Microsoft Releases Azure Blockchain Development Kit

Microsoft announced Blockchain Development Kit. It built on Microsoft’s serverless technologies.

Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Blockchain Engineering, Marc Mercuri in the blog post claimed seamlessly integration of blockchain with the best of Microsoft and third-party Sofware as a Services (SaaS).

The newly released Azure Blockchain Development kit extends the capabilities of existing blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench. Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs are part of a reference architecture and now can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications.

This first release of Microsoft's Blockchain Development Kit focuses on three key areas:

• Connecting interfaces, 
• Integrating data and systems, and 
• Deploying smart contracts and blockchain networks

The Azure Blockchain Development Kit includes samples for inbound and outbound SMS, IVR, IoT Hub, and IoT Central, Xamarin mobile client for iOS and Android, Dynamics integration via Common Data Service (CDS), bots and assistants (Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant) and web UX.

Microsoft also released a set of Logic Apps. These logic apps will enable the hashing of files and file related metadata, smart contracts for files and a file registry to store the hashes on the chain (blockchain or distributed ledger).

Logic Apps have been created to deliver this functionality for files added to the most popular sources for documents and media, including Azure Storage, OneDrive, One Drive for Business, SharePoint, Box, Adobe Creative Cloud, and FTP.

The Blockchain Application Development Kit also includes Workbench integration samples in the following areas:

• Legacy applications and protocols – Sending and receiving files via FTP, processing comma separated files and email delivery of data.
• Data – SQL, Azure Search, Excel, and PowerBI.
• SaaS –  SharePoint, Dynamics, Outlook, and Gmail.
• Registries – An accelerator that generates a custom registry and registry item smart contracts to accommodate any scenario.

Another announcement is related to a whitepaper on “DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contract” along with the implementation guide, available through the Azure Blockchain Development Kit.

Executive Opinion

Founder of Truffle, Tim Coulter, said, “We're excited to work with Microsoft to create the canonical DevOps experience for blockchain engineers. Our paper, ‘DevOps for Blockchain Smart Contracts’, goes into rigorous detail and provides examples on how to develop blockchain applications with an eye toward CI/CD in consortium environments.”

Head of Product Management, R3, Mike Ward said, "At R3, we are committed to ensuring developers can deploy CorDapps quickly, securely and easily. The Azure Blockchain Development Kit will give our enterprise customers tools to integrate with the applications, software, and devices that people use every day like Outlook, Alexa, SMS, and web UX. The blockchain is moving out of the labs and into everyday business applications.”

How to Access the Azure Blockchain Development Kit?

The Azure Blockchain Development Kit is available at GitHub location:
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/blockchain/tree/master/blockchain-development-kit

Microsoft also said that there will be set of Logic App and Flow Connectors to extend samples shipped with Azure Blockchainkit, to ledgers like Ethereum, Corda, Bitcoin, and others.