This article is from WeChat official account:Sixingren (ID: guixingren123)< span class="text-remarks">, author: Juny, editor: Vicky Xiao, title picture from: Visual China

Since May, news about Microsoft has always been a bit sad. When everyone has not recovered from the divorce of founder Bill Gates, a series of “crits” on star products also followed: the once-high-profile new generation of operating system Window 10X was Officially gave up; Internet Explorer, which has grown up with a generation, will also be sentenced to “death penalty”, putting an end to a once glorious era.

Amidst sorrow and emotion, this year’s Build Developer Conference came quietly. Finally, at the end of May, Microsoft relied on a series of “hard core” outputs to bring everyone’s attention back to the grand vision of its own product development. ‍‍

At this year’s Build conference, Microsoft’s many new products and new services hit a big hit. The first product function supported by GPT-3 was released, and the application designed for mixed work system was released. Platform-restricted Azure service, Edge 91 function update…

Windows and Office have become supporting roles, and new tracks such as cloud services and AI are making great strides. And this also seems to tell people that even if we say goodbye to yesterday’s feelings, there is still a sea of ​​stars ahead of Microsoft.

1. Really oriented towards developers, the protagonist does not have Windows

At 8 am on May 25th, the Microsoft 2021 Build conference officially kicked off. Like last year, this conference will still be held online and will be open to everyone for free in the next two days. Compared with the Google I/O that just ended a few days ago, Microsoft’s conference obviously has a stronger developer color, and it did not focus on showing star products that cater to the media and ordinary consumers, and once again focused on developers. .

But in the design of the meeting format, Microsoft’s interaction and interest are obviously stronger this time. Viewers can like, like, or step on the bottom at any time, and they can also follow the live broadcast on the right to comment and interact with other viewers watching from all over the world.

According to the usual practice, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivered an opening speech. Nadella spent 16 minutes discussing the importance of technology to people’s daily lives and the role that Microsoft will play in the digital transformation of all walks of life.

He said that the technology industry is becoming the main driving force of the world’s economic development and is expected to account for 10% of the world’s total economy in 2030, and more and more developers are playing an important role in the past two years. In the middle of the year, the growth rate of developers in traditional industries such as agriculture, consumption, and energy surpassed the technology industry itself, and the demand for software engineers in the automotive industry even surpassed that of mechanical engineers.

Under the trend of rapid integration of technology and various industries, Nadella pointed out that Microsoft’s core mission is to provide platform developers with a platform(to be the platform for platform creators). He emphasized that the purpose of this conference is not to formulate new rules or constraints for developers. On the contrary, Microsoft hopes to help developers innovate through the update of various platforms and tools. And this statement about control rights, I don’t know. Does it also contain an Apple that is in the midst of the “Overlord Clause” storm.

Next, he listed various conference themes including cloud service platforms, Teams, supply chain tools, etc., but also revealed that the much-anticipated next generation of Windows will not appear in this conference< /strong>. Nadella just said that the company is planning “one of the most important updates to Windows in the past decade.” In the past few months, they are strengthening testing and promising that the updated Windows will become the most innovative and open software platform. , Other than thatFor other details, I just say that the new system will meet with you “soon”.

It should be noted that Nadella does not refer to Windows as Windows 10. This may also indicate that after abandoning 10X, Microsoft may be planning a more significant update to Windows, not just everyone before. Guess the UI interface changes.

Although the protagonist of this conference does not have Windows, this time, Microsoft still offers us a lot of things to watch.

2. GPT-3 commercial journey begins: the first product function supported by GPT-3 is available

The most important update of this conference is the official commercialization of GPT-3 in Microsoft products.

Last year, Open AI released an API powered by Azure, allowing developers to explore GPT-3 features. Previously, people can already use it to complete language generation work from writing poems, posting tweets, writing articles, answering questions, etc. Its powerful functions break the boundaries of natural language learning. But things are good for good. Regarding the commercial value of GPT-3 and whether it can bring actual value to the enterprise, the industry has always questioned the key.

At this Microsoft Build developer conference, Microsoft introduced the first product function supported by GPT-3, which is integrated in the application development function of Power Platform. Simply put, it can help you not understand the code. Ordinary people have written code!

So first of all, what is this Power Platform? In the past process, ordinary employees to perform data analysis, build applications, or automate the process, generally need to make demands to the IT department, and then wait for several weeks or months to complete the work, while Microsoft’s Power Platform Allow non-technical users to “foolishly” develop software that meets their needs without the need for code knowledge.

The predecessor of Power Platform was Power BI, a data analysis tool. In 2017, the Silicon Star people had done a hands-on evaluation. As a liberal arts student without any data science and programming experience, the Silicon Star people watched the tutorial and operated it by themselves. Two interactive data graphs were made in one hour. After several years of development, the Power BI function of that year has become more powerful and “smarter”, so it has developed into today’s Power Plat.form.

Today, the platform consists of four parts: business analysis, application development, process automation and intelligent virtual agents, covering all low-code development needs from non-technical personnel to professional software developers. The so-called low-code (including no code) development is to use a visual method of “drag, pull, and drag” to allow developers to use the least amount of Code rapid development of application software.

Microsoft Power Platform, the picture comes from Microsoft China official website

This time Microsoft integrated GPT-3 into Power Fx, a low-code programming language used by Power Apps, for the first time, which undoubtedly opened a new commercial journey for GPT-3 as a basic new technology.

Power Fx relies on Microsoft Excel, which is easier to use than traditional programming languages, but in the past it was still a difficult learning process to create complex data queries with it.

For example, we want to implement an instruction to “find all U.S. users whose subscriptions have expired”. In the past, on Power Fx, we needed to build a Power Fx statement to find it, but now with GPT-3, we only need Enter our requirements in normal language, and it can directly translate into Power Fx code statements for you, for example, as shown in the picture below.

‍Microsoft said, Although this function does not completely replace the code executed after a person understands it, it can help developers make the right choice to a large extent. The way it is used is like we enter a question in a search engine and then select results from many returned information. GPT-3 will return multiple Power Fx formula suggestions for your input sentence, and then developers can choose by themselves I think the most suitable formula.

The important significance of using such an AI model is that it can promote the popularization of low-code tools to a larger audience, which means that everyone can become a developer in the future. Microsoft said the feature will be trialed in North America at the end of June.

Seeing this, the Silicon Stars feel that Microsoft is making the next big move. If GPT-3 continues to develop further, with the advent of the era of universal developers, a large number of programmers will not face the unemployment crisis?

3. Welcome to the era of mixed work system: Microsoft collaboration application Family Bucket unveiled

Just before the start of this year’s Developer Conference Build, Satya Nadella just announced that Microsoft will adopt a new hybrid office format in the future, and released a work guide to allow employees to maintain work flexibility based on a series of software tools. Can also maintain and improve work efficiency, and obviously, these measures are not limited to Microsoft itself.

Microsoft believes that with the spread of the epidemic, people’s work and lifestyle have undergone tremendous changes, and the mixed work system will be normalized. In the future, every customer and partner will have a higher demand for remote collaboration. Therefore, , People need a new set of applications, structural changes to the way applications are built and interacted.

These applications all revolve around collaboration, and can achieve real-time meetings, messaging, document collaboration, and business process automation synchronization and asynchronous collaboration models, and Microsoft refers to these new applications collectively as “collaboration applications “.

Microsoft collaboration application, the picture is taken from Microsoft’s official website

Currently, Microsoft builds collaboration applications based on the Microsoft Cloud. In the future, these ecosystem software can achieve cross-platform collaboration.

Microsoft first launched the public preview version of Microsoft Fluid Framework at the 2019 Ignite conference. This technology can help developers break the barriers between applications and provide a seamless operating experience. Now, This feature can also be implemented on Teams. People can seamlessly share and collaborate text, tables, task lists, schedules and other components between Teams and Outlook and Office applications.

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‍And Teams itself has also ushered in many feature updates this time. First of all, Microsoft said that Teams will allow developers to carry out shared phased integration, such as inserting whiteboards or presentation drawings during the meeting. In addition, it also provides developers with an application program interface that can perform audio and video Streams are accessed in real time, which enables multiple functions such as real-time transcription, translation, and meeting records.

In addition, Teams also added more scalability to the Together mode of the meeting, that is, adding more custom functions to the meeting system, allowing developers to create and share their own custom scenes for Teams meetings, allowing Online meetings are more attractive and more personalized. For example, like the following, make the meeting atmosphere more relaxed and interesting.

In order to help developers build and manage Teams more simply and efficiently, this time Microsoft has also launched a series of toolkits and resources. Developers can create experiences without using too much code, and with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Graph and others have “out of the box” integrations.

Four, Azure application services can run on AWS and Google Cloud

As the top priority of Microsoft’s business growth in recent years, the dynamics of the cloud platform Azure must also be an important focus of the company and developers. In addition to becoming the focus at the opening ceremony of the keynote speech, the There are also nearly 130 discussing various aspects of Azure development.

This Azure update includes “use Microsoft Cloud to build differentiated SaaS applications”, “use Azure to enhance the ability to utilize data in applications”, “safely manage sensitive cloud data” and other aspects that developers care about , But the most notable one is the theme of “Azure application services that can run anywhere”, according to Microsoft, this is the industry’s first.

Microsoft announced today that Azure application services, such as Apps services, API management, etc., can be run on Kubernetes clusters in local, hybrid cloud and edge environments through Azure Arc, which also includes its own main competition Rival platforms-AWS and Google Cloud.

Microsoft said that this new feature is currently in preview, so customers do not have to choose between platform and Kubernetes control. In the past, developers needed to build custom solutions for application hosting, data hosting, monitoring, security, etc., but these solutions used to rely on the platform to exist. Once the platform changes, a lot of changes will be required and become Unreliable.

“Starting today, developers can use portable application services enabled by Azure Arc to save time in building hybrid applications,” said Monroy, the presenter. “Applications and their data can now be run anywhere using fully managed cloud services. Microsoft is one of the companies in the industry that has made such a change.”

5. Other highlights: Edge browser feature update, Windows Terminal 1.9 preview release, establishment of the Green Software Foundation

In addition to the above points, the Edge browser is definitely indispensable at the Build conference, although this time it does not seem so surprising.

Today, Microsoft announced the update of Edge 91’s many new features, including “sleep options(Sleeping Tabs)” and “Startup Boost(Startup Boost)“. These two functions mainly bring performance to Edge The improvements on the edge make Edge run more smoothly on low-end hardware.

For example, the new “Sleep tab” allows tabs that are not working to automatically go to sleep, so that unnecessary memory and CPU resources will not be taken up. According to Microsoft, this feature can save 37% of the CPU on average And reduce memory usage by 32%, helping to improve battery life. And Startup Boost will enable Edge to start faster by running processes in the background at startup.

It may be that there will be a separate release on Windows in the future. There are still very few topics on Windows at this conference, and only a new preview version of the Windows terminal application has been released. Including the new Quake mode, which allows users to use keyboard shortcuts to quickly open a new terminal window from anywhere in Windows. It also includes a complete “Settings” page that provides options for selecting default command line tools and backgrounds. And other new features of UI options.

In addition, Microsoft also announced today that it has established a non-profit organization called the Green Software Foundation with top technology companies such as Accenture, GitHub, and ThoughtWorks to help solve the global climate crisis. The application provides support, and the goal is to reduce software carbon emissions by 45% by 2030.

Overall, this year’s Build still adheres to the hard-core technology style of “developer first”. Everything starts from the developer, and everything revolves around the attention and needs of the developer. Nowadays, after “lost ten years”, Microsoft has become more and more clear about its main track and positioning. If the foundation of Microsoft’s empire is Windows system and Office suite, then they are only the base now, and cloud services , AI and subscription services are the powerful driving forces for its future development.

And Microsoft is very clear that without many developers, there is no Microsoft’s huge software ecosystem. So