10 Awesome Things from MS Build Day 1

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Microsoft Build is packed with gazillion announcements, fun activities, people and it's so much to fit into one article. I won't be doing justice to the event by trying to fit everything that happened today in one article but I am just going to try and highlight some exciting news for those who are not able to catch up.

Keynote by Satya

The most exciting session was the keynote where Satya and few crew announced a handful of exciting features and products.

Satya spent approximately 2 hours on stage just making announcements — I couldn't even catch up with all the exciting news. Most times I got lost dwelling in exciting as a result the previous announcement he made and I missed the next. That was how packed it was.

I am going to do my best to talk about few of the announcements I caught and you can always learn more when the videos are released.

Edge Everywhere

Edge is now cross-platform. Yes, the browser can now be downloaded on iOS and Android devices. With Edge being Chromium based, building experiences for users and developers is going to become easier and more streamlined.

Better devtools, easier ad handling, super performant browser, cross-platform, etc. These are just few of what I was able to catch and trust me there are more powerful features on Edge today.

Windows Terminal and WSL2

Windows is getting a new terminal dubbed "Windows Terminal". It will be able to work with cmd, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux.

[Read about the Windows Terminal](https://scotch.io/bar-talk/microsoft-announces-a-new-windows-terminal)

React Native on Windows

Your customers are windows users but your developers love JavaScript, right? Well, you can now write React Native and build for not only iOS or Android, but also on Windows computers. I was privileged to help out on a booth with one of the developers working on this. She showed off demoes and compiled a React Native app to Windows right in front of us.

You don't have to worry about UI consistency because there's a library with a all the windows theme that helps you stay on track with what your users are used to.

Fluent Design System

Microsoft has published a new site on their design ideology called Fluent. Check out the new site:

https://www.microsoft.com/design/fluent

Fluent can now be seen on the web, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Fluid Framework for Content Collaboration

We are building a framework for content collaboration. Yes, framework. I am a content junkie — I write a lot of technical articles, edit a lot, share with editors, publish, etc. But how accessible is my content to other collaborators and consumers?

Fluid framework is a realtime framework that integrates with any type of content platform you are maintaining or building. Fluid empowers you with tools like realtime collaboration, multiple realtime collaborators, realtime language translations, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOhCf1c8\_Q&

My favorite feature about Fluid is how I can write my content in English and have Spanish, Chinese and French contributors on it. This is some next level content platform.

Smarter Assistance Research

As an African, I have a deep outstanding accent. Sometimes when I speak with my friends they try to teach me the correct pronunciation to a word. My response to this is usually "that is the African way to pronounce it".

Well, my friends wouldn't agree with that but the personal assistance (Cortana) we are building at Microsoft totally does. The AI is actively adjusting to understand how you say words. It is conversational, more interactive and confirms your commands but asking you further questions. This is personal to me because I have tried a lot of personal assistance and find myself repeating myself. This is what it means to build for the next billion users.

Jargon-Sensitive Speech Service

Still on voice based artificial intelligence, you can now have a trained service that understand the jargons in your speech. This is useful for medical, tech, and legal organizations. This video does the best justice to this feature:

Powerful Mixed Realities

I have never considered mixed realities until today. At this point I want to sign up to whatever it takes to build interactive realities. The opportunities presented by mixed realities is endless — from interactive learning in schools to accessibility for the next billion users. Imagine having a conference where the speaker can interact live with the audience on stage without being physically there.

Here is a short video I managed to catch on this:

Azure and Code

Azure and VS Code got a lot of announcements that I can't go into detail about so it doesn't bloat this article. That said, here are some of the exciting news under these categories:

• Visual Studio and VS Code live share just got better
• You can now connect VS Code to a deployed projects and make live changes
• We will soon be able to sign-up/login to Azure with Github
• New windows CLI that supports Powershell, cmd and WSL all in one
• Visual Studio Online

Booths

We wanted to teach developers and also collect feedback. Booths were are the heart of the event. You can walk in and ask the creator of TypeScript a "why" or "how" question. You could bring what you are working on and we live code together. You can just come by for stickers, shirts, swags, if that's all you care about.

The booths were staffed by core engineers and developer advocates. Helping everyone with all their questions. It is super fun and sometimes gets weird cause someone would ask a question like "why Vue and not Angular?".

Here are some pictures developers hacking or interacting at the booths:

People Behind Features and Products

I am big on know the people behind a product or feature. The more I can build a connection with them, how they thing, what they think of, etc, the more I can understand the reasons behind these products and features.

Channel 9 team was live-interviewing engineers, advocates, managers, directors, etc regarding some of the annoucements today.