Microsoft Build announcements at a glance: Azure, Power platforms get major updates

Microsoft Build announcements at a glance: Azure, Power platforms get major updates

When Microsoft was founded more than 45 years ago, it was a developer tools company, and its first product was a programming language. During his keynote address at the virtual Microsoft Build developer conference, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and AI group, said that developers and the platforms they use "have been core to Microsoft's DNA ever since."

And there's never been a better time to be a developer.

"The digital transformation that will happen in the next 10 years is happening today," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during his keynote address. “As computing becomes embedded in every aspect of our lives, there will no longer be such a thing as a tech sector. The world will be transformed by the rapidity of technology at large. Every organization will need to not only adopt the latest technology, but More importantly, it has to build its own unique digital technology or lag behind. Over the past two years, the number of developers in non-tech companies has grown faster than in tech companies.

"This convention is not about setting new rules or constraints that determine how or what you should build."

At the conference, Microsoft made over 100 announcements, including new features and functions intended to provide that support to developers. Here are some highlights:

AZURE

Given Microsoft's focus on the cloud, Azure got the most love in the build, with 24 specific announcements and a few more for its related services or products.

Azure AI includes three new components that help developers modernize common business processes. Azure Bot Service now has a visual authoring canvas with extensible open-source tools that allow the addition of speech and telephony capabilities. Azure Metrics Advisor, now generally available, uses machine learning to find anomalies in telemetry and provide insights from sensors, products, and business metrics. Azure Video Analyzer, which is now in preview, combines live video analytics and video indexer into a single service.

Two components of Azure Cognitive Services, Document Translator and Text Analysis for Health, have appeared from previews and are now generally available.

The Azure Machine Learning managed endpoint, which helps developers quickly build and deploy models, is now in preview. This includes infrastructure monitoring and log analytics.

PyTorch Enterprise is introduced on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft is working with PyTorch to create the PyTorch Enterprise Support program to provide users with a more reliable production experience.

Azure App Services are now in preview because Azure Arc is enabled, allowing them to run anywhere on a Kubernetes cluster.

Native support for the WebSocket API in Azure API Management is now in preview.

Azure Communication Services will receive many new intelligent features. Now in Preview: A UI Library to allow developers to create custom experiences, Traversal Using Relay around NAT (TURN) protocol support to allow voice and video between web or mobile apps, and to allow developers Azure Communication Services Calling SDK for Windows Universal Platform for Add voice and video calling to native Windows apps. Entering a preview sometime in June is Call Recording for Azure Communications Services and Direct Routing for Azure Communications Services.

Azure Logic Apps now offers new hosting options, as well as improved integration with Visual Studio Code. Microsoft has also announced a new standard pricing tier, as well as 4000 additional actions in the pay-per-use consumption tier.

Two new Azure Marketplace offerings make it easier for customers to migrate their Java apps to Azure. The Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform offerings are jointly supported by Red Hat and Microsoft, and the WebSphere Application Server offerings are jointly supported by Microsoft and IBM.

Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is a free long-term support version of OpenJDK, a reference implementation of the Java SE platform. It is now generally available.

Durable Functions, an extension of Azure Functions for building serverless workflows, now supports PowerShell, and is generally available.

Microsoft is previewing a series of updates to its Azure analytics tool. Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse lets developers working in Power Apps or Dynamics 365 bring their Dataverse environments to Azure Synapse. Azure Synapse support for Spark 3.0 and Synapse Apache Spark hardware will improve the performance of Apache Spark workloads. Azure Purview, a data classification and governance service, now supports Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Azure Cosmos DB received a bunch of updates, including an expanded free tier with 1,000 request units of provisioned throughput and 25GB of storage per month for the lifetime of an Azure Cosmos DB account. New features in the preview are: Azure Cosmos DB Linux Emulator, Partial Document Updates, Cosmos DB Unified Cache, and Always Encrypted for Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB Serverless and Azure Cosmos DB role-based access control are now generally available.

The two new pricing tiers for Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server include an soon-to-be 12-month offer for customers signing up for a free Azure account that costs $750 Free up to the hour. Additionally, Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Hyperscale now has a single node native tier, available in preview in the eastern United States (more regions coming soon).

Azure SQL Database provides ledger capabilities to provide cryptographic verification for enterprise customers with sensitive data. It is now in preview.

.NET 6 Preview 4 is available with several new features including Visual Studio support for its multi-platform app UI, which allows developers to build apps for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android with a single codebase, ASP.NET Blazor Hybrid Apps. gives the facility. More device targets including Apple Silicon and ARM64. This also includes performance improvements.

Azure Security Center now includes container scan results found by GitHub Actions.

Visual Studio 2019 16.10, with increased productivity and advanced Docker and Azure tooling, is now generally available.

Azure App Services are now Arc-enabled, allowing them to be used on-premises or on other cloud services through Azure Arc.

Azure Arch-enabled Open Service Mesh (OSM), which simplified integration between OSM and Arch-enabled Kubernetes clusters, is now in preview.

Azure Kubernetes services are now generally available on Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack HCI, a cloud-connected hyperconverged infrastructure operating system distributed as an Azure service, has also received new multicluster monitoring in the Azure portal.

Azure Bicep, an open-source language for deploying Azure resources as code, is releasing version 0.4 in June; It adds a new bicep linter, simplified code structure, and code validation.

The latest update to Azure Monitor adds two features to the preview: easy onboarding of Application Insights to Java apps on Azure App Services, and shareable query packs of log analytics.

Elastic and Microsoft are developing a native Azure experience, which is now in preview. Users can find, deploy and manage Elastic from within the Azure portal.

Azure IoT has announced that updates are generally available. Azure IoT Edge has been updated to include nesting capabilities, and Azure IoT Edge, also known as EFLOW, has been released for Linux on Windows.

Identity and Cloud Security

The Continuous Access Evaluation feature in Azure Active Directory is now in preview in Microsoft Graph.

Azure Active Directory Access Reviews lets customers review the assignment of privileged roles to help them better control access.

Azure Confidential Ledger is a new managed Azure service, now in preview, that provides a tamper-proof register for storing sensitive data for record-keeping and auditing. This is a reliable execution environment, protecting data in use through a secure area of ​​a main processor, and writing once to ensure that the data cannot be tampered with or erased. , Facilitates reading several guarantees.

Visual Studio 2019.10 provides a new command-line tool, MS Identity App Sync, which makes it easier for developers to register and configure ASP.NET apps. It is now in preview.

Microsoft 365

In addition to the Teams update, there were four announcements aimed at Microsoft Graph.

Graph Data Connect is now offered on Azure as a metered service instead of being billed per user/per month, so developers only need to pay for their usage.

Microsoft Search Association, which makes Azure Cognitive Search and Dynamics 365 a unified search, will be generally available later this year.

related

Microsoft Build 2021 . All team updates announced in

Microsoft is expanding searchable content sources using Graph connectors. Announced in 2019, the connectors are currently available for Microsoft Search in SharePoint, Office.com and Bing, with more coming soon to Teams and Windows.

A new embedded app, Organization Explorer, is coming to Microsoft Outlook this summer to help employees find teams to find or collaborate with people with similar skills within their company.

power platform

Power Platform users with the following codes received eight new gifts to enjoy:

Process Advisor, a new component of Process Automate, recommends automating processes and enables users without extensive coding capability to automate repetitive tasks. It is available with Attended RPA and Per-user plans.

Three new professional development tools and certifications: Power Platform integration into the Microsoft 365 Developer plan, a new stand-alone Power Apps developer plan, and a new Power Platform Fusion development learning path will help developers build low-code solutions.

Power BI integration with Jupyter Notebook is now in preview.

Power BI Premium's new capabilities include automation APIs, streaming data flows, and automated aggregation. The APIs are available now, while Data Flow and Aggregation will enter preview in June.

New features coming to Power Fx will allow developers to build apps using natural language, powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 natural language model running on Azure Machine Learning. For example, typing "show orders with product names starting with children" will generate a list of formulas best suited for the developer to choose from. Additionally, program synthesis using the example (PROSE) SDK can train the model to work when some examples are given. These capabilities will be in preview in June.

Power Fx is being expanded from Power Apps canvas apps to model-driven commanding and dataverse calculated columns. These extensions will be in preview in June.

Fusion Teams -- teams including both professional developers and so-called citizen developers -- are the target audience for a set of features that Microsoft says are coming "soon": Native Power Platform integration into Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, command- Support for line interface (CLI) source code files and packaging, independent publisher capabilities, and an application lifecycle management accelerator.

Power virtual agents are now integrated with the Bot Composer Framework to help developers and business users build bots together. Users can enhance their bot by developing custom dialogs with Bot Framework Composer and add them to their Power Virtual Agent bot. Custom dialogs added with Bot Framework Composer are deployed, hosted, and executed with Power Virtual Agents bot content and do not require additional Microsoft Azure hosting.

windows

Windows components were also not ignored.

Microsoft Edge 91 now has several performance enhancers, including Sleeping Tab, which puts ads to sleep when they're in the background, and Startup Boost, which keeps core Edge processes running in the background even when the browser isn't active. , accelerates its launch.

Edge WebView2, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms and WinUI 3 for Win32 C/C++ help developers bring web-based experiences to their native apps, regardless of the version of Windows. It is now generally available.

Project Reunion's preview lets developers build Windows apps faster by separating the UI from the operating system. It provides support for Windows 10 version 1809, the ability to use Project Reunion with a .NET 5 app and Windows UI Library (WinUI) 3, and Microsoft Edge WebView 2 for user interaction development. Version 1.0 is scheduled for Q4 of this year.

This summer, the Microsoft Store will be selling a Windows Snapdragon Developer Kit on the ARM reference device that allows developers to build native applications on the ARM64.

The Windows Subsystem (WSL) for Linux now supports Linux graphical user interface apps.

Commercial Windows users will soon be able to search from the Windows Search bar in enterprise tools such as Salesforce and Dynamics 365.

Windows Terminal 1.9 Preview, now available, has a new Quake mode that lets users open a new terminal window with keyboard shortcuts. It also has a new Settings UI, so that users no longer need to edit the configuration file.