Microsoft Build 2020

Microsoft Build 2020

Good morning, and welcome to Build. We're living through extraordinary times. I want to first extend my deepest sympathies to all who have been impacted by COVID-19, and deep gratitude to everyone working so tirelessly to get us through this crisis. While it's hard not to be together in person, I'm comforted by this community being gathered here virtually. The build is one of my favorite events of the year. I've always said this, I've marked each year of my own life at Microsoft through our developer events, and many of my fondest memories are from Build, and before that, MIX and PDC. While this year feels different, coming together as a community is more important than ever. There are tens and thousands of you tuned in from dozens of countries around the world, it's fantastic to see. Our industry has been called upon to help address the world's most acute needs through this crisis, and I'm proud of how all of you have raised the game and being there when the world needed you the most. Serving as those digital-first responders, to the first responders out there for whom we're very thankful. For me, that's being a point of light amidst this crisis, seeing developers come together with those on the front lines.







 At Johns Hopkins University, epidemiologists and software developers created that canonical dashboard to track the spread of COVID-19, adapter biotechnologies are using the Cloud compute and AI to decode the immune system's response to the virus. In the United Kingdom, a cross-section of manufacturers adjusted their production lines to build ventilators for the NHS using Mixed Reality to guide workers through the process. The NBA is using the power of the Cloud and Xbox to engage fans and maintain the joy of the game. The role of developers is more important than ever. Already, we've seen something like two years worth of digital transformation in just two months, and we've seen how critical digital technology is in the three phases of this crisis. From the emergency response to the recovery phase to the re-imagining of the world going forward. Every organization will increasingly need the ability, at a moment's notice, to remove everything from manufacturing to sales, to customer support. They will also need the ability to simulate anything; from how the immune system responds to a virus, to how a fault in a wind turbine can impact our power supply, and they will need to be able to automate everywhere to enable faster, the more agile response from triage in health care, to the maintenance and smart buildings, to cab site pickup and retail. I think that this opportunity is what grounds us in our mission at Microsoft to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, and it starts by empowering you, the developers.



Our platforms and tools are your building blocks in this era of the intelligent cloud and the Intelligent Edge. Our commitment to trust and security is at the core of all that we do and build. Over the next couple of days, you're going to hear about this new opportunity across the entire tech stack, and I want to give you a bit of a thumbnail for it. Let's start with professional developers. GitHub is the home for developers. It's where developers build software together. Fifty million developers use GitHub, and they're more active than ever. Visual Studio Code is the most popular code editor. In the past two months, we've seen increased developer activity, many multiple measures here; pull requests, pushes, collaboration. The adoption of CI/CDwith GitHub actions to drive both quality and agility, so critical during a time of crisis, and we're going further to give you new tools to power remote development productivity wherever you are. We're building the most complete toolchain for developers, bringing together the best of GitHub, Visual Studio, and Azure to help you to go from idea to code, and code to Cloud. You already see this in action. Codespace is a great example, is coming to GitHub, allowing developers to quickly provision a DevBox in the Cloud, pre-installed with Visual Studio Code, and fully configured for your DevStack.


You can work from any device, just even the web browser, and be up and running with your write Python runtime, package managers, libraries, environment variables, config settings, faster, easier than you can ever imagine. Our developer can review a pull request with GitHub actions, kick-off a build, check on quality, security checks, and then view even the app live in Azure. With WSL2 Windows is the best development environment for building apps even for Linux, with support for graphical applications and access to the GPU. The Linux apps now run alongsideWin32 as first-class, so it's great to see the progress. The other area that I'm very excited about it, and for the first time we're going to talk about this at a developer conference as another member of the toolchain, is Power Platform. There are 3.5 million people using Power Platform today to create applications, bots, workflows, dashboards, and Power Platform is a tool for end-users to build low-code/no-code applications and customize and extend Microsoft 365and Dynamics 365. But one of the most exciting things is how it's also a rapid application development tool for ProDevs.


ISVs can expose their applications through Power Platform Connectors, and ProDevs can do the same using this as an extensibility framework so that citizen developers can amplify their work, and we've seen tremendous momentum. During the month of March, we saw a 50 percent increase in first-time PowerApps users, and this year, we've seen a 70 percent increase in professional developers, and 70,000 organizations starting to use PowerApps. From New York to Washington, states are using PowerPlatform to inform citizens, providing the self-screening tools, tracking critical resources and supplies, and you'll hear more about the advances in Power Platform broadly, but there are two, in particular, I want to call out. First, is how we're bringing RPA, or robotic process automation connectivity to legacy apps, and services with our acquisition of soft motive. The second, how we are adding new professional developer extensibility to Power Virtual Agents, which is really getting used extensively even though this COVID crisis.


The next building block we want to talk about is that distributed infrastructure, the fabric that every developer needs for their applications. Today, over 95 percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure, and now more than ever organizations in every industry are relying on Azure to support their critical workloads. From healthcare triage with AI-assisted bots to digital twins in manufacturing to e-commerce and retail. This infrastructure enables you to remote, simulate, and automate any activity. We're building Azure as the world's computer. We have 61 datacenter regions, more than any other Cloud provider, and we're the only cloud that extends to the Edge, with all the flexibility you need; from Azure Edge Zones for 5G to Azure Sphere for secure IoT. Over the next two days, you'll see how we're innovating every layer from Edge to hybrid, to data in AI. We've always led with hybrid computing. Azure Arc is the first control plane built for a multi-Cloud/multi-Edge world. Today, we're taking it further with Azure Arcenabled for Kubernetes. At the data layer, Azure is the first Cloud with limitless data and analytics capabilities that can deliver a Cloud-native data estate for every organization. We literally rebuilt and reimagine the Cloud data estate using the new memory hierarchy of the Cloud. Today, you'll see Azure Synapse link, a new architecture that helps developers do live analytics on real-time transactional data.

Bringing Cosmos DB and synapse together is just, I think, going to be a pattern that we're going to see increasingly. In AI, we have the most comprehensive portfolio of tools, frameworks, and infrastructure. You'll hear about updates to AzureCognitive Services; for speech, the bot framework, from Project Bonsai, which brings intelligence to physical systems. We will also have new capabilities in Azure machine learning to better understand the interpretability of models, protect using differential privacy, control, and the audit ability of data as well as models. This is all very critical for building responsible AI. Finally, we'll share the progress with the world's first supercomputer in the Cloud. This is something that we started the last Build, and we've made tremendous progress. Everything from the infrastructure, to large scale multimodal models, acting as platforms themselves that other developers can use. Moving to Microsoft 365, we are building the worlds productivity Cloud as a people-centric, multi-device, multisense experience. We've seen tremendous scale and intensity of usage with Microsoft 365. There are over 75 million daily active users of Teams, and one billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 today. Moreover, we have seen75 percent increase in the minutes spent onWindows 10 in a month.


This translates to a rich opportunity for developers to create both new applications, and extend the reach of their existing applications. Let's start with teams, a rich scaffolding for your apps. Every time someone usesTeams before a meeting, during a meeting, after a meeting. In our case, it's driving the intensity of all of the office applications and the same is true for every application of yours. In fact, the number of organizations integrating the third-party line of business apps with Teams has tripled in the past couple of months and we're taking this to the next level, with Teams and the Fluid Framework, you can build teams apps with new collaborative Canvas.



Collaboration now is first-class in any application you build. With Teams and Power Platform, you can build and embed powerful apps, bots, workflows, dashboards for business process, with one click "AddTo Teams Experience", I think it's going to completely change, our front-line in particular, uses Teams and we're Teams and Visual Studio ProfessionalDevelopers have the ability to now have integrated workflows to build apps in Teams and now to Windows. A build Windows has always been the most important platform for us and we are seeing more developers across a variety of frameworks use Windows as their DevBox and now we'reunifying the Windows platform, allowing for seamless integration across both Win32 and UWP APIs using Project Reunion. It's an exciting announcement and I'm looking forward to what you as developers can do with Project Reunion and with windows Virtual Desktop, you can now stream your apps built for the Windows 10 install base beyond the one billion Windows10 install base because of streaming and it's rich. This is just a snapshot of what we will share with you over the next 48 hours.


These are your tools, your platforms to build a world we all want to live in. We're at an inflection point. As developers, you have that opportunity, as well as a responsibility to define what, should be rebuilt, what should be re-imagined, and what should be left behind and we're already seeing developers have this impact. Folding at home is an amazing project. It's a distributed computing project that harnesses the collective power of millions of volunteers to aid COVID 19 research efforts.When I was eight years old, I had the unfortunate experience of losing most of my vision due to macular degeneration. One of the things that drew me to studying protein dynamics is that there is something that nobody could see, that really levels the playing field for me. >> If we can understand how proteins fold, then we should also be able to understand how they misfold in Alzheimer's disease or how they malfunction and cancer. Folding at home is basically a big computer cluster where people around the world volunteer to run simulations for us and send the data back to our servers. >> We can take problems that would have taken 500 years to complete on a single desktop and start solving them within a matter of six months. It feels amazing that an ordinary person like me can help experts hopefully cure illnesses that are uncurable today. >> But the current immediacy of the pandemic, we brought the whole thing to bear on COVID 19. So over the last two months, we've gone from having around 30,000 to four million devices running, folding at home.




 But Microsoft has been partnering with us as we scale up in such a short period of time, GitHub started running our client on some of their hardware and we're making use of Azure resources to run some of the large simulations. We've already uncovered a couple of these novel findings citing the virus and are starting to delve into the structural details that provide new means to target these proteins. Welcome, Greg. It's great to talk to you on Teams. It's truly inspirational to see the progress you've made in such a short time. It's really remarkable. Maybe you can start by telling us more about the technology behind folding at home.



So folding at home is a distributed computing project for understanding all the moving parts of proteins and how we can control them. The basic idea behind the technology is to build what is essentially a map of the different structures that a protein can adopt as it goes about its function and has all of these moving parts and so we've called it out on the Internet for citizen scientists around the world to contribute their computing power to run simulations of how all the atoms in a protein move over time and on the server-side, we collect all that data and build up these maps and identify the interesting features like new therapeutic targets. >> So this is where you're going to start using more some of the Azure and GitHub, from what I understand, you're going to even use that to go to the next phase of this? >> Exactly. So Azure has been huge. So we've got these active learning algorithms that let us focus our compute resources on the structures that are most useful to us, running on Azure and along with those running servers that let us collect all that data and productively engage with all of our volunteers, we have a real opportunity to impact COVID 19. But this is also a general platform that we can bring to bear on Alzheimer's disease and antibiotic resistance and cancer, and a long list of other things. I'm excited about the engagement we're getting. That's fantastic to hear Greg and how can people get involved in your project?

Yeah, there's a wide variety of ways. The first thing is to go tofoldingathome.org/start-folding and you can download our software and start contributing your personal computing power. But if you want to get more involved, there are a variety of ways. So we have a huge need for developers right now and to help build out this platform and scale it in response to all the interests that COVID 19 has generated and the opportunity we have to make a difference. Yeah, tremendous.Thank you so much, Greg. It's such a great example of how you and a small group of developers and scientists working together can make such a big difference.



 So thank you for sharing your story and good luck going forward and we love to be involved deeply with you. Thank you, I'm excited and look forward to. It's incredible how a small group of developers and scientists working together can make such a huge difference and reflect on this power of community music has always been a unifying force in connecting us and it's inspiring to see musicians and developers at the San Francisco Conservatory Music working together to teach and perform virtually. Let's take a look. >> I picked a violin when I was three. What really got me practicing was the idea that, oh, I get to go perform, I get to go connect with an audience.  Before COVID came along, San Francisco Conservatory Music was a teaching in-person for over 100 years. So we were given the task of putting all of our classes, and performances online in a matter of weeks. 

We teamed up with magics and the VEGAS stream software to achieve this mission. It allows us to bring Microsoft Teams video calls into the software and you can take data that's in our organization, pulled into VEGAS stream, and create your titles, pulling, chat messages, and then broadcasts it out to the world. >> A classical musician, we love the in-person interaction and the feeling of the audience. I've been using Teams to connect with my audience who I can't see in person. It's really amazing to look at a screen and see all the faces. >> Even though it's been a challenging time, I think it's a really exciting time and seeing how education is going to be changed for the better.  Welcome, Allie and Todor. I've learned how teaching and performing music virtually is a huge challenge. Allie, maybe we could start with you. How are you currently using technology to address this issue?



So when my calendar first evaporated, I started doing Livestream performances and I realized pretty quickly that something was missing. I realized that the thrill of performing for me is not being seen, but seeing my audience and so the beauty of Teams in performing is that I can look out and see in these windows. The reaction and the collaborative effort I make with my audience. Yeah, now, that fantastic and so Todor, why did you choose to build this app and what was that inspiration, and obviously you choose to integrate with Teams and Allie already talked a little bit about why that is the case, but maybe you want to share a little bit from your perspective. What do choices design centers were all about?  Well, I'll start with something she just said. Inspiration is to enable people like her, to enable people to effectively communicate through video. So it's very exciting that this has come together, we talk about Teams in Microsoft. Microsoft 365 offers a very rich source of highly useful, relevant information. Everything from Spreadsheets, Notes, who's on my Team, who'squesting, set on the chart, what kind of reactions do people have and then the MicrosoftGraph APIs give us quick intelligent access to this data so that people like Allie can then communicate effectively. But it's really exciting when you combine that with the power of Teams, which is the core communication infrastructure in Microsoft so that you're able to effectively bring together this communication she needs to be able to do. 



Now I think that beautifully captures it because it's not just the one team session. It's what happens before the session, after the session, and all of it being constructed together and maybe Allie, how has this benefited you as a performer? Has this new medium of instruction, performance changed? How you approach it?  Yeah, definitely. It's this new frontier of performing to anyplace in the world now, it's opened up opportunities that I wouldn't have thought of usually as somebody who perform mostly in person. Suddenly I'm using the medium of video and live streaming performance in ways that I never even considered possible before. >> That's tremendous. Thanks so much, Allie and Todor, for what you're doing and inspiring us to think about this new medium in new ways. Thank you so much and have a fantastic build. I'm looking forward to watching alongside you.