Microsoft Connect(); 2016 Developer Event Coming to NYC Next Month

Microsoft today announced it will once again host its Connect(); developer conference in New York Nov. 16 and 17.

The event, which will be live streamed, will be an opportunity for Microsoft developers to get a look at many of the latest innovations from Microsoft’s developer unit, its cloud experts and others. An update of the Visual Studio developer tools suite is expected to be highlighted, among other things.

“At Connect(); 2016, Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie and Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman, alongside leading industry innovators, will share the latest innovations from Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure, SQL, Windows, Office and more,” said Mitra Azizirad, corporate vice president of Cloud Application Development & Data Marketing, in a blog post about the event. “Over the two days, you’ll have the opportunity to engage in live, interactive Q&A sessions with our engineering teams, customers and partners and learn how it’s now easier than ever before to build and manage breakthrough intelligent apps that work across Android, iOS, Linux and Windows.”

This will be the third Microsoft Connect(); event to be held in New York in the fall. However, in 2013, Microsoft held its Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event in New York in November. Azizirad said this year’s event promises to be the best Connect(); yet.

IDC analyst Al Hilwa said, “Microsoft’s Connect(); developer event has grown into a significant milestone for developers building modern apps for cloud, mobile and DevOps deployment scenarios, in the process helping drive positive business impact at their companies,” Azizirad noted in her post.

Connect(); has indeed become a popular Microsoft developer event during the fall season. It was at the first Connect(); event in 2014 where Microsoft began to build out its “any developer, any app, any platform” strategy. Microsoft announced plans to open-source key components of .NET at its Build 2014 conference in San Francisco two years ago. The company then shared its expanded plans to open-source the full server-side .NET Core stack at Connect(); 2014.

Microsoft’s goal is to become the premier provider of development tools for building any application on any platform, and taking its popular .NET framework cross-platform to Linux and the Mac is key to that strategy—along with its Xamarin acquisition and mobile developer tooling.

Azizirad said developers inspired Microsoft to create the Connect(); event.

“You are at the center of incredible business transformation and the disruption of entire industries through the development of powerful apps that change the world,” she said. “For the past two years, we’ve unveiled new innovative technologies and solutions at Connect(); that represent our relentless drive to meet the needs of any developer, building any application on any platform. Connect(); 2016 is the next step on our cloud-first, mobile-first world journey.”

In August, Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio “15” Preview 4, the latest edition of its flagship developer toolset that introduced a host of bug fixes and new improvements including a new installation experience for developers.

The new installation experience is designed to reduce the minimum footprint of Visual Studio, install more quickly with less system impact and uninstall cleanly, and make it easier for developers to select and install just the features they need, Microsoft said.

“The highlight of this release is that nearly all of VS is running on the new setup engine, resulting in a smaller, faster and less impactful installation,” said John Montgomery, Microsoft’s director of program management for Visual Studio, in a blog post on the release. “The smallest install is less than 500MB on disk (compared to 6GB in the previous release of Visual Studio). There are a couple of ‘workloads’ that aren’t present yet, including .NET Core tooling and Azure tooling, but the rest of the existing VS 2015 feature set is available.”

There will be more to that story at Connect();.