From November 15 to 17, tech giant held this year’s Microsoft Connect(); which is Microsoft Corp.’s annual online event for professional developers. This year, the company made and demoed several announcements including its new data platform technologies and cross-platform developer tools. A closer look at this year’s agenda revealed Microsoft attempted to reveal how it is enabling developers to use built-in artificial intelligence (AI) to support continuous innovation and continuous deployment of today’s intelligent applications.
The presentations are still available on demand here.
Speaking at the event, Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft, said with today’s intelligent cloud, emerging technologies like AI have the potential to change every facet of how we interact with the world.
Guthrie said, “Developers are in the forefront of shaping that potential. Today at Connect(); we’re announcing new tools and services that help developers build applications and services for the AI-driven future, using the platforms, languages and collaboration tools they already know and love.”
Microsoft at the event said it is continuing its commitment to delivering open technologies and contributing to and partnering with the open source community.
According to the company, new tools and partnerships are designed to help developers build intelligent, enterprise-ready and cloud- scale apps — regardless of their platform, and to give them the peace of mind with the built-in security, performance, compliance features, support and SLAs available in Azure.
The major announcements
Designed in partnership with the founders of Apache Spark, Azure Databricks was presented as a fast, easy and collaborative Apache Spark-based analytics platform that delivers one-click setup, streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace. Native integration with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Active Directory and Power BI simplifies the creation of modern data warehouses that enable organizations to provide self-service analytics and machine learning over all data with enterprise-grade performance and governance.
Another announcement made was the GitHub Roadmap for Git Virtual File Systems (GVFS). Microsoft said in collaboration with GitHub, they will further their open source partnership to extend GVFS support to GitHub. GVFS is an open source extension to the Git version control system developed by Microsoft to support the world’s largest repositories.
The company also announced initiatives aimed at helping developers to achieve more and one of such is the general availability of the Visual Studio App Center which is a new cloud service for developers to ship higher-quality applications more frequently.
Microsoft said Objective-C, Swift, Android Java, Xamarin and React Native developers can use App Center to increase productivity and accelerate services.
Another major announcement that was made was Azure IoT Edge which enables AI, advanced analytics and machine learning at the Internet of Things (IoT) edge; Microsoft also announced Azure Machine Learning Updates the latest include integration with Azure IoT Edge and AI deployment on iOS devices with Core ML, bringing AI everywhere from the cloud to the IoT edge of devices.
Microsoft also announced it is introducing visual studio tools for AI which would allow developers and data scientists to develop AI models with all the productivity of Visual Studio, on frameworks and languages.