BUILD Day 2, all the highlights

The first day of this Build 2014 conference was packed with awesome announcements about Windows Phone 8.1 and the Windows 8.1 Update. You can check our blogpost for a summary of what was revealed on day 1 or relive the day 1 keynote on Channel 9.

The Day 2 keynote of Build 2014 was mostly about the Application platform and it’s different components; , it’s all about Microsoft Azure and our other cloud services.

Our vision towards cloud is to simplify cloud development for customers with One Simplified Cloud Experience, no matter whether you’re using Microsoft technologies or not, and no matter whether you’re a developer or you’re part of the operations team that runs the service. It all about openness, extensibility and breaking barriers between developers and operations management.

What more have we announced today: (full press release here)

• New Microsoft Azure Portal – now in preview and designed to provide developers and business with a modern, fully integrated cloud experience that brings together the power of Azure and Visual Studio Online.
• Deeper Visual Studio integration allows to create, manage and debug Azure Instances from within Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Online went GA – Microsoft’s hosted development and deployment solution, has reached general availability and now provides service level assurances.
• Dozens of enhancements to our Azure services across Web, mobile, data and our infrastructure services (full detail here)

• Open Cloud Ecosystem – we want to give our customers choice and flexibility for deploying and configuring in the cloud. We have announced open-source partnerships with Puppet Labs and Chef for customers to leverage the operations tools their familiar with. You can now easily enable Chef and Puppet through Virtual Machine extensions; in addition, we’re adding a Puppet Enterprise virtual machine template to the gallery.

• Creation of an independent .NET Foundation to foster open development and collaboration around the growing collection of open source technologies for .NET. It will serve as a forum for commercial and community developers alike to strengthen the future of the .NET ecosystem by promoting openness, community participation and rapid innovation.https://www.dotnetfoundation.org/ 
• We also unveiled the next batch of exciting innovations in the .NET platform. Together, this wave of .NET innovation represents an important next step for the .NET platform. Read details on Soma’s blog.
  eg we announced .NET Native preview.

Your feedback on the first day of Build has been massive and we welcome you to keep doing so on Twitter by using the #bldwinbe hashtag.

If you missed the keynote or want to view any of the session recordings, head over to Build 2014 on Channel 9. In the meantime, also check the free online trainings on Microsoft Virtual Academy.