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Microsoft to 'Connect' with developers at November event in New York

Microsoft will be talking more about its mobile, cloud and dev/ops products, services and strategies at its Connect() event in New York in mid-November.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

The tipsters were on the money: Microsoft is holding a developer-focused event in New York City on November 12 to talk about its next-generation development tools and services.

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That invitation-only event, known as Connect(), will be webcast live. The first day will be broadcast from New York; a second day of content will be broadcast from Redmond. "Save the date" registration for the event is open as of October 16.

Among the scheduled presenters will be Enterprise and Cloud chief Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division Soma Somasegar, Technical Fellow and Team Foundation Server lead Brian Harry, and Principal Community Architect for Web Platform and Tools Scott Hanselman. 

Unlike the case at last year's similar New York City developer event, Microsoft won't be launching a new version of Visual Studio at its November event this time around. The next Visual Studio release, known by its codename 'VS '14' isn't slated to be made available in final form until some time in 2015. But Microsoft may make available a new preview build of VS '14 at the November 12 event, sources have said.

Microsoft officials have said that its "Roslyn" .Net compiler platform, ASP.NET v.Next (codenamed Project K) and supporting Apache Cordova tooling would all be part of VS '14. Microsoft also is continuing to flesh out standards support for Visual C++ in the coming VS release.

With the coming VS release, the C# and Visual Basic compilers and the integrated development environment are all built on the open-sourced Roslyn "compiler as a service." The preview build included early coding for the tooling for ASP.NET v.Next and ASP.NET 4.5 Web-application templates.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft release another test build of its .Net Native compiler (codenamed "Project N") at Connect. Microsoft made available a first developer preview of the .Net Native compiler in April 2014. .Net Native allows Windows Store/Metro-Style apps to start up to 60 percent faster and use 15 percent to 20 percent less memory when compiled with .Net Native, according to Microsoft officials. In short, NET Native compiles C# to native machine code that performs like C++.

And if the company doesn't release it before, I'd expect the fourth update to Visual Studio 2013 to be released around the time of Connect, as well. Microsoft made the near-final release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 CTP 4 available for download on October 16.

Microsoft's Build 2015 conference is scheduled for April 29 to May 1 in San Francisco. Officials are expected to focus on the company's developer tools and strategies for Windows 10, Windows Phone 10 and Windows Server Next at that event, among other topics.

Microsoft currently is advising developers to build Universal Apps which enable them to reuse a lot of their code across Microsoft's different flavors of Windows. The idea is to enable developers to write (mostly) once and run on any version of Windows. Microsoft officials are telling developers "the best way to prepare for Windows 10 is to keep building universal Windows apps." However, company officials also are guiding developers against using their Windows 10 as their primary OS for software development at this time.

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