Microsoft Build 2016 live keynote | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Build 2016 live keynote

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166 pointsAlexeyBrin91 comments

"Fastest Windows adoption ever"

Yeah, I know a bunch of people that had the 10 upgrade forced upon them. Making it a default "Windows Update" is certainly one way to get your adoption stats up!

Mine got updated through a specific application and never heard of Windows 10 update through Windows Update, let alone a forced one. The only forced thing was that the update application came to tray automatically and stayed there until I opt-in.

It's more likely that they accidentally opted in, various stories about this sort of thing have been debunked to accidental opt-ins.

So it's a somewhat lighter dark pattern.

Enlighten me: Someone clicked in typical "just ok everything"-mode on "update to Windows 10" and ... surprise ... it updated to Windows 10. Dark pattern? I don't see it.

People like latest and greatest things, so they see a pop-up "Hey, Windows 10 is here! Click here to upgrade!". And the person is like "SWEET! GIVE IT TO ME!". After 1 hour of upgrading, user is back in Windows 10, "Damnit, some of my shit ain't working! Goddamn automatic upgrade!"

Repeatedly throwing a question at users and being surprised that they eventually slip up and install it is probably a dark pattern.

And various stories have been proven. Including my friend who just wanted to use their computer, remembered to always click 'No' when it asked, and lost operation of her Wi-Fi card when she returned from a bath and her Windows had silently upgraded to Windows 10. I verified the behaviour after rolling it back, denying its request to update, and then letting the computer sit still for less than an hour.

I used to doubt too, whether it happened on its own or whether people made mistakes. Even back then, I believed if so many people can be made to make the same mistake, then it's more like they've been duped than that they all just happened to make the same mistake. Now, when I saw it happenning right in front of me, I was furious.

It's standard operating procedure to cherry-pick a number that looks good.

https://news.microsoft.com/2007/03/26/windows-vista-debuts-w...

> Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP.

https://news.microsoft.com/2013/01/21/net-applications-windo...

https://news.microsoft.com/2012/12/04/windows-8-touch-pc-dem...

It's fun to see how they spin things like an Iraqi defense minister. No matter what's happening, it's the best X ever! (X=december, absolute sales, relative sales, adoption rate, market share change...)

"The bash shell is coming to Windows"

Whoa.

Now the question is how well will it work.

Not a lot of details given. Just that its not cross compilation or vm

I saw C:\windows\system32\bash AFAIK it is a clean-room implementation of Linux APIs. It is native.

Hanselman wrote up a "demo" blog post here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...

They wrote the equvilant of Wine for Windows-- Binary compatible, apparently just translating system calls.

There's a joke that says people who hate Windows use Linux and those who love Unix use BSD. Microsoft seems to think that's true, too.

The blog he links to near the end is a very raw WordPress blog on the microsoft.com domain. That's entertaining.

So long Cygwin I guess.

Some choice quotes from: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.htm...

"Nope! This isn't a container either. It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows."

"Oh, and it's totally shit hot! The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance."

Full access to all of Ubuntu user space inc. apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch...

And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives.

Is there any way this is bad? I am honestly having a hard time not getting thrilled over it. I want to be cynical and worried, but hot damn this seems awesome. Getting that alphabet soup of utilities to be useful natively on Windows without Cygwin or `git bash` is a pain (and usually lags out of date; nevermind the startup lag too).

Just having curl, md5sum, and apt alone is a thrill and a half!

Totally agree. I use git for windows with optional unix tools. But having this built in is quite amazing.

Being able to run Linux binaries natively on Windows is nothing new.

CoLinux did it somewhat poorly but garnered a bit of popularity. http://atratus.org did it too. FreeBSD (and maybe the other BSDs?) have first party Linux emulation which isn't entirely trivial, as you still have to write effectively the same stuff. (ELF binaries to be interpretted on a COFF/PE binary platform for Windows; the FBSD guys wrote an entire layer that maintained the SysV COFF a.out standard while concurrently allowing you run the more modern ELF binary standard circa version 4.3.)

Windows also has had first party access to all of those utils via the `gow'[1] package. In ConEmu it looks pretty nifty too. (Not that you really need it since the whole MSbuild chain is now 100% open, but yeah not having to fight against Cygwin and mingw32 for hours as one had to 10 years ago is quite nice.)

[1] https://chocolatey.org/packages/Gow

I wonder how the Cygwin people feel? It would seem to me, and I'm a very long time Cygwin user (from before Red Hat bought them), that it makes Cygwin obsolete.

Docker?

On friday? ;)

This subject is covered in much more detail elsewhere on Hacker News:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390545

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418

After seeing some really impressive stuff, I cannot wait to test this stuff on my own! I mean seriously, a retail Xbox One as a devkit? That is so amazing I can't even comprehend it!

It's almost like a computer that you can write programs on and even run those programs on.

Only UWP Apps, acces to only 1gb ram.

Is that finally ready to go (I haven't been able to check out the links)? That's been basically known to people who follow game dev news that it was an upcoming feature since a little before the console launched, it's just been nothing but a promise up to this point.

If it's finally released, awesome. That's a major reason why I decided to get an Xbox One over PS4. I made games with XNA on the previous system, so I'm excited to finally get to start developing on the Xbox One.

Really hoping XNA gets a reboot, even if it became a completely different project as long as it accomplishes the same goals.

Looks like Unity is the engine Microsoft picked this go around to support Xbox One development. Maybe XNA will be resurrected at some point, but I doubt it will be anytime soon.

XNA was nice and fun to program with, but I think Unity is generally a better game engine, it's still C#/.NET development, the base version of Unity is pretty open and free now, and you're not locked into "The Microsoft Platform" with it.

So overall I'm pretty satisfied. I could probably even quickly port some of the XNA code over with minimal changes (not the graphics, unfortunately. Assumed a fixed size 2D viewport for all my layout and animation code, which was a mistake).

Any retail Xbox one as a devkit, yikes that's awesome.

I remember the days of the tens-of-thousands-of-$ devkits. Probably won't have the extra memory but that only really matters if you're building something right up against the memory size barrier.

Only UWP Apps, access to just 1GB of ram.

Is any media site doing a "live blog" of this? Similar to what Mac Rumours do for Apple?

edit: Looks like The Verge has something here:

https://live.theverge.com/microsoft-build-2016-live-blog/

http://live.arstechnica.com/microsoft-build-2016-day-1-keyno...

anandtech too

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10201/microsoft-build-2016-key...

Which is handy because the build keynote usually goes on, with brakes, for such a long time and so much stuff is discussed.

Siri, Cortana, Google Now and others..Software agents are finally here. When I got my first notifications from Google Now some years ago it was the first time my phone actually felt smart.

If Microsoft and others can figure out good ways to open these to the developers I bet this will be pretty big thing.

Don’t forget Tay:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-deletes-racist-genoc...

So what's the benefit of converting Win32 to UWP other than publishing to Windows store?

You can run your app on xbox one and windows phone. Access to some new APIs.

In addition to what doikor said, you get sandboxing aka "trust".

If you can distribute through the Windows store only, hopefully it will be the end of the hideously unpleasant task of creating Windows installers.

You get all the new WinRT APIs.

Microsoft gets 30% of your revenue.

The guy in the Fedora is trying way too hard.

Yo, make some noise if you like to breathe! That guy knows what I'm talking about!

All of his presentations are like that, it's his personality.

Which is something I really don't get, at all. This all looks and sounds way much nerd-ier just because they try so desperately to look cool.

Pretty sure that's just that guys personality.

Why would you extrapolate his persona to all of Microsoft?

Well they chose him to represent them for a reason presumably, and it may be related to his ability to speak well. He's a little over the top but not to a fault in my opinion. It's close though.

Actually, I was talking about this kind of too-deliberate-to-be-true and trying-too-hard-to-look-cool atmosphere at Microsoft events, not about Bryan Roper's style in particular.

As an engineer in shoes of a startup founder, I wish my presentations were half as cool as his.

He ain't the best showman but it's always easier to talk about presentations than actually give them.

Turn any Xbox One into a dev kit O.o

They have been saying that for over two years.

"...Age of Empires 2 running as a modern desktop app..."

I could not care less. If I'm a developer who has a game in Steam, why would I want to do this? To divide my user base?

Why would it divide your user base? Isn't it being used as a glorified package manager? Everything is still Win32 under the hood.

Well, since the game is no longer married to Steam at that point, my users would be losing Steam's achievements, mods and matchmaking. Am I not understanding that right?

They showed off installing mods from Steamworks in Age of Empires II during the demo.

Those were mods from SteamWorks? Sorry, I didn't catch that part. I still genuinely wonder why I would want to convert my app into a "modern desktop app".

    Sandboxed security. 
    Easier install/uninstall.
    Backup/restore.
    Live tiles and notifications
    Downloadable from the Windows Store (which means it will show up in Cortana search results when searching for it, even if it's not installed)
    Ability to use excellent new WinRT API's
    Deep linking
    Share to other apps easily (e.g., post to Facebook)

etc.

Thanks.

To make is discoverable by non steam users?

You missed the idea. He was discussing that even complicated programs (and games) can be converted to use Windows 10 features (i.e. modern desktop) flawlessly without breaking existing code. He wasn't talking about replacing Steam.

To have a second, larger, market. Window userbase is huge, much bigger than Steam's.

Really interested in modern desktop apps and the desktop app converter. Are these actually available yet?

Win32 to UWP converter Facebook, Instagram and messenger apps coming

I think hololens is quite mind blowing though. I can totally see myself exporting class dependency graphs and exploring them in 3D.

Any updates on Xamarin? Are they going to make it more affordable?

Xamarin session is on March 31 at 2:00PM PDT.

facebook advertisement and customer metric integration as if the native telemetry wasn't enough now you can add more to your apps.

Will Cortana come with a thorough uninstaller?

Aww yiss... I'm loving it!

"Windows is a fully open ecosystem". Uhhhhh right :S

Except that it really is becoming that way.

Sounds amazing. Where do I find the Windows source on Github?

They never said "Open source", Just "Open"

yeah I understood that as open source. My bad.

Hey MS - next time please stream on YT - got big lags

I have nothing against streaming in YT, But it is not wise to stream at YT only at all. In so many countries YT is blocked.

I think they prefer using their own platform (Azure-based) to do live streaming.

cool - just they could make it usable before streaming - stream is lagging - I can barely see one frame every 10 sec

more likely it's an intermediary thing. it's smooth for me.

They should probably use Pied Piper, middle-out is unmatched

https://youtu.be/GgutlKV42SY

SUA lives again!

What about the horrible performance issues with Universal Windows Apps?

http://www.howtogeek.com/243012/why-you-shouldnt-buy-rise-of...

In a nutshell...

     No SLI or CrossFire
     VSync is Always On
     Always Borderless Fullscreen Mode
     No Modding
     No .exe File (and No Steam Controller)
     No Overlays
     Mouse Macros Won’t Work
     No Clear Refund Policy
     Only for Windows 10

And that applies to anything running as a "Universal App". This seems very anti-customer, and a great reason to buy elsewhere (or, well, encourage piracy through bad policies/technical limitations). What is Microsoft doing to ameliorate these significant issues?

Edit: Really now? Some of those issues were addressed during the video(still no transcript), yet many others still stand. So one takes a karma hit for asking tough questions?

They covered a lot of those -- SLI and VSync will get fixed in a May update, they showed off mods for Age of Empires II, they talked about overlay support.

> They covered a lot of those -- SLI and VSync will get fixed in a May update, they showed off mods for Age of Empires II, they talked about overlay support.

Unfortunately, I've been around the block and then some. I've heard the empty platitudes of promises for X and Y features, yet later on it's considered inconvenient to implement. But as of right now, SLI and VSync are broken.

I did see the AoE2 mods. Having not played that game, I took those mods to not actually modify the base executable. In other words, it appears you can load in-game mods, but absolutely verboten to touch the 'executable'... because there is none in any usable form.

I'm not sure I'd be comfortable running mods that binary-patched the exe, anyway. Outside of a few old, old, abandonware-type games that never had bugs fixed, I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of game mods just swap out assets, data, and some scripted logic.

Yes, for the majority of users, removing the ability to arbitrarily change an .exe is a massive feature of UWP over conventional Windows, as it closes off a lot of attack vectors for malicious software.

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