May 26, 2021, Hong Kong — Microsoft’s annual developer event Microsoft Build 2021 is held digitally on May 25 – 27. A series of new Microsoft Cloud and Developer Tooling innovations were announced, empowering developers to build productively, collaborate securely and innovate at scale — no matter where they are.
This past year has been unlike any other, and developers have been critical to helping businesses in every industry and people everywhere respond and adapt to the challenges of a global pandemic. They have never been more important to the world – and it is increasingly clear that they are the next generation of digital creators.
Over 95% of the world’s largest companies are running their businesses on the Microsoft Cloud today. As industries are being stretched in new ways, public cloud adoption is a key ingredient to enable this type of essential transformation. As a company built by developers and for developers, Microsoft is dedicated to providing them with the agility to address the real-world needs of their customers. Our ambition is to be the platform for platform creators and empower developers to build what comes next.
Highlights from Microsoft Build 2021:
- The latest update of Visual Studio 2019 is generally available, and it includes productivity enhancements for .NET and C++ development, enhanced built-in Git tooling, support for creating GitHub Actions workflows directly from the IDE, improved container tooling and new Azure integrations for cloud development. The roadmap for Visual Studio 2022 was also released.
- Microsoft Teams’ new meeting features enables developers to build innovative scenarios and extend Teams meetings – such as shared stage, Together Mode extensibility and more. And the enhanced Microsoft Teams Toolkit makes coding easier by providing single-line authentication, Azure Functions integration, single-line Microsoft Graph client and more.
- Developers can now use GUI app support on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) so that all the tools and workflows of Linux run on their developer machine. Windows allows developers to work with seamless integrations with any workflow with GUI apps, Linux and GPU-accelerated ML training.
- With Visual Studio, GitHub and Azure, developers can code from anywhere with cloud-powered development environments, collaborate smoothly from anywhere with tools that help them work as a distributed team, and securely ship from anywhere, with fully integrated services and tools that enable them to maintain confidence in security despite being remote.
- The integration of Azure Security Center and GitHub for container scanning is now in public preview. It easily gives teams visibility into build and registry container scan results and provide traceability that helps SecOps teams alert you to issues faster.
- The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is free and open source starting today. It is generally available with commercial support on Azure and Azure Stack. Red Hat JBoss EAP is now available on Azure Virtual Machines, allowing developers to scale apps with VM Scale Sets, and IBM WebSphere is also available on Azure Virtual Machines now with automated solution templates to simplify its deployment.
- Preview capabilities of Azure application services to run on Kubernetes and anywhere with Azure Arc is now available. Developers can run their favorite Azure application services – which include Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Azure API Management, Azure Event Grid – anywhere, including on-premises, on the edge, and on other clouds such as AWS or Google. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI is also generally available for customers who are looking for a managed Kubernetes control plane.
- Cosmos DB Serverless are available for developers to build and modernize high-performance apps at any scale. There are also several new capabilities including new category of services called Azure Applied AI These services combine Azure Cognitive Services with task-specific AI and business logic, so developers can accelerate building AI solutions for common scenarios, such as document processing, customer service and extracting insights from content.
- The new update in Power Fx brings an intuitive AI-assisted maker experience so developers and other users can accelerate app development. We are also bringing Power Fx to model app builders with support for Model Driven Commanding and Dataverse Calculated Columns.
- The Visual Studio extension for Power Platform allows developers to publish APIs in Azure API Management while deploying a Power Platform connector, removing barriers and friction. And the VS Code extension for Power Platform enables native extensibility for Power Platform CLI publication directly from VS Code.
Microsoft Build is about celebrating the role of the developer community in shaping what comes next. Click here to learn more about Microsoft Build 2021 digital event.
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About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
