BOOK OF NEWS

Welcome everyone to Microsoft Build, our annual flagship event for developers.

Our goal with the Book of News is to provide you with a guide to all the announcements we’re making, with all the details you need. Our primary focus remains the same – to make it as easy as possible for you to navigate all the latest information and provide key details on the topics you’re most interested in exploring.

From the days of MS-DOS Basic to the creation of Visual Studio Code and acquisition of GitHub, Microsoft has been a platform and tools company – built by developers for developers. So in this way, Microsoft Build clearly reflects those roots. We’ll be talking about what Microsoft is doing for developers and providing tools that developers can use today.

This is a payoff moment. You’ve heard us talk in the past about our ambition to deliver tools and services to support any developer, any app on any device, for any platform. Now we’re going to deliver them.

This is the Microsoft Build where you’re going to see real tools and platforms for developers to make their lives easier. These tools can be used today and are often deeply embedded with AI from the cloud to the edge and automation.

We have a great lineup of news and some exciting moments planned for this year’s Microsoft Build. I hope you can join us.

As always, send us your feedback! We want to know how we can do better. Are you getting the information and context you need? What can we do to make the experience even better next time?

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The Microsoft Build Book of News is your guide to key news items that we are announcing at Microsoft Build. The interactive Table of Contents gives you the option to select the items you are interested in, and the translation capabilities make the Book of News more accessible globally. (Just click the translate button below the Table of Contents to enable translations.)

We also pulled together a folder of imagery related to a few of the news items. Please take a look at the imagery here.

We hope the Book of News provides all the information, executive insight and context you need. If you have any questions or feedback regarding content in the Book of News, please email [email protected].

If you’re interested in speaking with an industry analyst about news announcements at Build or Microsoft’s broader strategy and product offerings, please contact [email protected].

Microsoft Azure AI is introducing two updates to Azure Cognitive Services to help developers deploy high-quality models as APIs and infuse language capabilities into their apps more efficiently and responsibly. Azure OpenAI Service, an Azure Cognitive Service, is now available in preview. Approved customers can access different models from OpenAI, including the GPT-3 base series (Ada, Babbage, Curie and DaVinci), Codex series and embedding models, with the enterprise capabilities of Azure.

OpenAI Service helps customers enable new reasoning and comprehension capabilities for building cutting-edge apps for use cases such as writing assistance, code generation and making sense of unstructured data. With features like fine-tuning and built-in responsible AI, customers can also tailor the model to their specific needs to detect and mitigate harmful use.

Azure Cognitive Service for Language now offers summarization for documents and conversations, a new capability that helps developers quickly surface key information in documents and contact center calls, such as the reason for the call and resolution. Additional capabilities, now generally available, include custom-named entity recognition to help developers identify terms specific to a domain and custom-text classification to help developers organize and categorize text with a customer’s domain-specific labels, such as a support ticket or invoice.

Learn more about these updates, or download visual assets.

The Azure Machine Learning responsible AI dashboard, now in preview, is a new feature within Azure Machine Learning to help developers and data scientists more easily implement responsible AI. The dashboard brings together multiple capabilities such as data explorer, fairness, model interpretability, error analysis and counterfactual and causal inference analysis, which help developers debug their models and make more informed, data-driven decisions. In addition, Azure Machine Learning now offers a responsible AI scorecard to summarize model performance and insights, helping technical and non-technical audiences understand the impact of applying responsible AI.

Other updates to Azure Machine Learning include:

• Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints, now generally available, help developers and data scientists more easily deploy large-scale machine learning models for both real-time and batch inferencing.
• AutoML features, in preview, include support for natural language processing and image tasks, generation of models’ training codes and enhancements for product integration and machine learning operations (MLOps).
• ​The Python SDK v2, in preview, simplifies the developer experience, and the Command Line Interface v2, generally available, allows users to participate in the machine learning lifecycle without needing to learn specific programming languages.

Learn more about this update, or download visual assets.

Azure Form Recognizer has new capabilities in preview. Customers can unlock new document processing scenarios, such as streamlining patient check-in and vaccine verification with insurance card and vaccine card prebuilt models. Additionally, layout capabilities for paragraphs, headers and titles enable more precise text extraction.

Azure Bot Service and Power Virtual Agents are integrated to empower professional and citizen developers to build bots collaboratively. This integration will go a step further: Power Virtual Agents will be incorporating additional Azure Bot Service Composer capabilities, such as a new authoring canvas, rich responses, event-driven and contextual triggers and new telephony channels, to further cater to professional developers. These are all available in preview.

Azure Metrics Advisor’s new auto-tuning capability, in preview, enables users to customize the service to surface just personalized anomalies. Through the guided experience, customers provide detection preferences, such as level of sensitivity and anomaly pattern, to tailor the model on the back end. Users can quickly evaluate the effectiveness of the configuration with the estimate generated by running the customized model through historical data. The service then suggests an alert rule that can be further tailored for mission-critical notifications.

Learn more about this update by contacting the Microsoft Media and Analyst Events Team. 

Microsoft is committed to advancing AI so that every person and organization on the planet can achieve more. In addition to evolving AI through Microsoft research-driven AI breakthroughs that are implemented into Azure tools and services customers can use today, Microsoft also works with other organizations to help the global AI community evolve, expand and thrive. Today, Microsoft is announcing several key partnerships, including:

• Meta, which has selected Azure as a strategic cloud provider to help accelerate AI research and experimentation for developers. As part of the agreement, Meta will expand its use of Azure’s supercomputing power to accelerate AI research and development for its Meta AI group. Meta will utilize a dedicated Azure cluster of 5400 GPUs using the latest virtual machine (VM) series in Azure (NDm A100 v4 series, featuring NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core 80 GB GPUs) for some of its large-scale AI research workloads. In addition, Meta and Microsoft will collaborate to scale PyTorch adoption on Azure and accelerate developers’ journey from experimentation to production. In the coming months, Microsoft will build new PyTorch development accelerators to facilitate rapid implementation of PyTorch-based solutions on Azure. Microsoft will also continue providing enterprise-grade support for PyTorch to enable customers and partners to deploy PyTorch models in production on both cloud and edge.
• AMD, as Azure will be the first public cloud to deploy AMD’s flagship M200 GPU for large-scale AI training. Microsoft is working with PyTorch and AMD to optimize the performance and developer experience for customers running PyTorch on Azure, and to ensure that developers’ PyTorch projects run optimally on AMD hardware.
• Hugging Face, an open-source platform for data scientists and ML practitioners, will deepen its partnership with Microsoft and expand its Azure integration. The new Hugging Face Endpoints service, backed by Azure Machine Learning and available in Azure Marketplace, will help developers and data scientists more quickly and easily deploy thousands of custom or pretrained transformer models. Additionally, Hugging Face and Microsoft will bring Private Model Hub and the Expert Acceleration Program to Azure and enable consumption of Hugging Face’s APIs directly in Azure Machine Learning.

Learn more about this update with Meta and Hugging Face.

Azure Container Apps, now generally available, enables customers to run microservices and containerized apps on a serverless platform. Azure Container Apps is built on the foundation of powerful open-source technology in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Learn more about this update.

The Azure Communication Services Mobile UI Library, now generally available, helps save time and reduce complexity for app developers by providing production-ready UI components for mobile apps. The release includes support for 13 languages, accessibility for UI components and the ability to view shared screen content – including pinch-to-zoom, a key feature for mobile users.

Developers building communications-enabled apps using Azure Communication Services can now add email notifications to their apps using Azure Communication Services Email – now in preview. Triggering email from the app to customers enables scenarios that include account sign ups and password resets, service outage alerts, purchase confirmations and more. SDKs are available for .NET and JavaScript.

Learn more about this update.

Azure Spring Cloud, a fully managed service from Microsoft and VMware, solves the challenges of running Spring apps at cloud scale by removing the need to worry about infrastructure, app lifecycle, monitoring, container intricacies and Kubernetes. Since its launch in 2019, the service has expanded in functionality, including the launch of the Enterprise tier. To reflect the expanded scope of the service as a platform for all types of Spring apps, Microsoft is renaming the service Azure Spring Apps.

The Azure Spring Apps Enterprise tier includes commercially supported Spring runtime components to help enterprise customers ship faster and unlock Spring’s full potential. Azure Spring Apps Enterprise tier represents the continued collaboration with VMware to combine Microsoft’s Cloud platform expertise with VMware’s innovative Tanzu portfolio.

The Enterprise tier lets customers:

• Deploy and manage Spring and polyglot apps in the cloud at enterprise scale on a fully managed Azure infrastructure.
• Effortlessly route client requests to apps with fully managed Tanzu Spring Cloud Gateway and the Tanzu API portal.
• Select and configure commercial VMware Tanzu components like Build Service and Service Registry on-demand.
• Experience Spring’s full potential with long-term support (LTS) for Spring projects.

Learn more about this update.

Several key enhancements have been made to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to aid the developer experience. Draft 2 is a reboot of the open-source project that makes it easier for developers to build apps that run on Kubernetes. With Draft 2, developers can create, containerize and deploy their apps to Kubernetes. Draft can also generate a GitHub Action workflow file to build and deploy apps onto any Kubernetes cluster.

Other updates to AKS, in preview, include:

• Draft Azure CLI, Azure portal and Visual Studio Code extensions.
• Web application routing add-in, which provides developers immediate access to expose their web apps deployed on Kubernetes to the internet.
• An add-in to the Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA). Customers can drive the scaling of any container in Kubernetes based on the number of events that need to be processed.

Learn more about this update.

Service Bus Explorer capabilities are now generally available in the Azure portal. Developers can now use the portal to specify a Service Bus namespace and then send messages to a queue or topic in that namespace, as well as receive or peek at messages from a queue or a subscription.

Learn more about this update by contacting the Microsoft Media and Analyst Events Team. 

Azure API Management provides a hybrid, multicloud management platform for APIs across all environments. Updates to Azure API Management include:

• GraphQL passthrough support is now generally available. With GraphQL support, customers can leverage the existing benefits of Azure API Management, including security, observability and reduced latency for their GraphQL APIs while also adding GraphQL-specific features. Other benefits include the ability to easily add GraphQL services as APIs, securing GraphQL APIs by applying existing and GraphQL-specific control policies, and exploring the schema and run text queries against GraphQL APIs in the Azure and developer portals.
• Synthetic GraphQL and Token Store are both in preview.

Learn more about this update. 

Several updates to Microsoft Azure App Service are either generally available or in preview and include:

• Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) support, in preview, makes it possible for customers to host their gRPC apps on Azure App Service. gRPC uses the HTTP/2 protocol to streamline messaging between clients and back-end servers, providing an efficient way to connect services that require high-performance communication.
• The App Service Landing Zone Accelerator has been released. The Accelerator is a combination of documentation and automation to help customers deploy a reference enterprise scale deployment of Azure App Service on the App Service Environment v3. The combination of documentation and deployable artifacts makes it easier to move enterprise apps from an on-premises environment to Azure App Service.
• Azure App Service bulk migration capabilities are coming to preview in the coming weeks. This feature will make it possible for customers to not just discover and assess ASP.NET web apps, but categorize which apps are ready for migration, suggest a SKU for migration and provide a guided content and configuration experience for ASP.NET web apps to Azure App Service.

Learn more about this update.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, now generally available, is a new, integrated platform that unifies databases, analytics and governance, empowering organizations to invest more time creating value rather than integrating and managing a fragmented data estate.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform enables organizations to easily pivot and adapt in rapidly evolving landscapes, add layers of intelligence to their apps, unlock predictive insights and govern their data anywhere. It addresses major customer pain points like market fragmentation while also empowering customers to capture and utilize data more efficiently to increase market share.

Learn more about this update.

SQL Server 2022 is the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server with improvements in performance, security and availability.

SQL Server 2022 integrates with Azure Synapse Link and Microsoft Purview to enable customers to derive deeper insights, predictions and governance from their data at scale. Cloud integration is enhanced with disaster recovery (DR) to Azure SQL Managed Instance, along with no-ETL (extract, transform and load) connections to cloud analytics, which allow database administrators to manage their data estates with greater flexibility and minimal impact to the user. Performance and scalability are automatically enhanced via built-in query intelligence.

For the first time, anyone can download the SQL Server 2022 preview to test the new features in the release.

Learn more about this update.

Mission-critical apps come in every size and scale. New features for Azure Cosmos DB, now in preview, enable developers to build scalable, cost-effective cloud-native apps and add enterprise-grade features to their apps.

New burst capacity and elasticity features ensure apps deliver high performance during peak times without cost overruns. These features include:

• Increased serverless capacity to 1 TB.
• Shared throughput across database partitions.
• Support for hierarchical partition keys.

Developers also have new, free ways to test both online and offline. Azure Cosmos DB has an improved 30-day free trial experience, now generally available, and support for MongoDB data in the Azure Cosmos DB Linux desktop emulator.

A new, free, continuous backup and point-in-time restore capability enables seven-day data recovery and restoration from accidental deletes, and role-based access control support for Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB offers enhanced security.

Learn more about this update.

To help developers meet the requirements of modern cloud apps and drive business performance, Azure SQL Database is releasing new features that help simplify and expedite app development and reduce time to market.

These features, now in preview, include:

• Updated input and output bindings in Azure Functions give customers the flexibility of connecting to Azure SQL Database using Python and JavaScript languages, alongside the previously released bindings for C#. This further simplifies app development by reducing hardcoded access to Azure SQL Database.
• A local development environment update provides customers with a containerized, full-fidelity Azure SQL Database experience that includes Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio extensions. Developers can design, develop and test SQL databases from a source-controlled project and publish them to the public SQL Database service within the same workflow.
• New JSON constructors and ISJSON enhancements allow customers to easily validate JSON documents or convert SQL data to JSON.

​The ledger feature in Azure SQL Database, now generally available, enables tamper-evident capabilities through cryptographic verification for centralized data stores. It eliminates the additional cost, complexity and performance overhead of decentralized blockchain technology while providing many of the benefits of blockchain, including decentralizing data across multiple parties, in a fully managed and familiar SQL environment.

Learn more about this update.

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics.

The following updates to the service are now in preview:

• ​Azure Synapse Link for SQL enables near real-time insights by eliminating barriers between operational data stores and Azure Synapse Analytics. Customers can remove data movement barriers and replace manual extract, transform and load (ETL) cycles with more impactful innovation. For both SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Link serves as a seamless data pipeline to Azure Synapse Analytics, so customers do not need to manage ETL logic. This makes it easier to do business intelligence (BI) reporting on operational data in near real-time, without impacting the operational store.
• ​Microsoft Graph Data Connect makes it easy for Microsoft 365 customers to harness the power of their organizational data by moving it into Azure Synapse where they can uncover new actionable business insights that could improve customer satisfaction, increase productivity and optimize business processes. Microsoft 365 customers who use Azure Synapse can easily unlock new insights using Azure Synapse Analytics, taking advantage of valuable employee and customer collaboration data they already own.

Learn more about this update.

The Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server Memory Optimized service tier improves mission-critical workloads with lower input/output latency, higher availability service level agreements, higher resiliency and faster recovery from database failures. In addition, customers can redirect their reporting and analytical queries to their secondary read-only replica. This allows for better load balancing and faster reporting without impacting transactional performance.

With these new capabilities, now generally available, Microsoft is renaming Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server Memory Optimized service tier to the Business Critical service tier. The new service tier provides 1.5x faster performance than Azure Database for MySQL Single Server deployment.

In addition, the new 80-core Business Critical compute instance, also generally available, offers more memory, higher concurrency and faster throughput. Together these announcements make the new Business Critical service tier optimal for mission-critical MySQL workloads.

Learn more about this update.

Microsoft Purview Data Policy for SQL DevOps roles is now in preview. This is an intuitive experience for SQL DevOps roles to provision access to data assets that opted into Microsoft Purview’s governance boundary. This capability enables the data owner to manage the data entitlements centrally from Microsoft Purview.

Microsoft Purview Data Estate Insights will allow users to get a bird’s-eye view of their data estate’s health and governance program’s adoption. Data Estate Insights empowers the office of the Chief Data Officer by giving an overall summary of the data estate. Users can spot and close gaps in a few clicks. This update will be generally available in July.

Learn more about Microsoft Purview Data Policy and Data Estate Insights.

Microsoft Purview’s multicloud and extensibility capabilities are expanding to include native classification, labeling and protection capabilities for Adobe Acrobat to help secure PDFs, as well as new Microsoft Graph APIs for data lifecycle management. Unifying these components empowers Microsoft Purview Information Protection and Adobe Document cloud customers to consistently classify and label PDF documents natively, and to properly address security and compliance. These updates are in preview.

Learn more about this update.

Azure Arc helps customers get the most from their hybrid environments by bringing the best of Azure to on-premises and multicloud environments. These new features, now generally available, include:

The landing zone accelerator for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes gives customers tools to accelerate and simplify hybrid and multicloud. This provides best practices and automated reference implementations, so customers can get started with their Azure Arc deployments more easily. Customers can increase their agility by deploying cloud-native apps faster and at scale across different environments while strengthening their security and compliance posture.

The Business Critical service tier for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance delivers strong business continuity requirements, increased performance and continuous security to customers’ most database-intensive use cases. Specifically, the Business Critical service tier ensures uptime and redundancy through passive disaster recovery (DR) and Always On availability groups, as well as continuous security with automated updates, using a rolling upgrade to deliver patches and features without app downtime. Unlimited CPU and memory, as well as the ability to choose the right combination of the two for their business needs, allows customers to fine-tune performance for their SQL workloads.

With full-feature parity with SQL Server Enterprise Edition, organizations will be able to have the same security and automated update capabilities they have trusted for decades.

Learn more about this update.

Azure Stack HCI is a hardware and software stack that customers have been using to extend the Azure cloud to their physical location. The standard hardware configuration is optimized for scale and power, and the new single node offering provides additional options for business scenarios with different requirements.

The new single node Azure Stack HCI, now generally available, fulfills the growing needs of customers in remote locations while maintaining the innovation of native integration with Azure Arc. Specifically, it offers customers the flexibility to deploy the stack in smaller spaces and with less processing needs, optimizing resources while still delivering quality and consistency.

Additional benefits include:

• Smaller Azure Stack HCI solutions for environments with physical space constraints or that do not require built-in resiliency, like retail stores and branch offices.
• A smaller footprint to reduce hardware and operational costs.
• Solutions that can be built to scale, ranging from a single node up to 16 nodes if needed.

Learn more about this update.

NGINX for Azure, in preview, is a natively integrated software as a service (SaaS) solution with advanced traffic management and monitoring. The tight Azure integration enables ease of use with a few clicks for provisioning and configuration though the Azure portal. Developers can leverage advanced traffic management features, such as JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication and active health checks, with built-in security integrations like Azure Key Vault for SSL/TLS certificate management. Customers can purchase this solution through the Azure Marketplace, get a unified bill for all services they use on Azure and leverage existing enterprise agreements.

Learn more about this update.

Customers can leverage Azure confidential computing to bring large workloads with low trust requirements to the cloud with Microsoft Azure DCsv3 virtual machines (VMs) and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), including containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

DCsv3 and DCdsv3 VMs can provide app-level confidentiality through enclaves and Multi Key Total Memory Encryption (MK-TME), with up to 48 physical cores and a 12-times increase in memory. The Azure DCsv3 VMs with Intel Software Guard Extensions is generally available.

Learn more about this update by contacting the Microsoft Media and Analyst Events Team. 

Dynatrace for Azure is a natively integrated software as a service (SaaS) solution that will provide deep cloud observability for proactive identification and resolution of issues impacting mission-critical apps.

The tight Azure integration enables one-click provisioning and configuration through the Azure portal and effortless navigation through single sign-on (SSO). Developers can monitor cloud apps with secure and seamless dataflow to Dynatrace, including shipping logs and metrics. Customers can purchase Dynatrace through the Azure Marketplace, get a unified bill for all services they use on Azure and leverage existing enterprise agreements. Dynatrace for Azure will be available in preview in June.

Learn more about this update.

Azure Monitor is introducing a feature to improve customers’ ability to detect, diagnose and observe issues in apps and infrastructure. AIOps powered Smart Maps in Application Insights helps users visually spot performance bottlenecks or failure hotspots across a distributed app. This feature is now in preview.

Learn more about this update by contacting the Microsoft Media and Analyst Events Team. 

Microsoft is adding features to streamline and simplify cloud migration and modernization. These new features include:

• Agentless discovery and grouping of dependent Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers to ensure all required components are identified and included during a move to Azure. This feature is generally available.
• Azure SQL assessment improvements for better customer experience. Assessments now include recommendations for SQL Server on Azure VMs and support for Hyper-V VMs and physical stacks, along with already existing assessments for Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database. This feature is in preview.
• Pause and resume of migration function has been included to provide control over the migration window. This mechanism can be used to schedule migrations during off-peak periods. This feature is in preview.

In addition, the following update pertaining to ASP.NET and Java apps is also in preview:

• Discovery, assessment and modernization of ASP.NET web apps to native Azure Application Service. Customers can discover and modernize an ASP.NET web app to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Application Service Container and discover Java apps running on Apache Tomcat.

Learn more about this update by contacting the Microsoft Media and Analyst Events Team. 

Developers today face long onboarding times, conflicting development workstation settings and difficulty switching between tasks. It can also be difficult for IT admins to maintain secure, compliant and up-to-date dev environments while providing developers the flexibility needed to remain agile.

Microsoft Dev Box will give developers self-service access to high performance, cloud-based workstations that are preconfigured and ready-to-code for specific projects. Azure Deployment Environments will make it easy for developer teams to quickly spin up app infrastructure with project-based templates that establish consistency and best practices.

Both services will centralize management and governance, enabling developers to focus on coding while maximizing security, compliance and cost efficiency.

Learn more about this update, or download visual assets.

GitHub OpenID Connect (OIDC) with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) workload identity federation, now generally available, minimizes the need for storing and accessing secrets. The new capabilities alleviate the need for managing Azure service principal secrets and other long-lived cloud credentials in the GitHub Actions secret store.

With this integration, users can manage all cloud resource access securely in Azure. These capabilities also minimize the chances of service downtime due to expired credentials in GitHub. Customers can integrate with developer platforms, like GitHub Actions, to build apps swiftly and securely. With workload identity federation, Azure AD removes the secrets necessary to access resources in selected scenarios – adding another layer of security and removing the burden of secret management.

Learn more about this update.

.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI), now generally available, is a new framework for building modern, multi-platform, natively compiled apps for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows using C# and XAML in a single codebase. The framework solves the challenges developers face when building native apps across many operating systems. Instead of having to learn multiple technology stacks, .NET MAUI abstracts them into one common framework built on .NET 6.

Native apps look and feel like the operating system on which they belong by default, and layouts are fully adapted to each device automatically, with no additional code. APIs are available directly from C# to access over 60 platform features, including isolated storage, sensors, geolocation and camera. Visual Studio 2022 includes Hot Reload technology to make developers much more productive building .NET MAUI apps. Developers can also take advantage of the latest debugging, IntelliSense and testing features of Visual Studio to write better code faster.

Additionally, .NET MAUI enables web developers to build hybrid web apps with C# instead of JavaScript. Developers can share Blazor web components directly in .NET MAUI apps while having access to native device capabilities and packaging. By using .NET MAUI and Blazor together, developers can reuse one set of web UI components across mobile, desktop and web.

Learn more about this update.

Microsoft is sharing updates on the investments in large language models and is providing a glimpse into the next generation of AI capabilities. These updates will enable developers to build the next wave of software more efficiently and include:

• GitHub Copilot usage data from the technical preview and updates on general availability. Information on the research project Copilot Explain, which translates code into natural language descriptions, helping novice developers or those working with an unfamiliar codebase.
• OpenAI Codex, a model that translates natural language into code across more than a dozen programming languages.

These demos and the associated code will be available to Microsoft Build attendees on GitHub. Attendees will also get unlimited access to Codex models from OpenAI for 3 months, and free tokens to use on all other publicly available models on OpenAI’s API. Microsoft is also launching the Codex Innovation Challenge, a competition for Build attendees to share ideas for how Codex can be applied.

Learn more about this update.

The Microsoft Learn training and certifications portfolio has been enhanced with new and updated training and certifications to offer a wide range of benefits for users, ranging from exam prep to cybersecurity training to data analytics to role-playing real-world tech issues.

The additions and updates include:

• Microsoft Learn Cloud Games
• Microsoft Exam Readiness Zone
• Microsoft Certification Renewal
• Power Automate RPA (robotic process automation) Developer Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Customer Data Platform Security
• Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert
• Microsoft 365 Certified: Exchange Online Support Engineer Specialty
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate

Microsoft Learn Cloud Games and the Microsoft Exam Readiness Zone are generally available. The rest of the trainings and certifications are in preview.

Learn more about this update. 

Coming to private preview next month, developers will be able to create Loop components by updating their existing Adaptive Cards or building new Adaptive Card-based Loop components. When generally available, Adaptive Card-based Loop components can be copied and pasted across Microsoft Teams chat and Outlook emails. Adaptive Card-based Loop components will stay in sync across Teams chats and Outlook emails as they are copied/pasted and shared in various chats and emails. And with the help of Editor using Context IQ, users will be able to discover relevant Adaptive Card-based Loop components based on the context in Outlook email or Teams chat.

Learn more about this update by contacting the Microsoft Media and Analyst Events Team. 

New Microsoft Teams tools enable developers to build richer, more collaborative experiences that surface in the flow of people’s work across chats, channels, calls and meetings in Teams.

Live Share experiences for Teams apps
A new collaboration experience in Teams, called Live Share, enables Teams meeting participants to interact in new ways with shared apps directly in the Teams meeting window. For apps built with Live Share capabilities, the Teams meeting stage allows participants to annotate, edit, zoom in and out and interact with shared content in a variety of other ways.

New extensions to the Teams SDK, now available in preview, enable developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build Live Share capabilities into their apps and take real-time collaboration in Teams meetings to the next level. Tooling for Live Share experiences is built on Microsoft Fluid Framework, allowing developers to create synchronized meeting experiences, entirely client-side, with just a few lines of code.

Partners building Live Share experiences include Hexagon, which is reinventing how collaborative engineering reviews are done; Frame.io, an Adobe company, which is enabling synchronized, interactive reviews of video workflows; Skillsoft, which will deliver transformative learning experiences; and MakeCode, which is building interactive learn-to-code gaming scenarios.

Developers can access the new extensions at Teams Live Share.

Enhanced link unfurling and rich actionable previews
Link unfurling allows users to preview rich content associated with a link shared in Teams and easily take action directly from it. New capabilities enable developers to unfurl link previews – even when an app isn’t installed or when a link shared in Teams is not associated with a Teams app. For Teams apps, developers can make simple additions to the app manifest to enable their app links to unfurl into a rich card preview. This capability will be available in preview later this summer. For all other links, developers soon will be able to add structured schema.org metadata and tag actions in their website to enable rich actionable previews in Teams.

Teams JavaScript 2.0 SDK and manifest now generally available
The Teams JavaScript 2.0 SDK and manifest tools enable developers to build Teams apps that can extend Personal Tabs and Message Extension functionality to other Microsoft 365 apps, including Outlook and Office.com. This is the next step toward enabling developers to use a single codebase to build apps that extend across Teams and Microsoft 365 apps to reach more users in the flow of work.

New Approvals APIs
Approvals in Teams enables everyone – from frontline workers to office workers – to easily create, manage and share approvals directly in the flow of work. With new Approvals APIs, developers can extend the Approvals functionality into their apps and workflows. Developers can also use Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) APIs to enable approvals within line of business (LOB) apps, and they can use webhooks to track changes and drive workflows with Approvals in Teams. The Approvals APIs will be available for preview later this summer. Learn more about extending Approvals across your LOB apps in Teams and subscribe to devblogs.microsoft.com for updates.

Learn more about these updates, or download visual assets.

With Collaboration controls in Microsoft Power Apps, in preview this summer, developers will be able to use low code tools to easily embed Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams collaboration capabilities, including Chat, Meetings, Tasks, Files and Approvals, into Power Apps. Simply drag and drop collaborative capabilities, like meetings and tasks, into your line of business (LOB) apps to enable users to seamlessly collaborate in the flow of work.

New Microsoft Graph APIs for Teams, now available in preview, enable developers to embed rich, engaging Teams Chat and Channel features and content into apps, using Microsoft Graph APIs. These new capabilities enable licensed users to collaborate seamlessly between Teams and their own apps – without having to switch between multiple tools.

Azure Communication Services sample app builder enables developers to build and deploy a sample app for virtual visits in just a few minutes without coding. The sample app builder lets developers get started in creating customer-facing virtual appointment solutions. Developers can use Microsoft Bookings for easy scheduling, along with Microsoft Graph and Azure Communication Services UI Library, to provide a turnkey communications experience that is fully customizable, accessible and localizable. The sample app builder is fully open source and available on GitHub.

Learn more about virtual visits and these updates, or download visual assets.

Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio enables developers to create, build, debug and publish apps for Teams across web and mobile devices in minutes. This saves developers time by automating configuration across portals, cloud resource templates and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. New capabilities in the Teams Toolkit make it easier to bring an existing web app to Teams, use the toolkit step-by-step with existing projects and launch an app to Teams mobile and Outlook.

Teams Toolkit also makes it simpler to build one-way notifications that notify users of an event in the web app and display it as an Adaptive Card directly in Teams. Additionally, Teams Toolkit includes a set of features to help build and publish commands, responses and notifications for any business-related action.

The Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and the Teams Toolkit CLI are generally available, and the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio 2022 is available in preview.

Learn more about this update.

Several updates within the Microsoft Teams App Store allow developers to maximize user engagement and monetize their apps with more effective capabilities. These updates include:

Improved discoverability in the Teams App Store with intelligent recommendations and app flyouts is now generally available. With enhanced contextual discovery capabilities, it’s even easier for developers to get their apps in front of the right users in the right context. Additionally, the Teams App Store now has improved editorial content and a “featured apps” section, making it easier for users to find apps that are relevant to their productivity and collaboration needs.

APIs to configure in-app purchase, also now generally available, allow developers to make it easy for users to upgrade from free to paid subscriptions within their Teams apps.

New license management capabilities, in preview this summer, will allow customers to easily assign and track licenses for purchased Teams apps directly within Teams.

Learn more about these updates, or download visual assets.

The new App Compliance Automation tool for Microsoft 365 helps independent software vendors (ISVs) get their apps secured and compliant with industry standards required for Microsoft 365 certification. Additionally, developers within an enterprise who build custom solutions can leverage the same tool to evaluate app security and compliance, and then share the results with IT security professionals to complete Microsoft 365 certification.

Currently, ISVs go through a manual process to complete Microsoft 365 certification. This new tool automates a significant number of steps in the validation process, which will reduce effort and time while increasing efficiency. This tool is now available in private preview.

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Collaborative apps in Microsoft Teams bring together communications, data and business processes into a single organizing layer. New and updated Teams apps from ISV partners include:

• Figma, the collaborative design platform, is introducing a new app that will enable teams to share, present and collaborate in real-time on Figma and FigJam files within a Teams meeting. The app will also leverage the new Adaptive Card functionality, so when a user shares a Figma or FigJam file link in a Teams chat, the card unfurls, allowing users to open the file from within Teams. Users will be able to also view and respond to file notifications directly from Teams. The Figma app will be available this summer in the Teams App Store.
• The MURAL app for Teams gives teams everywhere the ability to bring a shared collaboration space directly into Teams. Users can improve teamwork with asynchronous visual collaboration and transform disengaged conversations into productive, engaging meetings and workshops using hundreds of templates and proven, guided methods that empower teams to deliver breakthrough results. MURAL is a Microsoft preview partner, and the MURAL app now works across Teams, Outlook and Office for a single, connected experience.
• The Observable app for Teams allows companies to bring their data, context and logic together in one place to uncover insights collaboratively and accelerate data-driven decision making across the organization. New updates coming to the Observable app in June will offer Teams notifications when collaborating through comments in Observable.
• The new SAP S/4HANA operational purchaser chatbot provides the collaborative capabilities of Teams to SAP S/4HANA users within a conversational user experience. It uses Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication and leverages Microsoft Graph APIs to allow users to call other parties or schedule Teams meetings with business partners directly from the bot in the context of the authenticated business user. This provides a tight integration of the Teams collaboration experience in a standalone app in SAP, bringing connectivity and collaboration where users need it.
• The ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app from ManageEngine, ZOHO’s enterprise IT management division, leverages Teams to streamline business and IT service delivery, manage and accelerate IT incident resolutions and improve service experiences across the enterprise. Coming soon, the ServiceDesk Plus Cloud app will enhance its existing static Adaptive Cards with Microsoft Loop components, allowing everyone working on the ticket to get the latest updates and trigger service desk tasks without switching tabs.

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Microsoft Power Pages is a low code development and hosting platform ideal for building business-centric websites, allowing low code makers and professional developers to design, configure and publish sites for both desktop and mobile through a fluid, visual experience.

Previously, Power Pages existed as a feature within Power Apps called Power Apps portals. Power Pages will become the fifth member of the Power Platform family as a standalone offering within the Power Platform portfolio.

Power Pages has been redesigned with a new user experience and many new capabilities, including:

• Design studio, now in preview, makes it easy to design, style and publish modern business websites either by scratch or with one of the ready-to-use templates.
• Templates hub, in preview, provides full-featured websites with demo data that allow users to manage scheduling, registration and app submission.
• Learn hub, in preview, features guides, tutorials and videos to learn how to build sites, model business data and work with code components.
• Pro-Developer tools, in preview, include integrations with Visual Studio, GitHub and Azure DevOps to help developers implement advanced business requirements.
• Security and Governance tools, in preview, allow users to secure their website content and data through role-based access controls and Azure.
• Microsoft Dataverse, generally available, is a low code data platform that allows users to securely collect and share business information with site visitors.

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Express design capability, now available to all Power Apps makers, leverages Azure Cognitive Services object detection models. Users simply upload a Figma design from that collaborative design tool, PDF, PowerPoint, paper form, screenshot of a legacy UI or a picture of a hand drawn app, and Power Apps converts it into a working Power Apps app with a UI and data schema within seconds.

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Power Virtual Agent’s new intelligent bot authoring experience, in preview soon, will unify the sophistication of Azure Bot Framework Composer’s pro-code capabilities with the simplicity of Power Virtual Agent’s low code platform. This will make it easier for professional developers and subject matter experts to build collaboratively in one Microsoft bot building studio.

The collaborative bot building studio adds:

• Rich, multimedia responses, including images, videos, adaptive cards and quick replies.
• Enhanced variable management and Power FX editor.
• Speech authoring and telephony bots.

Interested builders can apply to try some of these selected features in the technology preview.

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Datamart in Power BI, now in preview, is a new Power BI Premium self-service capability that enables users to uncover actionable insights through their own independent and dependent data sets. For the first time ever, Microsoft is empowering everyone with the ability to build datamarts that can be centrally governed and managed for workloads up to a terabyte.

This new Power BI capability brings turnkey data warehousing to millions of Power BI users, alleviates demands on IT and accelerates time to insights from months to minutes. As an evolution of the Power BI service, supporting both the novice and the professional user, datamart in Power BI provides every organization and business with agility, speed and flexibility that can help drive digital transformation.

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Unattended robotic process automation (RPA) and virtual machines (VMs) in Power Automate are now in preview. By hosting VMs that are powered by Azure, such as Windows 365, organizations can use Power Automate’s built-in auto-scale to scale VM capacity supporting the execution of RPA flows up or down automatically based on need.

In addition, a new integration with process advisor, the process and task mining capability in Power Automate, allows users to leverage process analytics from within their cloud flows, the digital process automation capability in Power Automate. This update is in preview.

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Microsoft completed a Low Code Trend Index that surveyed nearly 1,000 business decision makers, users and potential users about the impact of low code. Microsoft partnered with independent research firm Edelman Data x Intelligence to author the index.

The research showed that low code/no code is an untapped superpower, with many business decision makers acknowledging that it solves many of their top challenges. For both decision makers and users, use of low code/no code platforms have driven efficiency, accessibility and innovation for both customer and employee app experiences.

Other key takeaways from the Low Code Trend Index include:

• Efficiency and ease of use were the key motivators driving adoption of low code/no code platforms or apps across audiences. Nearly 90% of users felt low code had a positive impact on their productivity and 83% of users felt low code allowed them to do something by themselves that normally would have required a team of developers.
• Nearly 9 in 10 professional users and more than 7 in 10 personal users agree that low code/no code skills have made them more marketable to potential employers.
• More than 80% of users felt low code/no code platforms provide an opportunity to improve their development knowledge and technical skills.
• The partnership of business users and professional developers is yielding faster and better business outcomes.

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Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) will be retired on June 15, 2022. However, for users and organizations who need continued access to critical Internet Explorer-based web apps, Microsoft Edge provides backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer mode. For web developers, this means no longer needing to work on backwards compatibility to IE11. For app developers who embed web content through the MSHTML (Trident) engine, the app is unchanged by IE11 retirement and will continue to be supported.

Microsoft Edge WebView2 is Microsoft’s best and latest web platform for building embedded browsing experiences. In trials performed by Cerner Corporation, Microsoft Edge WebView2 reduced render time by 85%, CPU utilization by 33% and memory utilization by 32% compared to Internet Explorer. WebView2 is available with the .Net MAUI framework, which releases today, to help developers embed web-based experiences. WebView2 for WinUI 2/UWP will be generally available soon.

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As an open platform, Windows welcomes developers and apps across platforms and coding languages, including .NET, web, Android, C++ and Linux. Developers can design app experiences for Windows with their technology of choice. This keeps costs low and allows them to build with tools and software they are familiar with.

Several updates and improvements have been made across Windows developer technologies and include:

• The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has become an integral tool for many developers, dev-ops engineers, and others with Linux workflows, especially for the cloud and web. To make it even easier to install and update WSL, we recently made it available in the Microsoft Store.
• Windows Subsystem for Android is now running on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) 12.1 and features windowing and resizing improvements, enhanced networking, developer tool integration, increased app catalog and more. This is in preview and available from the Microsoft Store.
• The latest Windows App SDK 1.1 update, currently in preview and generally available soon, includes new features including Fluent visual materials in WinUI 3, updated desktop windowing APIs, enhancements to push notifications, new environment variable APIs for C++ and performance improvements.
• Tooling updates include Template Studio for WinUI 3 to help build Windows apps, .NET Upgrade Assistant to migrate Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps to WinUI 3 and updated Edge developer tools. These updates are generally available.
• Widgets in Windows 11 provide a fresh, glanceable and useful view into app content for users. Beginning later this year, developers will be able to start building Widgets as companion experiences for Win32 and progressive web apps (PWA) on Windows 11, powered by the Adaptive Cards
• Hybrid Loop is a cross-platform development pattern for building AI experiences that span the cloud and edge. This pattern allows developers to make late binding runtime decisions on whether to run inferencing on Azure or the local client. This capability will be exposed through a new Azure Execution Provider in ONNX Runtime along with a prototype AI Toolchain in Azure Machine Learning. The AI capabilities will be unlocked by Project Volterra, detailed below.

Microsoft is announcing a comprehensive Arm-native developer toolchain that includes Arm-native versions of Visual Studio 2022, VC++, .NET & .NET Framework. Microsoft is working to support Open JDK, Python, LL VM, Node and Git as open-source projects that natively target Arm64. The Arm-native developer toolchain releases are either in preview or generally available.

Lastly, Microsoft introduced Project Volterra, which will enable developers to take advantage of the powerful integrated neural processing unit (NPU) to build apps that execute local AI-accelerated workloads. As an Arm-powered device powered by the Snapdragon compute platform, it will enable Windows developers to build, test and debug Arm-native apps alongside all their favorite productivity tools, including Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, WSL, VSCode, Microsoft Office and Teams. Product features are subject to change and may vary by market when the product is released. Microsoft will share more details at a later date.

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The new Microsoft Store on Windows was rebuilt from the ground up for developers because of the tremendous growth in the number of developers bringing their apps and games to the Microsoft Store. In the first three months of 2022, there was a more than 50% increase in new desktop apps and games coming to the Microsoft Store compared to the same period last year.

The Microsoft Store on Windows is designed to help developers and customers connect. Microsoft is announcing Microsoft Store Ads, powered by Microsoft Advertising, to help developers surface their apps to the right user at the right time, and to help users discover new experiences. In the coming months, Microsoft will kick off a pilot program in which developers will be able to create ad campaigns for the Microsoft Store using Microsoft Advertising. Developers interested in participating can sign up for the waitlist.

Also, the Amazon Appstore preview on Windows 11 is expanding to five additional countries including France, Germany, Italy, Japan and United Kingdom by the end of this year. Amazon has brought thousands of apps to Windows 11 and will continue to grow the catalog monthly.

Microsoft is also announcing the removal of the waitlist program for Win32 apps in the Microsoft Store. Any app that runs on Windows, including C++, WinForms, WPF, MAUI, React, Rust, Flutter and Java, is welcome in the Microsoft Store.

Additionally, Win32 developers can reduce deployment friction by using their existing CI/CD pipeline in GitHub to directly publish to the Microsoft Store. Once developers have their Win32 app in the store, they can view actionable insights on health, installations and usage.

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