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posted by CoolHand on Monday May 04 2015, @03:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-big-promises-again dept.

The Microsoft Build Developer Conference 2015, or Build 2015, runs from April 29th to May 1st. Already, many surprises have been revealed:

We got Android apps running on Windows. A Microsoft IDE running on Linux. .NET ported to Linux, too. Support for Objective C, the language that only Apple and NeXT has ever really used. Support for Google and Apple APIs - in fact, just carry on writing for Google and Apple. Wild, untamed Win32 binaries scaling the ramparts of the Microsoft Store. Phones turning into proper PCs when you plug them into a monitor and keyboard.

Rumors of Android apps running on Windows 10 turned out to be mostly true; Windows 10 will include an "Android subsystem" and many Android APIs to allow app code to be easily reused by developers, but Android apps won't automatically run on the OS. "[Project] Astoria also provides Java developers with hooks to Windows APIs that aren't present on Google's platform." In addition, Microsoft is courting iOS developers:

[More...]

The same goes for iOS developers. Myerson said a new tool being announced on Wednesday – we're told it's called "Project Islandwood" – will make it possible to convert Xcode project files into Visual Studio solutions. There's no code translation involved. All of the original Objective-C files remain intact. Myerson said a future version of Visual Studio will include full support for Apple's pet language, including Microsoft's much-vaunted IntelliSense tech.

It won't be possible to run iOS binaries on Windows devices, but the idea is that they will recompile for Windows with relatively little difficulty. The idea is that Microsoft's conversion tool handles the heavy lifting of converting iOS API calls to the corresponding Windows 10 APIs. During his keynote, Myserson showed off an app that he said used Apple's UIKit framework and Core Animation infrastructure, but which ran smoothly on Windows 10, including support for both mouse and touch.

Microsoft wowed the Build crowd with rehearsed HoloLens augmented reality demonstrations showcasing virtual app overlays in an apartment, an interactive 3D human body for studying anatomy, and a holographic "robot" and Minority Report-style UI elements surrounding a real robot on stage.

Microsoft has released a preview build of Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2 as well as Intel's MinnowBoard Max.

Project Spartan, the replacement browser for Internet Explorer, has been given a final name: Microsoft Edge. Microsoft is defensively registering negative domains related to the new browser, although .sucks extortion is absent.

For the "enthusiast" PC gamer, Square Enix, Microsoft, and NVIDIA present "WITCH CHAPTER 0 [cry]" (video), a DirectX 12 demo running on four GeForce TITAN X GPUs.

This Gizmodo article has a nice writeup on all the happenings at the conference.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @03:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @03:23AM (#178307)

    This is fairly classic PC mentality. Take everything else make it run on a PC.

    The trick is to avoid the classic MS extinguish....

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:50PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:50PM (#179073) Journal

    This is fairly classic PC mentality. Take everything else make it run on a PC.

    The trick is to avoid the classic MS extinguish....

    Yeah, but that's gonna be hard to do here when nobody is really buying PCs anymore...