The biggest conference of the year for those of us who work in Microsoft stack, Microsoft Build, was this week. There were over 300 sessions across timezone were hosted for free on-line. Here is a wee summary of what I watched, learned & spoke about at Build...
Book of News
You can see the main announcements and news here in the book of news. In the sections below I will chat about the talks and announcements I noticed as a developer, but there are alot more here in the book of news.
Keynotes
As you would expect, Build kicked off with a keynote from Satya Nadella. A main focus this year is developer workflows & velocity.
If you have followed any of Build on twitter, you probably saw some of the conversation around the Keynote Application Development with Scott Hanselman & Friends and it's sitcom style format. A nice change from what we have seen in the last 18 months of everyone working from home! Scott & the team gave us demos of some cool upcoming features & tools including Hot Reload.
Another of the keynote sessions was: Scott Guthrie ‘Unplugged’ – Home Edition with a summary of many of the developer focussed news from Build.
.Net
As a .Net developer, this video was an important one to catch up on: .NET 6 deep dive; what's new and what's coming. We saw some cool stuff, like:
- Dotnet Upgrade Assistant a preview feature for now, a command line tool that helps developers know whats required to update to latest version of .Net.
- C#- We found out we'll get a new major version of C# every year along with .Net releases, as well some of the exciting features we'll be getting in C# 10 with .Net 6.
- Performance improvements in EF core 6
- Minimal WebAPIs
- .Net MAUI
- Blazor desktop apps
Many of the folks on this session were also on the Ask the Experts session hosted by Jeff Fritz.
Scott Hunter presented The future of modern application development with .NET
Other Developer sessions
These non .Net specific sessions were really interesting:
Application Authentication in the Microsoft Identity platform presented by Christos Matskas & John Patrick Dandison. They walked us through an intro to Microsoft Identity and a getting started with the Identity Learn module.
Increase Developer Velocity with Microsoft’s end-to-end developer platform by Amanda Silver, Donovan Brown & Julie Strauss.
This post about Developer Velocity Labs and this one on The Good Day Project discussing developer productivity.
UK Session
I was very lucky and privileged to be part of Build this year! I was part of the UK community session "Create friction-free code across all tools and frameworks" with Dean and Chris. We demoed some cool features that increase developer velocity, make it easy to set up a CI/CD pipeline and ensure our code is secure. Despite several perfect rehearsals, we had some live demo "fun"... but we worked it out and manage to solve the problem live!
Check out the full list of sessions here.
What sessions did you enjoy? Get in touch via Twitter.