Microsoft hosted its annual developer conference – Build 2017 – yesterday in Seattle among thousands of developers. If you are not aware, Microsoft’s developer conference generally consists of the introduction of new tools and services for developers to build more software products. At the event, Microsoft claimed that with Windows, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Azure together offer developers more than a billion opportunities to connect their innovations with Microsoft customers.
Further, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft announced that they have reached 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices.
Starting with what Microsoft had in store for the developers, the company introduced the new Azure Cosmos DB which it claims is “industry’s first globally distributed, multi-model database service to deliver horizontal scale with guaranteed uptime, throughput, consistency and single-digit millisecond Latency at the 99th percentile.” With the new Azure Cosmos DB, developers will be able to develop from any product ranging from IoT to AI to mobile. Apart from this, the company also released the new MySQL and PostgreSQL managed services to further increase the options and flexibility with minimum downtime and data retention and recovery. Besides, Microsoft also announced a new Azure mobile App which will allow developers to manage their systems on the go. The app will be available for both iOS and Android.
Other than Azure Database improvements, Microsoft also made some crucial announcements of which one is that any developer can publish for Microsoft Teams which is the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. In other words, developers can also add new capabilities to Teams apps, including third-party notifications in the activity feed, Compose Extensions and Actionable Messages.
Moreover, Microsoft is also planning to bring new Cortana-enabled devices of which one is expected to be a speaker which will take on against Amazon’s Echo.
Meanwhile, Cortana Skills Kite has also been in public preview which will allow developers to build skills for Cortana by creating a bot and publishing it to the new Cortana channel of the Bot Framework. This is available on Windows 10, Android, iOS and the new Cortana-powered Harman Kardon Invoke speaker, however, the Cortana Skills kit is only available in the U.S. right now.
Lastly, Microsoft also demonstrated how multiple products like Office 365, Dynamics 365, Cortana Skills, Microsoft Graph will be soon integrated into Tact which is sales experience platform that turns any connected device into an AI-powered virtual sales assistant. A lot other happened than this, so you can visit the official blog from Microsoft.