Blog

Microsoft Build 2022 highlights

Here's a brief summary of the main highlights of the Microsoft Build 2022 conference.

The Microsoft Build conference (Microsoft's premier developer conference) took place this week. As with all previous Build events, there were plenty of announcements covering all Microsoft technology areas.

The following YouTube playlist summarises Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's keynote.

The 'Build 2022 Book of News' provides full details of all the product announcements.

There was plenty of content (too much to list), but the more notable highlights included:

  • Project Voltara - Windows on 'Arm architecture' - this offers support for CPUs/GPUs NPUs for improved AI workloads
  • Dev Box - cloud-based workstations that are pre-configured with all development software
  • MS Teams Enhancements - Live Share feature adds collaboration/annotation features to apps
  • AI Enhancements - the features the new Azure OpenAI service

Power Platform Announcements

During day 2 of Build, I was fortunate to be invited to the in-person event at the UK Microsoft headquarters. This was an impressive and well-organised event with around 400 attendees.

I met many great individuals from the Power Platform and the wider developer community. A very interesting thing is that universally, the highlight for a significant number of attendees was the announcement of Express Design.


Using this feature, we can take a hand-drawn picture of a form.


We can then upload the image and Express Design will detect the contents of the image and convert it to a form.


This innovative feature will hopefully simplify the process of form design, particularly for beginners.

The second notable announcement was the introduction of Power Pages. Effectively, this is re-branding of Power Apps Portals. Instead of Portals being a subset of Power Apps, it now becomes a product in its own right. Power Apps Portals has been "promoted" to the 5th product in the Power Platform (the remaining products being Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents). 

Whilst this may not be as new as Express Design, the launch of Power Pages appears to have been effective at spreading awareness of Power Apps Portals/Power Pages within the wide demographic of delegates that I spoke with.


In summary, I find it encouraging that the main highlights of the Build conference have centred around the Power Platform. It definitely reaffirms that this is currently a great technology area to be involved in.
Previous
Next