|
|
If you are a developer who is leveraging Azure Cloud Services, this blog is for you. Your development productivity is often dependent on the tools you leverage for coding. By this time, you should already be familiar using Azure portal. You can use Azure portal not only for provisioning any of the Azure resource but also for debugging applications, monitoring performance and interacting with the Azure ecosystem of services.
Based on the type of software module being developed and Azure cloud resources being used, your productivity can be boosted in a number of different ways, by using different free tools available. Below are some important developer tools to help you get started and take your productivity to the next level.
Related Blog: How to bring your A-Game to the development role
Table of Contents
Visual Studio Code
You want a lightweight code editor with tons of features, Visual Studio Code is the way to go. This IDE is made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. Out of the box features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and an embedded Git. It also has inbuilt terminal for running your favorite commands.
Azure Storage Explorer
Azure Storage Explorer is a free storage management tool that gives users a bird’s eye view of their Azure storage account, including information about volumes, objects and files. Although you can access Azure files, blobs, and queues through the Portal, CLI, PowerShell, or APIs but its all about how fast and easy the access is. Azure Storage Cloud Explorer provides an easy to use UI and essentially works like Windows Explorer for all your Azure storage. This powerful tool can help you to troubleshoot storage issues and optimize your Azure storage usage.
Application Insights
Application Insights, is essentially a feature of Azure Monitor that provides extensible application performance management (APM) and monitoring for live web apps. It will automatically detect any performance issues, help you diagnose them, and continuously improve app performance and usability. It’s extensible – integrates with lots of tools and DevOps processes, gives you lots of telemetry, and just makes testing and debugging your project so much easier than using any other tool out there.
Microsoft Power Apps
Power Apps is a low-code/no-code option available to make and scale your applications quickly and securely. Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform. Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server etc).
Postman
Postman is an API platform for developers to design, build, test and iterate their APIs. If you are working on Azure, chances are you would interact with JSON based API’s a lot. Postman makes it easy to test your API’s and integration with Azure resources. Combined that Application Insights and you can triage any application be it Production or your own development environment. Check out the open sourced collection of API’s available on Postman website.
Conclusion
It should not come as a surprise that Azure is one of the leading public cloud platform out there competing head on with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The development ecosystem that Azure provides is one of the best out there. To advance in your career, it’s always best to validate your skills with an official Azure certification. Check out all the Azure certifications training courses and become an Azure certified professional.
Further Reading: How to prepare for Azure Architect Certification explained in this blog with tips and resources
Blog
