Release from 03/23/2017, 06:00:00 PM (UTC)

• Deployment integrity improvements
• Private solution sharing
• Support for high-throughput Machine Learning web service endpoints
• FunctionApp/AppService customization support
• Support for binaries and subdirectories in Azure Functions
• Support for “odbc” type of inputs in credential control
• Significant performance improvements
• Bug fixes
• What’s broken?

Deployment integrity improvements

This change addresses several major flaws previously found in the CIQS platform. Namely:

• new versions of existing solutions made previous deployments dysfunctional;
• previous deployments of solutions no longer present in the gallery (or SAW) became unavailable in the deployments list

We have removed the dependency between deployments and Gallery metadata. As a consequence, CIQS will now retain integrity of all deployments.

This frees solution authors from the burden of worrying whether the changes they are making are backwards compatible; everything that has been deployed will keep working regardless of what new changes are being made to existing solutions, even if, for whatever reason, a solution gets removed from the Gallery or SAW.

Private solution sharing

Unpublished solutions from SAW can now be privately shared with anyone.

Support for high-throughput Machine Learning web service endpoints

Example:

<AzureMlWebService title="Deploying as a high-throughput Web Service" hiddenParameters ="true">
  <GalleryUrl>https://gallery.azure.ai/Details/nyc-taxi-binary-classification-scoring-exp-2</GalleryUrl>
  <HighThroughputEndpoint endpointName=”highThroughputEndpoint”>
    <ThrottleLevel>High</ThrottleLevel>
    <MaxConcurrentCalls>100</MaxConcurrentCalls>
  </HighThroughputEndpoint>
</AzureMlWebService>

Detailed documentation
SAW Sample

FunctionApp/AppService customization support

Introducing <AzureFunctionApp>, a management provisioning step with the following capabilities:

• FunctionApp customizations
  • always on (yes/no)
  • 32bit/64bit
  • enable/disable storage account creation
  • service plan sku and tier
• adding/removing AppSettings and ConnectionStrings at any time in a safe an reliable way
• deploying WebJobs into the FunctionApp at any time without ARM templates (this is compatible with all existing WebJobs!)

SAW Sample (customizations and AppSettings)
Detailed documentation and more samples with WebJobs will be available shortly.

Support for binaries in Azure Functions

It is now possible to include binary files (executable or data) along with the Functions. For instance, a function can be implemented as an .exe file placed alongside its supporting libraries.

Functions can also contain subdirectories now.

Support for “odbc” type of inputs in credential control

According to ODBC 3.0 spec, [] {}() , ; ? * ! @ are not permitted in OLE DB or ODBC connection strings. If bcp.exe or sqlcmd.exe is used in the solution, odbc credential control makes it possible to disallow these special characters in credential inputs.

Detailed documentation

Performance improvements

Numerous fixes and optimizations included in this release will reduce latencies in many common scenarios by a factor of 3, or 4. We are continuing work on improving the performance even further.

Bug fixes

• Switched back to client-side Markdown rendering due to bugs in the server-side implementation previously used
• Repeated notification emails fixed
• Made <SolutionDashboard> more robust by preventing it from unintentionally restarting the FunctionApp; it is now safe to use in production-grade solutions
• Enabled the display of previously “orphaned” solutions.

What’s broken?

Due to several major changes in the CIQS infrastructure, previous versions of SAW (deployed or installed prior to March 20th) no longer work. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have an old installation, please save your work and re-create your authoring account. Currently, only SAW Web works. We are actively working on making SAW local available very soon.