Microsoft Build 2016: What to expect
Now that Microsoft has published its session list for Build 2016, it's apparent that cloud and IoT are going to be the big themes this year.
Microsoft's annual Build developer conference runs from March 30 to April 1 in San Francisco. Microsoft will be streaming the Day 1 and 2 keynotes (Wednesday and Thursday from 8:30 a.m. PT to 11:30 a.m. PT) on its Build site. Other sessions will be recorded and available for playback by all later next week.
I've posted a few stories about some of the expected hot buttons for this year's show:
- Microsoft's new rallying cry: Cloud first, Windows second?
- How Microsoft's HoloLens could change communication via 'Holoportation'
- Microsoft Graph: A way to build smarter, stickier apps
- Microsoft's multipronged strategy for bringing speech to IoT devices
- Here's what's inside Microsoft's private preview of Visual Studio Next
- Microsoft starts rolling out Office 365 Connectors as part of Groups
This year's session list-- which Microsoft provided a bit earlier than it did for past Build shows -- provides a glimpse of a few more of the topics on the agenda.
As expected, game development will be one such theme. Microsoft, as expected, will provide developers with more guidance as to how to build Universal Windows Platform apps for Xbox.
Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few sessions about developing for the Universal Windows Platform, with particular emphasis on the notification platform, Action Center and interactive Live Tiles. There's also a session -- along with privately scheduled Holographic Academy tutorials for those who bought HoloLens development kits -- on building Universal Windows Platform apps for HoloLens -- Windows Store apps that Microsoft calls 2D apps.
Information on Azure's evolving microservices development platform, which the company has dubbed Azure Service Fabric, is on tap. Last year, Microsoft officials said to expect Azure Service Fabric to open up to Java and Linux development. There's also this job posting talking about Open Source Developer Services -- a k a "a build-test-deploy developer pipeline based on best of breed Open Source technologies in Azure -- that @h0x0d discovered recently. I wonder if we might hear more about those services as soon as next week.
Other Build 2016 sessions that caught my eye:
- How to build Android, iOS, Linux, Mac and Windows applications with .NET in open source
- Building apps that make use of intelligent services (Project Oxford, among them, I'm sure)
- The Application Platform in Windows Server 2016 (with info on the Windows Server 2016 Software Development Kit, and maybe even Technical Preview 5, some of my sources say)
- Maybe some new VS/Xamrin bundles/offers? (A mystery session with Xamarin's Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, along with Director of Visual Studio Program Management Amanda Silver)
- More on Project Centennial, a k a the Windows 10 bridge to get Win32 apps in the Windows Store
- Some new Bing-as-a-development-platform news?
While the past week wasn't a good one for Microsoft bots, I'm betting we hear more at Build 2016 about the Microsoft Bot Framework under development, possibly in this session. I also spotted @BuildBot2016 briefly before the profile disappeared from Twitter....
Stay tuned to this site for lots more coverage live from Build 2016 next week.