With the help of the latest update, you will be able to create Visual Studio Online accounts in the Azure “West Europe” region, based in the Netherlands. The system will automatically detect a data center nearest to you. Moreover, you can also click the “change options” link to override the choice offered by the system.
According to official sources, you cannot move an existing account from one region to another. However, there is a plan to introduce this feature in the upcoming updates. Application Insights, which is currently in the preview stage is not yet available in Europe.
It is now possible to perform cloud based load testing from Europe by creating a VSO account in Europe. As mentioned above, your data will be loaded in the Azure West EU Datacenter. You need not have to modify any other setting from within the load test or from Visual Studio.
Cloud based Load Testing will be very useful for those developers who could not do the job due to EU data sovereignty concerns.
“For those of you who are interested in generating load from multiple data centres and want to understand performance characteristic in such situations, you now have EU as an option,” said Jimson Chalissery, Program Manager, Microsoft.
Along with the above mentioned updates, Microsoft also released Visual Studio Online REST API version 1.0. Developers will be able to bind app to the 1.0 API version thus ensuring that future Visual Studio Online deployments won’t break the app.
If your apps are already using 1.0 preview APIs, you should migrate to the graduated 1.0 APIs by following the steps mentioned on the official guide.
In yet another exciting development, Microsoft also announced the release of service hooks features. It is now fully supported in Visual Studio Online. The main purpose of service hooks is that it will enable your app or service to get notified instantly when an event happens in Visual Studio Online.
As of the time of this writing, Visual Studio Online supports 14 services as mentioned below
- Trello
- UserVoice
- HipChat
- AppVeyor
- MyGet
- Flowdock
- Zendesk
- Kato
- Zapier
- Campfire
- Azure
It is also possible to make use of service hooks to build your own custom solutions. It enables your solutions to react efficiently when events happen in your Visual Studio Online projects.