by Azure AI updates
Azure Cognitive Service for Language
This now provides summarization for documents and conversations, a new capability that helps developers quickly surface key information in documents and contact center calls, such as the reason for the call and resolution. More info details here
Azure OpenAI Service helps customers accelerate innovation with large AI models; Microsoft expands availability – The AI Blog
Azure Machine Learning Responsible AI dashboard
Learning to help developers and data scientists more easily implement responsible AI. The dashboard brings together multiple capabilities such as data explorer, fairness, model interpretability, error analysis and counterfactual and causal inference analysis, which help developers debug their models and make more informed, data-driven decisions. More details here –
Responsible AI dashboard: A one-stop shop for operationalizing Responsible AI in practice – Microsoft Tech Community
Cognitive Services Updates
Azure Form Recognizer has new capabilities in preview. Customers can unlock new document processing scenarios, such as streamlining patient check-in and vaccine verification with insurance card and vaccine card prebuilt models. Additionally, layout capabilities for paragraphs, headers and titles enable more precise text extraction.
Azure Bot Service and Power Virtual Agents are integrated to empower professional and citizen developers to build bots collaboratively. This integration will go a step further: Power Virtual Agents will be incorporating additional Azure Bot Service Composer capabilities, such as a new authoring canvas, rich responses, event-driven and contextual triggers and new telephony channels, to further cater to professional developers. These are all available in preview.
Azure Updates
Azure Container Apps
Azure Container Apps, now generally available, enables customers to run microservices and containerized apps on a serverless platform. Azure Container Apps is built on the foundation of powerful open-source technology in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Azure Container Apps General Availability (microsoft.com)
Azure Communication Services updates
The Azure Communication Services Mobile UI Library, now generally available, helps save time and reduce complexity for app developers by providing production-ready UI components for mobile apps.
Azure Communication Services Email is now in preview which will help developers building communications-enabled apps using Azure Communication Services to add email notifications to their apps
Availability of Azure Communications Sample App Builder – https://aka.ms/acs-appbuilder
Microsoft Build 2022: Azure Communication Services updates to build faster and reach further
Azure Spring Apps
Azure Spring Cloud is now Azure Spring Apps. Azure Spring Cloud is a fully-featured platform for all types of Spring applications, and to better reflect this the service is now Azure Spring Apps.
Azure Spring Apps Enterprise tier is now generally available! – Microsoft Tech Community
Azure Kubernetes Service
Updates for seamless developer and operator experiences, anywhere with Draft 2. Draft 2 is a reboot of the open-source project that makes it easier for developers to build apps that run on Kubernetes. With Draft 2, developers can create, containerize and deploy their apps to Kubernetes.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – Updates for seamless developer and operator experiences, anywhere – Microsoft Tech Community
Azure Service Bus Explorer
Service Bus Explorer capabilities are now generally available in the Azure portal. Developers can now use the portal to specify a Service Bus namespace and then send messages to a queue or topic in that namespace, as well as receive or peek at messages from a queue or a subscription.
Announcing Service Bus Explorer for Azure portal public preview – Microsoft Tech Community
Azure API Management and App Service Updates
Protect, Augment, and Build GraphQL APIs with Azure API Management – Microsoft Tech Community
What’s New in Azure App Service at Build 2022 (microsoft.com)
Azure Data Updates
Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is a new, integrated platform that unifies databases, analytics and governance, empowering organizations to invest more time creating value rather than integrating and managing a fragmented data estate.
Introducing the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure
SQL Server 2022 public preview
SQL Server 2022 is the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet, with continued innovation across performance, security, and availability. It is part of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, which unifies operational databases, analytics, and data governance.
Announcing SQL Server 2022 public preview: Azure-enabled with continued performance and security innovation – Microsoft SQL Server Blog
Database Updates
Announced at Microsoft Build: New features for scalable, cost-effective application development – Azure Cosmos DB Blog
Streamline development on Azure SQL Database (microsoft.com)
Announcing Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server for business-critical workloads – Microsoft Tech Community
Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics.
Microsoft Graph Data Connect makes it easy for Microsoft 365 customers to harness the power of their organizational data by moving it into Azure Synapse where they can uncover new actionable business insights that could improve customer satisfaction, increase productivity and optimize business processes.
Azure Synapse Link for SQL enables near real-time insights by eliminating barriers between operational data stores and Azure Synapse Analytics.
Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL – Microsoft Tech Community
Developer Tools
Microsoft Dev Box will give developers self-service access to high performance, cloud-based workstations that are preconfigured and ready-to-code for specific projects. Azure Deployment Environments will make it easy for developer teams to quickly spin up app infrastructure with project-based templates that establish consistency and best practices.
Introducing Microsoft Dev Box
GitHub OpenID Connect (OIDC) with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) workload identity federation, now generally available, minimizes the need for storing and accessing secrets. The new capabilities alleviate the need for managing Azure service principal secrets and other long-lived cloud credentials in the GitHub Actions secret store.
GitHub Codespaces is a solution where your developers can securely interact with non-trusted code inside a sandbox environment. This cloud-powered development environment is available anywhere, on any device.
DevSecOps practices with GitHub and Azure (microsoft.com)
.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI), now generally available, is a new framework for building modern, multi-platform, natively compiled apps for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows using C# and XAML in a single codebase.
Introducing .NET MAUI – One Codebase, Many Platforms – .NET Blog (microsoft.com)
Developer Assisted AI tools as below,
- GitHub Copilot usage data from the technical preview and updates on general availability. Information on the research project Copilot Explain, which translates code into natural language descriptions, helping novice developers or those working with an unfamiliar codebase.
- OpenAI Codex, a model that translates natural language into code across more than a dozen programming languages.
Conclusion
In this blog we looked at some of the great updates for Azure AI, Azure, Apps, Data and Developer tools as announced in Build 2022. In the next blog, we will look at the some of the Microsoft 365 updates
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