Tidy up - Unused Project and Nuget package reference using Visual Studio 2019

If you are a Developer/Architect using Visual Studio as IDE for your development activities, this blog post will be of your interest. During the Ignite 2021 conference, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2019 v16.9 and v16.10 Preview 1. As part of version 16.10 Preview 1, one of the cool features they introduced is to "Remove Unused References..." for any Projects and Nuget packages that are not in use. At the time of writing this blog post, we have Visual Studio Version 16.10.0 (official release) which includes this new feature.  As part of development, we generally get carried away and introduce new Nuget package references to your project and add new references to your Projects. By the end of development, you will not be 100% sure which are not being referenced and unused which means you will leave those unused project references in your application. Now you might be wondering what's the big deal in it since it doesn't harm. The advantage of removing unused project r...
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Announcements related to Azure Blob Storage

As part of Microsoft Build conference (may 2020) and from early this year few key announcements were made related to Azure Blob Storage. In this blog post will try to cover few key announcements which are now generally available and some in preview.

  • User Delegation SAS Tokens (Generally Available)

This feature was made GA in January 2020. Prior to User Delegation SAS token feature, if we want to access private or secured container it's managed through Managed Identity or Shared access signature token (SAS tokens). SAS tokens grant specific, time-limited access to storage objects without exposing an account access key.

A SAS secured with Azure AD credentials is called a user delegation SAS. With user delegation SAS tokens it now supports Azure AD and RBAC, what it means is now
lower-privileged users and services can now delegate subsets of their access to clients, using this new type of pre-authorized URL. With that if clients retrieve a user delegation key tied to their Azure Active Directory (AD) account, and then use it to create SAS tokens granting a subset of their own access rights. This feature is generally available which means it can be used for production workloads and available for all regions of Azure.
Note: This feature can be used with Azure CLI version 2.0.78 or later

  • Priority retrieval from Azure Archive (Generally Available)

Priority retrieval allows you to flag the re-hydration of your data from the offline archive tier back into an online hot or cool tier as a high priority action.

The two archive retrieval options are
  1. Standard priority which is default with retrievals taking up-to 15 hours.
  2. High priority - where you need for urgent data access from archive, with retrievals for blobs under 10 GB typically taking less than 1 hour.

  • Upload blob direct to access tier of your choice (Generally Available)

This feature enables customers to write cold data directly to Azure Archive using PutBlob and PutBlockList API.

  • CopyBlob enhanced capabilities (Generally Available) - The CopyBlob API now supports the archive access tier.

  • Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (Generally Available)
Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (GZRS) and Read-Access Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (RA-GZRS) are now generally available offering intra-regional and inter-regional high availability and disaster protection for your applications. GZRS writes three copies of your data synchronously across multiple Azure Availability zones.

  • Account failover (Generally Available)
Customer-initiated storage account fail-over is now generally available, allowing you to determine when to initiate a fail-over instead of waiting for Microsoft to do so. When you perform a fail-over, the secondary replica of the storage account becomes the new primary. Once the fail-over is complete, you will automatically begin reading from and writing to data from the new primary region, with no code changes

  • Versioning (In Preview)
As application create, update and delete data, now we have ability to access and manage both current and previous version of the data. You can restore a prior version of a blob to recover your data if it is erroneously modified or deleted. 
A version captures a committed blob state at a given point in time. When versioning is enabled for a storage account, Azure Storage automatically creates a new version of a blob each time that blob is modified or deleted.

  • Point in time restore (In Preview)
Just like how we have Point in time restore functionality for Azure SQL, this is one the much awaited feature for Blob storage. Point in time restore for Azure Blob Storage provides storage account administrators the ability to restore a subset of containers or blobs within a storage account to a previous state. Prerequisites for this point in time restore you need to enable following features Soft delete,  Change feed, Blob versioning. Since the service is in preview its supported in following regions Canada central, Canada east, France central only at this stage.
  • Blob Index (In Preview)
As datasets get larger, finding specific related objects can be difficult. Generally what we do is use ListBlobsAPI to retrieve records and parse through the list. To populate the blob index, define key-value tag attributes on your data, either on new data during upload or on existing data in your storage account. These blob index tags are stored alongside your underlying blob data. 

  • Object replication (In Preview)
Object replication asynchronously copies block blobs between a source storage account  to another account anywhere in Azure. Since the service is in preview its supported in following regions Canada central, Canada east, France central only at this stage.

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