Hello, and welcome to day two of our Build 2015 wrap-up coverage. For a really detailed look at what you missed if you didn't attend (or watch) today's keynote, Richard Hay's got a rundown of everything that was announced. He's also put together a great gallery of images from the keynote.
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Let's get this out of the way first: it's either hilarious or demoralizing to have a website guess your age, but the real interesting thing about How-old.net is how Microsoft took less than a day to mash together a face-detection API and a Bing search API. The point here is that it's possible to quickly launch websites that can collect and analyze a vast pool of data. It will be very interesting to see what developers do with a combination of Azure, PowerBI and the APIs available in the Azure Machine Learning gallery.
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What else came out of today's keynotes? The introduction of three new developer tools:
Vorlon.js, which helps developers remotely debug JavaScript; the big deal here is its extensibility, which will let developers debug on nearly any platform with a web environment.
Project Oxford, which lets developers romp through face, speech and vision APIs, and offers a natural-language playground by invitation only. If you need to crack a text-to-speech or facial analysis problem, this is where you go.
GitHub Enterprise for Azure, which will be handy for developers who want to manage code in one central repository. As a bonus, developers will be able to open GitHub repositories right from Visual Studio or easily load the code into Visual Studio from GitHub.
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Microsoft moved deeper into the Internet of Things territory, announcing that:
We are continually inspired by the enthusiasm and passion for technology represented by the Maker community. Today we are excited to share what’s next for Makers on Windows 10 with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Intel’s Minnowboard Max, and Hackster.IO.
We touched on Windows 10 on small devices at WinHEC and starting today you can download Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview with support for Raspberry Pi 2 and Intel’s Minnowboard Max. Windows 10 IoT Core is a new Windows 10 edition for low-cost, small-footprint devices that will be available ‘free’ for Makers and commercial device builders.
What this means in practical terms is that you could create, program and use, say your own security camera system.
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Your Build 2015 must-read of the day: Kevin Gallo's "A deeper dive into the Universal Windows Platform," which explains some of the outstanding features of the Universal Windows Platform, with an emphasis on responsive design, a develop-once-deploy-across-all-devices approach and the "Universal Windows App Model."
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And I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to the excellent we-are-there coverage my colleagues produced yesterday: Richard Hay has a detailed breakdown of all the developer news from day one -- don't miss his Office-as-a-platform rundown. And Rod Trent has a few comments about the new Microsoft Edge logo, as well as explains why Continuum is going to be a big deal for IT departments in the very near future.
