24–26 May 2022, hybrid, Seattle. Build 2022 was the conference where a pile of things we'd been watching in preview for months finally became things we could ship. It ran as a hybrid event — a small, invite-only physical presence in Seattle paired with a free digital stream for everyone else — the first soft step back toward in-person after two fully online years. We followed it the way most of the world did that year: on the stream, in the office, with the keynote on one monitor and a sandbox project on the other.
It was a dense Build. Microsoft put more than fifty product announcements on the table across three days, and the through-line was unusually practical: less "here is the future," more "here is the thing, it's GA today, go use it." For a Microsoft-stack shop like ours, that's the best kind of Build. We don't need another vision deck. We need a cross-platform UI framework that actually ships, a container runtime that doesn't make us learn Kubernetes first, and developer machines we can spin up without a procurement ticket. In 2022, we got all three.
.NET MAUI finally reached 1.0
The headline for us was .NET MAUI — .NET Multi-platform App UI — hitting general availability. One worth a small correction to our own earlier note on this: the GA blog post went up on 23 May 2022, the day before Build's official opening, and Microsoft folded the celebration into the conference. So MAUI was effectively the opening act rather than a Day-1-of-the-keynote reveal, but for practical purposes it landed as part of the Build cycle.
MAUI is the official evolution of Xamarin.Forms: one codebase, one project, targeting Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows from a single .NET UI stack. If you'd lived through the Xamarin.Forms era — and we had, across more customer projects than we'd like to count — the promise was obvious and the skepticism was earned. Cross-platform UI has a long graveyard of frameworks that demo beautifully and crumble the moment you need a native gesture, a platform-specific permission dialog, or a build that doesn't take a coffee break. MAUI's pitch was that it wasn't a new bet at all — it was Xamarin's mature mobile stack, rebuilt on the modern .NET tooling and the single-project model, with the rough edges sanded down.
The reason this mattered so much is that it ended an argument. For years our internal default question on any mobile project was "native or hybrid?" — and the honest answer was usually "it depends, let's spend a week scoping it." MAUI reaching GA collapsed that question for a whole class of work. A single C# codebase, the base class library we already know, the tooling we already own, running on iOS and Android phones in the field. That's not a compromise we tolerate; it's the architecture we'd actively choose.
We want to be fair about the state it shipped in. MAUI 1.0 was genuinely GA, but it was an early GA — the first months had their share of sharp edges, and the broader community said so loudly. The version most teams point to as the real "ready" moment came later that year alongside .NET 7. But GA is GA: it meant supported, it meant a release we could put in front of a customer, and it meant the planning question was settled.
Azure Container Apps went GA
The other clean GA win was Azure Container Apps — serverless containers for microservices, built on Kubernetes and the open-source KEDA, Dapr, and Envoy projects underneath, but without making you stand up and operate a cluster yourself.
This one is easy to undersell. The gap between "I have a containerized service" and "I have a production-grade place to run it" has historically been an entire discipline: a Kubernetes cluster, the YAML, the upgrades, the node pools, the 3am pager. For a lot of the workloads we build — a background processor, an API, an event-driven worker that scales to zero overnight — that's enormous ceremony for a modest need. Azure Container Apps put a serverless option in between bare Azure Functions and a full AKS cluster, with scale-to-zero, revisions, and traffic splitting built in. It's exactly the sort of unglamorous infrastructure decision that quietly saves a customer real money every month.
Microsoft Dev Box and Project Volterra: the developer's machine, reconsidered
Two of the more forward-looking previews were about the developer's own environment.
Microsoft Dev Box previewed as cloud-hosted, pre-configured developer workstations on Azure — spin up a ready-to-code Windows machine with the right tools, SDKs, and source already in place, instead of burning a new hire's first two days on environment setup. It followed naturally from the previous year's GitHub Codespaces, pushing the same idea up to a full Windows desktop. Anyone who has onboarded a developer onto a complex .NET solution knows the tax this targets: the half-day that turns into two days of "it builds on my machine but not yours."
Project Volterra was the hardware curveball — a compact Arm-based developer kit, built on a Qualcomm Snapdragon compute platform with a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit), and, in a nice detail, a chassis made from recycled ocean plastic. It was Microsoft's signal that Windows on Arm was a first-class target it wanted developers building for, and that on-device AI acceleration was coming to the desktop. To make that real, Microsoft committed to making its toolchain Arm-native — Visual Studio 2022, VS Code, .NET, the Windows Terminal, WSL, and more. Volterra had no price and a vague "later this year" ship window, so it sat firmly in the preview column, but the intent was clear.
The connective tissue between the two was a development pattern Microsoft called Hybrid Loop — the idea that AI workloads could move fluidly between the local device's NPU and the cloud, through ONNX Runtime and Azure Machine Learning. Panos Panay, then head of Windows and Devices, framed the ambition like this:
"In the future, moving compute workloads between client and cloud will be as dynamic and seamless as moving between Wi-Fi and cellular on your phone today."
Read that quote again from 2026 and it lands differently than it did at the time. In May 2022 it sounded aspirational. With hindsight, it was an early, accurate map of where the whole industry was heading.
The AI thread, before AI was the whole conference
It's worth remembering how AI sat at Build 2022, because it was a side dish, not the main course. This was six months before ChatGPT. The big announcement in this lane was Azure OpenAI Service opening up in preview — access, for approved customers, to OpenAI's GPT-3 model family (Ada, Babbage, Curie, and Davinci) and the Codex code models, wrapped in Azure's enterprise controls.
And GitHub Copilot — which had been a research preview since the previous summer — got its general-availability announcement, with paid GA confirmed for 21 June 2022. Microsoft noted at the time that more than a third of people who'd signed up for the preview had become daily users, which, for a tool that was still controversial, was a striking retention number. We were among the curious-but-cautious in mid-2022. The thing that's funny in retrospect is how small this all felt next to MAUI and Container Apps on the day. The GA of a code-completion tool and a preview of an enterprise GPT-3 endpoint read, at the time, as two interesting items in a fifty-item list — not as the opening of the era that would dominate every Build since.
The data story that became Fabric
Microsoft also used Build 2022 to introduce the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform — a re-framing of Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Synapse, Purview, and Power BI as a single integrated fabric for databases, analytics, and governance, rather than a pile of separately-purchased services. At the time it read mostly as positioning. In hindsight it was the narrative groundwork for Microsoft Fabric, which arrived as a real product about a year later. Alongside it came a run of Cosmos DB updates — serverless containers up to 1 TB, hierarchical partition keys, a 30-day free trial, and a Linux desktop emulator — the kind of incremental improvements that don't make headlines but do remove friction.
On the low-code side, Power Apps Express Design turned a PDF, a PowerPoint slide, a Figma file, or even a hand-drawn sketch into a working app skeleton, and Microsoft Power Pages previewed as a low-code website builder. Not our daily bread, but a clear signal of where Microsoft saw the app-building population expanding.
Why it mattered for us
Strip away the fifty-item list and Build 2022 did one thing that genuinely changed how we work: it ended the "native or hybrid?" debate for a whole category of customer projects.
By the summer we were prototyping the Kühne+Nagel CST mobile app on .NET MAUI — a single C# codebase running on iOS and Android phones used by people out in the field, not at a desk. That project shipped in 2023 and is still live on both app stores. We could have built it twice, in two native toolchains, with two teams and two backlogs. We built it once. That's the whole value proposition of the day, made concrete in one project: less code to maintain, one place to fix a bug, one stack our team already knows top to bottom.
The rest of the conference has aged into context. Azure Container Apps became a default answer for "where does this small service live?" The Intelligent Data Platform became Fabric. Dev Box and Volterra were early sketches of a developer environment that's still being redrawn. And the AI thread that felt like a footnote in May 2022 turned out to be the prologue to everything.
We'll be honest about the one thing we got wrong reading the room that week: we under-weighted Copilot and Azure OpenAI relative to MAUI. MAUI paid off exactly as we expected. The AI announcements paid off far, far more than we did. A good reminder that the most important thing at any Build is rarely the thing with the biggest applause.
Sources & further reading
- The Official Microsoft Blog — At Microsoft Build, Microsoft is delivering tools developers can use today: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2022/05/24/at-microsoft-build-microsoft-is-delivering-tools-developers-can-use-today/
- Microsoft News (EMEA) — All the key announcements from Microsoft Build 2022: https://news.microsoft.com/source/emea/2022/06/all-the-key-announcements-from-microsoft-build-2022-the-innovation-continues/
- Visual Studio Magazine — .NET MAUI Reaches General Availability, Replacing Xamarin.Forms: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2022/05/24/net-maui-ga.aspx
- .NET Blog — .NET MAUI Release Candidate – Ready for cross-platform app development: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-maui-rc-1/
- Tom's Hardware — Microsoft Volterra is All About Neural Processing (Hybrid Loop, Build): https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-volterra-ai-hybrid-loop-build
- TechCrunch — Microsoft brings support for Arm-based AI chips to Windows: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/microsoft-brings-support-for-arm-based-ai-chips-to-windows/
- OnMSFT — Build 2022: All you need to know about Azure: https://onmsft.com/news/build-2022-all-you-need-to-know-about-azure/
A note on dates: .NET MAUI's GA blog post was published 23 May 2022, the day before Build's official 24–26 May run, and was celebrated as part of the conference. Our earlier short post described it as shipping "Day 1 of the conference" — close, but the precise sequence is worth getting right.
Image credits
All photos are used under their respective Creative Commons licences; we are grateful to the photographers.
- Scaling New Heights 2013 Photo i005 by Grant Wickes — © Grant Wickes, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr (source).
- A Smartphone for Each Hand — © cambodia4kidsorg, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr (source).
- Artificial intelligence technology symposium in B.S Abdur Rahman Crescent University — © Mohamedudhuman05, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia (source).