Microsoft TechEd 2013 builds ties with developers

Held at the Hotel Lalit Ashok in Bangalore, Microsoft's TechEd event kicked off on Monday, 18th of March, to the presence of enthusiastic developers from the Microsoft community coming to attend the deep-dive tech sessions that were being offered by professionals and engineers from Microsoft.

Microsoft's TechEd 2013 consisted of keynote speeches, demos and workshops from experts for developer community and enterprises, on how Microsoft's latest technologies and platforms can be leveraged to build apps. Currently, Microsoft is touting Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Office 365, Office 2013 and Windows Azure as developer-friendly platforms that will support apps built by developers. Microsoft believes that this offers an excellent revenue opportunity for developers, and with around 60 million Windows 8 licenses having been sold(reported in January 2013), Microsoft believes Windows 8 will offer the widest audience for app developers.

Microsoft hosted multiple arenas during the event. One of them was the Microsoft App labs, which was a section dedicated to helping budding Windows 8 developers to perfect their apps. Armed with a wide variety of test devices, several Microsoft app developer experts were on hand to help provide design advice, as well as tweak developer's apps to perfect their quality.

We spoke to several developers, who told us that porting apps from Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 was fairly easy. Girish Nulli(CEO, Antara Software), told us that "It's only the UI which needs major changes to port an app over. 80% of the back-end is the same. Microsoft has promised us that with the next version of the API, the back-end functionality can just be replicated." He added that the UI can be modified for a Windows Phone 8 app within a day.

A few months ago, Microsoft also held the AppFest competition in Bangalore, where a Guinness record 2,567 developers coded non-stop for over 18 hours, producing Windows 8 apps.