Highlights from Day One of Microsoft Build Developers Conference

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

As you can imagine it was all about Windows 10 at the Microsoft Build Developers Conference. Ambitious in its size and scope of information, Microsoft is saying that it plans to have billion active Windows 10 devices by 2018.

Highlights of the Windows 10 announcements include:

- New Universal Windows Platform Bridge toolkits which enable developers to bring existing .NET, Win32, Javascript, Cordova, iOS and Android apps to Windows 10 devices with minimal code modifications.

- Formerly code named Spartan, Continuum for Phones will enable people to use their phones like PCs and Microsoft Edge.

- Development details for Microsoft HoloLens (the companies upcoming holographic computer), using one codebase and one store, with a consistent experience across Windows 10 devices.

- A new Windows Store offering new features, improved discoverability, better payment option and a new business store portal.

- A Windows 10 Developer Tools preview, released today to Windows Insiders.

Microsoft continued its push into the cloud space with announcements for the Azure platform. Highlights included:

- Microsoft .Net Framework 4.6 Release Candidate, Visual Studio 2015 Release Candidate available today for download.

- Project Oxford, a portfolio of SDK and REST APIs that add intelligent services like vision and speech that take advantage of natural data understanding.

- Azure SQL Data Warehouse, an enterprise-grade, elastic cloud data warehouse and new capabilities and enhanced security features for Azure SQL Database, including an elastic database option.

- Azure Data Lake, a hyper-scale data repository for big data analytic workloads and integrated with machine learning and big data services from Microsoft, and partners like Cloudera and Hortonworks.

You can learn more about the Windows 10 announcements here. To learn more about the Azure announcement go here.

Read more: http://www.buildwindows.com/