The final day of the Build 2018 conference is here! I will tell you about the great and awesome sessions from day 3 and the final celebration in Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle!
The afternoon block started with another great session - David Ortinau presenting What's new in Xamarin.Forms 3.0. After a quick recap of the latest updates of XF in 2017 including Native Forms and .NET Embedding and major performance improvements, David started presenting the new features of X.F 3.0. Among the most notable ones are Visual State Manager, which many WPF and UWP developers know and love, and CSS styling. The demos in the session were demonstrated using Conference Vision app which was built specifically for Build and features slick animations, Azure Cognitive Vision and more. The most pleasant announcement from this talk was that XAML Standard is alive and will be partially showcased in the next point release of XF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNU8-IXjyaI In Get in the Zone: Visual Studio 2017 Productivity Enhancements Allison Buchholtz and Kasey Uhlenhuth gave us an extensive recap of improvements to editing, refactoring, debugging and testing in latest releases of Visual Studio 2017. It really showed, that the IDE improves drastically and has more and more features that make it the perfect choice for any developer and even that the team is listening and implementing features that had to be supplied using extensions up until now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ozHCNVmrcw Finally, with head full of cool demos and announcements, I visited the Amplify your Awesome talk. This sessions was advertised before Build on Twitter, but I didn't really know what to expect. From the very beginning, it was clear that this is going to be something special. Six speakers were to take turns on the stage and each of them had just five minutes to deliver a powerful message to the audience to amplify their awesome - basically lightning talks, with the twist that the slides were switching automatically. The format was pretty cool and each speaker really delivered. Chris Jackson focused on epic goal setting, Lorraine Bardeen talked about capturing your heart's desire and passion and applying it to life, Raymond Chen told us how to write a great blog, Jeniffer Marsman gave us five tips for being awesome based on popular songs, Donovan Brown focused on the art of delivering amazing presentations and finally Jessica Payne explained how to be really awesome at failing. Definitely check out the video of this session, because it was not only extremely entertaining but also inspirational. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46BZMctAcNg And with that, Build 2018 conference was a wrap! Not long after the show, shuttles transferred us to Museum of Pop Culture for the final Build celebration. Microsoft reserved the whole building designed by Frank Gehry and served a variety of food and snacks, along with live concert and full access to the whole museum and its exhibitions. [gallery ids="1247,1248,1249"] The museum features many different themed exhibits including Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy, Indie Games, Star Trek and Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes. I spent most of the time in the Marvel exhibit which is the largest one and surely the one I was most interested in. [gallery ids="1251,1252,1253"] It told the complete history of Marvel comics from its inception and included not only unique copies of the oldest comics, but also actual props from the movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. [gallery ids="1237,1238,1239,1240,1236,1235"] One of the exhibits included a Kinect-powered "Become Iron Man" experience where you could step into Iron Man's shoes and try flying around in a virtual Stark lab and shoot down targets which was pretty cool. [gallery ids="1242,1243,1241,1244,1246,1245"] Outside the museum as a dome in which participants could dance to silent disco, play games on several Xboxes, challenge others at billiard and get your own caricature done in three minutes by one of the three fast caricaturists [gallery ids="1254,1255,1256"] The celebration ended at 10 PM with shuttles taking us back to the city center. I have returned to hotel and then finally took out all the conference swag from all my pockets and bags. So how many stickers and shirts did I collect?
I actually started to worry if I will even be able to pack this all in my bag, but luckily I had it almost empty on the way there and I was able to compress everything inside :-) . So that was it for Microsoft Build 2018 conference. I had one more day ahead of me in Seattle before my plane departs in the evening, so you can expect one more post on this trip. Stay tuned!