The most intriguing takeaways from Microsoft Build 2019

As far as developer conferences go, one can always expect something interesting from Microsoft Build, especially in terms of cloud computing and AI – two domains that the tech giant has taken significant steps in. Therefore, it’s worth taking a look at the keynote announcements made during the Seattle-based event.

Unsurprisingly, a plethora of announcements related to Windows, Visual Studio, Azure, Xbox, and HoloLens was made. For starters, developing on the Windows platforms is bound to become less stressful with the new Windows Terminal, a command-line application for developers that will feature “graphics-processing-unit-accelerated text rendering”.

Additionally, a fresh version of Microsoft’s integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio is set to roll out soon, equipped with a new companion tool and more features for remote workers. The company is also finally going to roll out Microsoft Search (a cross-domain search tool) and Microsoft Graph (a service that provides data access within Microsoft’s cloud products) to all of its users.

A particularly interesting announcement was the integration of Azure’s IoT services platform with Kubernetes, Google’s open-source framework for managing container applications. Further Kubernetes-related developments include Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA), an open-source project that is aimed at handling event-based and event-driven architecture on the cloud, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which has been the subject of general preview for several months but has now officially been released.

In a move that we saw coming ever since Microsoft’s titanic acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion, the company has also announced official GitHub integration, with developers having the flexibility to smoothly transition between Azure and the open-source code repository.

Any developer conference in this age would be incomplete without any mention of progress in AI, and Microsoft certainly has a lot up their sleeve in this department. The company highlighted its work on using AI to empower people with disabilities as well as a special toolkit for AI and robotics. A standout development is Ideas, an AI-enabled grammar and style checker that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to improve written documents, which has been integrated into Microsoft Word.

And finally, Microsoft’s gaming department got some stage time as well, with an announcement about the company’s partnership with game publisher Gameloft to bring Xbox Live features to some of its mobile games.