Build 2013 Impressions
I recently came back from Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference in San Francisco, where Microsoft’s latest technologies are introduced to developers. Much of the conference was devoted to technology related to Metro/Modern Windows/Windows Store apps, and also to Windows Phone, neither of which are relevant to JNBridge’s mission. However, there were a few things that caught my eye, and which are worth mentioning.
First, Windows 8.1 (formerly, Windows Blue) was unveiled. It’s definitely an improvement for desktop users. We currently run Windows 7 on our development machines and do our Windows 8 tests on virtual machines. While nothing I saw at Build regarding Windows 8.1 will change that, it’s definitely getting closer to being a system that I would feel comfortable using every day.
Visual Studio 2013 was introduced during the Build keynote, and I was quite impressed with the new code navigation features, including the enhanced scrollbars and the look-ahead capability that allows developers looking at a method call to open a mini-window containing the text of the called method. I can certainly see using these features in our future development.
It appears that the JNBridgePro Visual Studio plugin should work just fine with VS 2013, although we realize that this is a very early version of the software, and things could change. We will certainly be tracking that. Similarly, the new version of the .NET Framework that will be released with VS 2013 seems to run JNBridgePro just fine.
Finally, given our interest in interoperability issues relating to Hadoop, we were intrigued to see this talk on Azure HDInsight. We’ve been thinking of new ways in which JNBridgePro can be integrated with Big Data applications, and the talk suggested some scenarios that we’ll be working on in the coming months.
Were you at Build, and, if so, did you see anything interesting related to interoperability? Let us know.