I’m slowly working my way through my backlog of Microsoft Build 2023 session recordings, but wanted to take some time out to summarise my key takeaways from this year’s event.

The common thread that ran throughout the event this year was artifical intelligence (AI), woven into sessions focused on what developers are building and how they’re building it, as well as sessions looking at the future of work and how this will be impacted by AI.

Copilot everywhere

One of the biggest announcements from this year’s event is that Copilot is coming to Windows 11 (available in preview in June). Windows Copilot will enable all Windows users to become ‘power’ users, putting a personal assistant capable of taking actions, configuring settings, summarising content, connecting accross applications, and more, right at the heart of the Windows experience.

Elsewhere, developers can now integrate applications and services with Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins.

I’m excited to see how Windows Copilot can improve my daily workflows.

Windows Terminal is getting smarter

Another application, another copilot. This time, GitHub Copilot X is coming to Windows Terminal. Users “will be able to take advantage of natural language AI both inline and in an experimental chat experience to recommend commands, explain errors and take actions”.

I can see this being a huge time-saver. Error returned by a build script? Don’t switch context to Edge in order to search for the error, simply ask Copilot what it means and get back an explanation, as well as a resolution, all right there in the terminal.

A new dashboard for Windows developers

Dev Home is an open-source, centralised place to configure a development environment (not only a local machine, but also remote environments like Dev Box or GitHub Codespaces), monitor system performance, and manage projects.

System performance can be monitored using a customisable dashboard, which is extensible using widgets built using the Windows widget platform. Dev Home can be customised using extensions, one of which will be installed by default; the Dev Home GitHub Extension. Extensions can provide widgets for use on the Dev Home dashboard.

Reducing the time from new machine to local development environment can only be a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see whether Dev Home does gain any traction as being the central hub for all things development on Windows devices.

Dev Drive delivers performance improvements

The introduction of Dev Drive promises to deliver “performance, security and control”, bringing a new type of storage volume to Windows optimised specifically for typical developer workloads.

With an up to 30% improvement on overall build times, and performance improvements to other operations, such as cloning repositories, Dev Drive will bring important performance gains with minimal configuration required.

More AI training and development comes to Microsoft Learn

Additional training and documentation is being launched on Microsoft Learn, to help people leverage the power of AI, through instructor-led training, self-paced learning paths, cloud games, and more.

These newly-launched offerings cover a breadth of products, including Azure OpenAI Service, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and GitHub Copilot.

Further reading

Check out the Microsoft Build 2023 Book of News for a summary of news from the event.

Read more about Dev Home at Windows Blogs.

Further information on setting up Dev Home can be found on Microsoft Learn.

Read more about Dev Drive at Windows Blogs.

Further information on setting up Dev Drive can be found on Microsoft Learn.