Top 5 Announcements Made at Microsoft BUILD 2015

"A Windows Phone is a Windows PC" ehh.... I wish that was going to be as promising as it sounds. I don't see anyone really itching to "plug a mouse and keyboard into their phone"... What would be useful is potentially being able to run x86 desktop programs on a Windows phone. That would give some relevancy to the statement "A Windows Phone is a Windows PC". Is there anyone out there that really cares about "windows universal apps"? :rolleyes:
 
GotNoRice said:
"A Windows Phone is a Windows PC" ehh.... I wish that was going to be as promising as it sounds. I don't see anyone really itching to "plug a mouse and keyboard into their phone"... What would be useful is potentially being able to run x86 desktop programs on a Windows phone. That would give some relevancy to the statement "A Windows Phone is a Windows PC". Is there anyone out there that really cares about "windows universal apps"? :rolleyes:
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Its really all just about openness and platform unification. Part of the problem they've had with windows phone was the complete lack of apps, with Universal Apps, and Continuum that becomes a thing of the past. It also makes developers lives much easier as you need only to make one package, that runs everywhere that windows 10 runs.

I think there is a lot of things that that site missed out on that make the announcements at this Build so important. Microsoft is taking an approach of openness and transparency, its about a fundamental shift in the vision of the company. It's not just android apps that will run in windows 10, but iOS apps as well. MS is now supporting Objective C in visual studio, and allowing native iOS apps to run inside the appx containers. They even did some of the demos on Mac computers. Neither Apple or Google are even considering anything like this, they are trying to play nice with other platforms while the other platforms are behaving like selfish spoiled children. Yes its partially because they need to to survive, but the end result is a benefit for everyone. With Windows 10, now companies making apps for other platforms can expand to windows phone in a few minutes.

There are also a lot of smaller announcements around visual studio 2015, and Roslyn that make developers lives much much easier in general. Including a host of low level improvements to Visual Studio and the .net framework, including new features of the C# language, and a new cross platform IDE and compiler called Visual Studio Code. Not to mention the fact that the entire .NET framework is now open source (and on Github), which is making .NET on other platforms like Linux (via Mono) a thousand times more productive.

Additionally many announcements regarding Azure were made as well that they don't talk about in that article. I know a lot of that stuff gets over looked by bloggers, but I fully expect Azure to completely walk all over both google and amazon in the cloud space with many of the improvements they have made.

For the record, yes I was there. I talked to a lot of the presenters and employees of Microsoft and many from other companies, even some that previously only made Apple or Android software. Everybody is extremely excited about the company is taking. This is no small thing that they are doing!
 
ZenDragon said:
I think there is a lot of things that that site missed out on that make the announcements at this Build so important. Microsoft is taking an approach of openness and transparency, its about a fundamental shift in the vision of the company. It's not just android apps that will run in windows 10, but iOS apps as well. MS is now supporting Objective C in visual studio, and allowing native iOS apps to run inside the appx containers. They even did some of the demos on Mac computers. Neither Apple or Google are even considering anything like this, they are trying to play nice with other platforms while the other platforms are behaving like selfish spoiled children. Yes its partially because they need to to survive, but the end result is a benefit for everyone. With Windows 10, now companies making apps for other platforms can expand to windows phone in a few minutes.
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As trigger happy as they usually are, it's kind of remarkable to consider that Apple wouldn't take legal action to stop this. As it stands now they don't even let you run a true iOS Simulator on a non-Apple platform.
 
jwcalla said:
As trigger happy as they usually are, it's kind of remarkable to consider that Apple wouldn't take legal action to stop this. As it stands now they don't even let you run a true iOS Simulator on a non-Apple platform.
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It's not really simulating iOS though, simply "translating" most of the api calls into windows api calls. For example a notification call in iOS would be a toast in windows and anything that might bring up the keyboard in iOS would bring up the windows keyboard instead. If the program is accessing low level OS functions, say for example a virus scanner obviously it wont work. I'm sure there are a lot of other limitations to this that they didn't cover at Build, but the point is that this minimizes the amount of work that Apple developers have to do to start adopting the windows platform as well. It makes it easy for everybody to play nice. :)

I for one, commend Microsoft for what they are doing. It seems to me quite a bit more mature than their competitors, and like I said before they have to for the survival of the company. Ultimately, whether you are a MS fan or not, every consumer benefits from this approach.
 
Chas said:
Lemme know when I can get a phone with a 30" 4K screen into my pocket.
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So it's not a PC unless it's running a 30" 4k display? That sure does shrink the market.

Seriously, the vision is that you leave your displays and keyboards and mice at work or home or wherever and you'll just carry your phone between them, or even to displays and keyboards and mice that aren't yours. Will the first generations of this tech run GTA V at 4k? Of course not. Does this have potential to be very useful to folks who already have a phone with them? You bet.
 
I don't think the author of that article has a clue, especially on #2 and #5. I thought MS made it clear that the phone wasn't compatible with PC Windows software, making it less than a PC. It could certainly come in handy to dock it to a monitor and input peripheral(s), but it ain't a PC. OS X and Linux aren't getting Visual Studio; they're getting the "Monaco" code editor from Visual Studio Online, wrapped into a local Chromium-based browser called "Visual Studio Code". MS's page even says it's not a full IDE, just a lightweight code editor.
 
ZenDragon said:
For the record, yes I was there. I talked to a lot of the presenters and employees of Microsoft and many from other companies, even some that previously only made Apple or Android software. Everybody is extremely excited about the company is taking. This is no small thing that they are doing!
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Is there anything about Skype / Skype for Business? I'm particularly interested in the translation services that they're supposedly beta testing primarily English-English. Will the features they're showing off in Skype also be in S4B?
 
Eman D. Rahym said:
So it's not a PC unless it's running a 30" 4k display? That sure does shrink the market.

Seriously, the vision is that you leave your displays and keyboards and mice at work or home or wherever and you'll just carry your phone between them, or even to displays and keyboards and mice that aren't yours. Will the first generations of this tech run GTA V at 4k? Of course not. Does this have potential to be very useful to folks who already have a phone with them? You bet.
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Sorry, forgot to add the *SNARK* tag in.
 
Kaitian said:
Is there anything about Skype / Skype for Business? I'm particularly interested in the translation services that they're supposedly beta testing primarily English-English. Will the features they're showing off in Skype also be in S4B?
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I didn't see any updates or hear any announcements specifically regarding Skype.
 
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