Well it’s over. Microsoft Build is over for another year. I really don’t like the last day of a conference because everyone is leaving. They are packing up all the booths. Wait, this is a virtual conference. Yet it still has that feel like half the people have left and all the excitement is gone. It’s a little depressing if you think of it. So, what did I learn on this last day?
Copilot and Copilot Explain
Last year at Build they made a big deal about an experimental feature of Visual Studio and VSCode that would anticipate your… what’s that? I wrote about that in the day one blog entry? Oops, well in the day 2 keynote they talked about a new feature of it called Copilot Explain. This feature will take a snippet of code and explain it in simple terms. This would allow someone new to a codebase or a seasoned engineer learn a new section of code quicker. That’s quite a feature. I would love it if I could try it on some of the code I have to support. I wonder if it would work well.
Figma Adaptive Card
I think this was talked about on Day 1, but this will allow a design team to unfurl n interactive card within Teams where a designer and an engineer (teams not only individuals) could work on a design at the same time within Teams.
Kevin Scott - Microsoft CTO
AI
So the big buzzword for the recent past has been AI. These expanding AI capabilities for developers include Azure Cognitive Services which allows developers to bring AI in to their app. There are two new features called Azure OpenAI service and Cognitive Service for Language. The former will enable some reasoning within apps on writing assistance and code generation. Don’t worry I’m not using that to write my blog posts yet. 😉 The latter offers a summary feature that will help developers discover key information from documents. It’s a bit like an automated Cliff’s Notes for documentation. It’s pretty neat, but I think the coolest example was when they had a natural language CLI application. The demonstration was typing # What is my IP and it came up with the IP address right away. I thought it was pretty neat.
That was it from Build this year. It really felt short being only 2 days, but there was so much information on day 1 that it was a nice rest to be done so quickly. I still think the biggest announcement came the day before Build started. That announcement was the GA of .NET MAUI. I’ll plan on writing a lot about that in the near future so be sure to follow along for more. And please Tweet me if you have any question or comments. Thanks for reading.
