Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella[1] at the during his opening keynote at Day 1 of the Build 2017 developers conference in Seattle revealed that Windows 10[2] was now running on 500 million monthly active devices. That's a significant jump from the 400 million active devices figure revealed in September last year[3] - adding 100 million monthly active devices in roughly eight months.
While most announcements were developer facing, Microsoft[4] revealed that in addition to Harman Kardon's Cortana-powered Invoke speaker[5], the company had entered into partnerships with HP on devices and Intel on reference platforms to bring more Cortana-enabled devices. On the developer side of this announcement, Microsoft said the Cortana Skills Kit was now in public preview (in the US only), allowing developers to "build skills for Cortana[6] by creating a bot and publishing it to the new Cortana channel of the Microsoft Bot Framework."
The Redmond-based company also revealed that there were now 100 million monthly commercial active users of Office 365[7], which it claims makes it the largest productivity service available.
As we mentioned, Microsoft had several developer facing announcements to make, including some by Scott Guthrie and Harry Shum. To begin with, Guthrie announced the general availability of Visual Studio for Mac, which was released[8] as a preview alongside the Visual Studio 2017 Release Candidate for Windows back in November last year. The Windows version was released for public download back in March[9].
Guthrie and Shum also announced new Azure data and cloud services as well as new AI services. These will help developers quickly modernise their apps, apart from helping them build intelligent services...