Sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2011 with video on Thursday 15th September

Visual Studio 11 brings the most significant set of improvements for developing graphics-intensive apps in over a decade. Whether you are just getting started with 2D/3D games or a self-proclaimed "guru," there's something for you in this talk. We will walkthrough a slew of new tools integrated into Visual Studio that will make your life better.

Animations are fundamental in making Metro style apps lively and beautiful. Discover the animation library in Windows 8 and see how to bring these great animations to your apps with standard CSS 3.0 transitions and animations. In this session, you will learn how using standard templates and controls bring these polished animations along for free. You will also explore the library and learn how to add these smooth and elegant animations and transitions from the Windows 8 personality to your app’s experience!

HTML5 is ushering in a new era of graphically rich, visually compelling and highly interactive Web sites and apps. This session outlines some of what you can do with new HTML5 and CSS3 features introduced in Internet Explorer versions 9 and 10, including Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts, 2D & 3D transforms, transitions, animations, gradients, box and text shadow, border-radius, multi-column layout, inline SVG, and canvas.

Web app developers today are facing new challenges around how to expose data and services to multiple devices, browser apps and other cloud services. In this session we’ll explore how the Windows Communication Foundation Web API makes it easy for developers to expose their services and data to a broad set of clients and take advantage of rich emerging Web standards like WebSockets. We’ll show how simple it is to create new Web APIs, whether you are building Web apps or standalone services to expose existing functionality or data.

This session describes Windows Server 8 Continuous Availability across the entire solution continuum – single-node, multi-node and multi-site – and how it enables a range of server and storage appliances for different customer segments. The talk showcases sample hardware designs that create a new value chain for sophisticated yet cost-effective solutions, and covers various software partner opportunities around service, configuration and replication management, and cloud backup.

Through this session, learn how to take full advantage of local computer devices and resources without sacrificing traditional Web content and services. Come to this session to learn how Windows 8 enables you to integrate these capabilities in your apps while minimizing the risks associated with accessing content from the Web, even from untrusted sources. You will see how easy it is to bring your Metro style apps to life with dynamic content, Web data feeds, and OAuth-based services while maintaining the integrity of your Windows app.

When building servers, networks and storage for cloud scale data centers, many complex tradeoffs and technologies must be considered. These tradeoffs include performance, reliability, security, flexible virtual machine deployment, storage architecture selection and interoperability with the existing architecture. Each choice influences the other considerations. This session presents a few canonical architectures that highlight interesting tradeoffs for the design of servers and systems focused on cloud deployments.

To be announced.

Customers love to try an app before they buy it. Come learn how the Windows Store makes it easy for you to offer time-limited or feature-limited trial versions of your apps as well as how to create and capture ongoing value using in-app commerce.

In this talk, Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg will share project plans for the future directions of C# and Visual Basic, including a discussion of what trends are influencing and shaping the direction of programming languages. Anders will talk about asynchronous programming and Windows 8 programming, coming in the next version of Visual Studio. He will also discuss the long-lead project “Roslyn”, including object models for code generation, analysis, and refactoring, and upcoming support for scripting and interactive use of C# and Visual Basic.

Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform for quickly building and running scalable apps. In this demo-focused session, you will learn how to get started building your first Windows Azure app. You will see how to build and deploy an app to the cloud and consume several Windows Azure Platform services.

Windows 8 is moving to a single graphics driver model - the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) – offering more features over the older XP Display Driver Model commonly run on physical and virtualized servers. Windows 8 also brings updates to the inbox display driver (previously known as Standard VGA driver) which is the default standard on server systems. This session will provide information about providing support for Windows Server 8 systems that do not have WDDM capable graphics adapters, without having to update the hardware. We will also cover key design points for consideration in future server systems including utilizing graphics adapters for generic computational purposes and scenarios.

Build great touch apps for Windows 8 using XAML touch and gesture events. Learn how to create touch experiences using standard controls and behaviors and build highly responsive panning and zooming capabilities that customers will love. This session will also describe how to include mouse interaction with no additional work, and how to handle multiple types of input in a unified way.

In this talk, you'll go deep into the new C++ for Windows Runtime, meet with some of the developers on the compiler teams that designed the language extension for C++, and open the lid to see the wiring the compiler provides. We’ll discuss the new C++ for Metro style apps, including the syntax, the performance characteristics, the compilation model, and more. If you're a C++ programmer, don't miss this talk!

With throughput up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 and improved power management, USB 3.0 is the latest release of the world’s most popular PC interface. In this talk, you will learn how USB 3.0 is integrated into Windows 8 and hear Microsoft’s recommendations and requirements for taking advantage of this new technology.

Windows 8 is designed to provide a connected experience to users on a broad range of device form factors. In order to get and keep users connected to the Internet, the Windows team has made significant investments in Wi-Fi connectivity. This session will cover new Windows 8 Wi-Fi functionality, as well as improvements in connection times and power consumption.

This session provides an overview of the new Dynamic Access Control capabilities in Windows Server 8, and explains how to leverage these in line of business apps and products that focus on compliance and information governance (including data management and data leakage prevention). In this session, we will describe the new components including Central Access and Audit Policies, User Claims, Device Claims, Classification and new expression-based ACLs. We will demo how this all comes together and highlight the major integration and partnering opportunities.

Many apps today still use files directly. Files are the life-blood of some apps. This talk will use real code examples to walk you through the nuts and bolts of accessing and acting on files. Learn the common design patterns you need to access content locally, on the network, on the web and in other apps, perform various file operations, search through files and access properties using the rich Windows platform.

The Windows Driver Framework (WDF) helps developers build better drivers, more quickly and easily. This session will discuss how the WDF can improve driver reliability and will provide an overview on what’s new in the WDF in Windows 8 This session will also cover guidance for how to better realize power-savings and deploy drivers on multiple versions of Windows.

Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 bring a valuable set of new features and capabilities to agile teams. In this talk we will take a ride through an example project and show you how an agile team can efficiently prioritize, plan, and deliver high quality software.

Learn how to use Expression Blend to visually construct, style and layout Metro style apps using HTML for Windows 8. In this session, we will demonstrate how Expression Blend makes it possible to create a better user experience with greater productivity. We’ll start with semantic markup and JavaScript-generated content, and then we will demonstrate how to use Expression Blend to customize the user experience for Windows 8.

As you build your Metro style app using HTML5, follow these concrete and useful best practices to ensure it is safe and secure. In this session, you will learn patterns for handling untrusted input, working with Web content and protecting sensitive data thereby inspiring confidence in your users that your app will keep their data safe.

Metro style apps are much better with ink! In Windows 8, you code your Metro style apps for touch, and get pen and mouse support for free. In addition, with the new Windows 8 API for ink, you can expand your app’s capability and support ink strokes with precise control over Pen width and color. Add ink notations to your app, build an electronic whiteboard for families, create an app for the next Picasso—all these are possible. Interacting with your computer is going to be easier than ever with ink-enabled Metro style apps in Windows 8!

Dive into Windows Runtime and Win32 support for advanced touch and gesture input. Learn how to access rich touch input properties with PointerPoints, use flexible componentized gesture detection with GestureRecognizer, and work with touch and pointer device properties using PointerDevice. We’ll explore how apps can use Touch Targeting APIs to provide a better targeting experience and give an overview of touch APIs available to developers of desktop applications. Extend what you can do in HTML and XAML and take full advantage of the Windows Runtime touch and gesture platform.

In this session, you will learn how the new publish and subscribe messaging capabilities provided by the Windows Azure Service Bus can be used to interconnect services and apps. You will see examples of using pub/sub for decoupled communications inside Windows Azure using Queues and Topics, and you will also learn how to use Service Bus to bridge between services spread across cloud and local servers. Finally, you will see how Windows and Windows Phone apps can use the Service Bus to build continuous client experiences.

'Any service at any server in any cloud.' Next generation data centers should allow dynamic resource allocation and consolidation across large resource pools. The topological constrains of today’s data center networks limit how services can be assigned to servers. Windows Server 8 enables you to create an agile, multi-tenant cloud on top of your existing infrastructure by virtualizing the network. Network virtualization decouples server configuration from network configuration to provide a virtual dedicated network to each tenant. This allows seamless migration of workloads, while continuing to provide security isolation between tenants. Partners have the opportunity to become multi-tenancy aware and provide the next generation of services, devices, appliances, both physical and virtual, to augment and complete the Windows offering to build secure, scalable, multi-tenant public and private clouds.

This session demonstrates how the new claims based access control capabilities in Windows 8 significantly enhances the security audit and analysis capabilities for compliance and business forensic analysis. In this session, we will describe the new expression-based auditing policies that can be deployed centrally as well as locally, and will demo how monitoring products use these security events for compliance reporting and triggering alerts for suspected activity. In addition, we will describe the full set of auditing scenarios around claims-based access control to demonstrate end-to-end event-driven reporting capabilities for both compliance and day-to-day security management.

Xbox LIVE, Microsoft's premier entertainment service, is coming to Windows 8. Whether you are developing a game or another kind of entertainment app for Windows 8, Xbox LIVE can help your app stand out in the crowd and help engage and delight users. You will learn about how to implement our well-loved features like Achievements, Multiplayer, Avatars and Community and brand new ones like roaming storage and profiles.

This session will present an overview on how to develop drivers in Visual Studio using the new Windows Developer Kit (WDK) add-on pack. Topics will include developing, building, packaging, signing, deploying, debugging, testing and verifying device drivers – all within Visual Studio.

Do you want to associate your apps with specific file types, protocols or devices? Do your apps need to be able to launch other file types or protocols? Come learn how you can integrate your apps with the new file association and AutoPlay experience. This talk will walk you through code examples for common scenarios and highlight the changes in Windows 8. By the end, you will have learned how your apps can take full advantage of the new model.