Microsoft announced the completion of its flagship annual BUILD event, which brings together developers and decision-makers from all over the world to explore the latest innovations in code and application development. The event, which took place from May 24 to 26, featured five themes designed to empower today’s digital-experience builders to innovate without compromise when creating the next generation of apps.
“The tools and solutions that developers create everyday are driving massive impact all around the world, fundamentally changing the way we live and work. Today, we live in an era filled with unprecedented possibility that make it vital for developers and innovators to reflect not only what we can build, but what the world needs us to build,” says Necip Ozyucel, Azure Business Group Director: Microsoft UAE. “Just as we have done since we were founded 47 years ago, Microsoft remains committed to empowering development teams in this journey to build what’s next. Our annual BUILD event is an important part of that.”
A deep dive into how development teams can “accelerate innovation and achieve agility with a trusted, integrated data platform with hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities” was one of the five themes.
Microsoft announced its Intelligent Data Platform as part of this theme, a cloud-native solution that allows organizations to spend more time creating value rather than integrating and managing their data estates. To make it easier for developers to create applications, the platform integrates Microsoft’s databases, analytics, and data-governance offerings.
The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform enables teams to connect their data to the cloud via SQL Server 2022 (now in preview), the company’s most Azure-enabled release to date, which provides performance, security, availability, resilience, and cloud analytics via Azure Synapse Link for SQL and Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Furthermore, a widely available ledger feature in Azure SQL Database enables the development of blockchain solutions. Datamart in Power BI, a self-service, low-code capability for ingesting data from various data sources, is also in public preview.
Another theme of BUILD 2022 was how to “innovate with collaborative apps and low code”. This theme focused on how software professionals and their non-IT colleagues will live and thrive in the world of hybrid work. Sessions concentrated on how to build powerful apps, bots, and flows with a single integrated development stack that seamlessly blends low and pro code with Power Platform. The theme included the announcement of the App Compliance Automation Tool for Microsoft 365 (in preview) for applications built on Azure, to help developers accelerate the compliance journey of their apps.
Also in preview, Power Pages combines low-code capabilities and experiences to enable anyone to create and deliver modern, secure, business-centric, data-powered websites. And Express Design, a new Power Apps feature, allows users to create apps from images, Figma docs, or directly from APIs.