Notes From Microsoft Build 2022

Introduction

Every year Microsoft gets their innovations and their implementation using the cool demos to the end users and latest updates from their products and services are being showcased. What would have been seemed impossible 10 years back is now is seemed realistic with latest trends in technologies. Below are some of the topics that got my attention and would like to share with the community.

Nothing But Natural Language

The way we see computer programming is getting revolutionized soon. In the future, a good programmer needs to be fluent in their natural language. This concept is now in progess. Let's consider a simple scenario for getting output in c# the command we use now

Console.writeline(“Hello from MS Build”);

Now the programmer can write a simple English sentence in the framework like

‘print the output with message “Hello from MS Build”.

In the background, the code is being written for you. The need to remember the syntax is fading away soon with the help of AI based frameworks and solutions.

Open AI Codex: translates natural language to code
GPT-3: Generative pre-trained transformer, ability to identify thems from natural language and create summaries
DALL – E: Framework that builds images from text

Where MSFT is currently working on these AI based frameworks to provide the next gen tools for the developers. This makes the developers to allocate more time to thinking, designing rather than focusing on learning the programming languages and frameworks.

Containers vs Legoland

When I saw Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthire referring to lego blocks I was wondering how these are related to containers architecture. Legoland – from our childhood, most of us must be familiar with what the lego pieces are and how each single block plays a crucial role to build giant structures and models.

Each block is illustrated as a container service like Database, App service, Network Service etc., and how the blocks are built together to form a strong structure. Like in lego blocks you can snap-in and snap-out different pieces to form required shape and structure, in containers, you can integrate different services to design a cloud native application.

Presentation talked about how these services are well hosted in azure, in such a way a school boy could understand these and design a web site in just minutes. Below is the website that is done by school kids by using Azure Static Webapps and container services. Also the secuirty certificate renewals is automatically taken care by Azure Static Web Apps.

https://myhamsterblog.com/

Small house – Happy House

Have you heard about famous saying, ‘Great things comes in small packages’? Amanda Silver Head of the design, and her team visited a small wooden house aka tiny house and experienced small but comfortable space with below essentials.

Air conditioning
Kitchen
Decent living
A master bedroom on second stair
Washing machine
Dishwasher

What are truly essentials to live and how beautiful designing can be done in constraints, and people better connect in crunched spaces. This is true in case of war rooms where people will be provided a common table where team members sit closely to tackle the problem.

This can be correlated to an array of tiny houses existing in large tiny house distributed system and how they better evolve together accommodating more people.

In similar, when services are constrained together in a small but reasonable space, they can be better performed. This is where microservice architecture and system performance are well articulated using the tiny house concept.

Evolution from past 30 yrs

Back in the days in 80s and 90s for getting a powerful computer, it is required to physically spend the money and get the machines and it was a lot of time and effort. Now it can all happen with a simple internet and a browser. You can basically spin up a VM with required configurations, or you can add resources from the cloud to your client machine, providing the power where you want and when you want thus giving complete flexibility to user by using either pay-as-you-go service or enterprise subscription model. Scott Hanselman and team, toured MS archives, where they have showcased, first generation PCs from 70s, Floppy disks, Microsoft BOB aka first generation bot service that helped end user via type in questions.

The below screen capture show Sony Trinitron PC with Windows 3.1 OS

The below diagram shows how the storage has evolved from a single floppy disc to cloud services. You don't need to carry the storage physically with you to access the content, and now you rather access from anywhere you want.

POWERful UI

Back in the days, to design UI the developer needs to know HTML, CSS, and native UI languages such as JavaScript, React, Angular, etc. The Power Platform team simplified the UI design by introducing Power Pages. Using the latest UI tools, the rich and intuitive UI can be designed in minutes without needing to know the backend and Native UI frameworks. Thus, bringing the power of design to everyone using low code no code frameworks. Make sure to register live event of Power Pages from Reza to experience this Powerful feature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFmL4svm8yM

To get a sneak peak of this feature you can go to the one minute video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG382TuFIaQ

Conclusion

Thus in this article, we have seen the cool innovations and services from the MS Build from Day 1 and please stay tuned for future articles.

References