Microsoft 365 at Build 2020

Microsoft 365 was featured prominently at Microsoft Build 2020. It was a big week of announcements, so I wanted to summarize a few of the highlights.

Availability of Microsoft Fluid components

We announced the first of our Fluid Framework integrations within Microsoft 365, starting with Outlook and Office.com. These will enable people to collaborate on dynamic content and create components that can be shared simultaneously across apps. For the developer community, we announced the open sourcing of Fluid components to encourage a diverse, open, and vibrant ecosystem of Fluid-based applications. Developers can utilize Fluid’s web-based, low latency, real-time relay service to create collaborative apps and embed custom components within existing apps. You can check out the preview of Fluid Framework here.

New Microsoft Teams Developer Experiences

With more than 75M daily active users, there is a ton of interest from developers to create custom apps and integrations that exploit the growth and collaborative scaffolding of Microsoft Teams. We announced several new capabilities that will benefit the full range of developers – from citizen developers to seasoned professionals:

• New Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code Teams extensions to quickly build project scaffolding, configure features, create and validate app package manifests, and start the app publishing process.
• Multiple Teams and Power Platform integrations for corporate IT departments to create rich workflows and low code solutions.
• The ability for developers and admins to add their custom applications from Power Apps to Teams with a single click of the “Add to Teams” button.
• A “Share to Teams” button in Power BI that will allow users to easily collaborate and share reports or specific charts in reports.

Project Reunion

Project Reunion essentially weds UWP and Win32 apps with a UI framework that uses fluent design controls and styles decoupled from the OS. In short, it’s our vision for unifying and evolving the Windows developer platform. This unified approach makes it easier to build great apps that work across all Windows 10 devices and for the full 1B users on the platform. One of the first components revealed as part of the Project Reunion rollout is the WinUI 3 Preview. This API allows users to create new apps with modern UI that adapt and scale across devices or incrementally modernize the UI of existing desktop apps including those developed with C++, WPF, and WinForms. Developers interested in reviewing and working with the code can do so right now at the Project Reunion GitHub repository. Previews of WinUI 3 and WebView2 are also available to use today.

More to come for Project Cortex

There was an exciting announcement revealing Project Cortex at Ignite 2019. At Build, we announced that this summer, there will be an expanded preview of the Microsoft Graph APIs that work with Project Cortex to surface relevant content about people, activity, documents, and more inside of existing Microsoft applications. This will make it possible for developers to customize the way knowledge in an organization is surfaced and shared – and to do so using Azure and Power Platform.

Final Thoughts

It has been amazing to see the innovations across Microsoft 365 that make it a compelling platform for developers to build productivity solutions. Between Fluid Framework, Teams, Project Reunion, the Microsoft Graph, and the many other innovations announced at Build last week, it’s an exciting time to be building on Microsoft 365.