I just finished watching the #Build 2017 keynote and I am really excited by all the new things that were announced in this occasion. There were so many cool things that at the end I started to forget those mentioned at the beginning. That’s why I thought of writing a //build 2017 keynote summary, to serve more for me remembering all the things that I need to keep up with during the next year.
One of the coolest thing is the new Azure Cosmos DB offering. Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed, multi-model database. With the click of a button, Azure Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure’s geographic regions. It offers throughput, latency, availability, and consistency guarantees with comprehensive service level agreements (SLAs), something no other database service can offer. What this means is that you have a database where you can store documents, tables, graph data and many more in the same place and use really any DB API to access all the data in nearly real time.
Just to stay in the same database area, the announcement of Azure database for MySql was also a nice surprise. Basically, you get a MySql database as a service, without the need to take care of patching infrastructures and so on.
Further, Microsoft announced at //build 2017 the new Azure IoT Edge, a technology that’s meant to extend “the intelligence — and other benefits — of cloud computing to edge devices.” It’s a cross-platform run time that runs on both Windows and Linux, and it will work on devices that are smaller than a Raspberry Pi. This will solve a lot of problems in IoT scenarios with really small devices, since this new features enables a more straight forward communication between Azure and devices.
Next, the announcement of the new Azure Portal App for iOs and Android, together with the built in full featured Bash shell in the Azure Portal was also a very intriguing announcement. First, the mobile app is not available on Windows 10 mobile devices (I know, there are few of them out there, but still….) and second, the first integrated shell is a Bash shell, not PowerShell (PowerShell will come “some time” in the future). On the other side, this underlines once more the heavy open source approach that Microsoft is showing during last years.
The remote debugging of production web apps using Visual Studio 2017 without any downtime was also a great thing to watch.
Let’s go to the AI part. I was already fairly familiar with Microsoft Cognitive Services, but the announcement of the custom vision API was really exciting. This enables developers to easily train their own vision machine learning models, providing the necessary training data. This really starts to look more and more like democratized AI, which should enable developers to build more and more intelligent applications.
The PowerPoint Translator was also a fairly cool demo, but for me it was not necessarily something new since exactly the same thing was showcased two years ago at the Build conference, but back then it was a Skype extension, called Skype translator. These two are fairly similar.
A final observation: almost all demos were made from MacOS laptops and iPhones using internet and phone plan deals in Australia.
Watching the //Build 2017 keynote was a very good time investment. I still dream to attend this conference in person at some time 🙂
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Dan Patrascu-Baba
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Cool stuff! Fun times are coming.
There was also SQL 2017 cross-platform and new Cortana improvements, particularly in cars and home speakers built by a number of partners.
Lots of improvements in .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard as well!
Yeah, SQL 2017-cross platform is indeed a very nice announcement, but I completely forgot about it when writing the post. So thanks for bringing it up 🙂