Build Conference Goes from Zero to Sold Out in an Hour -- Visual Studio Magazine

Onward and UpwardKeith Ward, Editor in Chief, Visual Studio Magazine

Build Conference Goes from Zero to Sold Out in an Hour

If you blinked, you missed it. If you were on the phone, or out on a run, at the store or in a meeting, and you didn't sign up for Microsoft's upcoming Build conference, you're out of luck.

It appears that the show sold out in an hour. That's One. Single. Hour. Sixty little minutes.

Wow. Fortunately for us press types, things don't work quite the same way. I was in the middle of a press briefing -- with Microsoft, ironically enough -- when Build registration came and went in the time it takes to watch a Star Trek episode. So I'm set for Build, but many, many others aren't.

That bites, as does the timing of the show: Oct. 30 - Nov. 2. Doesn't anyone in Redmond have a calendar? None of those people noticed that Oct. 31 is Halloween? That's a pretty big holiday for lots of folks. I'm wondering if Microsoft is planning a massive party for that night, seeing as how they're keeping us from tricking and treating. I assume, of course, that the timing is much more due to the release of Windows 8 than anything else, but still...

I doubt there will be many earth-shattering announcements; most of those -- Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012, .NET 4.5 -- have been made. I'll be very interested in seeing how Microsoft positions its Surface tablet, given the growing unease by some OEM partners about hardware competition from Redmond. I'll also be watching closely for announcements related to Windows Phone 8, which could be the big deal in terms of news.

So there will be a lot going on; we'll try to keep those of you who had something else to do that hour informed.

Posted by Keith Ward on 08/08/2012

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.