Microsoft Build 2020: empowering developers today and tomorrow to bring impact

Here in Seattle, the original "Cloud City," developers from around the world have gathered for the past several years to connect, share ideas, refine or learn skills and create community. We won't meet in person this year, but the spirit of the event will continue as we move online – and the response we've received from our developer community looking to learn, connect and code at Microsoft Build 2020 has been overwhelming and quite frankly humiliating. This is probably going to be our biggest event ever not just for Build, but for all the events Microsoft holds. 

Socrates (not the Greek philosopher; the gas station attendant) once said: "The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

We are celebrating developers' vital position this week, and their tireless efforts to rally during this time of crisis. We also launched a number of innovative tools and services to provide tangible impact and value to meet customer needs, encouraging technologies that help companies and individuals achieve more.

You'll see an emphasis on impact and value, delivering solutions within Azure, M365, and Windows – from tools to help developers become more collaborative and productive at work, to services that give customers the flexibility to deploy AI capabilities in any environment – and without prior coding experience.

And finally, you will see a nod to technical excellence, and how we are looking to help developers achieve more in the future through AI and other advances in technology.

Key highlights in the news: 

We are introducing Azure Synapse Link, bringing in real-time operational database services and analytics. Launched initially in Azure Cosmos DB but coming soon to all operating systems, Azure Synapse Link helps customers to lower costs and reduce time without managing data movement to gain valuable insights.

Software upgrades for Microsoft Teams include a simplified experience for developers creating and publishing Visual Studio and Visual Studio Project Teams apps; IT administrators' ability to assess and deploy line-of-business and ISV applications for their Team users; and innovative ways for people to explore and participate in team apps.

We are announcing updates to the Fluid Framework, including making it open source for developers and introducing the first way for end-users to experience Fluid in Office.com and Outlook for the Web with the upcoming availability of Fluid components and Fluid workspaces.

In Azure Machine Learning we are delivering new Responsible ML tools and our OSS toolkits to help clients deploy AI models more responsibly by improving model interpretability, reducing unfairness while ensuring data privacy and confidentiality.

To help unify the development of apps across 1 billion Windows 10 devices, we are introducing Project Reunion: our vision of developing the Windows developer platform to make it easier for people to integrate across Win32 and UWP APIs and build great applications that work across all Windows 10 versions and devices.

With the acquisition of Softomotive, a leading provider of low-code, easy-to-use RPA development environments, we are further investing in bringing comprehensive low-code Robotic Process Automation ( RPA) technology into Power Automat. The technology from Softomotive will complement UI flows to streamline how our customers get their work done.