Latest / DevQuestions with Tim Corey / 157 The State of AI and .NET featuring Amanda Silver

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157 The State of AI and .NET featuring Amanda Silver · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to a special episode of Dev Questions here at Microsoft Build in Seattle.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: With me today, I have a special guest.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is Amanda Silver.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: You're the corporate vice president for all of DevDiv, which is pretty much everything.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, not exactly.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think, I think, you know, we work on everything that that is a product for developers.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, the Visual Studio family, which includes Visual Studio and VS Code, uh, you know, our programming languages, C, C sharp, you know, TypeScript, our programming language runtimes.net, and and you know, our Python runtime that we ship.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we also work on our Azure Paa solutions.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: So if you think about anything, like the application platform that people build against when they're targeting Azure, uh, so they're building an app service or they're building like how do you host a web application in Azure?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, all of that is is also on our team.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so you know, it it kind of, if you're a developer, you're probably using one or several of the products that we work on.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely, for sure.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um well, yes, so that's basically everything developer.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: Let's put that one.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: So glad to have you here.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um so we got a few questions for you, but I want to kind of cover what we're talking about here at Build this this week.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what are you most excited about?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: Let's start there.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's a broad question.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: That is that is a super broad question.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think the thing that I'm the most excited about, and the thing that I've that I always get the most excited about, is really how we're going to kind of bring more developers into the industry more quickly, get them up to speed and learn new domains more quickly, and really like like extend the finite talent that we have in the world of you know developers who are trained to write code.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: It is a very um kind of uh limited skill.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like not a lot of people actually understand how to do this.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: And yet it is something that is so essential to the way that the future is going to evolve.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's the thing that I get so excited so excited about.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I think this year it was really about uh how the power of the cloud and and AI both together are going to actually be accelerating developers.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's actually kind of touching on one of the kind of the fears out there um is that you know, with with AI coming out, you know, the rise of the machines and the idea that the machine can do anything that we can do, um, you're talking about expanding the amount of developers that are out there, not shrinking the amount of developers.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, how is AI gonna actually improve our life's you know, our lifecycle, and how is it gonna make us as developers more needed, not less needed?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a fantastic question.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: I would say a couple of things.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, the the overall demand for developer talent is is massive and the shortfall is huge.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we have over a million developers that are needed in the United States alone, uh, and we do not have that many developers in the United States.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: And over by by 2025, the the analysts estimate that it'll be about four million shortage worldwide.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: So huge, huge, huge demand in terms of just pure developer talent.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: That that sets aside other adjacent technical skills like data analyst capabilities or data scientist capabilities or you know, support technicians or other things like that.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we have an incredible kind of labor shortage in terms of the availability of this skill set broadly in the world.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I think, you know, from my perspective, what I look at is how can we actually take the the skills that and the set of people who have these skills and extend them as broadly as I possibly can so that we can have the maximum possible impact.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: You know, anybody who's a professional developer inside of an organization knows that their to-do list is way longer than they actually have the capacity to tackle.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: For sure.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, I think the thing that we th that we often try to kind of focus on is what is it that's really getting in the way in terms of the friction from in terms of the speed of I have an idea, I have a concept.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: How do I get that concept into code?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then how do I get that code to my customer, right?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that they can actually experience what I'm trying to build.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't matter kind of what kinds of applications you're building or who which where your customers are, every developer has that challenge.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot of friction that we encounter.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it can be everything from getting your developer box set up so that you can actually start writing the first line of code.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: It can be that writer's block that you encounter when you know you know you have this idea, but you're not exactly sure where to start.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe you need to do a lot of research to actually go, you know, just write that first line of code.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: It can be, you know, all of the actual like tasks, the individual tasks of, oh, well, now I need to, you know, create a cloud file server, or I need to, you know, uh, I need to be able to create a WebSocket so that I can have this app talk to that app.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, all of those things are are kind of in some ways like specialized knowledge that you have to go and seek out to understand how to implement that in your application.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: And yet it's really not that differentiated from application to application.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: So the question is, how can we make it easier to discover the uh coding tasks that are not unique to your application so that you can get those done, those aspects done more quickly, so that you can focus on the code that only you can write because it's your idea.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then once you actually get to the point where you have all of this uh implemented and you're ready to actually ship it to your customer, you know, in a lot of environments, uh you have to be concerned about security exploits or you have to be worried about quality degradation of your application as the set of users who use your application starts to scale up.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's the other dimension of this that the that we need to think about is how can we integrate quality and security and the other kinds of compliance issues that you might need to be worried about earlier in the process so that you don't and kind of just make it much easier to support so that you don't need to become a security expert expert to be able to have a secure application.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and then lastly, like this question of kind of operational toil.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Once you actually ship an app to customers, a lot of the developer's time goes towards maintaining that application and making sure that that um you know it does that their customers don't experience a a bad uh a bad day for the app and it doesn't you know impact other users on the app and you know just operations continue to run.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact is that today there's still a ton of operational toil that comes to developers.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, I built an app about a week ago, and you know, I knew all the different pieces, but it was gonna take me a couple days to kind of pull them all together and bring that.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I used uh Chat GPT and Copilot X and Bing.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: And it was an hour.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was just bringing those pieces together.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: I know I'm doing it.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: How long how long would that app have taken you without it?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: It was a couple days probably.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: Of just because I I knew all the pieces, uh-huh, but you don't remember syntax.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: You don't remember all the the nuances of how to do these things.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, I'd have to go to old samples and look up documentation, all these other things.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: I could just bring it here instead and and get going faster.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um one of the things I was excited about when we um talked about all the different copilots and all the rest of the AI that was announced was just the idea that we're bringing these capabilities out of the corporate, where it's you know, the massive enterprises.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: Microsoft has tons of resources to build these huge things where Mom and Pop don't.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and now Mom and Pop can take these resources and build something powerful for them with very little knowledge, you know, with the one developer or one part-time developer.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I love those those kind of things where we can help the average man as opposed to the big corporation.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's there's two dimensions of that that really, really help.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: One is AI and how we're actually going to speed up the development time, right?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Which means that you need to have, you know, maybe a little bit less of that developer energy going into the same equivalent application, um, which means that application gets out faster.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but the other thing too is just the question of access, right?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: If you think about it like throughout the world, many people don't have the bandwidth access, they don't have the hardware access to build certain categories of applications.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that there's a dimension of having cloud-hosted developer experiences, whether that's through GitHub Code Spaces or Microsoft Dev Box, uh, that you, you know, even if you have a low-powered, you know, machine, you can connect through the browser to uh a box in the cloud that has, you know, 16 CPUs uh that that you can start using uh, you know, and and have a really, really fantastic enterprise-grade developer experience.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk more about that.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_03: So code spaces, what exactly is it and how does it work, and how do you use how you find yourself using it most often?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: So so GitHub Code Spaces is basically an instant access developer environment hosted in the cloud.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and the way that it that you set it up is you basically create a container, which is kind of a way to describe a set of resources that your application is going to have a dependency on.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and in this case, the application that we're talking about is the developer experience.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so what does your developer experience depend on?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it basically has is a way to kind of encapsulate all of the SDKs and dependencies that you have to write code against so that you can compile and build the you know XE or DLLs or whatever is the set of binaries that will eventually become your application that you end up deploying into a you know web host or into you know a machine or a mobile device or whatever it is, right?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so the container uh is then hosted in the cloud so that you can you can basically with this a click, a right click of you know going to a um GitHub repository that you can discover anywhere on GitHub.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh, you know, and it, you know, there are there are millions of them out there and every single domain is covered.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And you can just go in and and click uh create a code space for me.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it can basically take that repo and go and instantiate and create all of the dependencies that you need to be able to build that particular repo.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: So this makes it so much easier for people to who are brand new to a domain, say, let's say I want to learn how to write a Chat GPT plugin, or I want to learn how to write a plugin for Teams, Microsoft Teams, or I want to create just a web application that you know uh can be hosted in Azure, or you know, all these different kinds of scenarios.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: I want to create a mobile application.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh all of those you can basically go up to a rip repository and you can click create a code space for me and you have an instant access developer environment that you can start coding against.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's great.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: I mean it's it's great that you have a browser and yet you have a full development machine.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: So wherever you are, whenever you are, just start and go.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if I had told a developer that 10 years ago, they would have been like, what?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: What is this world?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and also the just the fact that that there's consistency in these environments.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, one of the things that's the hardest aspect of setting up a developer box so that you can be successful is getting the code to match the dependencies on the machine so that you can successfully compile.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: Anybody who's ever had to deal with installing the Python runtime as an example and all of the different variations of the Python runtime, it can be kind of a nightmare and it can oftentimes take you multiple days to actually get to the point where you have a good match.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so, you know, if we can create container environments that have been tested by developers who are maybe more sophisticated and and understand how to debug those kinds of issues, then it makes it a lot easier for everybody to get started.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's great.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I did a demo earlier yesterday uh where we were testing out Dapper and Copilot and other things, and it was just start here in the repository and we were up and running.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and that was that was an excellent experience.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now you get, I believe, 60 hours for free a month.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really great for you know learning scenarios, tinkering scenarios, also contributing to open source repositories if that's where you want to get started and kind of uh and focus.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but yeah, 60 hours a month free, amazing.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's excellent.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: So um let's turn a little bit to the Visual Studio kind of family.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: So we have, you know, my audience is mainly C sharp developers, and so you know, the primary thing is Visual Studio 2022, which is awesome.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: We love it.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um but then VS Code's kind of come up behind and kind of crossing that boundary a little bit.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about that a little bit.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think from our perspective, you know, we see a ton of professional developers loving Visual Studio.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And we want to continue to make sure that they love Visual Studio.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and so we've been doing a ton of work to make sure that, you know, GitHub Copilot works fantastic in Visual Studio across all different kinds of scenarios from learning code to explaining code to diagnosing, you know, performance issues and all different kinds of things.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we also continually work on, you know, scenarios that are a little bit more sophisticated uh than just your your kind of like let's get started learning kinds of scenarios.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: We also work on let's get started learning scenarios, but but we need to kind of for the professional developers, you know, they need to do memory profiling and and general kind of diagnosing of issues, and uh they need integration with their source code control that's much easier.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, just like there's a set of scenarios that are a little bit more sophisticated that are available in Visual Studio that we've been focusing on.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh for V Visual Studio Code, you know, whereas Visual Studio, uh sometimes we call it big Visual Studio.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: The large one, yes.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, that is really designed to be the cockpit for a developer, right?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: When you think about a pilot's cockpit, you're sitting in there and then you have all the knobs and whistles that you need to fly the plane, right?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so you don't really necessarily need to go outside of the application very much to get the job done.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: We want to make sure it's your one-stop shop for development.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Visual Studio Code is really designed with a different point of view from a user experience perspective in mind.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it is designed to be a lightweight code editor.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you choose to use a lightweight code editor, you tend to kind of use other applications in the operating system as well.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: You use the terminal, you use other kinds of profiling tools, you use, you know, just kind of maybe browser tools, maybe, you know, uh other kinds of things.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what really V Visual Studio Code is kind of designed for.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: So if people, you know, don't want to have that cockpit style experience, or let's say they're just getting started and their their needs are just less, they don't need to have all of that sophisticated equipment that that Visual Studio provides, then Visual Studio Code, I think, works works better for uh C sharp developers in that case.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: The the thing that I would say is um, you know, if you think about someone who's developing with Node or Python, uh the typical competitor developer environments tend to be more lightweight code editors.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, there's a little bit of kind of a it's like a genealogy in some senses where you know, if you're a C sharp and Java professional developer, you come from a lineage where people are kind of expecting more of the cockpit style experience for their their integrated developer environment.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you come from a background of po Python or Python or said pod, uh Python or node, then then you tend to come from a background where a lighter weight code editor is what m is more commonly used in that community.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it does provide a nice option for both.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: As well as, you know, if you're on a Linux or a Mac, you know, you have those nicer options.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um now you do have Visual Studio for Mac.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um and you still like it.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: You're still making a lot of positive changes for it.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Improving performance.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we're you're moving it closer towards the the full Visual Studio kind of experience comparably, or yeah, I think what we're what we're learning, um, you know, I think originally when we had started on the Visual Studio for Mac uh kind of venture in some senses, we thought that a lot of the scenarios for usage would end up being mobile because uh because what we thought was, hey, to do a complete compilation, you oftentimes you need um Apple operating system, you need OS X to actually do the full compile cycle.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so we were thinking that a lot of folks who would who would use it would end up being mobile developers.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: And what we're actually finding is that a lot of them are ASP.net developers.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that that tends to be the more dominant use case.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of an interesting, interesting discovery.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think we're wet now two or three years into the the VS for Mac.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's that's an interesting idea.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: I hadn't known that.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: So excellent.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so you're also kind of over a lot of the Azure stuff, especially on the.NET or hosting side of things.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you mentioned earlier hosting a web app.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's a great question.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about that.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: How do you host a web app in Azure?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: What are your recommendations?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it kind of depends on what kind of web application.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: It depends.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's the answer I always give.
• 19:12
  unknown: Right.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think you know, we've made a lot of fantastic strides in the last couple of years on our static web apps.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that when most people typically talk about a web application, uh I think, you know, unless you're at a scale where, you know, you're creating something like an e-commerce website that's going to have massive consumer scale, uh, you know, if you're talking about your typical like restaurant website or uh, you know, kind of more of the mom and pop shop style kinds of scenarios, uh a business front page, right?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think that that's where static web applications really, really shines.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Because, you know, for the most part, it's not a it's not a complicated app to build, right?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: You have a little bit of of you know design content and you have a little bit of functionality, and you need to be able to invoke other APIs to make reservations or to, you know, have additional functionality to call the call the company, or maybe you have a virtual assistant or other kinds of things that you want to kind of plug into it so that you have better support experiences.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: But but for many of those scenarios, static web apps actually are probably a really great fit.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh as you get more sophisticated, let's say you're building something more like an e-commerce site that's going to have more users hitting it, uh, and there's going to be more functionality in terms of what you can complete and accomplish on that website, then you might look at something more like app service uh or container apps if you want to take advantage of either the container ecosystem or because you're really aiming for a serverless style of uh kind of execution.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that we use that word a lot, serverless.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: So what exactly are you talking about when you say serverless?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: Because we actually have servers, obviously.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so what is serverless?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: What does that mean for the everyday user?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it's a fantastic question.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think, you know, in the old old days, this is a little bit of a skew morphic conversation, right?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Because, you know, skeworphism is kind of the idea that like uh that things in the computing world resemble what's in the physical world, and the that the way that we describe them is is uh we just we use physical descriptions.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if you think about like a file server, well, like the idea of a file comes from the fact that we used to file papers, right?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of the origin of this idea of skeworphism.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: And and I think that the idea of serverless you can kind of explain through the evolution of skeworphism as well, which is that, you know.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: in the in the old days before we had the cloud, uh basically people would create app servers that they would have essentially dedicated hardware that was listening for requests to then serve out the web the web page that needed to be served up, right?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and so in a sense this idea of having uh of being not serverless is the idea that you need a server.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so over time that dedicated hardware moved to be hosted in the public cloud, but you still basically had dedicated, always running virtual hardware that was hosted in the cloud.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: So it is still a machine that is listening for the web requests that is constantly running, constantly has everything that you need to run that application, even if the requests that you're that you're receiving is super low.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so what that meant, that means is that people have to pay for the cost of always running that that server to be able to serve up their web application.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_03: Because Microsoft not a charity.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well you do charity work button we do a lot of philanthrop philanthropic work and we we do a lot of subsidies for you know for getting started developers and and small companies and things like that and open source.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: But but yes at the end of the day we have to somehow you know uh be able to pay for those servers and and keep the lights on right and so so serverless in a sense is basically kind of recognizing that for many many scenarios we don't need to have that all of that hardware running all of the time we could actually based on the request that comes in we could then spin up the necessary resources to respond to the request.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of more like a trigger based kind of invocation of the web server as opposed to an always on server.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh this is kind of where I think computing is going in this next generation of of you know cloud native computing uh it's it's moving moving beyond servers to the idea of serverless computing.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: To resources when you need them.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah exactly on demand.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the the thing about that is it both helps you with the scenario where you have really like sparse demand.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let's say you have you have a business website out there and you want to be able to you know respond whenever you get a ping but your pings are very low.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: So how can you get the uh the the most optimal uh you know most efficient way to support that uh but then also the other scenario that's really important is when your demand really has high highs and low lows.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so you might think about for example let's say uh again coming back to a commerce uh website you know everybody whether it's Black Friday or it's you know uh boxing day I mean different different places throughout the world have different massive shopping days right and so depending on where you are in the world uh you could have a certain season where your online hits to your to your website is going to be dramatically higher than it is for the rest of the year.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so the question is how can your costs to serve up your web application uh basically scale with the demand that you're actually getting in real time?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: So that I like that scenario because it it really helps the the new developer.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know I've got an idea.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: I want to get it out there and you know you want to plan to be the next you know Google or the next what Facebook but the reality is day one you're probably gonna have you know mom's gonna visit the site and that'll be about it.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know and so you want those those costs to be equivalent.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah because you're not making money off of mom well probably yeah if she mom might buy she might have subsidized your way through college moms are awesome yeah so um but yeah so the idea that you can you can plan for the massive growth but at the same time you can start with I only have a few dollars.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah scale with your business and I think that's one of the things that's so incredible about the era of technology that we are in right now you know the public cloud both by virtue of this notion of scaling with your business that you don't need to have as much uh capital as much money put into standing up a new business as as you would have had to in before the public cloud uh that I think is one incredible dimension that you know it's obviously leading to a boom of of new businesses being created which is an incredible incredible kind of um economic environment that we're in uh but the other the other point is this access point right uh this is this is also something that you know is not only available to to people who are in the United States for example or are in you know economies of a certain category this is available to everybody throughout the entire world and you don't net you don't necessarily need to have a high powered local machine to be able to create these kinds of applications and and bootstrap your business.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you know I think I think this is a I'm looking forward to the next couple of decades because I think I think what we're going to see is massive democratization of new business new digital businesses getting created.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent yeah I think that kind of carries that theme through of what we've seen at Build.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah is the idea that you know from creation where you've got the AI to help you and you've got the ability to go in the cloud and build something in the cloud on the cloud um and then the idea that you can go right through to production and deploy it for a very low cost point or a or a zero cost point even.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then get started and help kind of grow those things and try things out.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think the the uh the risk factor has gone down a lot to starting something new or trying something out.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: So that's excellent.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: So excellent so we've covered AI, you covered Visual Studio, you covered you know the the cloud I mean is is there anything else that's it's exciting or going on that I mean I there's tons of stuff that's been announced.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean there's 50 plus new things but yeah I mean I think the the other thing that's super exciting is this idea and the opportunity behind this new era of intelligent applications, right?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: In a lot of senses, this is a whole new game that that just opened up this past six months.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because there's a lot of disruption in the industry, right?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so anytime that there's disruption in the industry that's opportunity for new businesses to come in, right?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so the one that that I really talked about in my session that I that we talked about a ton and it's kind of repeated multiple times, uh kind of shown in different ways, is this idea that like you know the old paradigms of how people are going to find information and act based on that information is really going to change going forward.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know I think you know before search people needed to know the specific address that they needed to go I mean you know probably most of your listeners were not not you know the dark ages of the internet yeah it's the dark ages of the internet but like it used to be that you would get information by handing somebody a sheet of paper that gave you the URL that you needed to type into the browser.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so you would do that and that's where you would discover the information that you needed.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that's why all the business cards used to have the entire web app web address on them you know uh but in this era nobody does that anymore because there's search and there's aggregation uh apps like Yelp or other things like that that help you you know discover the business that you're looking for, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that we are now in an era where that world is going to be a little bit disrupted where you know people are going to be able to interact with a chat environment whether in their application or on the website or you know in these different kinds of environments and it's going to bring all that information locally to the context that you're focused on right now.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: So you're not going to have to kind of go and search out all of that information in the browser or in some other kind of application.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's all going to come to you in the context where you're currently working.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so what that means is that's disruption from how people are working today.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and everybody kind of gets to think about well what is how what is my how does my application how does my business um surface in this new era and so one of the things that we talked about a lot was this idea of building plugins that you can basically build a tiny little app it's not much more complicated than building a web application that provides a little bit of metadata to tell the chat engine when to invoke your application and it will get invoked.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then you know the demo that I showed in mine was actually a podcast app, ironically you know if you think about all of the inventory that you have of all of the podcasts that you've done, how can you make that inventory accessible in this side inside of a chat context, right?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so you probably have an API that publishes all of the uh apps that all of the podcasts that you've done in the past how can you take that API and expose it to our chat engines and so that is exactly the the demo that we showed in about five minutes so that you can use basically GitHub Goodspaces, you know, GitHub copilot and and your existing web API and basically create a new manifest to plu publish a plugin to chat GPT and ultimately to you know Bing chat and to M365 chat and Teams chat and you know wherever else this is all of these plugins are going to end up getting surfaced.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well that's great.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean I I think that intelligent is a great word for that um because you know we we we've talked at build about how um it's not just um it's not just chat GPT.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah you know it's it's chat GPT then we can build on top of that.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: That can be our foundation.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: You know and and so yeah taking our data and seeing how we can leverage it and and make something that's more intelligent, more effective for our customers is is excellent.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah and and not only that I mean I think this is just the first stage.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think we're going to get to the point where you can actually then take actions as well.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: So not only can I find the podcast that I'm interested in but I can actually play it with a little podcast uh mini app that's also embedded in in the context of the chat.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: That'd be awesome.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: So find people they are and and ha help them out.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: So awesome exactly so uh before we go I want to get some advice from you okay uh for my audience.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: So you know looking back on your career looking back on where you started obviously you know you came out of high school went to college and you know um you you probably have some advice for your former self you know so thinking about the audience and thinking about how we can help them kind of learn from our mistakes maybe or get forward faster.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know what advice do you have for an up-and-coming person or a person jumping into this industry maybe for the first time?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah I mean I get this question a lot actually because it is it is such a common concern and I think part of the reason why it's such a top of mind question for many people is because it's intimidating to join the industry and to you know collaborate with developers who are 20 years your senior and have you know incredible experience and just to kind of think like okay how do I how am I ever going to be able to contribute at a level that's meaningful um I would say a couple of things.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: First of all uh the developers that you're working with have a tremendous amount of experience yes but they are experts in the code that has already been written.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: What they are not experts in is the code that is yet to be written.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so the first thing to focus on is basically what is the what are the customer requirements what are the scenarios that you're trying to accomplish and how can you bring that into the center of focus and think about the best ways to accomplish that particular goal.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing that I would say is I think that also the AI is going to change the way that we interact with you know senior developers and junior developers collaborating.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: It used to be that you know you especially in this remote world as well like where everybody is you know there's a lot of people working from home or they're working geographically distributed they don't necessarily have uh they don't necessarily have you know the they're not sitting next to each other.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: How do you get the mentoring that you need from the senior developer if you're not sitting in the same office and I think that in a lot of ways the AI is going to be able to provide uh immediate feedback to you as a more junior developer so that you can be sure that when you are actually reaching out to the senior developer to seek out some advice, that you've done the research, that you've basically tried to do some investigation for yourself and you know that when you're asking them for advice it's something that you know is not obvious, right?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can be more confident in your approach to them than it is for good reason because uh because you know it can't be inferred from the existing code.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that's that's the couple things that I would say.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: Excellent.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah it kind of levels the play level levels the playing field a little bit for those new developers.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: I hope so my my goal is to bring more people into the industry.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_03: So awesome yeah well thanks for being here I appreciate it and thanks for watching and come back next time.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_03: And as always I am Tim Corey.
• 36:18
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• 36:21
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• 36:25
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• 36:32
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• 36:37
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• 36:44
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