Build 2013 roundup
In case you weren't able to attend Build 2013 last week (like me), Jake Sabulsky wraps it up for us:
Day 1 Keynote
On Wednesday Steve Ballmer kicked off the conference with the Day 1 keynote. He was joined by Julie Larson-Green and Antoine Leblond, who showed off lots of cool features of Windows 8.1 Preview and the developer platform. We got to see the new side-by-side windowing model, Bing integrated Search, new performance tools in Visual Studio, Internet Explorer support for WebGL, native 3D printing support, and tons more. You’ll definitely want to check out the Product Guide for Developers to get more info on all these new features.
Additionally in the keynote, Gurdeep Singh Pall from the Bing team showed some very cool demos of how apps can utilize new controls to bring the power of Bing into their app experiences. For example, Gurdeep showed how an app could use Optical Character Recognition to identify the text on a restaurant advertisement and then use machine translation to translate it into the user’s native language. That’s some pretty neat stuff there. If you want to check out more info on the new Bing controls take a look at the Bing Dev Center and their blog post.
Day 2 Keynote
On Thursday Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools Business, kicked off the activities with the Day 2 Keynote. Satya and folks from his team showed off tons of cool technologies for building services using Windows Azure. One particular area of interest for developers building Windows Store apps is the deep integration that Azure Mobile Services provides for your apps. Azure Mobile Services makes it easy to add a cloud backend to your app on any device. And if you’re building a Windows Store app, you can use Mobile Services and Visual Studio 2013 to quickly and easily add push notifications to your app in just a few simple steps. You’ll definitely want to go check out how to do this on the Mobile Services Dev Center.
Steve Guggenheimer also took the stage to showcase some of the great work being done by third parties to build great Windows Store apps and to make it easier for you to build apps as well. With new tools from Adobe, Khan Academy, Unity, and more, there are lots of options available when thinking about how to build your apps. Also, over the past months, MS Open Tech has been working closely with open source communities to help them provide opportunities for you as well. It’s becoming easier for you to re-use your skills, code, and favorite open source tools to build apps and games for Windows. jQuery, Backbone.js, Knockout.js, Require.js, KendoUI can all be used to build Windows Store apps. Check out MS Open Tech’s resource page for more great info on using these open source platforms in your apps. [more]
More after the jump. Also, be sure to check out the Channel 9 coverage of Build 2013 for videos of keynotes, sessions, etc.
Technorati Tags: Windows,Windows 8,Windows Store app,Windows programming