Microsoft's BUILD 2012 Set Days After Windows 8 Release

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

BUILD 2012 will take place mere days after the retail launch of Windows 8.

Tim O’Brien, general manager of platform strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft, announced on Wednesday that BUILD 2012 will take place just days after Windows 8 becomes commercially available.

Scheduled from October 30 to November 2, the event will be held on Microsoft's campus in Redmond rather than some "cavernous convention hall." The topics of discussion will include the just-launched Windows 8, Windows Azure, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and much more.

"BUILD 2012 will be on the Microsoft campus, and I know what you're thinking ... if it's not in some cavernous convention hall, then it must be a dialed-down version of last year's event, etc. ... but don't be confused: this will be unlike anything we've held on our corporate campus in a long time. More details to come," he teased.

He also indicated that this conference isn't one to be missed. "As we talked about in the January post, if 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.

Registration for BUILD 2012 will begin at 8am PST on August 8 (aka 8/8 @8am). At that point, Microsoft will start sharing details about keynoters, sessions, content, and more. Previous reports also claim that Microsoft plans to officially reveal Windows Phone 8 to the public during the conference -- it will go RTM in September, and then see the first wave of WP8 devices in November, sources said.

In Wednesday's blog, O'Brien also apologized about the timeframe, as it falls within the DevConnections conference scheduled for October 29 to November 1. "Yes, we knew about the date, and yes, we were worried about the conflict, as lots of folks are already committed to going to Vegas," he said. "The date for BUILD was mainly driven by (among other things) the date for Windows 8 availability, and the goal of slipstreaming behind launch to bring our dev community together the week after. Apologies to those who have the conflict."

Microsoft is currently finalizing details on pricing, and will go live with the info on August 8, so stay tuned. "Because my thesaurus was unable to suggest a decent synonym for 'super excited,' let's just say we're stoked about BUILD 2012, and we hope to see you there," he said.

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Kevin Parrish
38 Comments Comment from the forums
  • pjmelect
    Die Windows 8 Die.
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    pjmelectDie Windows 8 Die.Enough already, just go use OSX if it means that much to you
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    ReFS is something I am seriously looking forward to in Server 2012, it's gonna add a whole new element to data resilience.
    Reply
  • hotroderx
    I agree with Back I will at least try Windows 8 retail before I pass ultimate judgment on it. Who knows maybe people will even grow to love it.

    I am sure Microsoft caught tons of flack when they went from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 over the interface changes. I am sure they caught some flack when they released XP and its new start button interface.

    I am hoping they will give us some way to switch back to the regular style start button. I think people would be much more open to Windows 8 if they just allow them to choose Metro or Start Button instead of trying to force them.
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    HotRoderxI am hoping they will give us some way to switch back to the regular style start buttonYou already can, run Windows 7 in a VM
    Reply
  • memadmax
    Oh, I hope it doesn't rain when this goes down.
    Western Washington weather sucks sometimes.
    But I will be there, rain or shine =D
    Reply
  • memadmax
    HotRoderxI agree with Back I will at least try Windows 8 retail before I pass ultimate judgment on it. Who knows maybe people will even grow to love it. I am sure Microsoft caught tons of flack when they went from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 over the interface changes. I am sure they caught some flack when they released XP and its new start button interface. I am hoping they will give us some way to switch back to the regular style start button. I think people would be much more open to Windows 8 if they just allow them to choose Metro or Start Button instead of trying to force them.
    When Win95 came out, most people didn't have a computer except for geeks and businesses. But when it did come out it was so revolutionary, people didn't care about the UI, or even knew what a UI was... XP did indeed catch hell, it was called too "sesame street like"...

    But Win8 just plain does not make sense.... for a desktop.
    If MS would just say "OK! we got 2 versions of Win8! One for tablets! One for desktop with the Start bar!" Then I would have their back. But they didn't...
    Oh, and good luck getting businesses to buy this thing ANY TIME soon. You have to literally retrain people how to use a computer because it is such a departure from decades of the start bar, we are also in a recession, making money tight for the software itself and training people for it...
    MS Will NOT MAKE MONEY with this thing for a long time.
    And if they think that the tablets will pick up the sales, they are wrong. There are signs that Apple/Android already saturated the market, and the recession is STILL here...
    Reply
  • p05esto
    back_by_demandEnough already, just go use OSX if it means that much to you
    Windows 8 is almost as crappy as OSX, it will burn to the ground. No chance of success for Windows 8, just freaking horrible.
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    memadmaxOh, and good luck getting businesses to buy this thing ANY TIME soon. You have to literally retrain people how to use a computer because it is such a departure from decades of the start barIn most large corporations there will be banks of staff that all use the same 3 or 4 programs all day long, a Client Record Managment tool, an email program, the Office suite
    ...
    If these are placed on the home screen as big ass launch tiles then it will not take any retraining at all, click the tile and the program launches, when it does it behaves like it always did
    ...
    Honestly, way too much drama, try to dial it back a notch
    Reply
  • After using the Server 2012 pre-release I have to say I'm really disappointed in ReFS. Initially I was excited it would bring ZFS-like features to Windows but its not even close. At this point it seems really half-baked.

    Many NTFS features are no longer supported. Their explanation is that they are not commonly used. This includes: "named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas."

    Some of these I can understand, but quotas? those are widely used in enterprise environments. User data transactions (transactional NTFS) was just introduced in Vista and is a much better way to safely manage data updates. It's used by several windows subsystems like windows update so you don't end up with a broken system if theres a power loss.

    It is also incompatible with the new deduplication features. Self-healing only works with mirrored storage spaces so you have to choose between data integrity and space-efficient parity setups.

    Finally, they didn't add which is becoming an increasingly valuable feature: SSD caching. SSDs are becoming widespread and being able to use them for caching is a huge win in terms of I/O performance. For now it seems we're left with very expensive hardware options from FusionIO and/or SAN vendors.
    Reply