Belgians at Build Day 1: Keynote, First Sessions and Goodies!

Together with about 25 other developers from Belgium, Olivier Matis (C# MVP) is at the Build conference in San Francisco this week. He’s sharing his experience at the conference in a series of blog posts. The MSDN Belux team

As I expected yesterday, the news at Build is mostly on the hardware front. We start to see hardware that really uses the power of Windows 8. Is Windows 8 disappointing? No. The OS is not perfect, but I think the main problem was not having the right hardware. Start to save your euros now, the Christmas season will be hot!

Here’s a quick review of the sessions I followed:

- What’s new in WinRT for Windows 8.1

This was a very general session. They talked about 9 new or improved areas, and gave you a link to sessions covering them in deep. A nice session to have an overview!

- Building Apps That Use The Camera

I was a bit disappointed about this one. Not the session or the new apps are bad, but I was expecting more of an augmented reality session. If you’re interested in camera APIs, you might want to check it out.

- What’s new in XAML

Well, Tim Heuer and his team did it again! There are lots of improvements … Mainly new controls that make generic stuff like an app bar with buttons, setup flyouts, etc. … It’s easier because it manages all the design guidelines itself, removing that burden from developers. They also mentioned some nice performance improvements to the rendering/panning of lists. Grenderbitmap control and behaviors. Enough said!

This session is also linked to some other sessions that go deeper in some areas (like big listviews/gridviews performances).

Too bad nothing was said about the new snap views and how to manage them. It is probably in another session …

- Apps for Bluetooth, HID and USB Devices

I am not that much into Bluetooth, but I was curious. They showed a demo of serial Bluetooth. The session only took 20 minutes, but at the end they gave away a Sphero to the ones who got tickets at the entrance (and I was one of the lucky few …)

Goodies!

- Surface Pro 128GB with Type Cover

- Acer Iconia W3 64 GB + Bluetooth Keyboard + Micro USB to USB adapter

- USB Key with Windows 8.1 Preview and Visual Studio 2013 Preview ISOs

- SkyDrive 100GB one year subscription

Some pictures of the demo area, etc. … more pics will follow tomorrow!

200 Nokia Lumia 920s showing a selection of apps (made by Rudy Huynt)	Healthy (?) food	Glimpse of the insane waiting line for the goodies
Team ready to distribute the goodies	Geek games …	Food during pause between sessions

Successor of the Phablet: the Pixelsense Phone

Olivier Matis C# MVP MEET member .NET Architect