Microsoft Corp. went all-in on offering tools for developers today during its annual developer conference Build, with new tools and services that will upgrade their game when working with artificial intelligence in its Azure cloud and in coding environments such as Visual Studio.

Front and center, Visual Studio Code, the company’s integrated development environment, where developers do most of their code development, is getting the AI Toolkit in preview. VS Code is a lightweight editor for professionals that lets them get up and running quickly anywhere with numerous languages and the new AI Toolkit helps AI engineers do the same thing by acquiring and running large language models using local and cloud compute to optimize and fine-tune them using Azure AI Studio or other platforms.

Visual Studio 17.10 is getting GitHub Copilot directly in the IDE, this will give developers access to an AI assistant that can auto-complete lines of code and provide context-aware assistance. The Copilot can offer documentation assistance, refactor code, explain code and more. As the AI assistant is aware of a company’s codebase and can view what a developer is working on, it can also act as the ultimate pair programmer, now directly within their coding environment.

Supporting developers on the language side, Microsoft is updating .NET, the company’s open-source, cross-platform framework for building apps and cloud services. The framework is now in version 9 Preview 4, which is enhanced for optimizing cloud app development with support for generative AI applications and a newly unveiled .NET Aspire cloud-native stack. The new .NET Aspire is a cloud-native stack of tools and libraries for building cloud apps to help developers accelerate their time-to-live using preconfigured patterns so that they can worry less about setup and get to coding.

Microsoft Azure updates for developers and DevOps

Developers will get a lot more resilience with Microsoft Azure cloud service changes, including Azure API Center, which will help untangle application programming interface sprawl, especially with the number of AI solutions that need to connect to third-party services. Now generally available, API Center provides an inventory for the discovery of API connections and their management all in one place.

A new Azure App Service allows developers to build, deploy and run web apps, APIs and other components with ease. It includes sidecar patterns, which allow developers to add extra features to a main app, such as monitoring and caching, without changing the underlying code. It also allows WebJobs and background tasks that run on the same server to perform functions such as fetching email or executing scheduled jobs.

Dynamic sessions are coming to Azure Container Apps, in preview, which will allow AI app developers to instantly run LLM-generated code or extend software-as-a-service apps on-demand in secure sandboxes. These dynamic sandboxes can be quickly spun up, are easily managed, provide high security and are ephemeral, which means that they can also be torn down rapidly for reduced cost. Additionally, they support Java and have a .NET Aspire dashboard integrated.

Azure Kubernetes Service has launched Automatic, in preview, for DevOps teams and platform engineers, which will automate AKS cluster setup and management by automatically executing configurations so that users can be assured of security, performance and dependability for apps. Several new features in preview include deployment safeguard enforcement options, intelligent workload placement and an autoscaler for Kubernetes events. Now generally available, automated deployments and node auto-provisioning will select virtual machines for workloads based on resources.

Dev Box enterprise management features and ready-to-code 

Dev Box, Microsoft’s Azure service that provides developers a self-service project space anywhere they are, essentially a workstation “in a box,” is getting updated with multiple new productivity and enterprise management features while developers get greater flexibility.

Developers get new ready-to-code team customization and images now in private preview now add project-based catalog capability. This will allow project leads to generate images for Dev Box workstations with custom installations that can be rolled out at will so that teams will have the same environment when they go live.

Also in preview, Dev Box now has an improved experience in the Windows app, with easier access from the taskbar. This will make it easier for developers to move between Dev Box and Windows devices, for both on-premises and the cloud.

New enterprise management capabilities include Dev Box connection telemetry now generally available and hibernation on disconnect, which will help reduce costs for organizations so that idle instances will go to sleep. Windows 11 Enterprise images and Dev Box-compatible custom images with third-party tools can now be published via the “Windows client for developers” image in the Azure Marketplace. This feature is generally available and will make it simple for images to contain the third-party tools developer teams need in their day-to-day work. 

Microsoft also expanded the regions where Dev Boxes can be deployed to include Southeast Asia, South Africa North, Germany West Central, Italy North, Brazil South and Switzerland North and, starting June 1, in Sweden Central.

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