Microsoft, through their cutting-edge updates and events each year, empowers developers and IT professionals to enhance their proficiency. This year, at Microsoft Ignite, the tech giant introduced a wide range of products along with new developments in the existing ones. 

While the first day was jampacked with the announcement by CEO Satya Nadela, the following days will include workshops for professionals to learn and explore new tools.

A whole host of things were introduced for developers, enterprises, and others. Some of the eye-catching announcements were: Azure Arc, Project Silica, Azure Quantum, Synapse, Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Visual Studio Online, and Edge Browser.

For Businesses

Azure Arc: Companies today embrace hybrid clouds and caters to the varying need for different business activities. While a mix of both private and public cloud assists organisations in providing flexibility to manage data and applications, it also impedes the innovation as firms struggle to work in multi-cloud.

While there is no in size fit all cloud, companies will continue to use various clouds, thus to extend Azure management to on-premise, edge, multi-cloud, Microsoft has introduced Azure Arc. Adopting this organisation can access Azure tools even if they are performing an activity in Google Cloud or AWS.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager: Keeping in mind the rising security issues, Microsoft announced Microsoft Endpoint Manager to fortify data breaches. Nadela stressed on how cyberattack had cost $1 trillion last year to companies. He further said that these medium and small scale businesses are the prime target of these breaches.

Through this end-to-end security architecture, one can deploy security at data, cloud application, and any infrastructure along with finding vulnerabilities at every end. 

For Developers 

Visual Studio Online: Microsoft will now offer its Visual Studio IDE online to help developers write algorithms using their browser. Although there are numerous online IDEs available for use, Visual Studio being one of the most used tools will now help developers to write code on the go. Along with its intuitive user interface, Visual Studio includes numerous feature that assists IT professionals in streamlining their development with several plugins.

The online development environment will be directly hosted on GitHub, thereby eliminating the need of manually hosting. Besides, IT professionals can utilise the built-in terminal to track changes and then switch back to coding terminal for further writing algorithms.

Going online will empower users to get rid of managing various environments for different projects and avoid version conflict. This will allow developers to work on the same project across several devices without the need to set up specific environments in all the systems they use.

This is in a preview phase and can be accessed here.

Edge Browser: The new version of Edge Browser will be based on Google’s open-source Chromium. This will enable Microsoft to integrate web development tools to its browser and facilitate a browser that IT professionals can adopt it as a development-friendly browser. The release is planned to be in January 2020, but one can gain access to the beta release.

Storage

Project Silica: The new storage techniques developed by Microsoft in collaboration with Warner Bros. to store data on quartz glass. The new cold storage system is durable and reliable to preserve data. To test its resilience, Microsoft tried to examine it by keeping it in adverse conditions. They tried to boil, bake, and scratch the glass but it effectively safeguarded the data stored.

The data was encoded into the glass with layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations. Information is read back by Machine learning algorithms through decoding images and patterns of polarized light shine.