Build 2020 Highlights

Build has started today, and like most events during this time it has gone virtual. I’ve been following it online and just wanted to mention a handful of things from the opening keynotes that made an impression.

winget

We’ve had chocolatey for a while, we’ve also had scoop and appget as alternatives. Microsoft then added one-get which also let you add providers such as chocolatey. But it looks like we now finally have a great package manager to use in Windows: winget. It seems it’ll make things much simpler for us. It seems to use a curated list of apps and you can contribute to the list of apps in their repo here. I’ve been working on a script to set up my machine so it seems like I need to refactor them now 😅

WSL2

WSL2 is out of preview as of the last version of windows, but we’ll be getting more cool stuff soon. I was quite surprised to see a linux node in windows explorer, providing a quick link to the linux filesystem. And GUI apps running in windows, even if it’s just in preview at the moment, is awesome. More details here.

GitHub

I don’t think any of this was “new new”, but:

• Codespaces are great. And paired with having a dev environment working on the cloud is super useful.
• I hadn’t heard of GitHub sponsors before. It’s a great tool for all developers out there working on opens source stuff.

Azure Static Web Apps

This was really cool to watch. It lets you deploy full stack web apps from a GitHub repo to Azure. These can be build by frameworks like Angular, React or View, or site generators like Gatsby. You can also optionally have a backend powered by Azure Functions. You set it up pointing to your repo and it automatically configures a GitHub Actions workflow. Read more.

WinUI 3

We had more details on the future of WinUI

MAUI

OK, so they took Xamarin.Forms and turned it up to eleven. The .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) lets you target Windows, Android, iOS and macOS with a single project. (I need to look into this a bit more to see how it compares with Uno Platform)

Project Reunion

So Microsoft is attempting to solve the UWP vs Win32 rift by decoupling APIs from these frameworks. This has been done for WinUI 3, Webview2, and MSIX. Here’s the Windows blog on this.

There’s going to a lot more to unpack today and in the coming days, and there’s a whole lot of content summarized in Microsoft’s Book of News so I’m going to leave it here for now.