Enabling Cross-Device and Cross-Service Magic at Cloud Expo

This week I was at the Cloud Expo Conference in Silicon Valley talking about what developers need and doing some demos that showed how open Microsoft is when it comes to the cloud, devices, and app development.  Attendees told us they were amazed when we started the talk by demonstrating how developers can build an Android app that uses Azure and we created this app on a MacBook. And then we showed building out more of the solution on AWS using cool new capabilities like Typescript in Visual Studio, integrating with Azure Active Directory, creating a Windows 8 app around this, and wrapping it all with analytics in Excel - all in about 30 minutes.

While this open approach from Microsoft may be surprising to some it is all just business as usual in my gig here at Microsoft where we’re helping developers, designers, and IT pros create next-generation applications and experiences.

In the demo Neil Hutson and I focused on showing how in the world of devices and services it can be a real challenge to build and manage apps across devices running Android, iOS, Windows, create web content across different browsers, and to integrate with a wide range of services - whether they are running behind corporate firewalls or from different vendors like Microsoft, Salesforce, Google or Amazon. 

To help make this easier the demo shows how we’ve assembled a great collection of device APIs, cloud services, developer tools, and application patterns - all of which is available now.

Over the next few weeks we will be talking more about the work we’ve been doing with developers and organizations and we’ll be sharing the code and best practices we’ve come up with. You will find the code used in the demos up on GitHub.  We’re looking forward to continuing the dialog about the best ways to address these kind of challenges.  And I'm really looking forward to some upcoming posts from the rest of team - which includes James Whittaker, Patrick Chanezon, and many others.