Build 2018: Microsoft announces new partnership with GitHub, new Visual Studio Live Share, more

Arif Bacchus

Microsoft’s has long empowered developers to achieve more, and today at Build 2018, the company shared the next step in that mission. Indeed, it was detailed on stage that Microsoft is making moved to empower developers to build for the new era of intelligent edge, across Azure, Microsoft 365, and other platforms by using the languages and frameworks they know best.

The announcements cover three key development areas— Azure Kubernetes Service, Visual Studio IntelliCode. Improvements to all three of these areas and products aim to help developers simplify how they build, enhance everyday software, and collaborate in real time. See more about this below.

  • With Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), developers can drastically simplify how they build and run container-based solutions without deep Kubernetes experience. Generally available in the coming weeks, AKS integrates with developer tools and workspaces, CI/CD, networking, monitoring tools and more in the Azure portal, so developers can write code, not stitch services together. In addition, Microsoft is taking Kubernetes to the edge with AKS for Azure IOT Edge, along with enabling a seamless devops experience with Visual Studio Team Services projects for AKS.
  • Visual Studio IntelliCode is a new capability that enhances everyday software development with the power of AI. IntelliCode provides intelligent suggestions to improve code quality and productivity and is available in preview today in Visual Studio.
  • Visual Studio Live Share, now in preview, lets developers easily and securely collaborate in real-time with team members who can edit and debug directly from their existing tools like Visual Studio 2017 and VS Code. Developers can use Live Share with any language for any scenario, including serverless, cloud-native and IOT development.

In addition to the above, Microsoft is also looking to bring the power of Azure DevOps services to Github customers. This builds on the company’s commitment to developers and open source.  “Today, we released the integration of Visual Studio App Center and GitHub, which provides GitHub developers building mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS devices to seamlessly automate DevOps processes right from within the GitHub experience,” explained Microsoft.

Finally, Microsoft is also announcing the Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench, which should make it easier for developers to develop applications by sticking Azure-supported blockchain network with cloud services.