AI Development News

Microsoft Build 2017 – news for Developers from Seattle

Posted on By : David Intersimone

The annual Microsoft Build developer conference took place last week in Seattle. While I couldn’t make it up to the beautiful city on Puget Sound, I did watch the keynotes and a few technical sessions on the live (and replay) Channel 9 Build 2017 feed. Microsoft has a Build 2017 news page that has links to some of the announcements and presentations from last week. The headline title on the Build 2017 news page echos the focus of CEO Satya Nadella’s opening keynote and permeated throughout many of the technical sessions that followed: “Microsoft aims to empower every developer for a new era of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge”. Here are just a few of the many announcements and session topics that I found interesting.

Three Developer Requirements this New Era

  • Multiple Devices – whether you create applications for desktop PCs, Smartphones, Tablets, and other targets, developers require platforms and services that work on all of the targets using their programming languages of choice.
  • Artificial Intelligence – with the ever increasing amount of data being generated in the cloud and at the edge, developers will need tools that allow them to build apps that create knowledge and opportunity as data and compute gravitate to both locations.
  • Serverless Computing – developers will need new technologies and methods to simplify the complexities of future distributed architectures by focusing on the creation of functions that respond to events.

Developer Tool Announcements

With the hundreds of sessions taking place and many announcements, here are just a few tool and technology tidbits that appeared at Build 2017. The Build 2017 news page also contains links to top ten countdown lists for Day 1 and Day 2.

  • Visual Studio for Mac – out of beta and into general availability allowing developers to work on Windows and macOS base computers. Build apps for desktop, mobile, web, cloud, Xamarin.IoT, Azure SQL database support for MySQL- and PostgreSQL-managed services and more.
  • Cortana Skills Kit – public preview in the U.S. allows Windows 10, Android and iOS developers to create Cortana skills by using the Microsoft Bot Framework.
  • New Tools/Standards – .NET Standard 2.0 for UWP and XAML Standard coming this year for C++, .NET, web and UWP developers.
  • Project Rome – developers will be able to build connected apps across devices and platforms using Remote System APIs.
  • Fluent Design – developers will (when available) be able to build expressive and engaging apps that work across a range of devices that have a wide variety input and output interfaces. Watch the video “eloquent design system for a complex world”.
  • Azure Cosmos DB – industry’s first “globally distributed, multi-model database service that delivers horizontal scale with guaranteed uptime, throughput, consistency and millisecond latency at the 99th percentile” Read the announcement blog post.
  • 29 Microsoft Cognitive Services – Harry Shum, EVP of Microsoft AI and Research, said “AI now has the potential to disrupt every single vertical industry, like banking or retail, and every single business process, from sales and marketing to HR and recruiting.” Read more on his blog post “Microsoft AI – Amplify human ingenuity“

What Else Caught your Fancy during Build 2017?

What else happened at Build 2017 that excited you? Join the conversation and post a comment below.

David I

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://devnet.evansdata.org/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99

 

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