Build 2017 Main Keynote Highlights

I have the privilege to write live from the Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle. Once again, this year’s keynote has been chock full of new and exciting announcements, here are a few that really stood out.

The new concept of the “Intelligent Edge” is really interesting, making it the interface between the digital and the real world.

“In a world of near infinite compute power and an exponential growth in data, we are focused on empowering every developer to build applications for this new era of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge,” Satya Nadella.

Azure IoT Edge allows you to run cloud functionality directly on IoT devices remotely. I.e. shut down an industrial machine in case of impending failure even if the network is not working or an autonomous car performing machine learning on visual data in real-time.

Azure Cosmos DB is the first globally-distributed data service that lets you to elastically scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions while guaranteeing low latency, high availability and consistency.

Microsoft extends Azure managed database services with introduction of MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Visual Studio 2017 for Mac is now generally available and supports workloads for mobile, web, cloud and gaming.

Cortana skills are now available for developers and are implemented as a new channel for the Microsoft Bot Framework. Cortana is coming to devices such as the Harman Kardon Invoke desk speaker or even to cars.

Microsoft Cognitive Services get new, easy to use Custom Services such as the language understanding intelligent service (LUIS.ai)

Artificial Intelligence is omnipresent at the conference and becomes infused in many technologies developers use, i.e. SQL Server.