6–8 May 2019, Seattle. The last fully in-person Build before the pandemic, held at the Washington State Convention Center. The keynote felt less like a product show and more like Microsoft handing developers a roadmap and saying here, hold on to this for a while.
What we took away
- WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel inside Windows, native Docker compatibility, and dramatically faster filesystem I/O. The first time Windows was an honestly good Linux developer machine.
- Windows Terminal — a modern, tabbed, open-source terminal that finally treated
cmd, PowerShell, and WSL as first-class citizens. - The unified .NET 5 roadmap. .NET Framework, .NET Core, Xamarin, and Mono announced as one platform shipping November 2020 — the strategic decision that everything we now do at ThreeB IT depends on.
- Chromium-based Edge previewed with Internet Explorer mode, Collections, and stronger privacy defaults.
- AI for accessibility: Seeing AI, Live Captions, real-time translation in PowerPoint.
Why it mattered for ThreeB IT
ThreeB IT had been operating for two months when this keynote went out, and the world Microsoft drew in it was the world we were already building on. One .NET. Windows that runs Linux without compromise. A terminal you can actually use. The strategic bets we'd made on 1 March 2019 — stay close to the Microsoft stack, build and run — got validated, on stage, ten weeks later.
"As developers, the decisions you make and the code you write matter… the world is becoming a computer." — Satya Nadella, Build 2019 keynote.
That line aged into a thesis we ran a company on.