Video: Facebook, Microsoft, and Google aim to woo developers
Instead of leaping into the news that good old fashioned Windows desktop applications can include pieces of the 'modern' Windows APIs that were once reserved for UWP Store apps, or saying that any company can buy the 3D infrared camera from the HoloLens to build into their own devices, or even that Notepad can handle Linux line endings, CEO Satya Nadella opened Build by asking developers to be a bit more responsible as they change the world. Don't move fast and break things, as it were.
Must read: Microsoft's AI journey beyond Office[1]
But 8:30am on a Monday morning might not be the best time for philosophy, or asking developers to choose between 1984 and a Brave New World of consumerism as possible futures. Microsoft was somewhat constrained by having to work around the Google I/O keynote on Tuesday, and chose to start as early as possible on Monday and to cram in as many announcements as it could on the first day.
There were many more announcements dotted throughout the conference, from Azure Event Hubs supporting Apache Kafka for pulling in vast amounts of real time data at speed rather than relying on Microsoft's own Hadoop-based HDInsight, to a container version of Windows Server and even Windows 10 with no UI -- for testing applications, though it will undoubtedly be mistaken for a way to do VDI.
Build was crammed with new things and experiments; walking out as the event was ending we saw cricket bats with stick-on antennas to report the speed and strength of a batter's stroke to an Azure Sphere microcontroller, and another Azure Sphere nestling inside the case of an Altair 8800