As you know SAP NetWeaver Gateway is all about developers. This said it is not only about SAP developers.
The Microsoft BUILD developer conference 2013 will start in San Francisco tomorrow.
In this blog I will post about some of the news from BUILD 2013.
The official homepage can be found here: http://www.buildwindows.com/
Follow the event on twitter: https://twitter.com/bldwin
Interesting article by ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/the-build-up-to-microsofts-build-2013-7000016901/
Day 1 - The start button is back...
Day 1 started - no surprise here - with a keynote by Steve Ballmer.
One of the leading topics of the keynote today was the rapid release cadence and its importance to Microsoft in today's world.
To 6000 developers at the build conference - and countless online - Steve presented the tools and devices to make this happen.
One of the most anticipated "tools" is and was Windows 8.1.
With a great applause the audience welcomed the fact that the start button will be back in Windows 8.1. In addition it will be possible to directly boot to the desktop again.
You can download a Windows 8.1 Preview here.
A Windows 8.1 Product Guide for App Developers can be found here.
Finally Tools and SDK can be found here.
This said your way is open to build interesting Gateway apps on Windows 8.1.
In terms of new devices Steve presented different devices (e.g. Nokia's Lumia 928, 925 and for outside the US the 521)
Sprint will add Windows Phone devices to their portfolio (e.g. HTC Windows Phone 8XT, Samsung ATIV S Neo) and thereby broaden the reach of Microsoft's Windows phones.
Interesting to developers is the fact that Steve stressed the importance of touch for modern applications. At the same time he stressed the fact that is has to mix with existing user paradigms. Same is true for applications. In addition to modern apps - download through Microsoft's marketplace - it was made clear that classical desktop apps are not forgotten and that the mixture is important to the overall experience.
In terms of reach of Microsoft apps it might be interesting for you to read that Microsoft expects to pass 100,000 applications on the market in this month.
In addition to Steve Julie Larson Green, Antoine Leblond, and Gurdeep Singh Pall presented the latest and greatest.
E.g. Visual Studio 2013 (Preview available here), new bing features, and gesture control for Windows 8.1 devices.
Rusty McLellan and Dave McCarthy finally showed the Spark game and development environment for games with a very interesting approach to multi-channel usage of applications - even though a game here still interesting to see.
Welcome to the show (by Steven "Gugg" Guggenheimer - Microsoft VP and Chief Evangelist)
Day 2 - There it is: SAP in the keynote
Satya Nadella - President, Server & Tools Business - lead through the keynote today. In contrast to yesterday's keynote the focus today was more on backend systems and enterprise applications. Interesting to notice is the fact that the cadence for backends is even faster than for the frontends.
More specifically the keynote was mainly about 'the cloud for modern business'.
The presentation started with some impressive numbers:
- >50% Fortune 500 companies using Windows Azure
- 3.2 million organizations active directory accounts with 68 million users
- 2x compute + storage every 6 months
- 8.5 trillion storage objects
- 900k/sec - storage transactions per second (2 trillion/month)
To prove the battle readiness of Azure some additional numbers were provided:
- XBOX Live - 48 million subscribers
- Skype - 299 million connected users
- Outlook.com - 1 million users gained in 24 hours
- Outlook 365 - Nearly 50 million Office Web Apps users
- SkyDrive - 250 million accounts
- bing - 1 billion mobile notifications a month
- XBOX Live (again) - 1.5 billion games of Halo
After the introduction the keynote took a closer look at the different channels in that context.
Starting with the Web the integration with Visual Studio 2013 was shown in addition to ASP .NET improvements.
It was stressed that building Web apps is pretty simple and suports out of the box support for different browser (not only IE).
A closer look at the mobile channel completed the multichannel story. The deep integration into the development environment was well demonstrated.
Scott Guthrie - Corporate VP Windows Azure - then presented the autoscale feature of Azure and what it means for services such as Skype.
With autoscale feature for Azure costs can be reduced dramatically (>40%). Basically the feature allows setting rules for scaling your cloud environment (i.e. adding and removing capacity and thus reducing costs to the necessary amount).
The keynote overall had so much information that it is pretty hard to choose the most relevant one. However let me finish with the demo of biztalk services connecting to SAP systems using REST.
The complete keynote will be available tomorrow - I will post the link then and provide the position of the SAP bit.
After the keynote - or second part of the keynote - Steven "Gugg" Guggenheimer - Microsoft VP and Chief Evangelist - presented how the Windows 8 architecture allows reusage of coding on the different Windows 8 devices. In addition supporting companies were mentioned - e.g. Walgreens offering API to Windows developers.
Heads up for tomorrow: no keynote.
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