Last week we spent an exciting three days at Microsoft Build 2018, which took place at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. We’d like to thank those of you who attended, especially those who stopped by to say “hi” at our booth in the Expo hall; it was great to speak with so many of you. For those of you who were unable to attend, or in case you missed the App Center news amidst all the other news, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of our favorite announcements from the event.
Microsoft and GitHub Partner to Empower Developers
The continued partnership between Microsoft and GitHub is focused on empowering developers. At Build, one key highlight was our news to ship mobile apps faster with App Center and the GitHub C, including the release of the new App Center App in the GitHub Marketplace. With just a few clicks, you can integrate Azure mobile Continuous Integration directly into your iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React Native repositories, enabling you to automate your Build-Test-Distribute process for your apps directly within the GitHub experience. Along with the integration to quickly set up build and distribution, App Center has also worked to leverage the new GitHub checks API to kickoff builds on a new pull request, so you can now require a successful build as part of your process before a developer can merge code into your branches. Learn more about this integration in our official blog post.
We’ve also put together a step-by-step lab that you can run through to get hands-on experience with both the new GitHub integration and App Center.
Faster DevOps in Visual Studio Code
During his session at Build, Principal App Center PM Patrick Nikoletich showcased the new App Center extension for Visual Studio Code. This extension helps streamline your development process and improve productivity for React Native and Cordova apps. It also means you no longer have to log into the portal or open a terminal, but can instead manage your app in App Center from within Visual Studio Code. Create a fresh project or integrate an existing app directly into App Center in just a few clicks, kick off a new autonomous test run on one of our cloud hosted device, or immediately push an update directly to your users with CodePush, all from the comfort of your editor. This is just one step in our quest to help empower you to ship higher quality apps faster.
Download and install the extension today and try it out for yourself.
Automatically Ship New Builds to App Stores
We recently added new functionality that allows you to automatically distribute iOS and Android updates directly to the store. Once you have set up a store connection, you now have the additional option in the dropdown to connect directly to the store instead, adding another capability towards fully automating your CI/CD pipeline.
You can read more about this functionality on our documentation page. If you would like to review all the new updates we’ve made for Distribution, you can watch the full session from Build.
Still more to come!
We had a great time at Build and are excited to have you experience the new updates and functionality we’ve released. Log in to App Center (or create your free account today) and let us know what you think of our latest updates, as well as what you’d like to see next. We’re already heads down and working on the next updates to App Center, and we look forward to sharing them with you in the weeks and months ahead. Happy coding!
