Microsoft’s Build developer conference kicked off today, and as the company has done in the past few years, Microsoft’s opening speech focused primarily on AI and other closely related technologies. Microsoft Scout, an OpenClaw-based “autopilot” agent that can connect to Microsoft 365 data to perform tasks for users; several new AI models; An extended preview of “codenamed MDASH”, which is a “multi-model agentive scanning system” that aims to detect and fix software vulnerabilities.
Some of those announcements seemed particularly interesting to us, either for esoteric technical reasons or because they seemed like they might have some utility for people who aren’t spending their every waking moment using generative AI tools. (Microsoft’s recent efforts to make its flagship operating system faster, more reliable, more useful, and less annoying didn’t exactly succeed, but there have been several other announcements on that front recently.)
On the hardware front, we didn’t get any updates to existing Surface devices (except for yesterday’s Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is “a compact developer PC built around Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.”
The Dave Box somewhat resembles a cartoon anvil or piano that fell on the Xbox Series X and flattened it. Its aluminum casing was designed “to double as a heatsink”, and its preloaded version of Windows 11 Pro will include a “purposeful” set of developer-focused default settings and preinstalled tools.
It is a follow-up of sorts to Windows Dev Kit 2023, also known as “Project Volterra”. This Qualcomm Snapdragon 8CX Gen 3-powered PC was basically the system board of a Surface Pro tablet packed into a plastic box, and it came with Arm-native versions of several Microsoft developer tools. This helped set the stage for Arm-based flagship Surface devices launching the next year, which benefited from a better and faster x86-to-Arm code translation technology called Prism and a large number of Arm-native third-party apps that did not need to be translated in the first place.
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