On Wednesday 29 July 2015 the Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands organized a Windows 10 launch party. I received an invitation and since it was scheduled at 19h00, it was easy to attend after work hours. I have lots of friends who are Microsoft Student Partners and Microsoft Interns. Besides, Microsoft Technology Evangelist, Arnaud Meslier is a good fellow I know since like 2 years now. I met Arnaud during the Orange Code Challenge where I was a participant. He represented Microsoft who was a sponsor of the code challenge. My team won the second prize and I had a nice chat with several of the sponsors afterwards. Arnaud was among and he was talking about Microsoft stuffs and all; that’s when someone pointed to him “Ish is a Linux fellow” :) Nostalgia!

I finished work on Wednesday and rushed to Caudan Waterfront; that’s where the Microsoft IOI office is found. I met Shelly and then we both headed to the office. I then met Zuber and Arnaud, greeted them and asked whether the presentations had started. Not yet. I went ahead and met other folks, Pritvi, Shivek, JoKi, Arshaad and Cédric whom I met for the first time; though we exchanged some emails on the Mauritius Internet Users mailing list.

I saw familiar faces from local user groups and undoubtedly a lot of MSPs were there. It was their day after all. Strangely, they awed at my openSUSE t-shirt :)

Shelly and I

The presentations started shortly after 19h00. Arnaud welcomed all the guests and introduced Windows 10 through a promo video and some quick features & plans of Windows 10. A series of presentations then followed by Adrien, Dishay and Alex; they talked about Visual Studio 2015 and demoed an app. They emphasized on new features. I could not grasp anything there as I did not know the old features. Meh! I’m ain’t a developer. Nevertheless, it was a cool presentation and I am always happy to see the young folks all excited and having such enthusiasm when presenting something they’re passionate about.

Chervine Bhiwoo, a fellow developer, shared his experience on Visual Studio 2015. He complemented the prez of the MSP folks and explored the new debugging features of Visual Studio 2015.

Chervine Bhiwoo, the debugging experience in Visual Studio 2015

Chervine left a bug in his application on purpose and showed how the Visual Studio debugging tools would help him identify that piece of code which recorded a duplicate entry in the app database. The flow of his presentation was smooth and he’s got good presentation skills.

Zuber, who is a Microsoft Intern, presented Microsoft Edge, the new Internet Explorer. Oops! I mean the new Internet browser. I briefly explored Windows 10 build 10240 in a Virtual Machine and did not adventure much with this new browser. Therefore, I closely watched Zuber’s presentation. He demoed handy features of Microsoft Edge, like marking up web pages with the finger or a pen and the page reading view. Oh, Zuber also did a nice demo of Cortana, the popular voice assistant of Microsoft Windows.

Lastly, JoKi presented Visual Studio Code. I am currently using VS Code on Mac OS X and openSUSE 13.2. JoKi has a detailed article on his blog for installing VS Code on Linux boxes. I’ll recommend following those instructions if you’re looking for a clean VS Code setup on Linux.

In between the presentations, we had a short break with snacks, cold drinks, tea and coffee. For once I had cardamon tea and not coffee. MSP folks, once again thank you for the invitation to the Windows 10 launch party, I enjoyed it :)