Lots of rumors at this point about what will be announced...
Windows Phone 8.1
Windows 8.1 (big update)
New Nokia models
Surface 3
I would also not be surprised to see an announcement of an acquisition in the dev space, Xamarin comes to mind but I dont think that will happen (yet).
How is it any different from Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to Android 4.4 KitKat, or Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail to Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamader to Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, or Mac OS X v10.7 Lion to Mac OS X v10.8 Mountain Lion to Mac OS X v10.9 Mavericks?
They're all the same OS (and the same OS release) with names tacked on to differentiate between minor releases.
Exactly. "Update 1" is, when spoken, shorter than "Service Pack 1" what would be the older convention for this kind of release of Windows. Moreover, the changes are supposedly bigger than what they'd allow in the old-style service packs, so it's fitting not to name it the service pack and still shorter.
In a recent book (Visual C# Step-by-Step) the author keeps making a distinction about Windows 7/8 and Windows 8.1. I suppose it's because it's relevant but I have not really researched what the differences are from 8 to 8.1.
MS probably feels they are significant enough to keep calling it "Windows 8.1" as the product name. At the same time, Update 1 might be insignificant enough that it's not worth calling it "Windows 8.2".
While I appreciate the joke, you miss the point. This has more to do with marketing strategy than with release numbers used by developers. But I don't feel like discussing such small matter.
As a Xamarin customer I'm also wondering if Microsoft will announce a purchase or investment today. The risk for Microsoft has to be that if they don't then someone else might buy them first.
Xamarin's twitter feed has been kind of quiet today.
I'm hoping that MS arranges with Xamarin to be able to provide some form of the VS+Xamarin toolset for at least some SKU's of VS2013 and up for free. Sort of like InstallShield LE. They could delight if it were more.
Is it typical at this sort of event to announce new things? I'm generally unfamiliar with these sorts of conventions/conferences or whatever you call it, but reading through the titles and descriptions of the talks just makes it sound like a super-dry advertisement for a list of Microsoft products.
This is their developer conf. Any announcements will be strictly dev related, and limited to the keynote.
So, for example, maybe Azure upgrades/SDK changes. Visual Studio updates, .net framework, etc... All the other sessions are deep dives into the tech and how to use it
windowsondevices.com was live for a bit earlier today, now gone. Speculation is this is a play to get in on the 'internet of things' areas with Windows devs.
Someone better go up the quota on that Azure-based plan. That's the same message users get when someone doesn't allow auto-scale on a plan and a quota gets slammed.
Windows 8.1 Update 1 doesn't sound like a very big update to me. It should certainly be a smaller update than 8.1, if they didn't name it 8.2, and there was nothing major about the 8.1 update to begin with, unless you consider the adding of a Start Screen shortcut button a "major upgrade".
Windows is a behemoth that needs to support a ton of different hardware configurations, and it can't come out until it works very well on almost all of them. That means a year of development is a very short amount of time for Windows, and they can't add too much to it. Look at Windows 7 vs Vista. It took 3 years just to improve its performance a bit.
Tuned in mid-way through WP 8.1 Cortana part, and what stood out was the "Remind me to X when I next talk to Y". That alone would convince me to switch from Android when my I can no longer stand my current device.
Some talks tagged with C++ are listed at [1]. Only one, "Modern C++: What You Need to Know" presented by Herb Sutter [2], is actually about C++ though.
>This rapid growth [of javascript] has outpaced the growth of the language itself, which lacks features that allow teams to communicate requirements and build applications safely.
what? I guess I'll just have to wait for the announcement.
There are two answers to this: at runtime, there's nothing wrong with Javascript. That's why TypeScript compiles to Javascript. At design time, however Javascript doesn't have features of modern languages. For example, class-based programming. Some of these features are planned for in future Javascript releases, but as a language it's really behind other languages and will likely remain so. This makes large-scale Javascript programs more difficult to maintain.
Not all programming languages need classes and static types, and these features are not requirements for large-scale projects.
And there is plenty wrong with JavaScript at runtime. Lack of proper arrays is just one of the many things that come to mind. It's just a convenient runtime because it's good enough and ubiquitous.
> You can thank Microsoft for that. They refused ES4 spec.
Do not forget to thank Yahoo and Google as well.
"Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and other 4th edition dissenters formed their own subcommittee to design a less ambitious update of ECMAScript 3, tentatively named ECMAScript 3.1"
Windows Phone 8.1
Windows 8.1 (big update)
New Nokia models
Surface 3
I would also not be surprised to see an announcement of an acquisition in the dev space, Xamarin comes to mind but I dont think that will happen (yet).