Build 2019 Roundup: Windows Terminal, Microsoft Edge and more!

Microsoft held its annual developer conference named Build in 2019 from 6^th-8^th May 2019 in Seattle, WA. We were there to witness all the major announcements in person and covered them first on MSPoweruser.com.

Though this year, Build was not much exciting as not many consumer-centric announcements were made but there were many announcements that can be referred to be the groundwork to something greater that Microsoft is targeting in the future. This included a number of announcements which we are going to talk about in this article.

Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge was announced as a replacement to the Internet Explorer in 2015. At that time, though Internet Explorer was used mostly in the enterprise, in the consumer space, it was associated with terms pointing towards it being slow or gives poor performance. This began with the ever-growing dominance of Google Chrome. Initially, Microsoft Edge ran on EdgeHTML engine but recently, a public beta for the browser was launched where it was built from the ground up and ran on Google’s Chromium Engine. Being an open source engine, it was pretty simple for Microsoft Engineers to collaborate with the engineers from Google to build Edgium. You can learn more about our Microsoft Edge coverage here.

Microsoft Search

Microsoft announced Microsoft Search a while ago which bought a single hub for a user to search the web and across their work domain through a single search. The company has announced that Microsoft Search will hit GA starting May 28^th, 2019. It will act as an intelligent entity in the company where a user can just type in their query and the search service will look up all the resources in the domain and find the relevant information for the user. For example,

If someone searches for an employee in their company, the search will return results that would give all his displayable information like his name, contact details, office location and more.

Blockchain

Yes, Microsoft recently joined Blockchain and has teamed up with JP Morgan. Together, the two companies will be emphasizing on developing Quorum and the enterprise version of Ethereum further ahead. You can read more about this announcement here.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is one service that Microsoft has been working tirelessly to improve upon. They recently announced that about 95% of the Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure across different services inside their organization. Microsoft has been emphasizing on the use of privacy and responsible AI. Hence, they have announced Artificial Intelligence 2.0. With this, Microsoft pledges on building infrastructure framework, and tools for developers to build a responsible AI.

They also announced Azure Speech service which brings in an improved speech recognition algorithm which can now understand local accents and can deliver a real-time speech to text conversion.

Dynamics 365

Microsoft is continuing their work to grow their community of business app developers who will make great use of their Dynamics 365 and Power platforms.

Microsoft 365

With the power of Microsoft Graph and responsible AI, Microsoft is bringing various intelligent features to their Microsoft 365 and Office 365. They have announced a feature called Ideas for Microsoft Word. Ideas will help a user in designing and presenting polished documents and make use to Microsoft Search.

Ideas in Word for Word Online, which can help you easily design and present polished documents, and Microsoft Search, a new enterprise search experience that applies AI technology from Bing and deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph

Windows Terminal

Yes, Microsoft has announced the all-new, modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application which will contain all the command-line tools and shells including PowerShell, Command Prompt and various flavours of WSL.

ElectionGuard

This should stand out the most appreciated solution from Microsoft. ElectionGuard is a module that will make voting secure and transparent while being open source. Like many controversies in major democracies, Microsoft has made this announcement where the voting process will be made more secure and transparent and the user will be in charge of checking if their vote is not forged or anything.

DOT NET 5

Microsoft also announced .NET 5 which will be the next big release in the .NET family. It brings in a unified platform with which, developers can target various platforms like Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and more. It will be supported by Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio for Mac, and Visual Studio Code as well.

You can learn more about the announcement here.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Windows Subsystem for Linux has been upgraded to version 2. This brings in new features like file system performance improvements full system call compatibility which brings in support for Docker as well. You can learn more about it here.

This article covers all the major announcements that happened at Build 2019. We have already covered Day 1 of the event including Satya’s keynote which you can check out at our website. Do let us know your thoughts on Build 2019 in the comments section below.