Highlights of Microsoft Build Conference 2017

Microsoft held the 2017 Build Conference in Seattle this year and I was there to cover the event. The Build Conference is primarily a developer event covering a vast range of topics from enterprise, AI, cognitive services, cloud computing, Windows 10 updates and developer tools.

The two-day event is heavy on the technical side and there are even live coding sessions involved.

Here are some of the highlights  of the conference:

• Over 500 million monthly active devices are on Windows 10. In his keynote speech, Satya announced that Windows has reached 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices. This is up from the almost 400 million active devices they had about eight months ago. There are also over 100 million commercial Office 365 monthly active users with over 140 million monthly active users on Cortana.

• Preview of Azure IoT Edge, a technology that extends the intelligence of cloud computing to edge devices. This technology will allow you to search the real world in the same way you search the digital world and help keep data safe and secure while making you more productive. Using just about any existing camera monitoring setup, there were a number of practical scenarios (in construction sites and hospitals) shown in the demo that benefits from this.

• Microsoft introduced Azure Cosmos DB, the world’s first globally distributed, multi-model database service that guarantees uptime, throughput, and single-digit millisecond latency (at the 99th percentile). It provides large-scale cloud services (can scale up to millions of transactions per second) and data-intensive applications to IoT to AI to mobile.

• General availability of Visual Studio 2017 for Mac, which enables developers to work seamlessly across Windows and Mac environments with full support for mobile, web and cloud workloads, and previews of Docker tools, Azure Functions and Xamarin.IoT support.

• A new PowerPoint add-in called Presentation Translator that uses Microsoft’s Translation APIs, was also featured. The plug-in allows for real-time translation to multiple languages during any presentation.

The translator can provide real-time translation for subtitles as well as translate the entire contents of the presentation. It supports 10 spoken (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) and 60 written languages.

• The new Cognitive Services Labs were also launched, enabling developers to experiment with new services, such as a Gesture API, still in the early stages of development.

• In addition to Harman Kardon’s Invoke intelligent speaker with Cortana, partnerships were also signed with HP on devices and Intel on reference platforms to deliver Cortana-enabled devices.

There’s also another major Windows 10 Fall Creators Update coming later this year. This update will also include a new app called Windows Story Remix, a collaborative creation tool that works like Movie Maker on steroids (photo, video, 3D and mixed reality).

Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality motion controllers with no markers required. The motion controllers offer precise and responsive tracking of movement in your field of view using the sensors in a Windows Mixed Reality headset. There is no need to install hardware on the walls around you.  Acer will have these in a bundle with the headset for $399.

Though there’s not a lot of hardware featured in the conference (this is, after all, a developer conference), we managed to take a sneak peek at the newly announced Surface Laptop at the exhibit halls.

Most of the action in the Build conference are behind the scenes with tools and updates that help developers create better apps and experience for customers and Windows users alike.