Microsoft Build 2015

Build is the annual conference event held by Microsoft and is aimed towards software and developers for Windows, Windows Phone and Azure Microsoft’s online cloud service. This year’s event was held in San Francisco from 29^th Apr to 1^st May.

This year’s build is completely focused around Windows10, Windows 10 for phones, Internet of Things(IoT), HoloLens, Microsoft Edge, Azure.  For Microsoft Windows 10 is going to be huge, bigger than any previous releases of windows and they can’t fail this time.

Competition is picking up with all their might. In smartphones market the company started late, is making progress through Lumia line but still far from having sizable chunks from Android and iOS market share. With Windows10 Microsoft is aiming some big numbers, at 1 billion devices in two years from the time of launch. Those are some numbers, and not only that Microsoft also want developers to come and join forces in bringing their apps from iOS and Android to Windows10. Microsoft launched two tools which will use old codes from android and iOS apps and convert them to Windows10 app. What’s amazing is that these apps will all be Universal Apps, means they will run from Window10 PC, tablets, phones, Xbox and even HoloLens.

This time Microsoft is changing developers question of Why to develop for Windows to Why Not for Windows. Only time will tell how successful Microsoft will become in this approach. But seeing what all was announced at this year’s conference it’s pretty clear Microsoft is moving in the right direction and may be it will again hold the leader tag of technology which it held for so long. So people are you ready for this amazing thing. I hope you do beacause it's going to be pretty awesome.

Build 2015

This year’s conference started with the keynote of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He started by showcasing that many new announcement are going to be made for new things which going to be pretty exciting, he emphasized that MS is a “developer and platform company FIRST”. He said they want to empower every person, every organization to achieve more. He further said "We want all of these developers to come and exploit and take advantage of the platform innovation you'll see this morning. We want to bring bridges for you, we want you to bring your skills to our platform.”

Satya Nadella also talked about student developers, one of the kid from Bronx, built a robot which could climb stairs. On stage he brought young David William Hearn, who is the co-creator of music app Staffpad. Some of you may be having a idea about Staffpad, it’s a music creating app for Surface devices using Surface Pen. The presentation showed the app demo and David wrote music in bars, which I wish I could understand. But that’s not the point here. Staffpad works like charm and is available on Windows, not on iPad since it doesn’t have any stylus support.

Azure was the first topic of the event. For those not knowing Azure, it is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and infrastructure. Since the time Mr. Nadella has taken over Microsoft his approach has been very clear, mobile first cloud first. And Azure occupies very prominent space in that. To give an idea how huge Azure is, Scott Guthrie, said Azure has 19 compute regions opened which is more than Amazon. Azure has 50 trillion storage objects, that is huge really huge. With Azure Microsoft is allowing developers to choose between Linux and Windows, and that pretty open from the company. Also today Visual Studio Code was demoed running on, Ubuntu, Mac, Linux and obviously Windows.

Next up was Office, the same good old MS Office which we have been using since a long time. But only the name is same here. Office 2016 is new updated version. In the latest launched Office third party apps will be able to create add-ons in. Outlook was shown with add-on from LinkedIn and Salesforce. Uber add-on was pretty nice in work. There was ride reminder add-on in Office itself, a ride can be scheduled from Outlook itself, pretty nice. 

Windows10

As I have already said Windows10 is pretty big for Microsoft, same was the sentiment from Satya Nadella “Windows 10 is not just another release of Windows, it's a new generation of Windows. It's built such as users can interact with the variety of devices that will be powered by Windows.” 

In Windows10 Cortana, Xbox Live can be added in apps. Windows10 is basically one OS which will run from small screen phones, to large screens, all-in-one PC to large Surface Hub, to Xbox devices. Microsoft announced carrier billing not only for Windows Phone but for all Windows devices. A big step in getting largest carrier billing footprint. USA Today app was shown in the demo running on Windows10. The same app was open on Windows Phone and the same article opened automatically from the PC. The same USA Today Universal app was opened on Xbox One and it showed only videos since you are not going to read articles on your Xbox One. The app adapts according to screen sizes and its nice.

MS also showcased to developers to bring their apps to Windows10 and announced 4 different ways. This is really big from Microsoft, first up web can directly be converted to apps and listed in store. Second .NET and Win32 apps, Win32 apps will run isolated from rest of the system. Next up was Android App compiler, Terry Myerson explained “ We will be able to reuse nearly all of the Java and C++ code from an Android phone app to create apps for phone running Windows10”. Choice Hotel Android app was demoed running on Windows10 phone. So in this way MS is going to run Android apps on Windows. It's good and give developers to work for Windows10 without worry to start from scratch. Fourth and the last one was for Objective C and that means developers with iOS apps can bring apps to Visual Studio and to Windows10. Candy Crush the famous game which came to Windows Phone lately, is originally an iOS app.

There is lot more from BUILD 2015. Since it's already late today I am wrapping up here for now but promise that I will bring more in my next blogpost. Still more to come in next post regarding the Windows10 demo, Cortana, Microsoft Edge, Spotlight, Windows10 phone(mobile), Continuum(this is pretty  big and amazing) and HOLOLENS (can be the next big thing in technology). So folks till then read and enjoy.