The July 2020 release of Azure Data Studio is now available
The July release of Azure Data Studio is now available. Download Azure Data Studio and review the release notes to get started.
Note: After downloading Azure Data Studio, say Yes to enabling preview features so that you can use extensions.
Azure Data Studio is a multi-database, cross-platform desktop environment for data professionals using the family of on-premises and cloud data platforms on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. To learn more, visit our GitHub.
The key highlights to cover this month include:
- Feature tour.
- Notebooks enhancements.
- Drag and Drop Tables in Query Editor.
- Azure Account icon added to Activity Bar.
- Insiders Build highlights.
- Bug fixes.
For a list of complete updates, refer to the Azure Data Studio release notes.
Feature tour
Over the last few releases, we have focused on improving first-time experiences for Azure Data Studio. For a new user, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start. To help new users identify the key features in the product, we have introduced a Feature Tour experience.
The Feature Tour walks through five features that users will most commonly use. These features include:
- Connections Viewlet
- Notebooks Viewlet
- Extensions Marketplace
- Settings
- Welcome page
Each dialog includes a screenshot, description, and an external documentation link to learn more.
You can start the Feature Tour in two ways:
- Welcome Page banner.
- Command Palette by searching for Tour.
We will continue to identify features to add to the tour, and we would love to hear your feedback through Github issues.
New Notebook improvements
The July update brings additional improvements to the Markdown editing experience for notebooks.
Header support in markdown toolbar
Each month, we have been heading additional buttons in the markdown toolbar, and this month we have added header options.
You can easily add headers to improve the formatting of your notebook. In addition, you can easily remove all headers by highlighting all text and clicking Paragraph in the dropdown menu.
Side-by-side markdown preview in text cells
A common ask for writing markdown was to have the preview appear side-by-side instead of below the text. We have now added this view by default. However, if you prefer having the full width for editing, you can minimize the preview with the hide preview button on the far right of the markdown toolbar.
Drag and drop tables in Query Editor
One feature request from our SSMS users was to support drag and drop of SQL tables and columns from the database tree view to the query editor. With the July release, we now support this capability.
You can see a GIF of this in action from the original user feature request created by one of our engineers.
Azure Account icon added to Activity Bar
Signing into Azure was not very visible in previous releases. To align with Visual Studio Code, we have also moved the Azure account icon to the activity bar to make it more visible to sign into Azure.
In addition, we took this one step further to pop open the Azure accounts dialog.
Insiders Build highlights
Every day, we are publishing a new Insiders build of Azure Data Studio on Github. This is where you can try preview features and give feedback to the engineering team before we move features into stable. If you haven’t tried Insiders build before, you will definitely want to try it out this month to try out two features:
- SQL Database Projects extension.
- The SQL Database Projects extension brings project-based database development, well-known in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), to the cross-platform Azure Data Studio experience. From this early insiders release you can create, build, and publish a project from scratch or an existing database.
- Search in Notebooks viewlet.
Try downloading the Insiders build as well as these new features. This is an opportunity to get your feedback shared with the team before we publish in an upcoming release.
Bug fixes
If you would like to help make Azure Data Studio a great product, share any feedback or report issues through our Issues page. Our engineering team is regularly going through the untriaged issues and assigning issues into different monthly milestones so that you know we are working on it. Your votes on issues help us prioritize.
A full list of bug fixes for the July release can be found here.
Contact us
If you have any feature requests or issues, please submit to our GitHub issues page. For any questions, feel free to comment below or tweet us @AzureDataStudio.
