Build 2018 Day 2

Day 2 of build 2018 was an inspiring one. The morning started with a keynote from Joe Belfiore. This keynote was about the power of combining windows with office 365 and EMS (enterprise mobility + security). It became very clear that the role of the Microsoft Graph in this new Microsoft 365 is a key component. A lot of functionalities provided by Microsoft 365 won't be possible without the graph. Functionalities like Windows Timeline en Windows Sets are also powered by the graph. Microsoft 365 is not the platform by itself. The platform is made up by the Microsoft 365 components combined with the applications we build as (enterprise) developers. For enterprises this means that the platform is not complete without connecting the LOB applications to the Microsoft 365 platform. You can gain a lot of power by adding data to the Microsoft graph so that it can be used by functionalities like timeline and sets but this also enables working cross device. Functionalities like "pickup where you left off" are powered by data in the Microsoft Graph. A very interesting announcement was the release of the Microsoft Launcher for Enterprises. This is an app for Android which shows data from the graph (like appointments, emails etc) on Android. For a lot of companies this addition of the microsoft 365 data in devices like Android and IOS is very important. For Microsoft it is important to stretch the Microsoft 365/Windows 10 eco system to these devices. This is the only way to be able to participate in the Mobile story for Microsoft. By integrating functionalies like timeline in Windows 10 as well as in Anroid and in IOS, Microsoft provides one way of working whether it is on a PC or on a Mobile device.

Another interesting development in O365 are the adaptive cards. Adaptive cards is a way of adding business logic to emails (or bots) for example. A great example is the approval of documents. When you need to approve a document nowadays from email, you need to have an Office Add In for it or open a webpage from the email. With adaptive cards it's possible to directly approve a document from the email by pressing a button in the email. Note that no browser is opened, it's directly called from the email. This works great in outlook in o365 but it is not yet clear how this works in the full outlook client. However there is huge potential to improve productivity and user experience there.

Ofcourse one of the biggest topics on Build is Azure. Microsoft has some great services which provide serverless computing. This is very important when you consider costs,. flexibility, speed of development and ease of use. When using serverless computing you don't have to worry about the OS, patching, VM provisioning etc. Serverless computing goes from Azure Functions to Container instance (serverless container hosting). This architecture requires a change in the way we think about developing applications. There is no such thing as one big monolith. The application needs to be split up in several microservices hosted on potentially several different services in Azure (functions, docker containers etc). The (workflow) connection between those services may vary from logic apps to messaging systems and event systems (like the eventgrid). For event driven systems, cosmos DB has some very nice features like the change feed. This change feed contains all the changes (for now the insert and updates but deletes are coming) made to a cosmos db partition. When connecting azure functions to this change feed you can easily execute code based on record changes in the database. No need to build queueing systems or messaging systems. How easy is that.

One other service which got a lot of attention at Build is the Azure Kubernetes Service. When you build your own Kubernetes cluster, it can be very hard to get it right. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of services need to be set correctly. AKS solves this problem. Just by provisioning an AKS cluster in the Azure Portal, all the hard work is done for you. Even patching to newer versions of kubernetes is managed for you. A very interesting topic on this was the discussion around OSBA (open service broker for azure). This service allows you to connect from a kubernetes POD directly to Azure Services like Azure SQL Server. From an architectural point of view this is very interesting because you can now easily separate the application logic from the database and still use the power of Kubernetes. As the availability of the database on Azure (whether it is a SQL azure or Cosmos DB database) is very high (99.999%), this is a good place to store the data for the application. The application logic will be high available through the kubernetes cluster itself. So this makes it very easy to create a high available application from the business logic to the data.

Yesterday we already spend some time on Progressive Web Apps but today we got a deep dive on the service workers. Although PWA's are not new, this is the time to think about building applications using PWA techniques. All major browser now support PWA's and Microsoft will provide PWA applications through the store. The most important part of PWA for me is the way they can work even when you are not online. A lot of functionality can still work even when the user is offline (although the system needs to architected for it). Also the integration of PWA with the OS API's can be very useful for users. Think about the ability for a PWA to send notifications to a user when there is a document that needs to be approved. This toast notification can be send using the native Windows action center. When the user clicks on such a notification, the user can be send directly to the right document to approve. This makes it very easy for users to get work done faster. No need to go to a websites, lookup the tasks to perform and search the right document. Just one click in the action center is enough. 

The last session of the day was about Sharepoint and how it can be used to build the modern intranet. The most important part for me in this session was the integration between MS Teams and Sharepoint. When you build a Sharepoint solution based on the Sharepoint Framework, the same solution can be used within MS Teams. Not just by linking the Sharepoint page as a tab but you can inject the solution as a real solution in a team tab. So building the solution once and reuse the solution in different products. Also the availability of an Enterprise Application Catalog for Microsoft Teams is worth noting. An enterprise can distribute applications for MS Teams from that catalog.

So again a very productive day at Build. Got to see some new things, got some more technical information on things we are already using and got some new inspiration for some improvements on our technical platform and the way we deploy and manage applications.