Sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2011 about Windows 8 on Thursday 15th September

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People want apps that are social and connected - enabling them to upload pictures and share them with friends, download magazines, read news, or use the next big service on the Internet. Today’s popular services allow users to do these things over HTTP, but this can be tedious because of lengthy documentation, various authentication protocols and response formats. Come learn how Windows 8 makes it easy to provide a great social and connected experience by providing these HTTP services through a platform that is simple, rich, and enables multitasking - keeping your customers engaged in your apps.

RemoteFX in Windows 8 has been tailored for the Metro style UI to provide users a touch-first, fast and fluid experience on their remote desktops and apps over both LAN and WAN conditions for VDI, Session, and physical hosts. This session covers these enhancements with a series of demos using the new Metro look Remote Desktop client app. Whether you are an enthusiast using remote desktop at home or for your development needs, or an enterprise user getting work done using your IT provisioned centralized desktop and app deployment, to learn what is new in remoting in Windows 8, this is the session for you!

Will users of your Metro style app need to search through the app’s content? Come learn to leverage the Windows search contract to allow your app to search local files, an existing web service, or custom data. By the end, you will know how to make searching within your app reachable from anywhere in the OS, the right design and code patterns to use when implementing search from any language, and how to customize the experience and take advantage of built-in features.

Demand for wireless and network devices, including printers, connected TVs and keyboards are increasing steadily. Windows 8 makes it easy to connect devices to the PC by automatically detecting and installing network printers and TVs, enabling proximity-based device pairing and providing a new Metro style device discovery and pairing user experience. In this session, learn how device makers can participate in the new Windows 8 device pairing model to improve the experience and reduce the complexity for customers connecting devices to Windows.

3D graphics enable you to create the most immersive and impressive games around. But developers often think that creating 3D graphics is hard. In Windows 8, creating 3D graphics is easier than you think! You can write a Metro style game that uses the Direct3D API for high-performance 3D experiences. Come to this talk to learn how to use the 3D rendering pipeline of Windows 8 in your games and apps.

A great Windows 8 app starts with a great user experience. Come to this session to see how Visual Studio 11 Express enables you to take full advantage of the rich platform features, efficient workflow and tools that maximize your productivity and creativity when designing Metro style apps using XAML.

Every minute, people around the world are taking pictures and recording personal video and audio. They are capturing family memories, personal victories, and all the moments in between. You’ll learn how to capture these to provide powerful user experiences in Windows 8.

Microsoft has improved the Windows Certification Program for Windows 8, in order to drive high quality graphics experiences. This session will help you plan and develop graphics drivers that are certified for Windows. You will learn about new certification requirements, key testing scenarios and measuring graphics driver performance with the Windows Hardware Certification Kit.

Windows To Go is a new feature in Windows 8 that enables enterprise administrators to create USB drives containing complete, managed Windows images that users can use to boot and run Windows on any Windows 7 or Windows 8 capable computer. Windows To Go makes it possible for employees to use a managed device whether they work from home, a client office or in a free seating environment. This session will discuss Windows To Go, its hardware requirements and building compatible and complementary software.

Wi-Fi Direct is a new peer-to-peer device connectivity technology that enables high-bandwidth sharing of media and content between devices without requiring a separate Wi-Fi access point. Windows 8 natively supports Wi-Fi Direct and has integrated the technology into the Windows 8 Play To and proximity sharing experiences. In this session, you will learn how to build great devices that take advantage of Wi-Fi Direct connectivity and the Windows 8 in-box device experiences.

This session describes how data classification is used for information governance, security access and auditing using the new claims-based access control capabilities in Windows 8. In this session, we will explain how partners can provide automatic classification capabilities so that Windows applies appropriate security to the information. We will also explain how partners implementing data management capabilities such as encryption, archival, retention and disaster recovery can leverage classification in information governance offerings. Finally, we will show how line of business apps can tag data so that the appropriate information governance is applied to that data.

Draw users back into your app by taking full advantage of your tile in the Start screen. Learn how to make your app look great with tiles that come alive with content and notifications delivered through the Windows Push Notification Service. We also will teach you how to create content tiles that let users personalize their Start screen by creating deep links to specific places within your app.

Make it fast! Great performance is a huge motivator of satisfaction and user preference with apps. Direct 2D powers high-performance 2D graphics rendering in Windows 8. In this session, you will learn advanced techniques for optimizing your Direct2D code for maximum speed and efficiency in your apps.

The emergence of mobile broadband technology provides a new source of internet connectivity at home or on the go. To make it easy for customers to find, purchase and use mobile broadband, Windows 8 integrates it into the Windows Connection Manager and enables mobile network operators to create Metro style apps to manage services. This session will focus on how to customize the built-in experience for mobile broadband, as well as best practices for creating a Metro style app using the mobile broadband API’s in Windows.

Windows 8 introduces Version 4 of the printer driver model which provides support across all device architectures, enables custom printer experiences that extend Metro style apps, and reduces the need for compiled 3rd party code. This session will focus on the v4 driver model architecture and developer tool support, as well as how to build customized driver user interfaces using current app frameworks.

Windows 8 allows you to build PCs that are always connected to the Internet and deliver great battery life. This session will cover new network power management innovations that help PCs meet this goal with the help of the right network hardware.

Now that you know how contracts work in Windows 8, come learn how to leverage the Windows Share contract in your Metro style app. You’ll discover how to help your customers easily share content from your app through other apps installed on their PC. You’ll be ready to leverage Windows Share to connect your customers to the people and apps they care about.