Microsoft Build 2024: Key Takeaways and Insights

As we all know, Microsoft Build 2024 took place on May 21- 23 at the luminous Summit building of the Seattle Convention Center. Syncfusion, too, participated in the conference and showcased our Essential Studio and SAAS products.

The key focus of Microsoft Build 2024 was how AI will shape your future. In 307 sessions held over three days, around 620 speakers shared their knowledge about the latest trends in AI.

Our Syncfusion team also attended various sessions. In this blog, we’ll share what our team members learned from some of the sessions we attended at Microsoft Build 2024.

Azure AI Studio

Azure AI Studio is a powerful platform offering seamless management, automation, and advanced AI tools. Its dual development approach, combining a user-friendly UI and code-first capabilities, allows flexibility in workflow even if our requirements are complex.

Azure AI Studio provides access to the latest foundation models through Models as a service (MaaS), simplifying the creation of generative AI apps. The platform’s comprehensive AI toolchain supports data integration, prompt orchestration, and system evaluation. Features like tracing, debugging, and monitoring enhance workflow insights and ensure continuous improvement.

As part of our continuous effort to enhance our Syncfusion HelpBot, which is developed using LangChain, the features and advantages of Azure AI Studio have inspired us to plan a migration to this robust platform.

What’s New in C# 13

During the session on C# 13 at the Microsoft Build Conference, presented by Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell, several impactful features were introduced, all revolving around enhancing developer productivity and code efficiency:

1. Collection expressions : Enhancements to collection expressions allow more efficient data handling with less code, simplifying common tasks.
2. Params IEnumerable : The long-requested ability to use params with IEnumerable is now available, reducing boilerplate code for methods accepting collections.
3. Field keyword in Auto-properties : Auto-properties can now include bodies with the field keyword, providing more flexibility while maintaining encapsulation and reducing the need for boilerplate code.
4. Extension everything : A new syntactic approach allows extension methods, properties, and indexers to be defined more intuitively, making code more discoverable and easier to maintain.
5. Explicit extensions : This feature allows us to create type-safe wrappers around loosely typed data, enabling more robust and maintainable code when dealing with dynamic data structures like JSON.

These features simplify and enhance the C# development experience, providing developers with more powerful and intuitive tools to write cleaner and more efficient code.

Note: For more details, refer to What’s New in C# 13.

WinUI 3 and WPF updates

At Syncfusion, we are excited about the recent Microsoft announcements regarding WinUI 3 and WPF, which offer significant advantages for us and our customers.

1. Enhanced platform support: With Microsoft promoting WinUI 3 and WPF as the two recommended native UI platforms, Syncfusion’s investment in providing controls for these frameworks ensures that our products remain highly relevant and in demand. By default, our WinUI controls are based on the Fluent theme, supporting light and dark variants.
2. Broader adoption of WinUI 3: As Microsoft accelerates the adoption of WinUI 3 in its own apps and simplifies the installation process in Visual Studio, we anticipate an increase in the user base for WinUI 3. This surge in adoption can lead to greater demand for Syncfusion’s WinUI suite, which provides 35+ controls, such as 20 chart types, DataGrid, Scheduler, and more.
3. Continued investment in WPF: Microsoft’s ongoing investment in WPF, including updates for Windows 11 theming and new features like hyphen-based ligatures support, ensures that WPF remains a robust and modern platform. We can leverage these updates to enhance our existing Syncfusion WPF controls, providing even more value to our customers. WinUI controls can be hosted in WPF apps using XAML islands. This capability primarily incorporates modern controls (like WinUI) into legacy applications (like WPF).
4. Seamless integration: The alignment of WinUI 3 and WPF as preferred UI platforms allows us to offer a comprehensive suite of controls that seamlessly integrate with the latest Windows development tools and frameworks, ensuring a smooth development experience for our customers.
5. Modern desktop apps: By supporting the best path forward for creating modern native desktop apps on Windows, Syncfusion’s controls can help developers build high-quality, feature-rich applications that meet contemporary design and functionality standards. WinUI 3 excels in graphics, media, and consumer scenarios, while WPF leverages a vast ecosystem of third-party controls and libraries, making it ideal for line-of-business apps.

Sessions by our Syncfusion speakers

Create a Custom GPT with a Blazor and .NET MAUI Hybrid App by Michael Prabu M, Senior Product Manager

In just 15 minutes, Michael created an app that targeted web, mobile, and desktop platforms and integrated an intelligent chatbot into it using Syncfusion controls.

This kind of assistant can help small organizations search through their information by file search instead of costly options like a database search. Also, the users appreciated that this Blazor app was also built as a .NET MAUI hybrid app so it can be deployed in Android, iOS, and Windows.

Practical tips and best practices for API development by George Livingston, Senior Product Manager

This session shared tips like following RESTful principles, implementing security measures, using OpenAPI and Swagger tools, optimizing microservices with gRPC, and more.

Build an AI-powered Content Composer in Blazor Using OpenAI GPT by Umamaheswari Chandrabose, Senior Product Manager

This virtual talk showed how to use Syncfusion Blazor components and GPT-3.5 Turbo to build an AI-powered content composer.

Others sessions

Build API Plugins for Copilot in 10 minutes by Bob German, Principal Cloud Advocate

This session showed how to create a plugin for Copilot using an ordinary REST service, VS Code, and Teams Toolkit.

Throughout this demo, Bob German took TreyResearch consulting company, a fictitious one, as an example and built an API service that has certain endpoints to get and post details. With Devproxy , the request calls to the API service through Postman can be recorded to provide as much data as possible to LLM to generate an appropriate response by Copilot plugin when added through Teams Toolkit in VS Code to integrate into Microsoft Teams.

The Web is AI Ready- maximize your AI web development with WebNN

This session introduced the API to utilize the AI functionality in the client browser.

WebNN allows web browsers and progressive web apps to run AI inference directly on the client’s CPU, GPU, and NPU. It integrates with ML frameworks like ONNX RT to use native capabilities such as Microsoft DirectML on Windows, enhancing AI performance and efficiency on AI PCs.

Along with the ones mentioned above, we’ve also attended the following sessions:

• Power of AI and Copilot for Azure Databases — Shireesh Thota, Azure Databases Corporate Vice Present
• Deploy your .NET microservices to the cloud at lightning speed Sophia Carpenter, Jiachen Jiang

Note: For more details, refer to the Microsoft Build 2024 sessions catalog.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! Microsoft Build 2024 was a pivotal event where Syncfusion not only showcased its products but also gained invaluable insights into the future of AI and software development. From Azure AI Studio’s robust capabilities to the innovative features of C# 13 and the advancements in WinUI and WPF, the conference highlighted the rapid evolution of technology and its impact on developers and businesses alike. With our team members actively participating in sessions and absorbing knowledge on topics like AI integration in web development and building plugins for Copilot, Syncfusion remains committed to enhancing our products and supporting developers in creating cutting-edge solutions. As we look ahead, these learnings will guide us in delivering even more powerful tools and frameworks that empower developers worldwide.

Syncfusion provides a wide range of components and frameworks for various platforms, including WinForms, WPF, WinUI, .NET MAUI, ASP.NET(MVC, Core), Xamarin, Flutter, JavaScript, Angular, Blazor, Vue, and React platforms. Use them to boost your application development speed.

Visit our YouTube channel, documentation, GitHub, and web demos for more information about our components.

The newest version is also available for download from the license and downloads page for current customers. If you are not a Syncfusion customer, try our 30-day free trial to see how our components can enhance your projects.

For questions, you can reach us through our support forums, support portal, or feedback portal. As always, we are happy to assist you!

Related resources

• Microsoft Build 2024: The Syncfusion Experience
• Syncfusion Showcases at Microsoft Build 2024
• Easily Build ChatGPT-like App in .NET MAUI using OpenAI APIs
• Creating a .NET MAUI Smart PDF Viewer App with Auto-Summary Generation Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT
• Designing Systems in the Age of AI feat. Hassan Rezk Habib [Webinar Show Notes]