Microsoft hosts a number of events for developers, including TechEd, MIX and PDC. The other major event Microsoft has hosted since it announced that it was working on Windows 8 is BUILD. This year, the company just announced, BUILD will take place on its Redmond campus from October 30 to November 2. Just like PDC, BUILD doesn’t run on a set annual schedule, but when the company feels it has something important to communicate to its developers. This year, the conference is obviously scheduled to coincide with the launch of Windows 8 on October 26 and the launch of Windows Phone 8, which should also fall around this time.
As Microsoft’s Tim O’Brien, the general manager of platform strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft, notes in his announcement today, the company also plans to “have lots of other stuff to talk about too: Windows Azure, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012 and much more.” At BUILD 2011, Microsoft launched the developer preview of Windows 8 and outlined its plans to support ARM-based chipsets as well as X86 devices.
It’s relatively unusual for Microsoft to hold a major event on its Redmond campus. While Microsoft has all the facilities to host a major conference in its on-campus Building 33 conference center (with a fully featured “Executive Briefing Center” and the Microsoft Home house of the future right next door), this generally points at a smaller event. This makes sense, given that Windows 8 will already have shipped at that time, but O’Brien emphatically denies this and argues that “this will be unlike anything we’ve held on our corporate campus in a long time.”
Registrations for BUILD 2012 will open on August 8 (no coincidence, I assume). Microsoft hasn’t announced how much tickets will cost. Last year, full conference passes started at around $1,600.