Build 2016 - Day 2
Onto Day 2 and the second keynote. Once again us marvellous students were given our special seating to the front of the keynote. Having started the conference with a flying start the day before, Day 2's keynote had big shoes to fill in terms of everything. And boy did they provide. Not far in and what were we gifted?
Why its only Xamarin of course! We already knew that Microsoft had recently acquisitioned Xamarin but the best part came when it was announced that it would be released free of charge to all Visual Studio customers. And when they say all Visual Studio customers they really mean it!! Even those who use Visual Studio Community, the free edition, would have access to the whole Xamarin platform which sent the crowd wild. As a student I don't think the news could've gotten any better. Though I personally use Visual Studio's Enterprise version there are a lot of students who use the Community version as they unable to gain access to paid versions. With this they are able to build apps for so many platforms without having to even pay a penny. The response I got from my peers at university was nothing short of amazing. Cries of joy and excitement and even a 'Darn why didn't I have this before I started my final year project...' I'm already decided to make use of Xamarin in mine. New technologies for the win! :D
Lots of cool and interesting stuff from Azure next with a never before seen use of Internet of Things...
I'm 'azure' that's a cool t-shirt.. Yeah? Yeah? Ok.....
We then had some cool videos and talks from the guys at both Accuweather and BMW. Accuweather are an American company that provide weather forecasting services across the world. They use Microsoft's Azure to provide more than 4 billion daily data requests using real time data. BMW made use of IoT to allow our friend David to integrate his digital info across multiple devices. In this case his home and his car. Now in terms of concept videos it couldn't have looked cooler. You wake up and your house helps you plan your day and route to work before you get in your car to find that your route that you just planned is already up and ready to go. You're driving along and your car warns you of rock slides and allows you to hold conference calls with someone somewhere else in world just before you sync calendars so you can meet up for lunch when you're next in town. Oh that's all while you're still driving on your way to work. I can't speak for everyone in the keynote but I would certainly love me one some of that tech...
Ooh Calicowind spotted in the keynote :D
We were then given a number of announcements in terms of mobile and data services found within azure. There was also some interesting additions to the azure portal and application insights that I'm looking forward to having a go with.
An all in all very good keynote though personally I would say it would have been tough to beat day 1's :P
Next on Calicowind's agenda was the second day of luncheon talks for students. However instead we were lucky enough to borrow some of Gabe Aul's time for an interview. Please read up in my following blog post about how that went :)
We were then straight off to our next interview with the lovely Craig Kitterman. We found him near the .NetRocks booth at the back of the expo hall and they were very keen to see what myself and my sister even going to say that they had heard of the 'girls running around with a camera'. They very kindly let us use their booth to record in and they were just so nice. From both myself and my sister we both want to say thanks for the Visual Studio socks!! Please read my upcoming blog post about how my interview with Craig Kitterman went :D
I saw some more great sessions run in the pop up theatres on topics such as a break down of the new IoT kit, creating your own smart bot and a really interesting one about Rendering Mars!!
Only one more day left I can't wait :D