Thursday at Build 2016, Microsoft's executives outlined new tools for developers, spanning Azure, Visual Studio and Office. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group, and Qi Lu, executive vice president of the Applications and Services Group, demonstrated how Microsoft Azure services and the Office platform can empower developers to more easily leverage analytics, machine learning, emerging cloud development models and the Internet of Things (IoT) to build their intelligent apps.

Guthrie announced on Thursday that Microsoft is helping developers build native cross-platform mobile applications by including Xamarin's capabilities in Visual Studio Community and also making Xamarin Studio for OS X free as a community edition. In addition, Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers will now have access to Xamarin's enterprise capabilities at no additional cost. The company also announced a commitment to open source the Xamarin SDK, including its runtime, libraries and command line tools, as part of the .NET Foundation in the coming months.

Now developers can deliver native cross-platform mobile apps compatible with all major devices, including iOS, Android and Windows.

Guthrie also announced:

• The general availability of Azure Service Fabric, a microservices application platform developers can use to design apps and services that are available 24x7 at cloud scale. Battle-tested supporting Microsoft cloud services, Service Fabric handles application lifecycle management for constant uptime and easy application scaling. Also today, Microsoft announced previews of Service Fabric for Windows Server, for deploying on-premises and other clouds, and Service Fabric for Linux and Java APIs, and said it would open-source the programming frameworks of Service Fabric for Linux later this year.
• A preview of Azure Functions that extends Azure's platform services to serverless compute for event-driven solutions. Functions lets developers handle tasks that respond to events common in Web and mobile applications, IoT, and big data scenarios. Functions works with Azure and third-party services, automatically scaling out to meet demand and only charging for the time functions run. With an open source runtime, developers will be able to host Functions anywhere - on Azure, in their datacenter or on other clouds.
• New Azure IoT Starter Kits available for purchase Thursday. These kits allow anyone with Windows or Linux experience to build IoT prototypes that leverage all Azure's IoT offerings, for $50 to $160. In addition, early adopters can now use the Azure IoT Gateway SDK, which enables legacy devices and sensors to connect to the Internet without having to replace existing infrastructure, as well as device management in Azure IoT Hub to maintain and manage IoT devices at cloud scale.
• A preview of Power BI Embedded, which allows developers to embed interactive reports and visualizations in any application, on any device. Guthrie also disclosed that applications can now communicate with the fully managed Azure DocumentDB NoSQL service, using existing Apache License MongoDB APIs and drivers.
  

Microsoft's Lu showcased how developers can use the Office platform to create new business opportunity.

The Microsoft Graph, made generally available last fall, offers developers unified access to insights about how workers can be more productive. Microsoft previewed six new APIs for the Microsoft Graph that let developers link Office 365 data to third-party solutions. For example, one extension automatically compiles and exposes a list of times a group of people are available to meet, making it easier to work across organizations.

Lu also shared how conversational interaction will evolve in the future and how developers can immediately start building apps that engage users in conversations. The new Skype for Business App SDK and Skype Web SDK announced Thursday allow companies to integrate Skype calls directly within their Web or device offering.

The company also showed off new functionality that lets developers build apps and place them directly into Word, Excel and PowerPoint ribbons.

Finally, the developer portal for Office 365 Connectors is now available for developers to write and publish their own connectors. Connectors deliver relevant content, such as updates on financial records or helpdesk logs, from popular apps and services directly into Office 365 Groups conversations. The developer portal is launching with connectors such as Asana, Salesforce, Trello, Twitter, UserVoice, Zendesk and many more.