Recently I tried out the Azure Portal’s Desktop App, available for download here:
Initially, I thought to myself that this would be a strange thing to use, as it seems to only load the web UI inside the app. However, after using it for a couple of days continuously, it has proven to be delivering a lot better response times for loading all the UI and blades than the Browser-based Portal.
Azure Portal Desktop Application
You get pretty much the full experience, including the Azure Shell:
Azure Shell in the Azure Portal Desktop Application
And my other favorite feature is the search, which is exceptionally responsive:
Azure Portal Desktop Application, using the Search bar
Enjoy the experience!
How did I find the Azure Desktop App?
Visiting the https://preview.portal.azure.com portal with IE gives you the option to download this app instead of using the somewhat limited/broken functionality of IE.
Resources
Additional links that can prove to be beneficial:
- Azure Portal Documentation (Microsoft Docs)
- What is the Azure Portal? (Microsoft Docs)
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Are you comparing the loading times to the regular Azure portal or preview? Regularly I noticed that the preview portal is faster.
Good point. I initially measured the regular portal, but after checking the preview I still see an improvement locally. If all things are going well, I hope the current preview portal comes on par with the same quick load times though :)
Nice! Do you have an idea what's causing the improvements in the local app?
I haven't investigated it at all actually - I am just happy to get certain daily tasks done quicker this way 💪
👍
My "personal" account - works ok.
However it seems it doesn't work with "more fancy" authentication at the moment (through Federation, etc). Seems it's being lost between redirects and ends on the blank screen.. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, eager to give it a try!
Oh dang! I've tried it only with non-federated work accounts this far, and that's really smooth.
If you find a workaround or figure it out, feel free to update here and I'll include it in the post :)
Seems nothing we can do now.. In some "desktop browser-wrapped" (usually electron-based) apps you can access browser developer tools, but not in this Azure Portal app. :)
So not even sure what is happening there.
Do you know if there is any Microsoft support channels for this app? I could report it there. Because I heard about it for the first time right from this post, and didn't see any announcements previously. It seems it's sort of secretly-hidden app at this moment. :)
Valid question, I think I forgot to mention how I found it. I'll update the post, thanks for highlighting that.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c... When using IE (for research purposes 😂), and visiting the preview portal (preview.portal.azure.com), I'm presented directly with the option to download it. I did, and tried it out. I think the idea was "if you're still on IE, use this app instead of the browser", but seeing how darn quick it is, I'm using it anyway.