The dust has barely settled on //Build 2016; one, of the two premier annual Microsoft conferences: //Build and Ignite!  For those of you who not aware of it these two conferences morphed from two earlier Microsoft conferences.

//Build is the successor to the earlier Professional Development Conference (PDC).  That conference was targeted mainly at developers. It is still primarily for developers.

Ignite! is the successor to the popular Microsoft TechEd conference. It was targeted mainly at IT Infrastructure types.  Ignite! still maintains that focus.

However, in this day and age of DevOps the lines between the two constituencies are blurring quite a bit.  There is often something for each in both of these conferences.

Although Ignite! is scheduled for September 26th in Atlanta this time //Build 2016, held in San Francisco at the end of March, has just passed by.

There were a large number of announcements at //Build 2016.  Here is a brief summary of the ones that I feel are most important to the Azure community. (There were also a  large number of non-Azure related announcements; but I will leave those for someone else to catalog. )

Here is my top 10:

1. Azure Functions PaaS Preview (Server less computing/AWS Lambda Compete)
2. Virtual Machine Scale Sets General Availability (Autoscaling without pre-creating VMs)
3. Azure Service Fabric General Availability (A hyper-scale successor to Cloud Services)
4. Storage Service Encryption Preview (Encryption for Blob Storage rest.)
5. IoT Starter Kits & the IoT Gateway SDK
6. Document DB Mongo API Support Preview (A widely used NoSQL database) 
7. Import/Export up to 8TB
8. U-SQL for Data Lake (A new SQL Like language for Big Data)
9. DevTest Labs enhancements
10. PowerBI Embedded Preview

There was an excellent Day 2 keynote by Scott Guthrie recorded and available on Microsoft’s Channel 9 video site.  There are also a large number of session videos posted there so that, even though you did not get to actually go to //Build, you can take advantage of them. You can find one on any of the topics above, and more.

Enjoy

Bill