Microsoft Build, Ignite and Windows 10 Continuum

[apearce]

Hi All,

Just wanted to give you a bit of a heads up about what happened last week and some stuff being announced today. Microsoft have 2 main conferences now which is Build (for Devs) and Ignite for IT Pros.

 

Build was last week where they showed over some new developer tools including Visual Studio for Mac (called Visual Studio Code), announcements to make it easier for you to convert Andriod and iOS apps to Windows Apps through Visual Studio and also continuum for Windows 10.

 

Continuum will allow you plug in your windows phone directly into a monitor, bluetooth to a keyboard and mouse and use it as a desktop PC. Along side Universal app (where apps are written once but work across phone, tablet and desktop means they users gets a great experiences.

 

We also got to see Hololens in action - if you dont want to watch the full 3 hours, the last 60 minutes is worth it.

 

Keynote is 3 hours but worth watching and hearing how Microsoft are changing.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/KEY01

 

follow @o365updates on twitter for more information on whats coming in Azure and 365 throughout the week.

[JRowley]

It should be said that Continuum is substantially more than described, it is a feature set which adjusts the UI of apps based on the input and output devices available, so you can plug a phone into a screen and use it like a desktop. But equally you can remove a keyboard and mouse from a tablet and the UI will adjust to best fit a touch only device or add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to a tablet and it switches to a more keyboard/mouse driven UI. These are changes like, size of and location of buttons, menu structures, that sort of thing.

 

I watched the whole keynotes (all 3 hours of it!), it featured some very interesting additions. The most striking for me was the Visual Studio toolkit for importing code from iOS and Android apps so that they can be debugged/run on Windows 10, it will dramatically reduce development time for app developer and should help turn the tide for Windows.

 

The other big one for me was that the Microsoft Store now supports your typical Win32 apps, it's no longer limited to 'Modern' apps. So an example they showed was Photoshop elements being available through the store. On top of that they stated that these Win32 apps shall be sandboxed in a similar fashion to the rest of the apps available from the store by utilising App-V, or atleast a technology based heavily on it. The last thing I thought was interested was a process that a web developer can go through, which is to wrap their website in a container of sorts and publish it as an app on the store, complete with notifications, live tiles, achievements, in-app purchases, presumably keyboard short cuts (such as media buttons, play/pause, skip, etc.). Thought that was quite an interesting one, so now if you are a website like SoundCloud you might not need to write a whole new app for Windows 10, you could just wrap your website and publish it, again cutting development time.

 

So yeah some really interesting stuff.