Day 2 of Build kicks off with Scott Guthrie talking about Azure, which currently has 30 unique Azure regions around the world (more than Google + AWS combined) and is used bu 85% of the Fortune 500. No wonder that there’s still a lot of ongoing investment in the cloud. Another very important feature is the acquirement of Xamarin a few weeks ago. This keynote is a filled with demos and real world use cases which are interesting to see, so below just a quick rundown on some announcements.
Xamarin
Miguel de Icaza kicked right off with a demo of Xamarin in Visual Studio. The new features:
- The best news there is the iOS simulator remoted directly on Windows! With multi-touch support.
- Live code editing with Xamarin inspector for Android apps.
And then there’s this great news brought by Scott:
- Xamarin will be included for free in Visual Studio
- Xamarin Studio comes with Visual Studio subscription.
- Free Xamarin Studio Community for Mac.
- Open sourcing of the Xamarin runtime
Next up is a great demo of Xamarin Test Recorder, Test Cloud and CI builds for Xamarin on Visual Studio Team Services. One remark: it just works.
Internet of Things
Azure Iot Suite: securily device connectivity and management
Azure function preview
- Serverless compute
- Triggers on azure events or external services
- Open source runtime (C# or Node.js)
A lot of public previews (new or existing)
- Azure functions
- Azure hub device management
- Azure IoT gateway
- Azure container service
- Azure service fabric + standalone runtime
- Power BI Embedded
Changes
- New pricing and scaling options for DocumentDB
- DocumentDB global databases
- DocumentDB protocol support for MongoDB
Scott Hanselman demoed how Age of Ascent uses ASP.NET Core and Azure service fabric to create a MMO that sends millions of messages per second.
Bonus: Open source sample of Azure IoT + Xamarin + Universal app.