If you’ve been waiting for an Azure Portal Desktop App, then you’ll be happy to learn that Microsoft now has an Azure Portal App for Windows in Preview. It’s unclear when this first became available, but a quick search reveals it’s been available for a few months now. This Azure Portal App allows you to install a desktop experience for the Azure Portal on a Windows machine. It seems to be framing in the Azure Portal website into a desktop app window, but it does feel more native than the browser experience. Plus, it provides all the same features of the Azure Portal; including the Azure Cloud Shell experience!
Download Azure Portal App Preview
If you still use Internet Explorer and navigate to the Azure Portal, it will prompt you with a “Download or Continue” prompt experience. This is something that I actually discovered by accident, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. The prompt screen you see will look like the following screenshot.
If you’re interested in trying out the Azure Portal App Preview (and do not want to use Internet Explorer), you can navigate directly to https://portal.azure.com/App/Download within your favorite web browser.
Alternatively you can click the following button to go there too:
Azure Portal App Experience
The Azure Portal App provides a similar user experience for managing Azure resources to the web-based Azure Portal. For the most part it looks identical to the Azure Portal web application. The app has a title bar at the top with the same elements from the web app. However, the app has back and forward navigation buttons, in addition to the Windows minimize, maximize, and close buttons you would expect of a desktop application.
Here’s a screenshot of what the Azure Portal App experience looks like to give you a visual example of it being the same:
At first glance it appears that the app is just framing in the Azure Portal web application to give you a dedicated window experience; outside the web browser. Although, it’s unclear if this is what they are doing, or if it’s a more integrated and complex application than this.
System Requirements
It doesn’t seem Microsoft has the system requirements for the Azure Portal App listed anywhere at this time. Although after some digging into where it gets installed to, I found the app uses Electron. As a result it seems to be pretty lightwieght, and you shouldn’t have any issues installing it on any of your physical or virtual machines.
Here’s a look at the main folder where it’s installed:
If you want to poke around yourself, it gets installed to the following location:
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\AzurePortal\Production
If you have any comments on the new Azure Portal App “Preview”, please share them by posting a comment on this article. I interested to hear what everyone thinks about this app. Also, if you have any blocking issues, please contact Azure Support to directly give Microsft feedback on this preview experience.
About the Author
Chris Pietschmann
Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.
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The Azure Portal App for Android focused on Azure services, minus Azure Active Directory. Since Azure Active Directory is probably Azure’s most used component, I really hope to see AAD functionality in this Portal App, unlike what we see in Android.
Hi, I installed in March 2019 and used it for a few weeks. I liked it because I felt it as faster than the browser (IE o Chorme). I went back to the browser because I like working with several tabs, instead of several windows. If it has that feature installed I’ll start using it again.
I agree with Fernando, web experience is better as multi-tasking is important for me. Also, I use two identities, one for admin, one for dev/test, and the full app makes it difficult to work with multiple identities.
How do you uninstall it?
In the Windows Start Menu, you can right-click on Azure Portal, and there’s an Uninstall option to remove it. However, it seems currently in the Preview state of the app, you can’t uninstall it?… I did submitted feedback about this using the feedback mechanism in the app. You could submit it too if it’s an issue for you.
How do you uninstall this app? It does not appear listed under Programs and Features in W10.
As is already pointed out, this is just a framed version of the web site that can’t allow multiple identities (as the web browser version does) — utterly pointless.