Ask Paul: May 27 (Premium)

After a bleary and extended stay in Mexico City, I’m back in time for Memorial Day. So let’s the long weekend started a bit early. I need to sleep. :)
Twitter feed on Thurrott.com?
Pakeha asks:

I see your posts on Twitter and wonder if these could also appear on your Premium Site for those who seldom access twitter?

That’s a good idea, and I feel like we did this at one point? (Maybe that was on the SuperSite, I can’t recall.) As you may know, we’ve just started a massive site refresh, and that’s an interesting idea for that, and I feel like we’ll need something else for the right rail (column). That’s definitely a possibility. I will throw it by the team, thanks.

Update: this is already getting some good traction. I think we’ll figure out something for this.
Build 2022
ggolcher asks:

Any impressions about Build? I personally find myself disappointed at the lack of substantial announcements. 'Very little about Windows or Office, no mention of Loop, or even confirmation of Microsoft Designer. The only product that got a bunch of announcements seems to me to be Teams. Anything I'm missing?

That’s interesting. I was actually pretty excited about Build 2022, but I think the difference is a matter of perspective. Google’s and Apple’s developer shows are big on end user/consumer news, and Build hasn’t been like that for years. And you really had to parse the news for anything interesting for end users.

Of course, Build started off with Windows 8 when Microsoft was still promoting Windows as its central platform, but it’s switched to Azure more recently, of course. And that’s been my issue of late: I don’t care at all about Azure per se, and with many Builds being Azure-heavy, they’ve made my favorite Microsoft conference less enjoyable (to me).

But the thing with Build is, it is a developer show. And I think from the perspective of Microsoft-focused developers, whether it’s on the client or the cloud, there was a lot going on. There was a reasonable amount of Windows news, and while there was no real “new” news for Edge, there were some interesting things there as well. From a client perspective, I’d point at .NET MAUI GA, Windows App SDK 1.1, the Microsoft Store (and less excitingly, Amazon Appstore for Android) improvements, Microsoft Dev Box, all the Power Platform advances, Microsoft Teams Live Share with extensibility, native Arm support for Visual Studio, .NET, .NET Framework, and Visual C++, and Adaptive Cards across both Microsoft Loop and Windows 11 Widgets.

For Windows specifically, I recommend that anyone interested in the platform, especially with a software development bent, watch the session Create next-gen experiences at scale with Windows. There is some real insight in there about the future of Windows, generally. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

I was surprised that we didn’t get more Loop news. I was really expecting a beta or whatever, but it’s...