Things have been fairly quiet on the developer front as Microsoft gets ready to put on its really big show in San Francisco, Build 2015. Here’s a few things we’re looking forward to learning more about.
Microsoft’s Build 2015 starts on Wednesday and its promising to be quite a show. With a new version of Windows moving quickly to availability, new Azure features being announced if not actually explained, and Visual Studio 2015 around the corner, this conference is sure to hold a few surprises. Scott Hanselman, a conference keynote favorite, is promising to blow our minds in the keynote. Here’s a few things we’re hoping to see.
Windows 10+
With Windows 10 Technical Preview rolling out new bits every few weeks its hard to speculate on what really new features are going to be announced for the flagship OS at Build. Of course what most people are waiting for is a release date which we can expect to get an idea of. Will there be more Contana? Or will the focus of Windows 10 for Build be on the Windows Phone version whose technical preview has been running a bit behind the primary desktop release? And we might even start to get a glimpse at the post 10 release currently code named Redstone.
Azure Awesomeness
Microsoft recently announced a new Service Fabric for Azure that promises to be able to make developing applications at scale easier and more seamless across their services. Based on the same functionality currently in use for products like Skype for Business, Event Hubs, and others this technology could change the way we build and deploy apps for Azure. What’s been missing from their recent announcements are the details and that is what we hope to see later t his week. And of course I expect that Mark Russinovich and the Azure team have a few new tricks up their sleeves to show off as well.
HoloLens
I haven’t actually heard anthing to specifically make me think that HoloLens will be a part of the Build conference this week, but the fact that we haven’t seen much about HoloLens since it’s original unveiling back in January is why I’m hoping we’ll see more of this technology during Build including some of the backend and development aspects. Perhaps a Hololens SDK?
Windows 10 for Phone
Windows 10 for Phones has been out in Technical Preview for several weeks now but what has been sorely missing is new hardware to run it on. With all of the latest Lumia phones aiming at mid-to-low range users there has been little or no talk of a new flagship. If Microsoft wants to get developers excited about Window 10 on phones, it needs to come out with new hardware or at least a partner with new hardware. A new OS on existing phones isn’t going to be enough to kick start developers into building Universal apps.
iOS and Android Support
This is one area that I think we’re going to hear quite a bit about. Microsoft is supporting two major models for building apps for iOS and Android using their tools; Apache Cordova and Xamarin. The rumor miss misfired quite a few times on a possible Xamarin take over by Microsoft so I don’t expect that to be announced this year, although I’d be happy to be wrong about that. But with Microsoft providing first class support for AngularJS 2.0 via TypeScript I do expect to see a more solid and appealing development experience for Hybrid apps being announced this week.
Office 365 Apps
It’s time for Office to get some developer love and I expect that this conference will include more than a few developer announcements in that space. We’ve seen recently some announcements about app support for Outlook.com, I expect to see much more of that geared toward building on Microsoft’s key Office products as well.
No matter what we see or don’t see this week at Build, it’s sure to be an exciting ride. You can get all of the details right here at Wintellect DevCenter as we cover the keynote announcements and other happenings in future posts. So stay tuned!