San Francisco, May 25 (IANS): Announcing that over 95 per cent of the worlds largest companies are running their businesses on Microsoft Cloud, the tech giant on Tuesday shared new features in its productivity apps, Azure Cloud and Developer Tooling, helping developers to build productively, collaborate securely and innovate at scale.

Kicking off its virtual ‘Build 2021' developer conference, Microsoft said that the latest update of Visual Studio 2019 is now generally available.

It includes productivity enhancements for .NET and C++ development, enhanced built-in Git tooling, support for creating GitHub Actions workflows directly from the IDE (integrated development environment), improved container tooling and new Azure integrations for cloud development.

The company also released the roadmap for Visual Studio 2022.

"As always, we are looking forward to hearing user feedback in our Developer Community to help us build the best IDE we can. We will soon release its first preview with a refreshed look and feel," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft.

With over 145 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams is integrating apps and business processes where collaboration takes place.

"New meeting features will enable developers to build innovative scenarios and extend Teams meetings -- such as shared stage, Together Mode extensibility and more," Guthrie said.

The enhanced Microsoft Teams Toolkit makes coding easier by providing single-line authentication, Azure Functions integration, single-line Microsoft Graph client and more, the company informed.

There are now over 1.3 billion devices running Windows around the world.

"With Visual Studio, GitHub, and Azure you can code from anywhere with cloud-powered development environments, collaborate smoothly from anywhere with tools that help you work as a distributed team, and securely ship from anywhere," Microsoft said.

On the Cloud front, Microsoft announced several new capabilities including new category of services called Azure Applied AI services.

These services combine Azure Cognitive Services with task-specific AI and business logic, so developers can accelerate building AI solutions for common scenarios, such as document processing, customer service and extracting insights from content.

"We are also making it possible for users to build apps using natural language without needing to know how to write computer code or formulas, with Power Fx," Microsoft said.