Build 2016, Day Two

Back in the hotel after another eventful day. As tired as yesterday. I’m getting to old for this, I think.

Awesome news during the keynote today. As you’ve probably already have heard by now, Microsoft is going to be including Xamarin for free together with every version of Visual Studio. Yes, every version. That does include the Community Edition, which means that you will be able to develop iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps for free!

Well, you still have to have a mac with xcode installed for iOS. And you need to pay all three the developer fees. BUT! That you would’ve had to do either way.

And best of all - you will use C# for them all. Which is really nice. For obvious reasons.

You still won’t have free access to the Xamarin Test Cloud though. Which I can understand, there’s a lot of infrastructure behind that one! You will be able to buy it as a standalone service and it will be accessible through Visual Studio Teams Services. Nice having everything in the same place, and they showed some real impressive deploy and test functionality for it.

We actually tried out Xamarin for our last internal conference, NAPC15. Personally I really digged it. Awesome being able to share code in between different platforms, and using Xamarin Forms a lot of the UI could be shared as well, cutting down on development time for everyone. Really nice being able to preview the iOS from your windows machine as well with their remote viewer for the iOS simulator.

But, I digress. Back to Build!

Was a lot of talk about Azure today. And about how awesome it is. They now have 30 unique Azure regions and locations around the world, making sure everything is served as locally as possible. Quite impressive!

Another really impressive number is that over 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use Azure in some capacity!

Saw one really cool feature of Azure that I’ve totally missed until now… RemoteApp. You remotely connect straight to an app hosted in the cloud. This means you can access it from whatever device, pretty much. The example I saw was running Visual Studio on a Windows Lumia 950 phone, through Continuum. Super cool!

Angular have had quite a presence during this Build as well. With Angular 2 soon coming out, it’s been a lot of talk about it. Seems rather sweet, they have definitely gotten up the speed even more, and have nice solutions when it comes to precompiling templates on .Net, Java, Node.js and more. They wrote all of Angular 2 using Typescript, which definitely tells us how good Typescript is becoming as well.

I definitely look forward to my third and last day of Build 2016 tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what more goodies we will learn! Until then - Good night America… wherever you are.

…Oh yeah. Midnight Caller, 1988. Good times, good times.