Build 2015 Student Diary – Day 3

Hi all! This is me again, Steven Cooreman, checking in for coverage of the final day of Build 2015. And let me tell you, it was a blast. The sessions were mostly top-notch, and the actual hands-on experiences on site were also very, very helpful.

The first thing I noticed on the last day of the conference was that there were remarkably fewer people around. Whether that was due to conflicting schedules, the lack of a keynote or something else, I don’t know, but it was surely refreshing not to have to stand in line as much … Oh, and the attendee party the night before could have had something to do with it as well. ;)

Since there is no keynote on day three, I attended a few sessions instead:

• API Contracts: A well-constructed session on an excellent direction Windows as a platform is headed in: API contracts! The gist of it is that you no longer have missing references or hooks which are present on some platforms but not on others. Instead, an API is fully defined and referenced for every platform (yay IntelliSense!), but on platforms that don’t support the specific API you’re using, it fails gracefully by returning an error code. Thank God, no more exceptions just because of platform differences.
• Building Bluetooth apps in Windows 10: I went into this session not really knowing what to expect, since the title is quite broad. I left very satisfied, though. It was mostly about how Bluetooth LE beacons are going to work, but at the same time, it was exciting to see that the Bluetooth API’s are finally getting harmonized across the whole Windows device spectrum. As someone who has been looking into creating a BLE ‘gadget’, that alone made my day.
• Building device solutions with Windows 10 IoT was the final session I attended. It ran a little short because of additional time for questions and general troubleshooting (there was a team on hand at the end of the session), but did give a good idea of how you would evolve from a ‘maker’ project into something that would be usable on a bigger scale.

And that was it! Overall, I’d say going to Build 2015 was definitely worth it. There were lots of opportunities around for just about every aspect of being a developer. I covered the sessions already throughout the blog posts, but the hands-on aspect of a conference like this, together with the networking opportunities are, in my opinion, positively priceless. If you have the chance to go next year, I’d definitely recommend doing so!

And that’s a wrap! Hope you enjoyed my coverage of Build! And just in case you missed it, be sure to read my coverage of Day 1 and Day 2 of the conference too!