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...

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