Microsoft has granted several media outlets, including InfoQ, an exclusive look into what will be presented at this year’s biggest Windows developer conference, Build 2017. For the Day 1 Keynote, we expect to see presentations and demos from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president (EVP) of Cloud and Enterprise, and Harry Shum, EVP of Artificial Intelligence and Research.
While Microsoft’s CEO has historically opened Build every year, the overall speaker schedule represents a change from prior years and the course of the keynote will reflect this. Microsoft observes that the combination of the cloud-era and the vast accumulation of information on big data presents the world with a great opportunity, but also great complexity.
To better structure this data, Microsoft is announcing the release of Azure Cosmos DB, which they describe as "the industry’s first globally distributed, multi-model database service to deliver horizontal scale with guaranteed uptime, throughput, consistency and single-digit millisecond latency at the 99th percentile". Joining this will be new MySQL and PostgreSQL managed services on Azure.
Another area of increasing focus is artificial intelligence, with Microsoft reiterating their commitments to "intelligent technology" in the areas of the Microsoft Bot Framework, deep learning, and the integration of this technology into several new services for Bing.
Scott Guthrie will be announcing the release of updates to several key products, including ASP.NET Core and .NET Core, Visual Studio 2017, and new technologies for Microsoft Azure—including Azure Service Fabric, Azure Functions Runtime, and Azure Batch.
To introduce Microsoft’s new developments in artificial intelligence, Harry Shum will discuss Microsoft’s vision to "to make the power of AI available to everyone, from developers and data scientists to tech enthusiasts and students". He will talk about Microsoft Cognitive Services, Microsoft Graph, and the integration of AI across the company from Office to Xbox.
Be sure to check in with InfoQ throughout the day for more news and updates from this year’s Build 2017 conference.