Top Highlights and Takeaways from Microsoft Build 2019

Microsoft Build is an annual technical conference dedicated to developers and IT professionals during 3 intensives, starting from 6 September until 8 May at the Washington State Convention Center Seattle in Seattle, WA.

More than 6,000 people from around the world are joining the amazing conference last week, for the first time, children are a part of Build.

Student ambassadors, the Imagine Cup participants, and students from local schools in Seattle are joining as an attendee.

It is about learning new development trends, acquire knowledge and experience about the latest developer tools and new technologies in Containers, AI/Machine Learning, Serverless, DevOps, IoT, Mixed Reality and Power Platforms.

Day one kicked off with the CEO Satya Nadella opening the Build days and welcoming participants.

Vision keynote was special this year because the CEO was focusing on the opportunity to be in this conference and the question was why should I have to be a part of it? And the answer from the CEO was:

“And that’s the sense of purpose mission that grounds us at Microsoft, to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. It starts by empowering all of you as developers to go after that moonshot in any industry, in any sphere or life or society.”

And during the keynote, he started by talking about cyber-security and he announced an open source project in collaboration with a partner called Free and Fair, called ElectionGuard and it will be open on GitHub by the end of this month, realized by Microsoft Research and it will present

After the keynote was about the four platform opportunities :

• Azure:

‘The world’s computer’: it’s an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge platform that Azure enables, with 54 data center regions around the world and recently they added the first public cloud with data center regions in the continent of Africa. It is an open platform, We moved from Azure and Azure Stack to Azure IoT, to Azure Sphere, to Azure Data Box Edge, to Azure Kinect, HoloLens 2, Azure Database Edge, Azure fabric comes to help developers building the applications of the future. If we said consistency between Azure and the Edge we talk about hybrid as a distributed computing fabric within the environments used by developers, the technology stack in our case and the models operated. As usual, He gave some success stories, for example, is about one of the largest pharmacies Walgreens Boots Alliance and Starbucks.

In this video, he talked about Starbuck’s Deep Brew, an intelligent recommendation based on reinforcement learning models. For more details, take a look at this video.

He put the focus into the democratization of artificial intelligence with infrastructure, tools, and frameworks to ensure the move to AI-first company.

He mentioned Coca Cola that it uses Azure in all HR, finance and IT processes and the built bots for internal functions. and more clients using Azure in their internal process like Shell, Schneider Electric …

After he talked about HoloLens 2 as AI device mixed reality.

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform:

They have rewritten Dynamics as an Azure cloud-native app. Take advantage of the power of data and intelligence-connected. He explains the Dynamics 365 template’s architecture to be multitenant SaaS applications as a unified solution integrating AI but and especially the extensibility of the framework through Power Platform. If we go back to Open Data Initiative that was announced with Adobe and SAP last year in Microsoft Ignite, the challenges between organizations were to adopt more SaaS apps is sometimes they create new silos so they are able to exchange data across both of systems, offering to customers a new experience.

• Microsoft 365: ‘The world’s productivity cloud across work and life’:

It’s about communication, collaboration not only in work but for life too. It describes the business process workflow to ensure opportunity. To facilitate the conversation, Cortana was integrated and Bot Framework has been wired as an extensibility framework.

In this video, we have an example of the use:

And he talked about the new vision of Edge that it will be a commitment to the future of the web.

And in this video, they will talk about Fluid Framework, that is an innovation for the web and in the collaboration area.

Finishing with Microsoft Teams:

• Microsoft Gaming: ‘Play with anyone, anywhere on any device’

If we talk about games, we remember Xbox, he talked about Microsoft Game Stack where the gamer can give life for any game idea. So he talked about Azure PlayFab and Xbox Live community.

And during this keynote, AI was always present to improve every platform.

And two technical keynote was followed by the Executive Vice President, Experience and Devices, Microsoft, Rajesh Jha and the Executive Vice President, Cloud & AI, Scott Guthrie.

During the first 2 days, they announced much news and you can find the list in this book: https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/prod/sites/558/2019/05/FINAL-Book-of-News-Build-2019.pdf

The third day was rich by technical sessions and if you missed them, they are here on-demand: https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions