In the past week, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some fantastic attendees at the Microsoft BUILD conference as a member of staff. The company I work for, Black Marble Ltd., attend the BUILD conference every year, but this has been the first where they had the opportunity to have a stand demonstrating Windows Apps at Work with tuServ, an application which we develop for Microsoft technologies. I was one of three, chosen to man the stand and discuss with attendees the approaches to developing Windows 10 application on various form factors, focussing on the success that we had with updating our application to the new universal app model.
looking through #build2015 notes. The standout item from @jamzc92 who told the tale of the 95 day UI refactored as universal app in 3 days. @blackmarble
— Martin Allen (@martingallen) April 30, 2015
The greatest part about being able to talk with the attendees was that everyone came from a different development background. Folks ranged on the spectrum from “old-school engineers”, as they said, all the way to young students, all interested in the development process of Windows 10 applications. Some were still running Windows 7 building Win32 apps, and others were already up-to-speed with the modern Windows Store app development for Windows 8.1 and Phone 8.1.
The keynote speakers on both the first and second day exposed to the attendees a whole range of new features being baked into the Windows 10 ecosystem. Developers will now see their older WPF and WinForms applications being able to run as Windows 10 apps with the ability to take advantage of those new APIs that didn’t previously exist like Live Tiles and Actionable Push Notifications. Not only that, but Android and iOS developers now have the opportunities to bring their pre-existing mobile applications over to the platform, again with access to the Windows 10 APIs, with minimal change to their Java, C++ or Objective-C code. With these announcements, we had hundreds of attendees flock around the booth areas to discuss with us on the stand about how they can start enhancing or upgrading their applications to the Windows Universal App model.
It has been an incredible experience working at my first Microsoft BUILD conference. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed meeting other like-minded developers eager to get started with the new SDK, and I can’t wait to see the future of Windows 10. On a side note, I’ve already got the latest VS2015 RC and I’m starting development on what I hope to be an amazing Windows 10 application following the new design guidelines, and taking advantage of the new APIs available!
Did you attend the Microsoft BUILD conference this year? Or did you watch online? What have been your favourite announcements? Let everyone know in the comments below, and I’ll try to respond to as many as I can! If you also came around the Windows Apps at Work stand, let us know too!