BUILD conference day 2
Posted on 9/15/2011 at 1:05am
Another big day at BUILD. Today was all about developers. The keynote showcased a lot of enhancements to the frameworks and tools we use to create everything from websites to 3D games. To cap it off, Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) took the stage and delivered a great pep talk. He outlined the larger strategic vision that Microsoft is pursuing among its separate lines of business (Windows, Productivity, Cloud, Mobile, etc.) and left off by declaring the forthcoming Windows 8 era the "era of the Windows developer."
After the morning's keynote, I attended a series of breakout sessions devoted to Visual Studio 11 (the upcoming version of our development environment), Asp.Net and HTML 5, and new features in Windows Azure (Microsoft's cloud computing platform).
Some takeaways:
- Visual Studio 11 is going to be FULL of productivity enhancements
- A powerful set of refactoring commands (watch out JetBrains)
- Built-in code profiling
- The ability to find copy + paste "code clones"
- A sophisticated image editor
- A 3D model editor
- Amazing Application Lifecycle Management tools integrated right into Visual Studio (this could be its own blog post)
- Asp.Net will now automatically bundle and minify Javascript and CSS assets
- HTML 5 Websocket support is built-in to the .Net 4.5 Library
- jQuery Mobile will start shipping as a standard .Net component next week
- There are HUGE enhancements to .Net that will greatly simplify mobile-optimization of websites
- The new asynchronous programming model in C# 4.5 makes asynchronous programming VERY easy (relatively speaking (: )
- A new "Testing Center" tool will provide browser automation for "Exploratory" testing and should both save time in QA and produce a better product
Whew. There's more on the way tomorrow.
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