Microsoft is making sure its developers are supplied with the latest set of tools. The company announced it is bringing location-based services to Azure with TomTom, making it easier to send and receive WebHooks with ASP.NET, and improving Visual Studio Code.
Microsoft’s new partnership with location and navigation provider TomTom will focus on helping developers build and manage location-aware apps for the enterprise, mobile, web and Internet of Things.
“Location is fast becoming a critical component of a broad range of applications and services,” said Harold Goddijn, CEO of TomTom. “Teaming up with Microsoft will bring our technology to a much broader developer community on a platform they are already familiar with.”
TomTom solutions provide up-to-date maps, real-time traffic information, and traffic-avoiding navigation.
(Related: Microsoft takes on next-generation solutions)
For its ASP.NET solutions, Microsoft announced ASP.NET WebHooks V1. This solution is designed to enable users to send and receive WebHooks as part of their ASP.NET apps. “WebHooks provide a simple pub/sub model for wiring together Web APIs and services with your code,” wrote Henrik Nielsen, a principal architect at Microsoft, in a blog post. “A WebHook can be used to get notified when a file has changed in Dropbox, a code change has been committed to GitHub, a payment has been initiated in PayPal, a card has been created in Trello, and much more.”
Nielsen explained that, on the receiving side, the new solution will provide a model for receiving and processing WebHook solutions. It includes support for Azure alerts, Bitbucket, Dropbox, PapPal, Slack, Visual Studio Team Services, and WordPress. On the sending side, the solution supports generating WebHooks, and manages and stores subscriptions.
“This allows you to define your own set of events that users can subscribe to. ASP.NET WebHooks provides a lot of flexibility for sending and persisting WebHooks, scaling your solution up and out, as well as sending WebHooks from WebJobs and other places in addition to your Web Application,” Nielsen wrote.
ASP.NET WebHooks V1 enables users to take advantage of it for just receiving, just sending, or both.
In addition, the company announced version 1.8 of Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is the company’s open-source solution for code editing. Key highlights of the release include hot exit (so developers and switch between context without losing changes); capabilities that allow developers to focus on their code; a new configuration experience; new selection menu; and faster text search. Microsoft also announced that multi-targeting debugging is no longer experimental in this release.