Microsoft today announced the successful conclusion of its flagship annual BUILD event that brings together developers and decision-makers from around the world to explore the latest innovations in code and application development. Held from 24 to 26 May, the event featured five themes designed to empower today’s digital-experience builders to innovate without compromise when building 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.”
Among the five themes was 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”. As part of this theme, Microsoft announced its Intelligent Data Platform, a cloud-native solution that empowers organizations to invest more time creating value rather than integrating and managing their data estates. The platform integrates Microsoft’s databases, analytics, and data-governance offerings to help developers easily create applications.
The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform allows teams to connect their data to the cloud through SQL Server 2022 (now in preview), the company’s most Azure-enabled release yet, providing performance, security, availability, resilience, and cloud analytics through Azure Synapse Link for SQL and Azure SQL Managed Instance. Additionally, a generally available ledger feature in Azure SQL Database enables blockchain solutions development. Also, in public preview is datamart in Power BI, a self-service, low-code capability to ingest data from different data sources.
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, Power Pages, now in preview, combines low-code capabilities and experiences that empower anyone to create and deliver modern, secure, business-centric, data-powered websites. And Express Design, a new feature of Power Apps, empowers users to build apps from images, Figma docs, or directly from APIs.