Microsoft Future Decoded 2015

It was about this time last year that I wrote a rather negative blog post regarding the Microsoft Future Decoded event. The event was meant to show up and coming technologies and to help inspire developers to go off and create the next generation of awesome software.

I felt it failed to do that.

This year however, I'm glad to report, Microsoft got it right.

The day, like last year, kicked off with the key note speakers. The key notes were all presented by very good public speakers but even more important was the content being shown. All of it was relevant. All of it left me wanting to go away and research a topic or to try and come up with new and inventive ways of using a piece of new technology. More importantly, it got me thinking which is the whole purpose of the event.

There was a big emphasis on the Microsoft cloud, which in fairness, is massively impressive. There was even more information regarding the azure machine learning service and it's not surprising. The ability to recognize patterns or anomalies within a huge data set is a very powerful tool. One of which I didn't realise I had at my fingertips. Learning about how the theory behind it works, as well as the practical side of things was vastly interesting and may just prove to be the next area of computer science that I devote my time to.

The technical sessions followed the keynotes and they too were interesting and thought provoking. An area that I'm interested in at the moment is the imminent release of .NET 5. The technical tracks demo'd various new features included in that release. As an example, a simple performance test was run on the new Kestrel web server (the one that replaces IIS in Core.NET) and the sheer difference between the two was staggering.

I expect these events to be thought provoking. I expect these events to inspire and I expect these events, at times, to make me go "Wow!".

This event did all of that.

Bring on next year!