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6 min read

A look at the announcements from Microsoft Build 2021

An ad for Microsoft Build, featuring an image of Bit the Raccoon.

This year’s digital edition of Microsoft Build has now wrapped up, but don’t worry if you missed it! The high-quality sessions and keynotes from across the two days are available to watch on-demand via the Microsoft Build Session Catalogue.

The event brought us many surprises, so just in case you couldn’t tune in live, let’s walk through some of the announcements.

Azure AI

Azure AI is introducing new enhancements to empower developers to significantly reduce time to value in modernizing common business processes, with updates coming to Azure Bot Service, Azure Metrics Advisor and Azure Video Analyzer.

Azure Cognitive Services, a family of AI services to deploy high-quality models as APIs, has also received multiple updates. These include the general availability of document translation and text analytics for health.

There are also two new machine learning capabilities to help customers accelerate deployment of AI models – Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints, and PyTorch Enterprise on Microsoft Azure.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

Azure Cloud Native and Application Platform

Azure app services like App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, API Management and Event Grid can now run on Kubernetes clusters anywhere across on-premises, multicloud and edge environments with Azure Arc. With this capability now in preview, customers don’t have to choose between the productivity of platform as a service (PaaS) and the control of Kubernetes because the same app services can run with either model.

Azure Communication Services, the first fully managed communication platform offering from a major cloud provider, now has new intelligent features and functionality to complete customers’ end-to-end communication experiences.

Multiple updates to the Azure analytics tools are now available. These updates bring together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to provide real-time data insights. These analytics and governance capabilities support faster, more reliable insights in an increasingly complex market.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

Azure Data

Multiple updates to the Azure analytics tools are now available. These updates bring together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to provide real-time data insights. These analytics and governance capabilities support faster, more reliable insights in an increasingly complex market.

Updates for Azure Cosmos DB are now available to help developers build and modernize high-performance apps at any scale. Additional features give customers enhanced security, cost-effectiveness, control and flexibility.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

Azure Developer Tools and DevOps

.NET 6 Preview 4 is now available. .NET is an open-source developer platform created by Microsoft for building different types of apps.

Azure Security Center can now show container scan results found by a GitHub Action so ASC customers can easily incorporate security and compliance into early stages of the software development lifecycle. This feature offers end-to-end traceability, improving remediation time and strengthening an organization’s cloud security.

Visual Studio 2019 16.10, now generally available, comes with new productivity enhancements for .NET developers. These include new IntelliSense features, which automate common workflow tasks, and new tools to improve quality of testing.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

Azure Hybrid and Multicloud

Azure Arc, which extends Azure management and services to any infrastructure, has new capabilities, including compatibility with Azure App Services and Open Service Mesh.

There are also new capabilities for Azure Stack HCI, a cloud-connected, hyperconverged infrastructure operating system delivered as an Azure service.

 

Azure Infra

Azure Bicep, now available, is an open-source language for declaratively deploying Azure resources as code that simplifies the authoring experience. It provides concise syntax, better support for code reuse and improved type safety.

Elastic is working with Microsoft to roll out a native Azure experience. Now in preview, the new integration allows users to find, deploy and manage Elastic from within the Azure portal.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

Azure IoT

Azure IoT is a collection of services and capabilities that meets customers where they are, from the edge to the cloud. New updates include nesting capabilities to Azure IoT Edge, and the general availability of Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows.

 

Power Platform

Process Advisor, a process mining capability in Microsoft Power Automate that helps identify which activities take the most time and are consistently repeated across an organization, is now generally available.

Users can now embed Microsoft Power BI analytics reports in a Jupyter Notebook. Jupyter Notebook, an open-source development tool featuring documents with live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text, is often used for data visualization and more.

Microsoft Power BI Premium, which allows analysts and business data users to create and analyse business intelligence reporting, now features streaming dataflows and automatic aggregation.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

Windows

Microsoft Edge will be the best-performing browser on Windows 10 with Microsoft Edge 91. Superior performance is based on Sleeping tabs and Startup boost, features exclusive to Edge.

For Windows developers who want to bring web-based experiences into their native apps, Microsoft Edge WebView2 in Windows UI Library 3 is now production-ready and forward-compatible.

Support for Linux graphical user interface (GUI) apps are now available in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL allows users to run their favourite Linux tools, utilities and apps for developer workflows.

The full list of updates is as follows:

 

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A photo of Chris Walden.
Chris Walden
Editor for TechNet UK

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