Microsoft Build has been moving away from big consumer announcements, instead focusing on business and cloud services. The company may, however, have some surprises in store for us when the developer conference kicks off on Monday in Seattle.

Microsoft has already published much of the breakout session titles, though it usually leaves a few unnamed until after the big keynote reveals. The ones we know about are heavy on AI, Azure cloud services, partner services, and developer tools.

In fact, Microsoft's own blog post about the conference states: "This year's event is focused on empowering developers of all kinds, from experienced computer scientists to tech beginners with big ideas we have so much in store!" This year, there's just one, 90-minute keynote from CEO Satya Nadella, so it seems there will be more vision than actual news.

I had hoped that, unlike last year, Microsoft would time the release of its next feature update to Windows 10, the May 2019 Update, with the conference, but that seems unlikely. The company is being very careful about the release, which it intends to keep in the preview testing channel longer than usual, until late May.

No doubt this is a response to the update hiccups encountered by some users with the October 2018 Update. Another new precaution is that, starting with May 2019, updates will no longer be pushed on users until their version goes out of support. Instead, the OS will pop up a notification that their PC is ready for the update.

Microsoft has teased partner news, and we'll certainly hear more about HoloLens applications and new Office capabilities. Read on for what else we may expect to hear about at the show.

Next for Windows

We know that Microsoft is hard at work getting Windows to integrate with smartphones. Android has benefitted most from this effort, but I'd love to see more functionality with iPhones, which Microsoft has previously said its working on.

We're likely to see more reveals of what's coming next for the OS, including things like Android screen mirroring, and we may find out the status of the postponed Sets feature. And no doubt the Fluent Design system will spread to more parts of the OS, improving consistency.

Microsoft is not expected to talk about a hot-button topic among Windows fanatics—Core OS (WCOS), also called Windows Lite—a lightweight, stripped-down version of the OS that's adoptable to lower-powered hardware.

Azure and AI

A whopping 209 sessions at the conference include the term Azure in their titles, giving you some idea of its central role. Azure is a key component in Microsoft's competition with Amazon AWS in the cloud service business. It's also central to the company's AI strategies, allowing programmers to tap into cognitive services like vision, speech, and anomaly detection.

Another push in this field is toward intelligent edge computing—letting the local device handle some AI computation rather than hosting everything on the server. This is essential for applications that need real-time determinations. There's actually one session entry called "What's new with Azure Cognitive Services," so stay tuned for that.

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HoloLens

The HoloLens 2, announced at Mobile World Congress in February, is a huge upgrade over its predecessor. It sports a larger vision field, Spatial 3D audio, eye tracking, and a more ergonomic, comfortable build. We'll definitely hear more about mixed reality and holographic computing, Microsoft's terms combining AR and VR.

Open Source

Long a foe of the open source community, Microsoft has in recent years changed its mind and jumped on the open-source train. It's contributed code like Xamarin, a distro of FreeBSD, Visual Studio Code, and TypeScript—a scalable, compatible JavaScript variant. In all, the company has contributed over 900 projects to the open source community. Heck, the company even bought GitHub, the largest online repository of open-source code around. I would be surprised if the company didn't announce additions to its open-source contributions during Build 2019.

Fluent Design

The Verge's Tom Warren recently produced an epic piece of tech journalism based on a visit to Microsoft's Redmond campus. A key takeaway is that consistent design is now a mission of the company. Fluent Design provides the language to achieve this consistency. Of course, that consistency must extend to hardware like the Surface and HoloLens. We've seen Fluent creeping into Windows components and default apps, but I expect announcements of more Fluent at Build 2019.

Partner News and Always-Connected PCs

Microsoft's blog post mentions partner news coming at the show. It would be cool to see reveals of really powerful Qualcomm-based, always-connected PCs, as previous iterations have been fairly underpowered. Qualcomm already announced that it's working with Microsoft on new AI chips, so we may hear more about those. The company also just announced a partnership with Dell and VMware to bolster Azure services.

Startups and Youth

Microsoft is emphasizing young people getting into coding this year, allowing attendees to bring family members between the ages of 14 and 21. It will feature a Student Zone and is also highlighting its Imagine World Cup championship, a global competition for student coding teams. This event will take place even before the keynote.

Xbox and Gaming

The conference coincides with the availability of the diskless Xbox One S All Digital Edition. Presumably that should prop up sagging Xbox One sales. But this is a developer conference, not a hardware or gaming conference. That said, Microsoft has often used the show to reveal upcoming game technology. A hot topic in gaming of late has been game streaming, with Apple's Arcade and Google's Stadia recently unveiled. Hence, we'll likely hear more about Microsoft's xCloud game-streaming technology.

Office 365/Microsoft 365 and Meetings

At last year's Build, possibly the most impressive demo was of a meeting overseen by a smart speaker cone that identified participants and made a replayable transcript of the meeting. I'd love to see more progress on this product. We also heard a lot about Microsoft 365, as opposed to Office 365. The former includes Windows 10 licenses as well as Office apps, mobile apps, collaboration, and security features. Perhaps we'll see more AI applied to this offering. Office itself got a major upgrade with Office 2019 version, but Microsoft continues to tweak it, so we could see some news.

I'll be in Seattle starting on Monday, so stay tuned for all the news.

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