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Build 2012 Slated for Week After Windows 8 Release
This year's developer conference is scheduled to take place at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Wash., just days after Windows 8 ships.
Microsoft has announced the dates for Build 2012, the developer conference for building Windows 8 applications that replaced the company's longstanding Professional Developers Conference in 2011. Scheduled to take place the week after Windows 8 ships, this year's conference is slated for October 30 to November 2, at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
Windows 8 is expected to become generally available on October 26, 2012, according to an announcement earlier this month by Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live divisions at Microsoft. Visual Studio 2012, which is required for Windows 8 development, is slated to release to the Web sometime during the first week of August.
In addition to Windows 8 development, this year's Build event is offering sessions on Windows Azure, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012 and Visual Studio 2012, according to Microsoft evangelist Tim O'Brien, who announced Build 2012 in a Channel 9 blog on Wednesday.
O'Brien noted that developers who are thinking, "if it's not in some cavernous convention hall, then it must be a dialed-down version of last year's event," shouldn't worry. "[T]his will be unlike anything we've held on our corporate campus in a long time," he said.
"[I]f you've gone to a Microsoft developer event, you know that most of the speakers and participants are from our engineering teams, so a campus event puts you in the thick of things along with the engineers directly responsible for our products and the platform opportunities they represent," he added.
Build 2012 follows last year's Build Windows conference, which took place September 13-16, in Anaheim, Calif. The highly anticipated event marked the unveiling of the Windows 8 Developer Preview, which was handed out to attendees on Samsung tablets. The conference was designed to get traditional Microsoft developers and Web developers onboard, as the company shifted to a new development paradigm.
The new app model was based on a native Windows Runtime (WinRT), capable of supporting components developed using C++, VB, C#, XAML, HTML/CSS and JavaScript code. It also marked the debut of radical change in the operating system's user interface with a Metro live tile design similar to the UI used for Windows Phone 7.
Windows 8 Metro-style applications designed for touch first, only run on Windows RT-based tablets powered by ARM chips. (Windows RT is the version of Windows 8 that runs on ARM, formerly called WOA.) Several tablets are expected to be released by manufacturers later this year. Microsoft has also announced Surface, its own tablet hardware designed to support Windows RT and Windows 8 Professional editions.
With Windows 8 devices expected at retail starting in late October, Microsoft is anxious to get developers onboard to build Windows Metro-style apps for the Windows Store that can showcase the advantages of the new operating system and hardware for the holiday season and beyond. Registration for Build 2012 opens on August 8 at 8:00 am PDT. The 8's in the time, month and date are by design, according to O'Brien. Microsoft is expected to share more details about the event in the coming months.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.