that I kinda noticed it, and I just looked it up was the whole Linux support in Windows 10. Did you catch that? The whole plans that will, they're gonna support the whole Linux GUI apps in Windows 10, with full fledged Linux apps running alongside Windows apps using their whole Windows Subsystem for Linux.

- [Scott] Yes. So there's some interesting things going on there. So they've been talking about WSL 2, Windows Subsystem for Linux for a while now, and it's certainly been available inside of Insider builds. So if you've been running Insider, you've been able to do WSL 2 along the way. And WSL 2 is quite a bit nicer. It's integrated closer, like there's things that you can do in WSL 2 that say you can't do in WSL 1, because of the way they chose to virtualize some of the system. So unlike WSL 2, if I wanna do a Docker build, I can't actually install the Docker daemon, because of the way that effectively distribution that app is running kinda out of the App Store, and stuff like that is going to work inside of WSL 2, 'cause they're virtualizing kind of an all up Kernel. It's a little bit more like a VM that's been presented back to the machine but not. 'Cause they've done just some really cool things with it. But all that's still there, it's gonna be ready to go. They're bringing support for GPU compute workloads. You're gonna have NVDIA CUDA support and direct ML support. So any direct X12 capable GPU, you're gonna be able to run those GPU driven workloads inside of WSL 2. They are also bringing Linux GUI support, like you which I find to be very interesting. Because the Linux folks, I think if you're on Linux, and you have like that one program that has to run on Windows, you either virtualize it or you hope that it runs inside of wine or another emulation layer, something like that. And now it's coming like full circle, where I can run Windows, and I've got to virtualize my Linux UI stuff. That's all kindA cool for the GUI. I think one of the interesting things they announced, when the GUI support comes, they're also going to bring sound support. Which I think will potentially be a little bit bigger. So if you do any kind of scripting or sound manipulation, or you require direct access to those kinda sockets, they'll be available to you.

- [Ben] That's interesting. I won't lie, there's times when I'm like, "Huh, maybe I should start playing with Windows again, "instead of Mac OS." But, I still really like Mac OS.

- [Scott] I would like to be in Mac OS for certain things, certainly for certain programs. But on the Windows side, like I find, I live inside of WSL today even. so when I'm doing all my, say I'm creating like new, whatever ARM templates or deployment scripts or things like that, my default terminal inside of VS Code is my WSL instance.

- [Ben] Got it.

- [Scott] Just to spin it up and have quick access to it. I haven't played around too much with WSL 2, 'cause you do have to be on the Insider builds, and I run those in VMs not on my bare metals. I'm not always firing them up.

- [Ben] You're not living on the edge?

- [Scott] No, not yet. Some day.

- [Ben] All Right. Sounds good. Well, I think that was a fairly good wrap up, from a couple IT pros on a developer conference.

- [Scott] They had stuff even for you.

- [Ben] They did, they had a few things. Although I did feel like Build overall was, because it was shorter it was compressed. I felt like they definitely focused more on development this year, than maybe they have in past years. For past years, because that's the week long conference and everybody's there. I feel like a few more announcements that were, they had a few more announcements that weren't so Dev-Centric, and with this shorter, what 48 hours? I really did feel like it was a lot more focused. It had a lot narrower focus on Devs. Which is fine. It's kinda what it should be, right?

- [Scott] I think it was quite a bit more targeted this year. The format was certainly something to kinda behold from the outside with the 48 hours of continuous streaming. And I don't know if you caught on, but for lots of the sessions, they had them three times. So they would have session A would run for the a.m Pacific. And then eight hours later, they would have the same session again, and then eight hours after that, they would have the session third time. They were not recording the first session and then just replaying it the other two times, those speakers and announcers and everything, they were coming back every eight hours to redo their sessions. So they were live and they can answer questions and things like that.

- [Ben] Got it. That is cool. I think it gives us a little insight too into what Ignite will probably be like this fall. Is very similar to Build and I didn't mind it. Again, I missed the networking that you get within in person conference and going around and doing podcasts up there, but, being able to just have it playing on the TV while I was working, those couple days was kinda nice. And that's how I picked up a lot of stuff. It was more just in the background, I'd glance over if it was something that was interesting. But there was something nice about just sitting at home and letting it stream the whole day.

- [Scott] Yeah, it was good, coffee shop noise in the background.

- [Ben] Yes, exactly. So with that, I think we'll wrap up today. We got a little long again today but it was interesting. Some interesting stuff that came out of Build, excited to see some of it start hitting tenants and some of it again, is already there like the Static App Service

- [Scott] Static Web Apps.

- [Ben] Static Web Apps.

- [Scott] App Service is extremely confusing. 'Cause you've got App Service Plans, you've got App Service for Linux, and then you've got web apps for containers or regular web apps or static web apps. Lots of stuff.

- [Ben] Azure Static Web Apps. Static Web Apps, okay. Drill it in my head. Yes, all right. Sounds good. Well you enjoy the rest of your day Scott. Enjoy your weekend, and we'll talk to you next week.

- [Scott] Thanks, Ben.

- [Ben] If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros, can learn about Office 365 and Azure. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter or Facebook. Thanks again for Listening and have a great day.