To kick off the 2021 edition of Microsoft’s annual conference dedicated to developers, Satya Nadella, of course, has been the number one of the Redmond giant for seven years, since (February 2014) he took over from Steve Ballmer on the armchair by Ceo. From that moment on many things have changed within Microsoft (the dogma of “mobile first, cloud first” is the first turning point) and even in the virtual keynote for the opening of Build 2021, the Indian-born manager tried to open some new ones horizon (and greater economic opportunities) for the immense community of developers. Speaking about the next generation of Windows, in particular, and the long-awaited UI overhaul (codenamed Sun Valley, expected in the fall), Nadella highlighted how it will be one of the most significant OS updates in the last few years. ten years. And he praised a number supporting the strategic importance of Windows for the present and the near future of the company: 1.3 billion. Many are the users who use it to work, communicate, connect and play. “It brings together all the development and collaboration tools in one place, allows you to choose the hardware you want, works with Linux”, the CEO warned again, emphasizing how Microsoft is ready to “welcome every developer who is looking for the most innovative and open platform to build and distribute and monetize applications “.
The boom of Teams
Another number to be circled in red that emerged from the first day of the event concerns the videoconferencing platform, whose user base has experienced (thanks to Covid 19) a growth that Microsoft has defined as one of the fastest ever in the technology industry. Over the past twelve months, the number of active Teams users every day has practically doubled to 145 million (thanks also to the substantial contribution of companies with over a thousand employees who rely on the service by leveraging third-party applications) and he stated goal of the company is to continue to enhance it by stepping up the pace of releases. The new features made available a year ago have been around 300 and a third of the total have enriched the experience of using the platform in these first months of 2021.
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More functionality for hybrid workplaces
to the news announced yesterday, which reflect the strategy of opening programming interfaces and components to third-party developers, the wildcard put on the table by Microsoft is the possibility, for the developers themselves, to sell subscriptions to apps written for Teams. In terms of new features, however, the platform will soon be enriched with tools for integrating the shared stage of a meeting and for creating customized scenes and experiences to share with users. To complete the picture, here is the update of the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and the new Teams Developer Portal, a console dedicated to app management, accessible via the web or directly from the platform, which allows you to register and configure your apps from a single place. The focus of these updates, in general, is to encourage the development of collaboration applications for what Microsoft calls a “hybrid work environment”, which mixes the model of smart working with that of interaction in presence and proximity linked to partial return to the office.
The browser is always faster
The new arc arrows of Edge 91, now available in Beta, are essentially Sleeping Tabs and Startup Boost, two attributes that according to Microsoft’s managers will bring a generalized performance improvement and will allow you to use the software more easily on even little hardware devices. powerful, ensuring that background processes run directly on startup. The idea, in a nutshell, is to make the new version of the browser the fastest browser in the history of Windows 10.
Arriva lo Snapdragon Dev Kit per Windows on ARM
Just ten years ago, thinking of a Windows notebook equipped with non-Intel processors was still only hypothetical. Today, however, Microsoft’s partnership with Qualcomm is increasingly close and the efforts of the two companies to improve the Windows on Arm experience on entry-level personal computers prove it. The Snapdragon Developer Kit, in this sense, is a desktop micro pc based on Windows 10 and Snapdragon 7c chipset that will be on sale on the Microsoft Store starting this summer and will offer developers the opportunity to write their own apps on Arm architecture and to make those already existing compatible with Arm64app. All with costs reduced to a minimum.