Empowering every developer to achieve more at Microsoft Connect(); 2018

[News Bot]

As we share our new innovations for every developer at Connect(); 2018 today, I’m reminded that now, more than ever, we’re moving towards a world of ubiquitous computing where technology is responsible for transforming every consumer and business experience. For developers, the opportunity to use technologies like AI, IoT, serverless compute, containers and more has never been greater. I’m excited to share some of the latest things we’re working on at Microsoft to help developers achieve more when building the applications of tomorrow, today.

 

Tools for every developer

 

As a company built by developers and for developers, we understand the opportunities and challenges that developers face every day. Today, we are continuing to deliver developer tools and Azure services that help you be more innovative and productive than ever.

 

I’m excited to announce the general availability of Azure Machine Learning service, which enables developers and data scientists to efficiently build, train and deploy machine learning models. Using Azure Machine Learning, you can automate model selection and tuning, increase productivity with DevOps for machine learning, and deploy models with one click. With its tool-agnostic Python SDK, Azure Machine Learning service can be used in any Python environment with your favorite open source frameworks.

 

Over 12 million developers around the world use Visual Studio to build new applications and enhance existing ones. Today, Visual Studio 2019 Preview and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview are available for download. With numerous improvements to capabilities like IntelliCode for AI-assisted IntelliSense, expanded refactoring capabilities and smarter debugging, developers can spend more time focusing on writing code. Developers can now collaborate in real time with Live Share and the new GitHub pull request capabilities. And developers using Azure will find better support than ever, whether you’re modernizing with containers or building cloud-native solutions with serverless technology.

 

.NET Core 3 Preview is now available, bringing the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Forms application frameworks to .NET Core. This enables more flexible deployment with side-by-side and self-contained EXEs, better performance and the ability to use native Universal Windows Platform (UWP) controls in Windows Forms and WPF applications via XAML islands. On the server side, check out composable UIs with ASP.NET Core using Razor Components, which provide full-stack web development with .NET for the first time.

 

For developers looking to build cloud-native, data-driven applications, Azure Cosmos DB offers a fully managed, globally distributed database which supports NoSQL workloads and guarantees less than 10-millisecond low latency and high availability. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB Shared Throughput Offer with a lowered minimum entry of 400 request units or $24 per month — a 25 times lower entry point — which makes Azure Cosmos DB more accessible to developers who have databases with multiple ‘Azure Cosmos DB containers’.

 

Microsoft <3 open source

 

At the heart of great developer innovation is community, and that’s why to open source is so important. We’re committed to empowering developers at every stage of the development lifecycle — from ideation to collaboration to deployment. Our announcements today are not only about open-sourcing more of our own products for community collaboration and contribution, but how we are also actively investing in collaborating on initiatives with others.

 

Modern container applications often include a variety of components such as containers, databases and virtual machines, and therefore need an easy way to package and maintain the apps in different environments. Today, I’m excited to introduce Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB), a new open source package format specification created in close partnership with Docker and supported by HashiCorp, Bitnami and more. With CNAB, you can manage distributed applications using a single installable file, reliably provision application resources in different environments and easily manage the application lifecycle without having to use multiple toolsets.

 

A year ago, we introduced Virtual Kubelet,Virtual Kubelet (VK), providing a pluggable architecture to extend the Kubernetes API to deploy and manage containers in compute environments like serverless and edge. Since then, a number of VK providers have been added, enabling integrations with multiple services such as Azure Container Instances, AWS Fargate, Alibaba ECI and Azure IoT Edge. Today, we are donating the Virtual Kubelet project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). By working within the CNCF, we can encourage even more participation and innovations in the community to integrate Kubernetes orchestration with more environments.

 

I’m also happy to share that we’re delivering on top requests from the .NET community by open-sourcing Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms and WinUI XAML Library (WinUI). The initial commits add many namespaces and APIs, with more in the coming months. We look forward to receiving your contributions to these repos.

 

Easier access to technology enables freedom of choice for developers to select the best solution for the project at hand. Today, we’re announcing that the Azure Database for MariaDB service is now generally available. This enterprise-ready, fully managed service for MariaDB community edition provides built-in high availability and elastic scaling, as well as flexible pricing.

 

Serverless for all

 

We’re excited to bring the benefits of serverless computing to every app pattern. Whether you are building event-driven functions, running container workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes or simply managing APIs implemented on any platform, you can do it all without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

 

Powered by the open source Virtual Kubelet technology, the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) virtual node public preview enables serverless Kubernetes. With this new feature, you can elastically provision additional compute capacity in seconds. With a few clicks in the Azure portal, you can turn on the virtual node capability and get the flexibility and portability of a container-focused experience in your AKS environment without worrying about managing the additional compute resources.

 

Azure Functions enables you to build serverless, event-driven applications in the language of your choice, including .NET, JavaScript and Java. Today, we extend this further with Python support to Azure Functions. Build Linux-based functions using Python either as code or as a Docker container, while enjoying an end-to-end development experience — build, debug/test, publish — using local tooling such as CLI and Visual Studio. Python support brings the serverless approach to machine learning and automation scenarios.

 

These are just a few of the new tools and services we announced today. I encourage you to look through all the updates and join the live interactive coding sessions at Connect(); 2018. Tune in online today or watch on-demand, explore the code samples shown throughout the event and share what you think on social media (#MSFTConnect). I can’t wait to see what you will build next.

 

 

 

 

 

The post Empowering every developer to achieve more at Microsoft Connect(); 2018 appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

 

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