Developing for the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge at Microsoft Connect(); 2017

[News Bot]

Today we’re kicking off Connect(); 2017, one of my favorite annual Microsoft developer events, where over three days we get to host approximately 150 livestreamed and interactive sessions for developers everywhere — no matter the tools they use or the platforms they prefer. Today at Connect(); 2017 I’m excited to share news that will help developers build for the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge. It’s never been a better time to be a developer, as developers are at the forefront of building the apps driving monumental change across organizations and entire industries. At Microsoft, we’re laser-focused on delivering tools and services that make developers more productive, helping developers create in the open, and putting AI into the hands of every developer so they unleash the power of data and reimagine possibilities that will improve our world.

 

Any developer, any application, any platform

 

In previous years at Connect(); we announced the open-sourcing of .NET Core. Last year we announced Microsoft joining the Linux foundation and shared SQL Server on Linux. This year we’re continuing to deliver on our commitment to the open source community and making sure we can support customers no matter their platform of choice.

 

Azure Databricks — preview:

Built in collaboration with the founders of Apache® Spark,

Azure Databricks

is a fast, easy and collaborative Apache® Spark-based analytics platform optimized for Azure.

Azure Databricks

combines the best of Databricks and Azure to help customers accelerate innovation with one-click set up, streamlined workflows and an interactive workspace. Native integration with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB and Power BI simplifies the creation of modern data warehouses that enable organizations to provide self-service analytics and machine learning over both relational and non-relational data with enterprise-grade performance and governance. Customers inherently benefit from enterprise-grade Azure security, compliance and SLAs, as well as simplified security and identity control with Azure Active Directory integration. With these innovations, Azure is the one-stop destination to unlock powerful scenarios that make AI easy.

 

Microsoft joins MariaDB Foundation:

Today we’re excited to be joining the

MariaDB community

as a platinum member of the MariaDB Foundation. As part of this membership, we’re committed to working closely with the foundation, actively contributing to MariaDB and the MariaDB community. We’re also announcing we’ll be delivering a preview of

Azure Database for MariaDB

, which will bring the fully managed service capabilities to MariaDB. Developers can sign up for

the upcoming preview

for Azure Database for MariaDB.

 

Azure Cosmos DB with Apache® Cassandra API — preview:

With this preview

, developers now get a Cassandra-as-a-service using the Cassandra SDKs and tools they are familiar with using the power of

Azure Cosmos DB

. Developers re-use existing code they’ve already written and build new applications using the Cassandra API against Azure Cosmos DB’s globally distributed, multi-model database service. Azure Cosmos DB has been designed to scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions with comprehensive SLAs and with greater consistency levels for more precise data latency management.

 

GitHub Partnership on GVFS:

With GitHub, today we’re announcing Microsoft and GitHub are

partnering

to bring GVFS to GitHub’s 25 million users. GVFS is an open-source extension to the Git version control system developed by Microsoft to support the world’s largest repositories.

 

Helping developers be more productive

 

At Microsoft our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and developers are no exception to this. We have a strong set of new announcements to help developers, as well as whole development teams, be more productive as they move into a world of continual innovation and continual development of their apps. At Connect(); we’re announcing:

 

Visual Studio App Center — general availability:

The most comprehensive app development lifecycle solution for Objective-C, Swift, Java, Xamarin and React Native,

Visual Studio App Center

helps developers automate and manage the lifecycle of their iOS, Android, Windows and macOS apps. Developers can connect their repos and within minutes automate their builds, test on real devices in the cloud, distribute apps to beta testers and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data, all in one place.

 

Visual Studio Live Share — first look:

Visual Studio is delivering the next major advancement in developer productivity with

Visual Studio Live Share

, which enables true real-time collaboration within both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. It lets developers seamlessly and securely share their project with other developers so that they can collaboratively edit and debug in real time together without having to sit in front of the same screen or in the same room. Rather than just screen sharing, Visual Studio Live Share lets developers share their full project context with a bi-directional, instant and familiar way to jump into opportunistic, collaborative programming.

 

Visual Studio Connected Environment for Azure Container Service (AKS) — upcoming preview:

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code will now use the

Connected Environment for AKS

features, making Kubernetes development a natural for Visual Studio developers. Developers

will be able

to easily edit and debug cloud native applications running on Kubernetes in the cloud with the speed, ease and full functionality and productivity they’ve come to expect from Visual Studio.

 

Azure DevOps Projects — preview

: Available in the Azure management portal,

Azure DevOps Projects

will deliver a guided experience, helping developers easily explore the many Azure platform services available to help build their apps and in the process, configure a full DevOps pipeline powered by Visual Studio Team Services. In less than five minutes,

this feature

will ensure that DevOps is not an afterthought, but instead the foundation for new projects and one that works with many application frameworks, languages and Azure hosted deployment endpoints.

 

Take a look at how Columbia Sportswear is leveraging Microsoft’s developer tools and DevOps platform to drive their own digital transformation.

 

 

Putting AI in the hands of every developer

 

As AI becomes more pervasive and developers are able to harness the vast amounts of data being created every day, coupling with the power and scale of the cloud, we want to make it easy for developers to create the next generation of intelligent applications. We want to put AI in the hands of every developer with the tools and platforms they are most familiar with. With the announcements below, we’re delivering new AI tools and bringing machine leaning and intelligence to the edge.

 

Visual Studio Tools for AI — preview:

This is an extension of our popular Visual Studio IDE, which will allow developers and data scientists to create AI models with maximum productivity.

Visual Studio Tools for AI

delivers debugging and rich editing, with the support of most deep learning frameworks such as Cognitive Toolkit, TensorFlow or Caffe. With

this addition

, developers and data scientists have a full development experience at their fingertips to create, train, manage and deploy models locally, and scale to Azure.

 

Azure IoT Edge — preview

: Today we’re making available the preview of

Azure IoT Edge

, a service that deploys cloud intelligence to IoT devices via containers, and we’re introducing a new set of breakthrough cloud capabilities to run on IoT Edge, with Azure Machine Learning, Azure Functions and Azure Stream Analytics. Azure IoT Edge enables developers to build and test container-based workloads using C, Java, .NET, Node.js and Python, and simplifies the deployment and management of workloads at the edge. Azure IoT Edge can run on IoT devices with as little as 128MB of memory. As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing

Azure Machine Learning updates

, which enables AI models to be deployed and run on edge devices through the Azure IoT Edge service.

Additional updates

include easier AI model deployment on iOS devices with Core ML, as well as updates to the Azure Machine Learning Workbench tool.

 

Every year at Connect(); we get to share new tools and services that we hope will empower and inspire developers to build great apps. I encourage you to tune into Connect(); 2017 to learn more about all of the new innovations we’re announcing today, and to see what you can reimagine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Developing for the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge at Microsoft Connect(); 2017 appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

 

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