PreEmptive Thoughts from Build 2017

Like so many of us returning from Build 2017, we at PreEmptive are feeling both energized and highly motivated. Energized because of the truly impressive innovation coming out of both Microsoft and our larger ecosystem – and motivated because we can all see the expanding concern around application risk management and data security in this rapidly evolving world – and of course, that is where PreEmptive Solutions comes in.

Microsoft announced (and released) a broad range of software at Build: Improving Azure, Visual Studio, cross platform application development, and DevOps automation and efficiencies. I’m proud to say that PreEmptive Solutions were able to continue our 15+ year tradition of keeping pace with Microsoft’s remarkable cadence with a few announcements of our own.

At Build 2017, we announced

• An update of our debug defense capabilities inside Dotfuscator to defend against native debuggers in addition to managed,
• Enhancements of our Xamarin integration to significantly simplify and automate our protection there, and
• Support for .NET Standard and Dotfuscator CE support for VSTS.

In other words, we also “announced (and released) a broad range software at Build improving Azure, Visual Studio, cross platform application development, and DevOps automation and efficiencies.”

I think my lasting impression of Build 2017 (and I’ve attended every Build so far) will be that the general awareness – even sophistication – around application risk management concepts and practices has never been higher. In fact, in the keynote (see image below) Microsoft noted that a specific key concern developers have is in making sure “their stuff” does not get hacked.

I see this jump in awareness as a direct consequence of the increasing importance of applications in all that we do. The higher the value of an application (and applications in general), the more it is worth protecting. And application developers attending Build certainly demonstrated the high value and impact of the work they’re doing. This is going to be an exciting year.