At its annual Build developer conference—once again an online-only event this year—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized AI-powered data, cloud-native apps, and the hybrid workplace, among other themes.
This being a developer-focused event, Nadella noted how the community played a central role in keeping the world running during the pandemic. Developer positions are growing at non-tech companies faster than at tech firms, he said, in industries including wellness, agriculture, mining, and retail. The automotive industry is hiring 35% more software engineers than mechanical engineers. And there’s been an eightfold increase in remote dev job postings since last year.
The conference, which runs from May 25-27, is free to watch online and includes traditional sessions, as well as live discussions, expert Q&As, product roundtables, local discussions, and opportunities for one-on-one consultations. Sign up on the Build Registration page for 24-hour programming that includes localized sessions for China, Finland, France, Germany, Haiti, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the UK.
Microsoft Teams: Enabling the Hybrid Office
Microsoft Teams, the highest-profile member of the Microsoft 365 suite (formerly called Office 365), has burgeoned over the last year. The number of daily users has doubled to over 145 million, and Microsoft has added over 300 new features.
At Build, Microsoft is announcing a new class of hybrid workplace apps that can extend Teams meetings with together mode extensions, audio and video streams, media bots, and stage view. Visual Studio gets an updated Teams Toolkit that makes extending the collaboration software faster, and a new Teams Developer Portal offers central management for Teams coding.
Azure Takes Center Stage
Azure is clearly a primary focus for Microsoft, with over 20 Azure announcements planned for the show. There’s seemingly nothing for the consumer here, but in the AI realm, Microsoft is announcing: Azure Applied AI Services, for task-specific business logic; PyTorch Enterprise on Microsoft Azure, which brings open-source machine learning to Microsoft’s cloud; new features for Azure Cosmos DB, including some for cost control and security; and Azure SQL Database Ledger capability for blockchain-like cryptographic verification of data.
“Azure has a larger global infrastructure footprint than any other cloud provider," says Frank X. Shaw, corporate VP for Communications at Microsoft, though that assertion would seem hard to measure. Those other cloud providers, of course, are Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.
Cloud native apps are the way of the future; Nadella said "over 95% of the world’s largest companies are running their businesses on the Microsoft Cloud today." Build includes three announcements to further this trend: Azure Application Services that let apps run on Kubernetes on the edge, locally, or in the cloud using Azure Arc; on-premise Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI, which supports local containerized app development; and Azure Arc-enabled Open Service Mesh, which lets devs create both client and cloud distributed apps.
Shaw also tipped an integration between GitHub and Azure Security Center to help teams deal with vulnerabilities.
Windows Gets Some Love
With Apple moving full speed ahead toward using ARM-based CPUs, Microsoft (which has been working on making Windows run on the platform for several years) is trying to jumpstart the initiative by offering an affordable Snapdragon Developer Kit this summer.
Details about pricing, exactly what hardware is included, availability requirements, and release date haven’t yet been announced. What is known is that it’s a small desktop PC that lets developers test their Windows on ARM apps.
Microsoft is also updating Project Reunion, which is meant to unify the various Windows programming models, as well as the ability for enterprises to include custom business results in the Windows search bar from enterprise tools like Salesforce. Finally, Windows Terminal, for command line use, will get a Quake mode, which will let users open the terminal quickly with a shortcut along with a simpler settings interface.
The Edge browser will also get performance boosts with Sleeping tabs and Startup boost. Microsoft claims these will make it the fastest browser on the platform. Recently, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be retired, making the Google Chromium-based Edge the only Microsoft browser going forward.
Power Platform
At this year’s Build, Microsoft is talking up what it calls the Power Platform. This consists of the Power Apps and Power Fx low-code business development tools, Power BI for surfacing business insights from data, Power Automate for rules-based business workflow automation, and Power Virtual Agents for building chatbots. Announced at Build is the availability of Process Advisor, which identifies repetitive, time-consuming activities for automation.
Power Fx, introduced earlier this spring, is an open-source no-code development tool based on Excel. New for it is the ability to build apps using natural language and no code at all. Making use of GPT-3, you can now use Power Fx to train machine learning models. Also new is “PROgram Synthesis using Examples SDK (PROSE), which can train models to do certain tasks by typing in a few examples.” We think of machine learning as a forefront of high-tech coding, so bringing it to low code is an impressive advance.
Also at the software forefront is conversational bots. We saw a Google demo at the recent I/O conference of a bot pretending to be Pluto. Bringing the ability to create conversational bots to non-professional coders is the goal of Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents and Bot Framework Composer technologies. The latter actually uses a visual authoring metaphor to build conversation flows.
Also on tap for Build 2021 are Visual Studio extensions for the Power Platform, a low-code tool that allows business experts to collaborate with developers. Microsoft is also releasing it roadmap for Visual Studio 2022, which will feature a new look and use a 64-bit architecture.
The Greenest Microsoft Yet
Environmental effects of Microsoft technology are another topic at the conference, where it's announcing the Green Software Foundation, a nonprofit collaboration with the Linux Foundation, Accenture, GitHub, and ThoughtWorks.
The Foundation will provide best practices and tooling for building greener code and measuring apps’ energy use. Microsoft previously announced that it will become carbon-negative by 2030, and at Build it went further, saying that all the carbon Microsoft has emitted in its entire history will be removed by 2050—no small commitment for a major cloud computing player. Using data science and AI, Microsoft will enable its customers to reduce their carbon footprints as well.
Day Two of Build promises a more conversational approach, with Tech Talk with Scott Guthrie, and discussions of app innovation and Microsoft 365 developer opportunities. For more late-breaking Build 2021 announcements and analysis, check back at PCMag's Microsoft Build hub.