On behalf of the entire Workbench team, thank you for your continued support and interest in Azure Blockchain Workbench. With every month’s release, our focus areas are driven by the topics you care about the most. Workbench 1.5.0 focuses on two key themes, making Workbench easier to deploy and simplifying the process of developing and testing your end to end blockchain solutions.

Whether you’re a new customer or upgrading your current deployment, we hope you like what we have built.

Deploy faster

The previous Workbench installation provided a lot of flexibility that most people didn’t need. We have streamlined the deployment template with default values and easier Azure Active Directory (AAD) integration. For advanced users, you still have customization options available within the template. For customers with higher scale needs, we also have newly published guidance on how to scale your deployment.

Develop and troubleshoot easier

You’ve told us that Workbench helps you build and deploy blockchain applications faster, but you would like more help with debugging issues in your contracts and your integration code. We’ve added guidance on how to use Application Insights to troubleshoot issues, added robust telemetry, and more targeted error messages to help you pinpoint issues faster.

As more people build out end to end solutions, we’ve identified some optimizations that we can make in our messaging API. In this release, we have updated the messaging format for ingress to make it more intuitive. We will follow up in the next month with an updated messaging format for egress.

These messaging API changes will require updates to your existing code. We’ve updated all our existing samples on GitHub to reflect the ingress message changes introduced in Workbench 1.5.0.

If you’re just getting started with Workbench, don’t forget that we have a robust set of samples available for you on GitHub which we are continually updating. 

For more details on other items in this release, please review the release notes on GitHub. You can stay up to date on Azure Blockchain by following us on Twitter @MSFTBlockchain. Please use our Blockchain UserVoice to provide feedback and suggest features or ideas for Workbench. Your input is helping make this a great service. We look forward to hearing from you.