Developers’ Heads Will Be In The Cloud At Microsoft’s Build Show

The focus of Microsoft's developer show this week is expected to land on cloud-computing and new applications being opened.

For a few days this week, legions of technicians wearing lunch mats covering downtown Seattle at lunchtime will not work for Amazon.com.

Some are here to see Microsoft.

The most important technology show in Microsoft's Calendar - The Structure Developer Expo - comes to Seattle this week, drawing an expected 5,500 technologists to the city. It is the first time the event will take place in Microsoft's backyard since 2012.

Microsoft has changed a lot in that span.

The Redmond company spent much of the last decade touring Silicon Valley, an effort to get people who develop consumer apps to bet on Windows, a tougher sale as Google, Apple and Facebook tastes won the battle for The eyeballs of consumers on the web And in the smartphone market.

But in recent years, Microsoft has reoriented its efforts to be a developer of business technology, focusing especially on the growing dominance of cloud computing.

The concentration of the cloud computing experience has been a driver of the recent growth of the Seattle-area high-tech industry, with startups and giants like Google and Facebook installing or expanding to leverage talent in the field.

"Seattle has grown a much more complete community (technology) in the last five, 10 years," said Alex Miller, who works with developers in the online programming community Stack Overflow. "Previously, Seattle may have been a bit more corporate - Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon. You now have a lot more variety in terms of the work being done."

Microsoft is expected to announce new features and capabilities planned for a range of products in its Build program, which runs from Wednesday to Friday at the Washington State Convention Center.

The company uses the program to try to get programmers who build software interested in developing applications for Microsoft products. The event typically features a parade of executives, and, behind the scenes, coding demonstrations that explain the ins and outs of creating tools that play well with Microsoft's range of software.

"What has been exciting over the past two years has really been a renaissance for Microsoft," said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise unit, and a long-time developer of software builder. "I think the level of energy among developers about what we are building is really high. Hopefully, we will meet these expectations."

The four previous iterations of the fair were held in San Francisco - years that included efforts largely failed to attract developers of Windows 8 applications and editions of Windows smartphones.

External observers are hoping this year will focus on cloud computing, and new applications ranging from "smart" chat robots to analytical tools that help companies make sense of the stacks of data.

The diversity of technology on display in the program has grown with Microsoft's emphasis on the cloud, according to Microsoft employees and partners. During its days of PC monopoly, Microsoft could wait for developers to come to the company, and essentially require them to use Microsoft tools.

But in the open world of cloud computing, Microsoft has adopted more technologies built outside its walls, including a range of open source software and the much-feared Linux.

"It used to be an absolute Windows,.NET display," said Julia White, a corporate vice president at Microsoft who oversees Azure marketing, referring to the Microsoft programming framework built in the early days of the modern web. "Now, it's a much more diverse crowd. Much more a reflection of broad technology than Microsoft's loyalists."

Peter Yared, chief technology officer for Sappho, a San Francisco-based software maker, called Microsoft's approach to developers now "a complete turnaround."

The Sapho product, which allows employees to complete work in the workplace from a chat window or text message, links to the Microsoft Team Chat service. He plans to attend the conference in Seattle.

"It used to be, that they had come here and say 'you have to implement Windows Phone,'" he said. "It's now 'What can we add to the Teams so that their customers use it more?'"

As for this week, he said, "it's going to be cloud, cloud, cloud."