BUILD 2015: Day 1 Developer News Summary

At Microsoft’s Build developer conference, which kicked off today in San Francisco, several new tools and services for developers were announced during a 2.5 hour keynote which was started off by Satya Nadella.

There has been a lot of speculation over the last few days leading up to this event about seeing Android apps on Windows platforms. Well today we heard about the tools that Microsoft has built that will not only help developers easily bring their Android code to Windows but their iOS apps as well.

There were also several announcements regarding Microsoft Azure, Office as a Platform and new development tools that are now available for download/use.

This is a run-down of all of today’s announcements and links to further information:

Microsoft Azure

Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Supports petabytes of data storage which can scale as necessary to save money on storage costs and produce valuable data analytics for insight towards business decisions.
Azure Data Lake. Provides a nearly infinite amount of data storage that can store files as big as one petabyte. Machine learning and big data services combine to deliver insights into the stored data.
Azure SQL Data elastic database pools. Allows developers and ISVs to manage the performance, scale and cost across a larger number of databases as a single pool of capacity.

Universal Windows Apps/Development Tools

Four new SDK’s released which allow developers to use existing code to bring apps to the Windows Store. They include web sites; .NET and Win32; Android Java/C++ and iOS Objective-C.
Visual Studio Code. A new addition to the Visual Studio family which is a free lightweight, cross-platform code editor for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. It includes many of the features Visual Studio such as IntelliSense, peek, code navigation, and debugging, but it centers on being a keyboard-centric editor.
Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 RC (English). You can now download the VS Enterprise 2015 RC in English (or go here for other languages and editions). In addition to the many new features in this RC itself, Microsoft also released related technologies: Tools for Apache Cordova (uninstall previous versions first, please), Entity Framework 7 Preview, ASP.NET 5 Preview, tools for Docker preview, and updates to the emulator for Android.

Office as a Platform

A sneak peek of the new Office Graph API—Now developers can build powerful solutions that tap into rich data and machine learning capabilities to build smarter applications, all through a new single unified API endpoint.
Expanded Office add-in capabilities—With Excel for iPad support for add-ins, developers can reach over 100M additional Office users. Word and PowerPoint for iPad are coming soon.
Add-ins for Outlook.com—Extend Outlook.com with your own capabilities to over 400 million users.
Unified APIs for enterprise and consumers—Accessing data wherever it lives will be simpler through a standardized set of commercial and consumer APIs in Outlook and Outlook.com, OneNote, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.
Simpler API endpoint access—Access Office 365 data through a single API endpoint.
Office 365 Groups API—Developers can now build applications that leverage the native team collaboration capabilities of Office 365 Groups.
New Skype Developer Platform—New developer tools and opportunities for Skype for Business and Skype enable web developers to create solutions that allow businesses to connect with customers, vendors or partners through a simple Skype button, mobile apps, browser-based chat allowing sharing, audio, video calls and more.
Office 365 Developer Program—To provide easy access to the latest news and resources, we’re introducing a new community for developers working with Office.

For more information on these and other related announcements be sure to check out the following Microsoft blog posts:

You can watch the entire Day 1 keynote on-demand at http://www.buildwindows.com/

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