News

Top 10 Dev Products Going GA at Microsoft Build 2022

• By David Ramel
• 05/24/2022

Microsoft always announces a slew of product and platform developments at its big Build developer conference, and this week's 2022 event is no exception, with these 10 interesting products/technologies hitting general availability (GA) status:

1. .NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI): This is replacing Xamarin.Forms, adding support for creating desktop applications in addition to the traditional iOS/Android mobile apps supported by Xamarin. Microsoft describes it as "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." Read all about it here.

   

2. Updates to Azure App Service (GA or in preview): This fully managed platform for building web applications, mobile back ends and RESTful APIs in the programming language of your choice has GA or preview updates including:
   • Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) support, in preview, helps customers host their gRPC apps on Azure App Service. gRPC uses the HTTP/2 protocol to streamline messaging between clients and back-end servers as an efficient way to connect services that require high-performance communication.
   • The App Service Landing Zone Accelerator has been released. It's a documentation/automation offering that helps customers deploy a reference enterprise scale deployment of Azure App Service on the App Service Environment v3. The combination of documentation and deployable artifacts simplifies the movement of enterprise apps from an on-premises environment to Azure App Service.
   • Azure App Service bulk migration capabilities is coming to preview in the coming weeks. It enables customers capabilities beyond just discovering and assessing ASP.NET web apps, such as categorizing which apps are ready for migration, suggesting a SKU for migration and providing a guided content and configuration experience for ASP.NET web apps to Azure App Service.
   Go here for more.
3. Azure Container Apps: This lets customers run microservices and containerized apps on a serverless platform, founded on powerful open source technology in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Go here for more.
4. Azure Communication Services updates: Now at GA is the Azure Communication Services Mobile UI Library, designed to help developers save time and reduce complexity by providing production-ready UI components for mobile apps. The release supports 13 languages, accessibility for UI components and viewing shared screen content, including pinch-to-zoom. In preview is the ability to build communications-enabled apps using Azure Communication Services Email, providing the ability to add email notifications to their apps.
5. Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code/Visual Studio: The VS Code kit is now GA, while the Visual Studio IDE offering is in preview. They help developers quickly create, build, debug and publish apps for Teams across web and mobile devices, saving time through automatic configuration across portals, cloud resource templates and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. "New capabilities in the Teams Toolkit make it easier to bring an existing web app to Teams, use the toolkit step-by-step with existing projects and launch an app to Teams mobile and Outlook," Microsoft said. Go here for more.
6. Teams JavaScript 2.0 SDK and manifest: The Teams JavaScript 2.0 SDK and manifest tools help developers build Teams apps that can extend Personal Tabs and Message Extension functionality to other Microsoft 365 apps, including Outlook and Office.com. "This is the next step toward enabling developers to use a single code base to build apps that extend across Teams and Microsoft 365 apps to reach more users in the flow of work."
7. Microsoft Dataverse/Power Pages: This is a low-code data platform that helps users to securely collect and share business information with site visitors. It's part of the low-code business web site builder that's now in preview, called Power Pages, with preview features including:
   • Design studio: This eases the design, styling and publishing of modern business web sites either by scratch or via ready-to-use templates.
   • Templates hub: This provides full-featured websites with demo data that allow users to manage scheduling, registration and app submission.
   • Learn hub: This provides features guides, tutorials and videos to learn how to build sites, model business data and work with code components.
   • Pro-Developer tools: This integrates with Visual Studio, GitHub and Azure DevOps to help developers implement advanced business requirements.
   • Security and Governance tools: This helps users secure their web site content and data through role-based access controls and Azure.
   Go here for more on Microsoft Dataverse. Go here for more on Power Pages.
8. Updates to Azure API Management: This is a hybrid, multi-cloud management platform for APIs across all environments, with the following now being generally available:
   • Azure Private Link support allows incoming traffic to Azure API Management's gateway to be secured to clients running in a virtual network through Azure Private Link.
   • Managed certificate support lets customers secure their custom domains easily and quickly with a free certificate provisioned, managed and automatically renewed by Azure API Management.
   • GraphQL passthrough support helps customers leverage the existing benefits of Azure API Management, including security, observability and reduced latency for their GraphQL APIs while also adding GraphQL-specific features. "Other benefits include the ability to easily add GraphQL services as APIs, securing GraphQL APIs by applying existing and GraphQL-specific control policies and exploring the schema and run text queries against GraphQL APIs in the Azure and developer portals."
9. GitHub OpenID Connect with Azure AD workload identity federation: This minimizes the need for storing and accessing secrets, with new capabilities to alleviate the need for managing Azure service principal secrets and other long-lived cloud credentials in the GitHub Actions secret store. "With this integration, users can manage all cloud resources access securely in Azure. These capabilities also minimize the chances of service downtime due to expired credentials in GitHub. Customers can integrate with developer platforms, like GitHub Actions, to build apps swiftly and securely. With workload identity federation, Azure AD removes the secrets necessary to access resources in selected scenarios -- adding another layer of security and removing the burden of secret management." Go here for more.
10. Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform: This is a new, integrated platform that unifies databases, analytics and governance in one offering to help organizations invest more time creating value rather than having to manually integrate and manage a fragmented data estate. Microsoft said it addresses major customer pain points such as market fragmentation while also empowering customers to capture and utilize data more efficiently to increase market share, effectively letting organizations:
    • Easily pivot and adapt in rapidly evolving landscapes
    • Add layers of intelligence to their apps
    • Unlock predictive insights and govern their data anywhere
    Go here for more.