While many — including myself — will be disappointed to see the lack of consumer-focused updates at Build 2018, this show is, of course, a developer conference. And Microsoft is showing off a bunch of developer-oriented updates to Azure, and its developer products and tools at Build 2018.

First things first: Microsoft is changing the revenue share policy for its store. App developers will now get up to 95% share of their revenue, giving only 5% to Microsoft — which is much better than what developers receive at the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. The updated revenue share policy doesn’t apply to games for obvious reasons, however.

For Windows 10 developers, Microsoft is introducing the UWP XAML Islands at Build 2018. With UWP XAML Islands, developers will be able to take advantage of Fluent Design and integrate Microsoft’s new design language, introduced at last year’s Build, into their apps — regardless of which UI stack they are using. This means that apps built on Windows Forms, WPF, or native Win32 will be able to take advantage of the new Fluent Design APIs using UWP XAML Islands.

For Visual Studio users, Microsoft is launching Live Share in preview today. The company first announced this feature, which allows for real-time code collaboration, late last year. Think of it as a modern way of doing pair programming, as it lets developers edit and debug code directly on Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code without needing to use any additional software or video-calling software. Developers will also be able to debug code on the fly using Live Share.

Microsoft is also bringing an AI-powered feature to Visual Studio as a preview today. The new feature, IntelliCode, uses AI to provide intelligent suggestions to improve code quality and help developers save time.

Microsoft is also showcasing other new features for developers. The company is launching new APIs for Microsoft Teams, support for Adaptive Cards on Teams and Outlook, support for Power BI Visualizations within Excel, .NET Code 3.0, the Windows Machine Learning platform, and much more.

Tagged with Microsoft Store, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Windows Developers