Ask Paul: May 3 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I’m in Vancouver, British Columbia ahead of next week’s Build conference, so it’s no surprise that many are wondering about the show.

Reminder: Because Ask Paul is a Thurrott Premium feature, I am only answering questions posed by Premium members. Thanks for understanding. –Paul

Build hopes and dreams

dcdevito asks:

Paul, what are you looking forward to the most from Build next week?

Build is my favorite Microsoft conference, but with the company pushing its cloud-based platforms over the client-based personal technology products I care about most, I feel like I’m getting squeezed out a bit more each year. I assume this is a feeling most readers can relate to with regards to Microsoft generally these days.

That said, I do have some expectations and hopes from Build. And I’ve set up some interviews with people at Microsoft who work on the products and services I care about most so that I’ll have a good week even if the firm’s official presence at the show skews towards the cloud. (Which, of course, it will.)

Obviously, anything Windows is top of mind. I’m hoping for some clarity around Windows 10 20H1 and 19H2 with regards to why we’re testing the former already but not the latter and what the feature sets for each will look like.

I was hoping for some news about Lite OS and the EdgeBooks I expect to see happening as a result but have been told that that will not happen at Build.

I am very interested in the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge and do expect we’ll learn more at Build.

I wrote about UWP being supplanted by what were previously considered legacy platforms (Win32, .NET, WPF, etc.) and about me openly wondering about the future of the Microsoft Store. Both of these topics will come up at Build, though Microsoft won’t present them as I did. Instead, the move away from UWP will be described as the move to open up Microsoft’s modern app platform to all developers. And the move away from the Store will be described as the new Edge offering developers a new way to deploy their apps. Semantics.

Finally, I hope and expect to hear a lot about Microsoft’s cloud gaming efforts. Xbox is not a great business today, but it fits very neatly into the firm’s cloud future and could be huge going forward.

Azure Sphere, too. What’s going on with that?

Developer interviews

Chris_Kez asks:

It seems with each passing year there is less for consumers to be interested in at Build. Will you be able to find any developers of consumer-facing applications at the conference? If so, can you maybe do an interview or get them onto a podcast to talk about what they were excited/disappointed by, or just their thoughts on the state of Windows development?

I keep threatening to do more interviews, and I have set up some interviews for next week, though not with actual developers. I will try to do what you’re asking here.

Software development

helix2301 asks:

I would first like to say I just bought myself a Surface Laptop with 512 SSD / 16 Gig Ram / i7 was a big investmemt but I like it so far and have started using it over my Mac. I know Mehedi uses VSCODE as do I. I am also one who uses Pycharm and Visual Studio. I was wondering if you Paul do any kind of programming or tinkering anymore with programming? I know Leo bought himself a new Lenovo laptop to do programming with just wondering if its something your interested and if so what do you use.

I got started in the industry as a developer and many of the first 10 or so books that I wrote were about software development topics (Visual Basic, VBScript, Active Server Pages, Visual InterDev, Borland Delphi, and so on). Since then, I’ve kept up with software development but more in a dabbling sense. And that has evolved over the years as things have changed.

For the past year or more, my focus has shifted between mobile and web development.

On the mobile side, this has included iOS development in Objective-C and then Swift in Xcode on Mac, Android development in Java using Android Studio on Windows, and, most recently, cross-platform development in Flutter/Dart using either Visual Studio Code or Android Studio in Windows and Mac.

On the web development side, I have been studying JavaScript and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), using VS Code on Windows. I’m interested in TypeScript, a Microsoft improvement to JavaScript, as well, but haven’t really spent much time on it yet.

Fitbit interoperability

SeattleMike asks:

I know you’re a Fitbit user. I use and love the Charge 3 but I have endless frustrations with FitBit’s iPhone app. I would love to do things like see historical data, trending, improvements over time, etc., that the app just won’t do. Do you use or recommend any 3rd party apps that work with the Fitbit to provide these sorts of options? Thanks!

No, sorry. Ideally, this would simply be an open platform where you could mix and match whatever tracker you wish to use with whatever software and services. I did investigate tools for moving data from Fitbit at one point and found a mobile app that sort of worked. But because of limits in how much data Fitbit allows you to move at once, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Fitbit does have something called Fitbit Plus that may eventually provide the functionality you need. It’s invite-only right now, but if you search Fitbit’s support forums, you’ll see that this service can sync Fitbit data with services like Apple Health and Google Fit (for example, this post) on the fly. Once/if this is possible, there will almost certainly be many good options to do what you want.

Microsoft 365 for consumers

Pierre Masse asks:

Do you think they will announce Microsoft 365 for consumers at Build?

It would be the logical time/place to do so. (Ignite is about the enterprise, so that makes no sense.) As a developer show, Build will focus on Microsoft’s three big cloud businesses, which are Azure, Microsoft 365, and Xbox. So yeah. That makes sense.

Will they, though? I don’t know.

Android app bridge

ReformedCtrlZ asks:

Now that windows phone is dead and Microsoft is opening up to more development options for their platforms, do you think there’s a chance we’ll see a return of the Android app bridge? If Microsoft is looking to position their new lite platform against ChromeOS, does it not make sense to open up every possible way for users to get access to their favorite apps on Microsofts platform?

I think about this a lot. Am, in fact, somewhat obsessed with this topic.

For those unfamiliar, Microsoft once had an Android Bridge product in development alongside its iOS Bridge, Desktop Bridge, and Web Bridge products that would help mobile app developers bring their apps to Windows (which at the time meant Windows broadly: Windows 10, Xbox, Phone, etc.). But Android apps worked so well on Windows Phone that Microsoft canceled Android Bridge because it was worried that developers would abandon UWP and native Windows Phone apps.

Which is interesting because UWP never took off in a meaningful way, Windows Phone is dead, and Microsoft is now bringing all UWP functionality to once-legacy platforms like Win32, .NET/WPF, etc., as noted above. And it’s doubly interesting when you think about Lite OS and my assumption that Microsoft and other PC makers will make what are Edge-powered Chromebook-like laptops that I call EdgeBooks. And that there is no reason that these EdgeBooks couldn’t run Android apps, just like Chromebooks do.

I see this platform as the future of Windows now. Windows for normal people, if you will, where Windows 10 as we know it today becomes basically a workstation-like platform for those with advanced needs. On that note, I’m not sure that we’ll see a return of the Android Bridge per se, and the fact that that team was literally broken up with its members scattered all over Microsoft doesn’t help. But some effort to not just bring Android apps to Lite OS/EdgeBook but maybe to “real” Windows too? Yeah. I can see that. Especially the former. And I can see Microsoft extending the native Chrome OS capabilities around Android apps to make that more appealing to businesses too.

Will we hear about this at Build next week? It’s the logical place. But it may be a year too early, given that I was told that Microsoft will not discuss Lite OS at the show.