Big announcements from the keynote of Microsoft Build 2023

Microsoft Build 2023 just kicked off several days ago, and it’s really an AI focused event. Satya said that there are 50+ updates to developer community, but he highlights 5 of them that I’ll listed below. I would say AI is everywhere now at Microsoft products and services. Below is the latest updates that I picked up from what Satya has shared:

Developer Experience

Microsoft continues pushing hard to bring best experiences for developers around the globes, from GitHub CodeSpaces, Microsoft Dev Box, GitHub Copilot / Copilot X, GitHub actions for Azure development environment, etc.

• Microsoft Dev Box: bringing self-service, on-demand development is one of key purpose of Platform Engineering and Microsoft Dev Box is one part of that ecosystem. With Dev Box, an Azure service, developers can easily get ready to code, with many preconfigured environments whether you’re front-end / backend engineers, data engineers or a data scientist.

• GitHub Copilot & Copilot X: I have tried CoPilot in VS Code and loved it so much, now with Copilot X, Microsoft will bring Copilot + chat experience to help you code better right in VS Code. You can register for Copilot X here once you’re in, you can use Visual Studio Code Insider version to try: https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x

Bringing Bing to Chat GPT

Although it’s not in free-tier yet, but you can enjoy this feature with ChatGPT Plus. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet as I don’t have ChatGPT plus license. I’ll try to share more details in another session once I have the ChatGPT plus license.

Copilot is everywhere

• Windows Copilot: you can ask Copilot to complete your tasks on Windows such as change the color theme, work with your documents (explain, rewrite, summarize,…). It also works with all apps on Windows, simplify your workflows with plugins, collaborate and communicate. You can turn on Windows Insider and get the latest Insider Preview Build.

• Copilot for Microsoft 365, Power platform, Microsoft Dynamics, VS Code

• Build your own Copilot with Copilot stack: see more here and Copilot extensibility and plugins. Now you can build your own Copilot which sits right in your enterprise and help you use best experiences of Copilot for your own data.

Microsoft AI Studio

I have used Langchain for a while and I would say it’s the best framework to build LLM apps these days. Now, with Azure AI studio, Langchain, vector database, secured LLM models on Azure, prompting engineering all are the first class citizens to help you build LLM apps faster, easier and more trusted. Microsoft also takes care so much on privacy and security with AI safety buil-in.

Microsoft AI Safety

Responsible AI principles, AI Ethic, all of that has been going along with Microsoft AI services for long to help enterprises building AI application ensuring reliability, safety, fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy & security and inclusiveness. Now with Microsoft AI Safety, we can build AI apps with more trusted than ever.

This is the biggest launch of the data products in Microsoft ecosystem since launched SQL Server. This is all in one place data analytics platform that is promising to bring best experience for data engineer, data analyst, BI and data scientist. Just a note that Copilot is also added to Microsoft Fabric to boost productivity.

• Unified experience: pipelines, orchestration, experiments for training machine learning and much more.

• Unified governance: security & complianceUnified business model

At NashTech, we’re very focusing on modern data solutions such as Azure Synapse, Databricks, Azure Data Explorer, Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Now with Microsoft Fabric, we’re eager than ever to try this. We will share each topics in details, stay tune.