Code, collaborate, and ship your apps from anywhere

Welcome to Microsoft Build 2020! This all-new 48-hour digital experience is designed to help you and other developers around the world come together to solve challenges, share knowledge, and stay connected. Here we’ll cover some of our latest innovations in developer tools and cloud platform technologies—to help you code, collaborate, and ship your apps from anywhere, so you can support the changing needs of your business and continue to deliver the quality experiences that your customers expect.

So how do you overcome the challenges of today and remain productive as developers? Thankfully, in today’s digital world there are tools to help you work remotely and be as productive as ever: with Azure as your trusted cloud platform and cloud-powered developer tools with Visual Studio and GitHub.

Code

Developers often spend endless hours configuring dev machines for new projects: cloning source code, installing runtimes, setting up linters and debuggers, configuring extensions—just to do it all again for the next project, the next bug, or the next code review. The challenge is even more prevalent in times of remote work, where you might not have access to your preferred development machine. Visual Studio Codespaces, available in preview, enables you to create a cloud-hosted development environment that’s ready to code, in seconds. You can access it from Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio and it also includes a full web-based editor you can use to edit, run, and debug your applications from any device. We recently announced that Codespaces is coming to GitHub in preview, so you can also easily code from any repo.

To help .NET developers share code across platforms, today we released .NET 5 Preview 4. With .NET 5, we continue the journey to unify the .NET platform across all workloads like mobile, desktop, and web. .NET 5 Preview 4 also has many improvements for working with containers and reducing the size of images particularly for multi-stage build scenarios.

For developers with C# and HTML skillsets looking to create web apps, Blazor is a free and open-source web framework that allows you to do that—without writing JavaScript. Today, we announced ASP.NET Blazor WebAssembly that lets you build web apps that run completely in the browser with C#, which can perform better, take up less memory than JavaScript, and can run completely offline.

If you are building a modern single page application with JavaScript and looking for minimal configuration and deployment globally in minutes, then check out a new hosting option in Azure App Service, Static Web Apps, now available in preview. Static Web Apps supports frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue or Static Site Generators such as Gatsby and Hugo. Initializing a Static Web App with a Git repo hooks up GitHub Actions that then connects smart defaults to your CI/CD pipeline. This means that any time a developer makes a change, it will go through the quality and security checks.

For applications optimized for cloud scale and performance, we recently announced the general availability of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for Windows Server containers. If you’re looking to lift and shift your Windows applications in containers, you can now run them on a managed Kubernetes service in Azure and get the full benefits of portability, scalability, and self-healing for your production workloads. To help you instantly scale your apps on demand with limitless, guaranteed speed and performance, today we announced new innovations to Azure Cosmos DB and considerable costs savings gained by pairing autoscale with the Azure Cosmos DB free tier.

Azure also makes it easy for developers to add AI into applications with Azure Cognitive Services. Today, we announced new capabilities, such as enhanced voice styles, enabling you to tailor the voice of your app to fit your brand or unique scenario. If you’re looking to run AI anywhere, we also announced general availability of container support for Language Understanding and Text Analysis.

And, if you need deliver apps quickly, take advantage of the combination of Microsoft Power Apps, a low code platform, and Azure to analyze data, automate processes and create virtual agents. Learn how to extend Power Apps with Azure services such as Bot Services, Logic Apps, and Functions. 

Collaborate

To effectively collaborate as a local or distributed development team, you need the ability to accommodate flexible work schedules, collaborate both asynchronously and in real-time when needed, and track and prioritize work. With Visual Studio Live Share, you can create shared coding sessions and co-edit, co-debug applications with your peers securely—no matter where you are. Today, we announced expanded capabilities for Visual Studio Live Share, which include text and voice chat support. With these additions, your team can collaborate more effectively from the comfort of your own dev tools, without the need for additional apps.

With over 50 million developers, GitHub is the place where developers code together. We continue to innovate to ensure collaboration is seamless at every stage of the software development lifecycle. For example, you may find yourself needing to brainstorm feature ideas, help new users get their bearings, and collaborate on best ways to use the software.  GitHub Discussions recently announced at GitHub Satellite helps you do just that and is in public beta. Learn more about the latest GitHub innovations to help you collaborate with your team members.

Ship

Over the past six months, we’ve published more than 30 GitHub Actions for Azure to help you create workflows to build, test, package, release and deploy to multiple Azure services, from web applications to serverless functions to Kubernetes. We heard from you that it can be difficult to craft CI/CD pipelines by editing a bunch of YAMLs and you spend a considerable time setting up and switching between different discrete tools. We are pleased to announce that GitHub Actions for Azure are now integrated into Visual Studio Code, Azure CLI and the Azure Portal simplifying the experience of deploying to Azure from your preferred entry points. Download the new Visual Studio Code extension or install the Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) extension for GitHub Actions for Azure.

Security is also top of mind when releasing code into production. At GitHub Satellite, we announced cloud betas of code scanning and secret scanning to help developers consume and ship code safely. With code scanning enabled in GitHub, every “Git push” is scanned for new security concerns using the world’s most advanced semantic analysis engine, CodeQL. Secrets scanning is now available for private repositories. This feature watches private repositories for known secret formats and immediately notifies developers when they are found. Developers can now identify, remediate, and prevent vulnerabilities in source code before they are deployed into production.

More exciting news for every developer

With all the new coding improvements and advancements combined with Windows 10—it truly is a great time to be a developer. Today, we announced the general availability of Windows Terminal 1.0, which provides a modern, fast terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, WSL, and Azure Cloud Shell. We also announced upcoming support for GPU compute in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for faster computations. And coming soon is GUI app support which means you can open a WSL instance and run a Linux GUI app directly (without the need of a third-party X Server). You can use this feature to run your favorite IDE in a Linux environment, or some applications that you could only find on Linux.​ 

Join us

Regardless if your team is onsite or remote, we want to help developers spend less time setting up environments, configuring systems and dealing with underlying infrastructure so you can spend more time coding and building solutions. We want to ensure development teams can easily collaborate on projects regardless of where you sit. We want to help you deliver and maintain code with automated workflows that are free from security vulnerabilities. Microsoft offers an end-to-end cloud platform and developer tools designed to meet your engineering needs and keep you and your team as productive as possible wherever you work.

Please join me in Scott Guthrie’s, Azure: Invent with purpose session, and make sure to watch Scott Hanselman’s session, Every Developer is Welcome, to see many of these new innovations designed for every developer. I can’t wait to see what you build!