Windows Phone 8.1

2 additional WP8 hardware vendors
WP8.1 action center, with SIM info, battery stats,
WP81 lock screen experience, how text elements and animations show.
WP81 start screen, show background photos through the tiles
Cortana. Speech assistant. powered by bing. has a notebook about the users preferences, interests, quiet hours, relevant people. First beta on US, then UK and china, then rest of the world.
skype update for WP81
cortana can be used to queue work 3rd party apps
WP81 enterprise geatures. VPN, S/MIME, MDM capabilities, such as prevemting locally saving files. Users in a BYOD scenario, as well as the IT depaartment, can delete the workplace connection.
WP81 store:
better calendar views (such as week view).
Wi-Fi Sense service suggests automatic connection sign-in to free hotspots. Also enables secure sharing of access to private hotspot with friends.
Ongoing phone call can be enriched with Skype video call-
shape writing keyboard is really cool.
roll out to consumers in a few month. new phones early may.

Windows 8.1 Update

April 8th in store
Universal Windows apps for Phones, Tablets and PCs (and XBox). One shared code base across devices plus tailoring for special form factors.
Open existing Windows 8.1 app and add a new device target, i.e. phone.
Use the context switcher to quickly see how a universal app XAML renders on tablet and phone.
Buy a universal app on the phone, and use it on the PC and vice versa. Same for in-app purchases, notifications etc.
Store submission 50x faster.
Modern Office
- Fully optimized for touch. Rebuilt on DirectX for real snappiness
- Gesturing (pinch) and inking in presentation mode
- The modern Office is the poster child for universal apps (tablet and phone with the same app)
Enterprise development. Brokered componemt for side-loaded apps enable modern apps to talk to an old code base on the desktop side, such as ado.net app and SQL Compact.
IE11 on phone, tablet and PC. Support for WebGL demo, MPEG DASH,
Use WinJS for cross-platform development on Windows, Android and iOS, open sourced via MSOpenTech at github/winjs.
Kinect v2 for Windows is coming.
Universal apps will be able to run in a window on the desktop, and there’s something that rally looks like a start menu ;-)
An Xbox One and a 500$ gift card for the Microsoft store. Too bad not being a regular attendee ;-))

Stephen Elop on stage.
Windows Phone 8.1 will be shipped to each Lumia device running Windows Phone 8 today.
New colors (bright green, orange) for devices
New Lumia Devices
- Nokia Lumia 930, bright display, wireless charging, 20 mega pixel camera with image stabilization. 4 (four) microphones in the device
- 630 and 635 with changable shells. 3G dual-sim capabilities. Can have phone tiles separated by sim, or mixed together. Even choose on a per-contact basis in the addresss book which SIM to use for calls. Will be sold starting in May with WP81 in Asia.
“Creative Studio” for editing on the phone.
Sensorcore is a low-power sensing technology for fitness tracking, SDK for motion-based location- and context-aware apps.
500 apps flow into the phone store each day.

The entirety of the Windows family, from the Internet of things, consples, phones, tables and PCs. Not to forget the cloud.
Why build for Windows? Because we innovate with a challenger mindset.
What is the cross-platform story? WinJS, Phonegap, Xamarin
How does Microsoft compete in the tablez space? great devices, pricerange, apps,
How does UX change over the next 5 years? UX came long way. Today, we are design inspiration for other platforms and design. Bill Buxton says it is the context which needs to be considered. Wimdows hasnthe broadest interaction range, touch, mouse, keyboard, gesture, speech.
When mode data goes to the cloud, how can we deal with latency? 18 Azure regions, do stiff at the edge,mcaching, software-controlled networking, run geo distributed. Use Microsoft Azure Zraffic Manager.
How can Microsoft help Startups when they grow? Check BizSpark. Do community support. Accellerators on Berlin, Silicon Valley, Bejing. Seed funding.

Each rack has top of rack switch
Two fault domains are guatanteed by Azure.
Updates are user- or platform-initiated. Maximum is 20 update domains. First worker and first web role are on fist UD.
changing upate domain count for an existong service triggers rdeployment.
90% of customers do not use availability sets… #ouch
Do not (NOT) use single-instance availability sets. It just means you do not get update warning e-mails.
Right now, when the update notification for a singleton (single instance IaaS machine) comes in, proactively rebooting does not give you assurance that you reboot on an already updated machine.

Sochi streaming: 35PB streamed, 204 live channels, 500 billion storage transactions, 100 TB storage.
transmuxed to Smooth, HLS, HDS, DASH, shown on Adobe Player Client
ZON, Nascar
“Office Video” is SharePoint using Windows Azure Media Services for Enterprise Video portals.

Move from blocking to async/await is important, and for any real deployment saves real money.
Collapsing tiers
The new three-tier architecture is frontend, asynchronous backend processing and a couple of data services
“I don’t give you exact numbers, because we reserve the right to make it better.”
If SQL Azure has a connection limit of 180 connections, and ADO.NET has a pool of 100 connections, it takes 2 VMs with a bad app to max out the DB.

While I understand that young JavaScript programmers do not see why they should use something like TypeScript, this presentation is a from-the-trenches eye-opener on why TypeScript makes much sense.

See also http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2014/04/02/thoughts-on-day-1-of-build-2014.aspx