Windows Developers @ Build 2016
Experience the best of Build online with sessions, blog posts, videos, coding challenges and other highlights updated live from around the web.
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Entity Linking is a natural language processing tool to help analyze text for your application. Specifically, Entity Linking helps you match a textual mention of a named entity to an appropriate entity in a knowledge base. For example, let’s say the word ‘times’ may appear in text; it may refer to two separate entities: “The New York Times†or “Times Squareâ€. Given a specific paragraph of text within a document, the Entity Linking Intelligence Service will recognize and identify each separate entity based on the context.
Building and deploying your own chat-bot has never been easier. Bot Framework is a new platform from Microsoft that lets you create your own chat-bot, deploy and connect it to any of the popular channel clients like Skype, GroupMe, Slack, etc.
Take any image URL from the web, then use Project Oxford to understand the contents of the image via tags and captions
In this Quick Start Challenge, you'll experience the familiarity of development tools in the powerful Windows environment. Learn how to use Bash on Ubuntu on Windows to check out projects from GitHub, then build and run the Linux version locally, tail’ing and grep’ing the logs while it runs.
XAML offers many building blocks for enabling commanding and navigation experiences in your app. SplitViews, command bars, menus, and pivots are just some of the building blocks you can use to create great tailored experiences that work well across all screens, devices, and input types. In this Quick Start Challenge, learn guidance on when and how to use these building blocks in your app to create universal commanding and navigation experiences.
The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a common application platform for creating apps that seamlessly target Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox platforms. In this Quick Start Challenge, you will learn how to create a simple XAML/C++ Windows app using Visual Studio 2015. C++ is one of the most portable languages in the industry today. Coupled with XAML, a powerful mark-up language, you can build a great app with very little code!
The Windows SDK for Facebook is an open source implementation of Facebook’s Graph API that allows developers to integrate Facebook login/social features into their Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. You can use the SDK with an UWP app to set up Facebook login, retrieve the user’s profile picture, utilize the Dialogs to Share to the user’s timeline, and make requests to the Facebook Graph API. This Quick Start Challenge will be focused on using the SDK to make an appropriate Graph API request to get the authenticated user’s photo list.
Mapping technologies in Windows 10 provide you with a number of different tools to make your app stand out—from rich street maps that work offline, to stunning Aerial 3D and street-side imagery, to flexible capabilities that make data analysis really shine. In this Quick Start Challenge, you’ll learn how to get started with Maps and leverage its best features in your UWP app.
This challenge demonstrates how to extend Cortana with voice commands to query information from a travel app. Developers can use this technique to make useful information available to customers through Cortana.
This challenge demonstrates how to listen for speech commands and use them to control an object on the screen. Developers can use this technique to implement speech-based command-and-control in their app or game.
The Universal Windows Platform now allows apps to create their own extensibility platforms and host custom extensions provided by other apps. This feature is not limited to web browsers; any app can have its own extensibility platforms and utilize extensibility offered by other apps. For this challenge, you will create an app that has an extension that provides additional content and functionality to another app.Â
Live Tiles are an excellent way to display at-a-glance information on the user’s Start screen, and a core component of any calendar/task app. In this Quick Start Challenge, we’ll use these features to create an app that keeps the user informed, even when the app is closed.
This Quick Start Challenge will show you how to take a core XAML control, like ListView, and extend it by using the visual layer exposed through Windows.UI.Composition. The goal of this challenge is to showcase the relative ease with which you can create a more exciting and engaging experience with the tools available in the Windows UI platform. We will look specifically at how to add motion and polish to an app without forfeiting the awesome power of the XAML framework.Â
Leverage the cross-platform power of the web to create an app that runs across all Windows devices. This Quick Start Challenge will demonstrate how to use Visual Studio or the command line to quickly create a UWP Hosted Web App, as well as how to integrate windows APIs directly with JavaScript (hosted on a remote server) to add Cortana, Live Tile, Calendar, Title Bar, or Contacts functionalities.Â
Azure Active Directory B2C is a cloud identity service for your consumer web & mobile apps. It is highly-available, secure and scales to millions of consumers. Consumers can use their social accounts (Facebook, Google, Microsoft account) or create new credentials to access your apps. In this challenge, you will create a .NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) web app that allows a consumer to sign-up & sign-in to the web app using an email address and a password.
A very large percentage of applications today are web based and data driven – so the underlying application services needed are web infrastructure and a database server. In this challenge, you will create this infrastructure in Azure and you will deploy some simple web code and a database. Your finished app, although simple in nature, will run on a very sophisticated, highly resilient and scalable platform using Azure Web App and Azure SQL Database.
In this challenge, you'll see what it takes to get started developing and debugging Unity applications using the Visual Studio Tools for Unity extension and the Unity tools.
Reminders form a core component of any calendar/task app and also prove an excellent way to display at-a-glance information on the user’s Start screen. In this Quick Start Challenge, we’ll use the Reminders features to create an app that keeps its users informed, even when the app is closed.
The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is a common application platform for creating apps that seamlessly target Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox platforms. In this Quick Start Challenge, you will learn how to create a simple XAML/C# Windows app using Visual Studio 2015. C# is one of the most popular languages in the industry today. Coupled with XAML, a powerful mark-up language, you can build a great app with very little code!
To jumpstart Windows 10 Universal App Platform (UWP) development, Mobilize.Net has created a free tool called Mobilize.NET Silverlight Bridge for UWP. The Silverlight bridge is an extension to Visual Studio and automates a big part of the transition process from Windows Phone 8.x code to UWP. Â It takes as input your existing projects for both application code and class libs and outputs a new UWP project, converting C# and XAML files to the new UWP platform. In this Quick Start Challenge, you will learn how to use the tool to convert an existing Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight app to Windows 10 UWP.
In this Quick Start Challenge, you will convert an existing desktop app to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) using the Desktop App Converter and then add UWP features to the converted app. This is a technical preview of the Desktop App Converter and the Desktop Conversion extensions which support side-loading of your app for local testing.
The Windows Bridge for iOS is a Microsoft open-source project that provides an Objective-C® development environment for Visual Studio and support for iOS APIs. The bridge allows you to create Universal Windows apps that will run on any Windows 10 device using iOS APIs and Objective-C code. This Quick Start Lab provides you with a hands-on introduction to the Windows Bridge for iOS. It explores how the SDK is laid out, walks you through how to import a simple yet compelling Xcode project into Visual Studio, and demonstrates how to call Windows APIs using Objective-C.
Microsoft is developing a data-leak protection technology called Enterprise Data protection (EDP). The intention to protect data spans across all Windows devices, including corporate-owned devices and bring your own device (BYOD). This Quick Start Challenge will show you how an application enlightened for EDP will have the ability to differentiate between Personal or Enterprise Data, prevent accidental or malicious data leaks, and protect enterprise network boundaries.
Using the ApiInformation API, your Universal Windows Apps can easily adapt their functionality across different versions of Windows and different device families. As an example, this Quick Start Challenge will show you how your app can take advantage of the new Print Preview feature when running on the latest Insider Builds without generating errors on existing OSes that lack the feature.
Windows App Studio is a free online tool that allows you to create and publish Universal Windows Apps in record time with no code required. In this Quick Start Challenge, we will dig into a Windows App Studio feature that's designed to help you extend your app in Visual Studio with the use of NuGet packages, which speed up app development by making production and consumption of packages easier.
Learn how to drive more users to your app by supporting app links. When users tap a link to your website, they are seamlessly redirected to your installed app without going through the browser first. If the app isn’t installed, tapping the link gracefully falls back to your website as usual. In this challenge, you will learn about registration, verification, app link paths, and activation.
With the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), you can write one app that can run on any Windows 10 device. When writing an app that spans many screen sizes, adaptive layout is important to ensure you deliver a quality user experience. This coding challenge leverages XAML to give you the power and flexibility to write fluid layouts easily, and adapt your UI to any screen.
Windows UWP app developers have several options for monetizing their apps. With advertising accounts for approximately 1/3 of the overall revenue for apps, it is critical to understand these options. In this exercise, we will demonstrate how one can mediate with multiple ad networks to improve revenue. We will look specifically at how to code your app, configure mediation in the Dev Center, and evaluate the reports.
Learn how to use the new Skype Web SDK to easily embed real-time presence, messaging, and AV directly inside of your custom web experience. You'll also get hands-on experience with app registration and authentication needed to interact with the new User API for Skype for Business Online.
HockeyApp gives crash reports and user metrics through a simple to implement SDK. In this challenge, you will how to quickly take advantage of the SDK to improve your app by responding to crashes on devices outside your development or test environment, and by understanding how users are adopting your app. HockeyApp also enables you to easily distribute your app to beta testers, giving you extra confidence about the quality of your app before you release it to the app store.
Visual Studio 2015 contains newly refreshed C# and Visual Basic editing experiences built upon the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn"). In this challenge, you'll explore a handful of brand new features, such as code fixes and refactorings with the light bulb, and an "Inline" Rename experience that detects conflicts as you type.
C# 6 adds a lot of small but useful language features to remove boilerplate and clean up your code. This challenge takes you on a whirlwind tour through all the new language constructs.
In this challenge, you will explore several new features in Visual Studio 2015 that help you build beter applications. These include the new Diagnostic Tools debugger window, enhanced breakpoint configuration, Edit and Continue improvements, Exception Settings window improvements and the usage of lambda expressions in the debugger window.
Ionic is a UI framework based on Angular that allows developers to create Cordova apps that can adapt their UI to Android and iOS standards. During this challenge, you’ll create an ionic app using the ionic templates for VS. You will deploy and debug to an Android device, then use remotebuild to deploy and debug on an iOS device.
Node.js is a platform for building fast, scalable applications using JavaScript. It’s making its way just about everywhere – from servers, to Internet of Things devices, to desktop applications, to who knows what next? In this challenge, you will see how to use Visual Studio Code to build a Node.js app that leverages Project Oxford's facial recognition APIs.
Maps can be your guide through physical and virtual worlds, they can help track your activities, or be an additional dimension to pivot your data. In this challenge, you’ll investigate common visualizations of data with location context and learn to distribute the results across devices and screens using the same code base.
It's always hard to debug what happens in your code, and even harder when your code is run remotely in cluster, when it is massively paralleled, and when you are dealing with a large amount of data. We want to make your big data development journey easier - in Azure Data Lake Analytics, we provide a new language named U-SQL which will be automatically paralleled; We also provide the U-SQL development environment in Visual Studio and you can use Visual Studio to debug your code and find where goes wrong easily. Join us and try to debug and fix those errors!
Bing knows what's trending on the web, and now so can your apps. We'll teach you in less than 15 minutes how to create your own trending topics reader, whether it is for images, videos, or news. All this can be done by leveraging the new features of the Bing Search APIs.
In this Quick Start Challenge, you will instrument a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for A/B testing and then use Windows Dev Center to enable and measure the effectiveness of a variation of an existing experience in the app. Developers can now use A/B testing in Windows Dev Center to experiment on the fly with program-variable assignments in their apps. By building app logic around these program variables, developers can enable variations of existing app experiences for random samples of their user base. They can then measure the overall success of each variation against predefined goals in order to identify a “winning†variation that will likely earn the developer the best business outcome (e.g. provide the most lift in in-app purchases).