BUILD 2014 – Day 1 Keynote

BUILD 2014, San Francisco
Keynote 1 – Joe Belfiore, Nick Hedderman, David Treadwell, Kirk Koenigsbauer, Harry Pierson, Terry Myerson, Stephen Elop, Satya Nadella

Day 1, 2 Apr 2014, 8:30AM-11:30AM

Disclaimer: This post contains my own thoughts and notes based on watching BUILD 2014 keynotes and presentations. Some content maps directly to what was originally presented. Other content is paraphrased or represents my own thoughts and opinions and should not be construed as reflecting the opinion of Microsoft or of the presenters or speakers.

… missing content, due to Livestream being unavailable at start of Keynote …

Belfiore is showing off Cortana

Love that Joe is struggling to get Cortana to recognize his voice.. “Vagaries of a service that’s alive”

Future of Halo game? Cortana says sorry, you don’t have access to that info

Pretty sure that was a canned response

Love that Cortana is being sold as a “she”—competing with Siri, clearly. And targeting young white techie males and guys who enjoyed the movie “Her”

Nice that they talked to “real-world personal assistants”

People reminder

The next time I talk to so-and-so, ask her about her puppy.

But will the phone chirp in and say this out loud?

Using Cortana to tell Hulu to add something to his queue

Natural language

“What’s up with Terry”?

Cortana was on the Tonight Show?

Cortana is the first truly personal digital assistant

Nick Hedderman – Windows Phone 8.1

Various interesting things ..

Joe Belfiore

Joe is back, joining Nick.. 11:12am

Summary

Added various abilities
Partner ecosystem
Windows experience comes to life across variety of devices
Windows Phone is the right choice for business

Joe – Features Added to Windows Phone 8.1

Quick sampling of features put in to make you smile

Enhancements to Store experience

Happier finding apps

Pan left—”FOR YOU” area with recommendations

Also quick links, e.g. “New and Rising Apps”

Next—new calendar

Swipe to right to get to next day

For developers, have reimplemented using the public dev API only

Improve basic performance of Windows Phone

WiFi Sense – Suggest “good” WiFi spots

Can automatically sign-in without user intervention

Another scenario

Having to give friends your WiFi password
You can securely share your WiFi password with your friends
WiFi Sense Service lets them sign into hotspot, gives them access only to Internet
Don’t have to tell them the password

His sister calls:

Ahh, Cortana says—ask her about her new puppy.

Can elevate to Skype call

Nicely scripted—funny—”your new puppy is beautiful”.

Joe’s favorite feature in Windows Phone 8.1

Enhancements to WordFlow keyboard
Learns what you type
Much better in Win Phone 8.1
Addition of shape writing

Wow—incredibly fast

Outrageously fast typing, actually.

Here’s a video showing use of the keyboard, world record for typing on phone keyboard.

Beating Galaxy S4

WordFlow keyboard is now world-record holder for fastest typing on a smart phone.

How does Win Phone 8.1 work with Windows?

Auto upload to OneDrive (oops—started to say SkyDrive—laughter)

Settings

Password for WiFi shared
Theme color, etc.
IE11, now part of Win Phone 8.1
- New reading mode

“Many, many delighters”

When will people get Win Phone 8.1?

Update in next few months to consumers
Pre-installed on new phones, starting in late-April
Will hear more about new phones later
David Treadwell will have something for you (in audience)

Love Joe’s red shoes

Windows 8.1 Update

On desktop, focus on mouse/keyboard
Boot/resume straight to desktop

Bing showing things that he told Cortana about

Enterprise Mode in IE11

Change user agent string et. al. to mimic IE 8, for legacy sites
IT managers can set list of sites that should auto-trigger this setting in IE11
Mix of modern rendering for new sites, older rendering within enterprise
Easier story for deploying on PCs in enterprise

UI improvements for mouse/keyboard

Taskbar
- Have Title bar, Minimize icon in Modern apps (at least he didn’t say “Metro”)
- Switch between Modern apps and Win 32
- Same switching model for all apps
- Polite applause
- “Work that we did to make touch great is unaffected by these changes”

Start screen
- PC Settings tile
- Power button (the death of Charms?)
- Right-click context menu: Unpin from Start, etc. (Microsoft is going back to these familiar paradigms, kicking and screaming)

Pre-pinning Store app to Taskbar

Likely because some users never found the Store app

When people search, make your apps more prominent—i.e. apps in Store show up in Search

New apps highlighted now in the All Apps list

Update will be available 8-Apr

“Windows 8.1 Update”

Have a terrific BUILD conference

Cortana introduces David

David Treadwell – Corp VP, Operating Systems Group

What we’re doing for developers in OS, tools, etc.

David has been at Microsoft for 25 year

Wrote Sockets layer for Windows NT

David describer driver architecture to prove he’s got “dev chops”
“Another freaking driver” (probably he said something else)
WinSock.dll and driver’s name became “AFD” (Another Freaking Driver)
Wow, this is going long
He named it the “Ancillary Function Driver”
To this day, afd.sys
Geez, that was a long joke

Three main areas where we’re listening to you as developers

Some secondary audio track is kicking in here
So I missed this, grr.

We all want same app experiences across all devices

Introducing Universal Windows apps

Use common code across phones, tablets, desktops

First in industry to make it easy to build apps across all these devices

User Interface

One app running across all form factors; should adapt GUI automatically
Adapt one design across devices
Tailor experience to the form factor

Bulk of the code is the same across all devices

App Model

Based on Windows Runtime

Use the programming language that you love

Kevin Gallo – Visual Studio

Is “Universal App” taken from iOS? I.e. iPhone/iPad

Visual Studio demo

Windows Phone 8.1 target
Kevin should talk to Hanselman about how to zoom in on app during a demo

Code moved into shared project, including XAML

Hub control is universal control

So you can use it for all devices, e.g. Phone, PC

Ignore warnings, “like most of you probably do as well” – big laugh

Hmm, does Win Phone emulator crash Office 365 for him as well?

Need to now tune app for the device

And add device-specific features
Different user controls for various views

This is the part where the journalists/bloggers doze off and the devs sit up and take notice

Diagnostics:

Quickly switch context to another device:

Two key features

Build Universal Apps
Share some/all code and do tuning per-device

Dave Treadwell is back

Have streamlined the Store experience around Universal Apps

Shared App identities
Can buy just one app for multiple platforms
Universal App badge to indicate that experience is the same across devices
“Host of other improvements”
Submitting apps to Store is 50x faster (what does this mean? Process?)

Let’s take a look at Cortana in Visual Studio 2013

Sorry Dave, I can’t do that
Another poor joke

Kirk Koenigsbauer – Corp VP, Office

Bring forward Office experience to Modern platform

Open a file and open a document.

“Unmistakenly Office experience”

Touch-first Ribbon

Every document should open flawlessly on any platform

Includes Smart Art, text, graphics, etc.
Full fidelity of Office experience

Blazingly fast

Built on DirectX

Editing

Touchpoints on Ribbon are big

Automatically constantly saving to OneDrive in cloud

Unlimited Undo via unlimited versions

Presentation mode, transition effects:

Inking with finger:

Taking advantage of Windows Runtime

Look at same application on Phone (as what was on tablet)

Phones, tablets, PCs, large screens

Dave again

We’ve added hundreds of new features to Win Phone 8.1:

What it means for existing Win Phone apps

Silverlight Phone 8.0 apps will continue to run
Update to Silverlight Phone 8.1 app to get new features
Or migrate to Universal Windows App

App voice commands powered by Cortana:

Love it when the stream stutters: “The power of Cortana, power of Cortana, power of Cortana”

Another speech recognition demo

New tweet, hashtag cortana hashtag awesome

“Well, we were close”

Existing enterprise apps

Win 8.1 update, reuse more of your existing code

Harry Pierson – Operating Systems Group

Gosh, he doesn’t look like an Enterprise App developer

Let’s look at old enterprise app:

Windows tablets run Windows

This app runs on SQL Compact
Can run on x86 compatible tablet
But won’t be good user experience—since designed for keyboard/mouse
We want a touch-first version
But don’t want to throw away code

Brokered Components feature

Looking at code that interacts with database
New DLL for RT that runs old-style DLL in brokered mode
Underlying DLL has full access to Windows
For side-loaded apps only
Nice way to “cheat” Win RT constraints and get at old-style stuff like local data access, outside of WinRT

Every good Microsoft demo starts with the words “All I had to do”..

Dave Treadwell back

Third major theme of talk

How Windows enables cross-platform apps
We’re working hard to make cross-platform work better for everyone
Critical need in today’s world
“We want to help you with that”
We want to contribute to that world (of course you do)

Developers using Unity published 3,000 apps in 9 mos in Windows Store

HTML/Web is one of the most important cross-platform technologies

Brought to phones
Access latest HTML5 stuff
E.g. WebGL – hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (no applause)
Media Source extensions, adaptive bit-rate streaming
As he said “streaming”, he stuttered
“Huge” for your productivity

HTML will continue to be big way to do cross-platform

Is he saying all of this to assure us that Miguel isn’t the complete king-of-the-hill now?

Web-based fish aquarium demo

3D graphics benchmark
WebGL using hardware acceleration

Inline video playback:

WinJS:

Infrastructure for high-quality modern apps
Works alongside other Javascript libraries
Going cross-platform and open source

Open source under Apache 2.0 license
Is this Microsoft throwing WinJS into the recycling bin?

I showed you three things

Reach customers across multiple devices
You need to deliver apps/services on other platforms

Announcements

Win 8.1 update available today
Visual Studio 2013 update 2 RC available today
Win Phone 8.1 Dev preview – registered Win Phone app devs can download/install on their existing Win Phone 8 devices

Terry Myerson is back

Main feedback at BUILD—share your roadmap

What’s coming?

Here’s some stuff that’s coming in the future (not available today)

Universal apps on all Windows devices

What about TV?
Xbox is the best TV experience
Used on 80,000,000 televisions
XBox One – avg user is using 5 hrs/day (I know this guy)
We’ll do Universal Apps running on Xbox

Demo – educational content videos – Khan Academy

Have shown tablet and Win Phone
Now—XBox

Hmm, it just looks like the tablet (which is the point):

Shared code in shared part of project

I can use Visual Studio—just look at my hands!

Do these 5-hrs-a-day guys really want to run the Khan Academy app? Doubtful.

“One interaction model across platforms”

Kinect

At first, “hey pretty neat”
Took home, played games with kids
Whole new way of interacting with computer
Important to bring Kinect to PC—Kinect for Windows a while back
400,000 active devs with Kinect (really?)

Today—Kinect v2 for Windows

Uses new sensor included in XBox One
Skeletal tracking, facial tracking, gesture recognition
Good in low light
Not just games

Two companies in video, using Kinect

Physical Therapy
“Freakin’ Genius”—bring art of animation to everyone

Umm, is this what we want?

To be honest, I don’t want my doctor using Kinect

Terry is back

“I really think you should explore this”
These cameras are going to become pervasive

Graphics

XBox One graphics are phenomenal

XBox has low-level control that allows access to this graphics technology

Make this technology available on every platform

Bring into DirectX 12 and bring DX12 onto every device
Same graphics platform on every device (he has to beg for applause at this point)

Looks like somebody just discovered parallel algorithms.

Asked Turn 10 Studios (Forza) to look at DX12 on PC

Forza on PC

Internet of Things

Oh crap, here it comes.
Intel’s Galileo board, with full x86 system-on-chip
“PC runs on something the size of an eraser”

Built step-on-floor piano using Galileo

“Piano that runs Windows”
See? This is why we don’t want/need the Internet of Things
Telnet into Piano (yikes)
Playing Heart and Soul by running an app

Attach debugger to piano

Joe B. dances on piano as debugger spits out Trace statements (so WHY did we do this)?

Things are connected to the Internet

Piano is feeding data back to Azure data service
Hey, Joe knows Heart and Soul. And he saw “Big”

“The devices that we are programming to are going to change”

10:40am

(Isn’t he 10 mins over at this point?)

Windows Desktop

“All in with this Desktop experience”
Universal Apps can run in a window

New Start Menu

Available to all Windows 8.1 users, as an update (audience actually GASPS)

When Windows for Internet of Things is available, it will be FREE

We’re officially watching an Infommercial

Free XBox One to everyone in the audience

BIG cheers. Oh wait, every geek in the audience already has one.

And a $500 g.c. for a new device.

Beliefs that guide as

We believe in natural user interface (gestures, voice)
We believe in Internet of Things
- As screens get smaller, the cloud gets bigger
We believe in all of you (starting to feel like a Gary Cooper film)

Stephen Elop – Exec VP Nokia

“In just a few days or weeks”.. (joining Microsoft)

Spark is lit by Windows Phone 8.1

Nokia Lumia devices are best way to light up that experience
Existing Lumia devices get better with 8.1

I.e., All existing Win Phone 8 devices

E.g. Lumia 520 running Win Phone 8.1
- Best phone at its price point
Lumia 1520 fully loaded with 8.1
Adding some extra colors in coming days

Introduce next generation of Lumia devices

Lumia 930

Build on/for Win Phone 8.1
Elegant
Vibrant new colors
5″ full HD display, amazing readability

20MP PureView camera; optical image stabilization
Zeiss optics
Creative Studio
- Filters, sharing

Living Images, storyteller – video
- Music in background
- Mix of images and video
- Share to social networks
Cinematic video experiences
- 4 high-perf digital microphones
- Surround sound capture
- Or focus sound with directional stereo recording
Microsoft services well integrated into Lumia
- OneDrive (Stephen’s a pro—he didn’t even come close to saying SkyDrive)
2.2GHz SnapDragon 800 quad-core
- “Just rocks”
Avail in June, in Europe, Asia
In US, focused on continuing with Icon
- And 1520
- Sad face, no US availability?!
Around $599 before subsidies

Lumia 630, 635

Uncompromised, lower price points
Five colors, changeable shells
3G single SIM or 3G dual-SIM
3 column, even on smaller screen

Dual-SIMM:

Separate call history (or you can merge them)
In Contacts, can specify which SIM to use for calling that person

Cortana available on all Win Phone 8.1 devices

Bringing Cortana to all price points

Equivalent of fitness band

Sensor Core – tracks motion/location

Nokia stuff

Nokia MixRadio
HERE Maps

Lumia 630, 635

QuadCore
First devices with Win Phone 8.1 – in May
Lots of operator support
In US by July
640 3G single SIM: $159 ($169 dual-SIM) ($189 4G)

Two new SDKs

Imaging SDK 1.2
SensorCore SDK (motion-based apps)

11:07am

Satya Nadella – New CEO

Major applause

Where’s my Keynote?

Mobile-First, Cloud-First

Satya answering developer questions, gathered by Evangelism group

Will play and Satya will respond

Q: Android dev, wondering why he should build for Windows

A: We’re going to innovate with a challenger mindset

Every dimension—hardware, software
Bring IT, users, and devs together
Create “developer opportunity”
Opportunity for developers is expanding
Microsoft betting on this platform

Q: How will apps developed on MS platforms port to other platforms?

A: Make is possible for every dev to bring assets to other platforms

That’s the principle
APIs with language bindings across native/managed/web
Can build core libraries in language of choice and then move to other platforms
PhoneGap, Xamarin, Unity (this is key—not just Miguel, but this is the full set of partners)