AltConf / WWDC Wrap-Up

Visual Studio App Center

Visual Studio Mobile Center is now Visual Studio App Center. Learn more here.   We just wrapped up four days in San Jose for AltConf 2017, and we had a fantastic time. We shared some information, learned an awful lot from attendees, and had a blast along the way. Here are some of the highlights. “Automate all the @#$% tasks and release more often” with Ryan J. Salva

Speaking Sessions

We got to present three sessions to several hundred attendees. Ryan J. Salva spoke about how iOS developers could automate their way to productivity, Craig Dunn demoed our brand-new Visual Studio for Mac, and Simina Pasat and Luke Kim showed how to build an integrated pipeline for builds, tests, beta distribution, and release management. Thanks to everyone who attended the sessions, and thank you for all your feedback.

The Booth

We had a lot of fantastic interaction with developers at the booth. Many attendees had never heard of Mobile Center, so it was a great opportunity to get a fresh perspective on what we’re building. Some popular questions:

  • “Will it really work with Swift apps?” (Of course! We actually supported native iOS apps written in Swift and/or Obj-C before any other languages or frameworks.)
  • “Are those UI tests are running on emulators?” (Nope. Not even one. We have more than 2700 real iOS and Android devices in our data centers)
  • “How do you build apps without a Mac?” (Magic. And some dedicated Mac build agents in the cloud.)
  • “Is this really a Microsoft thing?” (It really, really is. Really.)

Demoing Mobile Center

We also got some questions about our roadmap (“Launching later this year!”) and pricing (“Very, very soon”), and a ton of offers to provide more detailed feedback. Please do. We’re building this for you, and if you don’t like it, we don’t like it.

The Party

If there’s anything devs love more than a fully-automated CI/CD pipeline, it’s probably beer. More than 200 devs joined us for happy hours Tuesday and Thursday. It was a terrific opportunity to dive in deeper on your feedback and feature requests, but also a fun way to just meet other developers who want to do the same thing we do — change the world with mobile apps.

It was really more of a Happy Hour and a half…

And because it’s so awesome, a bonus pic of Jayme Singleton showing our youngest future developers how to control robotic spiders with a Xamarin app:

Jayme Singleton with a young attendee

Thanks so much to everyone who came, and don’t wait until next year to stay in touch. Sign up for Mobile Center now and let us know what you think!

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