Belgians at Build Day 3: More Sessions, 3D Printing and Microsoft Store San Francisco

Together with about 25 other developers from Belgium, Olivier Matis (C# MVP) attended the Build
conference last week in San Francisco. He’s been sharing his experience at the conference in a series of blog post – below you can find his final report.

The MSDN Belux team
Here’s a short summary of some of the sessions I attended on the 3rd and last day at Build:

- Windows Runtime Internals: Understanding the Threading Model

Such a session at 9am on the last day is a killer . They kind of did the same last year, I’m starting to think some session planners are sadistic … Anyway, the session is interesting if you want to know how things are going behind the curtains, but not really a must-see, as these things are very theoretical and you can live (99% of the time) without it. But if you want to be prepared for that 1%, this is for you!

- Visual Studio diagnostics tools for XAML based Windows Store apps

This session gives an overview of the diagnostics tools, emphasizing startup performance analysis, power analysis (specifically network power) and memory dump analysis. Also included a nice small side talk on why Wifi is less power hungry when sending small chunks of data little by little.

- How to use point-of-sale devices in your app

This session is about the new POS APIs that allow you to use barcode scanners or magnetic strip readers. Before, there were some USB devices that allowed it, but those were only emulating a keyboard entry. Now it is more direct, easier to use and you can read encrypted data. There was a demo and code sample on how to deal with 2 apps on the screen that want to use the device. Nice too: this WinRT API can be used by desktop apps also.

- Building Windows app that use scanners

66% of printers connected to Windows are also scanners. Now, with Windows 8.1, you can have an easy API, which can be used on both Store and desktop apps, that supports the majority of scanners out of the box. No OCR integrated, too bad. Otherwise, it’s the same kind of API than POS or Proximity, etc. …

And that’s a wrap! Must say I’m a bit disappointed there was nothing (new) about Xbox or Windows Phone. But otherwise, attending a big conference like Build is always a nice experience. Windows 8.1 is promising and going into the right direction.

See you at Build 2014 and the preview of Windows 9 !

Below there are some more pictures and a super cool video of a 3D printer …

3D Printing! Watch a video I made here.