Each year, Microsoft fans and developers get together at Build for a sneak peek of Microsoft’s upcoming announcements. At this year’s Build, there was a lot of exciting news!
“Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Developer Experience, delivered the Build keynote address to showcase how partners are innovating using Azure, Office and Windows.” Expected this summer, Microsoft announced at the keynote that with the upcoming update, there will be new UI improvements and features which will be a free upgrade to existing Windows 10 users. One of the additions that will give Window developers access to a larger community of open source, command line tools is the inclusion of the Linux-based Bash command line shell. This is not going to a be virtual machine or cross compiled tool, but a native Bash shell that will allow developers to run Bash scripts and popular Linux commands like awk, grep, and sed. Microsoft Windows running Linux commands, yes there are crazy times.
Xamarin Studio Tools for Free!
Back in February, Microsoft agreed to acquire Xamarin. Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft is going to help developers easily build cross-platform native mobile applications by including Xamarin’s tools in all Visual Studio 2015 editions, include the Community Edition. There was also an announcement of a Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition for OSX. Guthri
Visual Studio “15” Preview made available
With the Developer Division release cadence, it was a nice surprise to see a preview of Visual Studio “15”. This vNext version of the most popular developer IDE is far from being finished, but you can get a glimpse of what’s to come. Enhanced support for Apache Cordova, the ability to import existing Xcode projects into Visual Studio, SQL Server Data Tools support for Azure SQL Database, and so much more. You can download the preview from the Visual Studio Enterprise “15” Preview page. Remember, this is a preview release so you might want to install it on VM or a non-production development machine.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what we saw and was announced at Build 2016. There were a lot of announcements and session around what’s coming with Microsoft Azure. We recommend that you check out the Channel 9 Build 2016 page that has all the keynotes as sessions.
