The following are, in my oinion, some of the top highlights from the Build 2015 Day 1 keynote. Let’s see how this might impact what you do in your day-to-day life. The first day's keynote was started by Satya Nadella. He took the stage to welcome the large gathering of media, analysts, and developers. He began by saying that he has attended every Microsoft developer conference since 1991, first as a third-party then as a Microsoft developer. I virtually attended this conference from Microsoft Gurgaon Office with Microsoft and C# Corner friends. The gathering was awesome. I am summarizing here the points I think are the most significant. This isn’t a full list of announcements. Honestly, you need to watch the keynote to get everything.
Recordings of the event: Channel9.
New Azure: Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft begin elaborating on the first point on Azure. He shared very much of interesting information, including these fun facts.
- Azure has datacenters in more locations than Google and AWS combined.
- More than 40% of Azure revenue comes from startups. (Jennifer Marsman)
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The following are a few new features being introduced to Azure SQL Databases:
- Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).
- Full text search Elastic.
- Database Pool.
Visual Studio Code: Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform code editor for building/debugging modern web and cloud apps that runs natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac. It supports many languages out of the box, and offers IntelliSense. It has git integration and the ability to push to the cloud. It is free and available to download from CodeVisualStudio.
This is exactly what it looks like, a lite version of Visual Studio that runs on any operating system you want. As of today, Visual Studio isn’t only on Windows anymore.
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Holographic Platform: The Windows Holographic Platform is the platform behind the hardware that is HoloLens, Microsoft’s Augmented Reality glasses/headset. This is some super-innovative technology that has the potential to fundamentally transform the way we use computers. The HoloLens was first announced a few months back, but today Microsoft shed a little more light on the technology surrounding it.
- HoloLens applications are built as Universal Windows Apps and distributed using the Windows Store.
- HoloLens is stand-alone and doesn’t require a phone or PC to use.
- Any Universal Windows App can be placed / overlaid on your wall, refrigerator, or whatever you want within your space (Says Alex Kipman).
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Universal Windows Platform: Universal apps are optimized to run on any type of device. Microsoft also demoed some other uses of the HoloLens; for instance, a medical education showcase where a student is able to study the human anatomy using virtual reality. It should be known that a hologram is an object like any other object in the real world, with the only difference that instead of being made of physical matter, a hologram is made entirely of light.
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Android Support: In a major strategy shift, a top executive told an audience of several thousand software developers Wednesday that Microsoft will release new tools to help them quickly adapt the apps they’ve built for Apple or Android gadgets, so they will work on smartphones, PCs and other devices that use the new Windows 10 operating system coming later this year. Microsoft hopes to get more people using the next version of its Windows software on many kinds of devices by giving them access to many of the same apps they’re already using on Apple or Android phones.
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Other Big Announcements
- Windows Phone as Desktop Replacement.
- Office Graph API to support cross-platform integration for Office 2016.
- The Microsoft Edge Browser was announced as the official name of the new web browser from Microsoft that was formerly known as Project Spartan.
- And many others
This was just a day to kick-start a very exciting week for Microsoft and the Windows platform.
Image/content Credits: keynote video and Google/MSDN, Read More for Day 1 : Click Here
Stay tuned for Day 2 and Day 3.