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Build 2016 – The Highlights

  • Artikkeli

The Build 2016 keynotes are only a few days back and there were so many announcements made, it feels like the world saw a new Microsoft and a new .NET Platform. For .NET developers, now is a great time to look at the full breadth of options you have available using your existing skills.

Make sure to visit the Channel 9 BUILD 2016 site to review all the recorded keynotes and breakout sessions of the biggest developer conference of the year in the Microsoft universe.

Here is a short summary of some of a few of the top developer announcements:

Xamarin is now a part of the Visual Studio suite – Enterprise, Professional and the free Visual Studio Community editions. This enables you to build native iOS, Android and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps using C# or F# and .NET APIs that you can upload to any app store. Like Visual Studio Community Edition, Xamarin Studio is now available for free. The Xamarin SDK (runtime, libraries and command line tools) will be made open source in the coming months.

On the topic of Open Sourcing .NET, the .NET Foundation has started a Technical Steering Group to enable companies to formally participate and influence the direction of .NET. Red Hat, Unity and JetBrains are joining the .NET Foundation as part of the Technical Steering Group. Mono has been relicensed under the MIT license and is now available for every imaginable use, no strings attached.

The Universal Windows Platform in coming to the Xbox One. Every retail Xbox One can now be put in Developer Mode that allows debugging UWP apps and games. Check out this short video that shows how to get started!

We also announced the Bot Framework, a platform for developers to create and integrate intelligent bots into their apps. Bots are conversation agents that users can interact with wherever they are, from Text/SMS to Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail and many other popular services.

HoloLens is becoming available to developers in the US now and although it won’t be available in Europe for a while, developers can start playing with the SDK and the HoloLens emulator today.

Windows 10 will receive an “Anniversary Update” later this year with lots of new features for end users and developers alike. One of the coolest features is that the bash shell is coming to Windows with support for native Ubuntu binaries.

We have hosted a keynote live stream viewing event here at Microsoft Switzerland and have asked some of the participants for their feedback in this short video.

There were far too many great announcements during this year’s Build conference to put in this short post, so once again I recommend to visit the Channel 9 BUILD 2016 site to get the full picture.