Luckily, i attended the 2016 Microsoft Developer Conference held in Egypt few days ago. It was an inspiring event where the latest tools and technology where discussed in the conference. I thought it will be useful to share a brief summary of the conference sessions. The conference agenda is shown below.
The opening speech was from Sherif El-Sanadily, Developer Experience Director at Microsoft. He talked about the idea of searching and finding opportunities and being creative and finding a way to success instead of making excuses.
Then the special keynote speech by Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. He talked about company mission which is “empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.” Satya was great to see the creativity and passion of Egyptian developers and startups after meeting with some of them.
Next, Walla Atef talked about Internet of Things (IoT) and Windows Azure as the backbone of Microsoft. Also, Azure is not a place to host Microsoft technology only , all other technologies are welcomed there. Two demos was shown in this session which was built on windows azure:
- Twitter ballon: Mohamed Yamama demonstrated a solution where a twitter tweet is classified using machine learning as a negative tweet or positive tweet based on its content. The result of classification blows a corresponding balloon (one for negative and one for positive) using a simple hardware.
- Money Box: Bishoy Labib from LinkDev talked about a project in UAE of money boxes for charity. The problem is when to know the box is full of money and need to be collected from the box. He worked on a solution where each box is configured with a sensor to detect the fullness of the box and the readings was collected remotely using Microsoft Azure and results shown on dashboard.
Then the sessions are divided into two main tracks:
- Cross Platform Track
- Cloud Track
I attended the cloud track and will summarize the technologies mentioned in these sessions from my notes and memory.
First session was about big data and machine learning by Hany Azzam. He talked about Big Data and how to transform it into predictions and actions. He talked about the difference between static analytics and stream based analytics. The services he mentioned:
- Azure Stream Analytics: a cloud service that provides real-time analytics for your solutions.
- Azure Machine Learning: is a service that a developer can use to build predictive analytics models (using training datasets from a variety of data sources) and then easily deploy those models for consumption as cloud web services. He mentioned also this free book that can be downloaded.
Hany also demonstrated a demo for real time vehicle destination prediction. This demo was live where a car trip was started during the session and its location information was streamed to the cloud in real time. The model that was trained using previous trips kept predicting the destination of the car at run time based on its current location.
Second Session was about Azure Logic Apps by Shehab Fawzy. Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that automate business process execution and workflow using an easy-to-use visual designer. Shebab talked how to modernize existing business workflows and building workflows using the service. Shehab showed a simple demo where an SMS is triggered and sent based on request inserted into a SQL database.
Third session was about Office 356 Development and Graph API introduced by Dina and Sherif El Mahdy. They talked about how to integrate Office 365 data into your application in addition to customizing Office 365 experience within Office itself using Office 365 APIs.
Sherif also talked about Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) and its integration with applications. Graph API was introduced also which is a unified API that includes APIs from other Microsoft services such as Outlook, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, and Office Graph, accessible through a single endpoint and with a single access token. At the end, Sherif showed a demo for authentication using Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps.
Fourth session was by Remon Zakaria talking about software delivery challenges and DevOps. Remon talked about working effectively in software projects using Microsoft technologies. The main focus was on Visual Studio Team Services which are services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software. Remon mentioned Team Services different features including version control, Agile Planning, Continuous integration, delivery and testing.
Remon also showed a demo using Application Insights on KetApp app. Application Insights is a cloud service that tracks usage in mobile apps and web apps including issue detection.
Last session was on Azure Billing APIs by Dina Helmy. Azure Billing APIs provide access to resource consumption for Azure subscriptions, providing the ability to better predict and manage Azure costs. It contains two APIs, one is Resource Usage API and the other is RateCard API. Dina demonstrated a demo of how to query this API.
Hope this summary is useful. I’m glad I attended the conference and can’t wait to experiment and use these latest technology from Microsoft.
have FUN 😀
Multipoints Projects 