Microsoft's Visual Studio gets new tools to help developers embrace AI

Microsoft announced today that its Visual Studio integrated development environment is getting a new set of tools aimed at easing the process of building AI systems. Visual Studio Tools for AI is a package that's designed to provide developers with built-in support for creating applications with a wide variety of machine learning frameworks, like Caffe2, TensorFlow, CNTK, and MXNet. Once users have coded up models inside Visual Studio, the AI tools make it easier for them to send that code off to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform for training and deployment. Launching these tools brings a host of advanced capabilities to developers in a point-and-click format that would have previously required the use of a command line interface. It should make building AI systems more accessible for a class of developers that haven't been able to use Visual Studio's rich development environment to its full potential for that purpose.