Microsoft continues to woo the app development community and announced several new developer opportunities at Build 2014. These announcements included several interesting developer sessions focusing on Windows Phone 8.1, Windows Azure, Windows and other Microsoft platform.

The two updates are obviously occupied a good part of the conference keynote, but the Redmond company has also announced new equally important news for both developers and end users, i.e. the Windows universal app. The same applications can be installed on PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones and Xbox One.

Until now it was necessary to create separate app for Windows Phone, Windows and Xbox One. Now a single app will work on all devices, regardless of form factor. In November 2013, Microsoft had unified the account and the registration process for publication on the Windows Phone Store and the Windows Store. The next step is therefore to develop Windows apps universal, opportunities made ​​possible by the same Windows runtime that enables the reuse of code across all platforms.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC

To create the universal app, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC. In addition to new features for productivity and collaboration, the update includes the Shared Projects that allow you to develop an app suitable for smartphones, tablets and PCs. Developers can decide to make the app only once and can be installed on multiple devices. The universal app will be identified with an icon depicting a smartphone superimposed on a computer. Thanks to the cloud, users can synchronize content, notifications and in-app purchases.

The universal app Windows will reduce development time, as you will only need to make small changes to the interface, integrate support for mouse and keyboard on a desktop, and controller and Kinect on Xbox One. To simplify the convergence between platforms, Microsoft has also unified pricing structure and revenue sharing model.

The major new features of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 include Windows Phone tools and support for universal Windows application development, the final release of Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2, and TypeScript 1.0. In Visual Studio, Microsoft introduced a notion of shared projects for C#, C++ and JavaScript, making sharing code and assets between the Windows and Windows Phone heads of the same app as easy as possible.

Microsoft is taking its Microsoft Azure platform and Visual Studio Online and bringing them together to provide a fantastic end-to-end experience from a developer perspective in a single portal. Microsoft also made it clear that it would be providing deep Visual Studio integration with Azure. For example, developers can now manage, delete and debug virtual machines (VMs) on Azure from Visual Studio.

Microsoft’s S.Somasegar in a blog post says the suite of tools in Visual Studio for Windows Store development can all be used during development, debugging and diagnostics for Windows Phone 8.1 projects.  This includes key new diagnostics tools, such as the memory profiler and the combined UI responsiveness, energy consumption and CPU utilization can be used to profile your Windows Phone 8.1 universal apps. Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 enables developers to make WinRT-based apps for Windows Phone in C#, XAML, C++/XAML, C++/DirectX and JavaScript/HTML.

Focused on Windows Phone 8.1 platform

Windows Phone 8.1 brings with it many other innovations including Action Center, the swipe keyboard, Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana, the separate management of volume levels and the debut of the mobile version of Internet Explorer 11, a new application for the camera and one for managing podcasts.

But for developer, Microsoft has announced APIs to make development easier and less complicated for developers. The Windows Phone Speech APIs help developers integrate app into Windows Phone’s new system-wide speech and natural language user experience. The new converged XAML app support on Windows Phone 8.1 along with new Silverlight 8.1 contribute Windows development to a different direction. That’s not all. Now developers building enterprise apps will be able to use .NET code alongside WinRT code.

To improve the developer experience on Windows, Microsoft announced updates to Windows Store to improve app discoverability and monetization, as well as easier shopping for end users with improved search, more personal recommendations and better merchandising.

In addition, Microsoft delivered a preview of its .NET Native Code Compilation for Windows and Windows Phone. The .NET Native is a faster just-in-time compiler to produce native images with improvements to startup time, memory usage and application performance.

Ubiquitous computing

To help developers build innovative apps using a natural user interface, Microsoft detailed plans for Kinect for Windows v2 with a new sensor and SDK. These tools will enable developers to create Windows Store apps, with the Kinect sensor with precision, responsiveness and intuitive capabilities.

The introduction of the Enterprise Mobility Suite can be seen as the Microsoft’s ubiquitous computing future that will bring many devices and many scenarios, with sensors, smartphones, tablets, and big screens into one platform. Bringing together the Mobility Suite and Azure makes a lot of sense when you consider just how devices are being used and how it is being managed.

It’s the machine learning systems in the cloud that make features like the recently announced Office Graph work, and Office for iPad. Microsoft is also providing rich APIs and cloud services, where hardware and software developer come together to take full advantage of Windows devices.