Microsoft Build 2023 | The Highlights

As is tradition in May, Microsoft is again bringing together the community of developers, software engineers, IT professionals, and businesses to launch the latest news on its services and platforms.

* We will update this post with daily releases and news

When and where Microsoft Build 2023 is being held

For the first time in four years, the event is returning to its face-to-face essence and offering the opportunity to attend in person at the Seattle Convention Center. However, given the grand reception in recent years, thanks to increased accessibility, the event will also be streamed online and free of charge to anyone who registers. The dates chosen are 23, 24 and 25 May.

Microsoft Build Conference 2023

This edition will be full of new innovative proposals and sessions ranging from the latest innovations in code development or challenges to case studies from world experts.

The sessions will be led by Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) and significant industry figures and partners such as Kevin Scott, Scott Guthrie, and Rajesh Jha. In addition, they will be organized in several virtual modes to connect attendees with Microsoft engineers, experts, and other presenters during the meeting.

• One-on-one consultations: meet with a company engineer to discuss specific questions and solutions.
• Microsoft Learn Cloud Skills Challenge: hone, expand, and discover new skills and get a free certification exam by completing any of the eight unique Microsoft Learn collections (.NET Challenge, Azure AI Challenge, Cloud Development, Microsoft 365, Azure Cosmos DB, DevOps…).
• Imagine Cup: Millions of student developers participate in this global competition where they learn and make a difference in their communities.
• On-demand sessions: if you missed a session, don’t worry; you can watch it again thanks to the complete catalog of on-demand sessions.

Microsoft Build 2023 Recap

We will be summarising the most important news and event presentations in detail. Stay tuned because we will be updating this post as we go along!

Day 1 | Recap

The kick-off of the first day of MS Build 2023 has been full of new announcements, especially related to artificial intelligence. Here is a summary of Satya Nadella’s keynote.

Bing integrated into ChatGPT

Undoubtedly one of the big launches of the event. A few days ago, they started the transformation of the world’s largest category, search, thanks to artificial intelligence.

They are taking the following steps by further expanding how people can interact with search and how developers can build on their AI platform. To this end, three updates have been unveiled:

• Integration of Bing search in ChatGPT.
• Common plugin platform with OpenAI and new partners.
• Extended integration of Bing Chat in Microsoft Copilot.

ChatGPT will now have a built-in search engine to provide more timely and up-to-date answers with web access. Responses can now be based on search and web data and include quotes for more information.

Plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Generative AI models are changing human-machine interactions. Microsoft 365 Copilot was launched in early March and has now introduced extensibility with plugins.

Developers can now integrate their applications and services into MS 365 Copilot to reach millions of people. These plugins leverage the capabilities of AI systems, allowing them to interact with APIs from other software and services to obtain real-time information, incorporate business data, and perform new types of calculations.

Microsoft Fabric

The world is full of data moving from device to device, and organizations are harnessing the power of this data to transform themselves and gain a competitive advantage digitally.

Microsoft Fabric is a unified, end-to-end analytics platform that combines all the data and analytics tools businesses need. It integrates technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single, unified product, unlocking the power of data and laying the foundation for the AI era.

Windows 11 and Edge more intelligent

Copilot is also coming to Windows 11 and Edge as intelligent assistant.

For Windows 11, it will be integrated as a feature within the taskbar that, when selected by users, will open a Copilot sidebar. From this window, users can ask to summarise, rewrite or explain the text in the various apps they are using, as well as automatically adjust settings.

In the case of Edge, Microsoft 365 Copilot will be integrated into the browser’s sidebar and will allow content from various sources to be brought into projects generated in apps such as Outlook or Word, among others. In other words, extracting data from a website and adding it to a spreadsheet or creating a summary in a text document will be possible.

Azure AI Studio

Microsoft has also announced a new AI toolset for Azure to help you responsively build, run and deploy your next-generation applications.

Azure AI Studio simplifies the integration of external data sources into Azure OpenAI and Azure Machine Learning. It facilitates the creation of prompts through solutions such as Semantic Kernel, a set of tools and models that analyze natural language text and generate semantic representations that capture its meaning and structure.

Azure AI Content Safety

Building responsible and secure AI is crucial to further progress with this technology. Azure AI Content Safety, a service that helps companies create safer online environments and communities, has been introduced to achieve this.

It will be integrated into all Microsoft products, and new tools have been included in Azure Machine Learning, such as support for a responsible AI dashboard for text and images. It helps identify bugs, fairness issues, and explanations before deployment.

Microsoft Dev Box

It is an Azure service that provides access to ready-to-code, project-specific, pre-configured, and centrally managed development environments.

New features have been introduced today to enhance the experience and boost productivity:

• Customization through configuration as code.
• New starter images for developers: offers ready-to-use, customizable images.
• Managing custom environments from a dedicated portal for each developer: Azure Deployment Environments.

Azure Cognitive Search

Vector search will be integrated with Azure Cognitive Search, allowing keywords to be easily stored, indexed, and searched using organizational data, including text, images, audio, video, and graphics. This will make it possible to create applications to generate personalized responses in natural language, provide product recommendations, detect fraud, etc.

New capabilities will be implemented in Azure Cognitive Service for Language. These will include customizing the summary and conversational language recognition functions… In short, it will be possible to interactively customize language skills in applications, generating value more quickly for organizations that want to use LLM.

Prompt Flow

Implemented in Azure Machine Learning, it will provide a streamlined experience for requesting, evaluating, and tuning large language models.

Users can quickly create alerting workflows that connect to multiple language models and data sources to assess the data quality.

Day 2 |Recap

Copilot in Power BI

Still, in preview, it will blend the power of big language models with an organization’s data to help discover and share information faster.

Users can now create and customize reports in seconds, generate and edit DAX calculations, create narrative summaries, or ask questions about this data. All of this can be done in conversational language, with the ability to easily adapt the tone, scope, and style of narratives and add them to reports.

They have also launched Power BI Direct Lake. This is a new storage mode within Power BI datasets that will allow businesses to unlock massive data without having to replicate it.

Updates to Azure Cosmos DB

It has become the leading cloud database for generative AI and application development workloads. New enhancements have now been introduced to optimize cost, performance, and developer productivity. Some of the key ones include:

• Burst capacity: allows you to use idle throughput capacity from your database or container to handle traffic spikes.
  Hierarchical partitioning keys: Enable more efficient strategies and improved performance. This eliminates performance trade-offs.
• Materialized views for NoSQL: You can create and maintain secondary views of your data in containers that are used to serve queries that would be too costly.

Microsoft Azure Container Storage

This is a unique volume management service built natively for containers and will now have new features aimed at improving performance, reliability, and workload experience:

• Volume snapshot will allow capturing the point-in-time state of persistent volumes.
• Increased scalability target for Persistent Volumes, which will allow easy scaling of the storage footprint.

Confidential Containers on Azure Kubernetes Service

This option will allow teams to run standard, unmodified containers aligned with the open-source Kata Confidential Containers project to achieve zero-trust operator deployments with AKS.

These containers will be able to integrate with typical services used by applications running on AKS for monitoring, logging, etc. in a trusted execution environment.

Azure Deployment Environments

This is now generally available and allows you to self-deploy the environments you need on demand using infrastructure templates as code.

In addition, as an update, a dedicated portal has been included that provides a clear and simple interface for creating and managing your environments. The portal can also be used to view, manage and activate Microsoft Dev Boxes.

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps

This service will natively incorporate automated security checks into Azure DevOps, allowing you to protect your code, secrets, and supply chain without cluttering your workflow by:

• Code scanning, which locates vulnerabilities in source code and provides remediation guidance.
• Secrets scanning blocks the introduction of secrets into code repositories.
• Dependency scanning to discover vulnerabilities within open source dependencies and automate update alerts.

Stay tuned as we continue to recap the highlights from day 2 of Microsoft Build 2023.