Microsoft’s Windows 8 BUILD conference sells out

By Tom Warren, on 1st Aug 11 12:56 pm with 45 Comments

Microsoft’s Windows 8 centric BUILD conference is now sold out.

The software giant opened its doors to BUILD registration on June 1 at the All Things Digital conference. Two months later and the company has sold all tickets to eager developers wanting to learn the latest on Microsoft’s plans for 2012. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet noticed the sold out notice at Microsoft’s BUILD site and reports that some developers were unable to convince their managers that it was worth attending BUILD given Microsoft’s lack of agenda and information.

Microsoft is expected to deliver a Windows 8 beta at BUILD in September alongside more details on other Microsoft technologies. Internet Explorer 10 is currently being worked on and will be part of Microsoft’s Windows 8 offering. The company is expected to detail further IE10 enhancements and test bits for developers. The BUILD conference replaces Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, typically held every year.

BUILD developer conference

  • http://www.Nave360.com Sebastian Gorgon

    “some developers were unable to convince their managers that it was worth attending BUILD given Microsoft’s lack of agenda and information” So… is it even worth waiting for news from that event?. I want to see a LOT of windows 8 revealed. 

  • Anonymous

    I wish I could go.  Tablet/Windows 8…

  • SteveBallmer

    Aww…

  • SteveBallmer

    I’m such a poor chap, I was the CEO of Microsoft yet billy didn’t gave me any tickets!?!?

    • Anonymous

      Who’s Billy? Do you mean Bill Gates? He’s somewhere waging a war against malaria so he’s hard to get a hold of.

    • http://www.Nave360.com Sebastian Gorgon

      lol

    • http://www.youtube.com/user/ZephyrnixLive Lydell Washington

      ROFLMAO!

    • Pacific

      I think he was referring to Billy the goat. :)

    • Pacific

      I think he was referring to Billy the goat. :)

    • Guest

      You’re may be poor, but most of all you’re just not very funny and kinda pathetic.

    • Guest

      You’re may be poor, but most of all you’re just not very funny and kinda pathetic.

  • Alanandterry

    Good ol’ Mary-Jo. Making something out of nothing at all. If people couldn’t pursuade their managers to let them go, how come it’s sold out. Who wouldn’t go to see Windows 8 ?

    • Anonymous

      dude, that’s not the point. the point being that there were developers who were bit by MSFT’s idiotic lack of detail about build that would have been on the list otherwise. Although the number of seats would have been the same, it is in microsoft’s best interest to be forthcoming and clear with its best customers: developers and IT. Those who didn’t get a seat because they procastinated aren’t the point here.

    • Clamdigger63

      Come on. What did you think the conference would all be about

    • Alanandterry

      Yo Dude,
      Mary-Jo has always been a Negative Nellie when it comes to Microsoft. If I was running for election I’d hate to have her on my team.

    • Anonymous

      I like Mary Jo but she casts certain things in a negative light, the girl makes her living by reporting about Microsoft, she’s needs friends in Redmond and stop biting the hand that feeds her.

    • Guest

      Yes and no. They’ve been bitten in the ass before by letting Windows information out early.

    • Guest

      Yes and no. They’ve been bitten in the ass before by letting Windows information out early.

    • Anonymous

      Agree with you totally, Microsoft used to open the information spigot to certain developers and journalists and it backfired on them, journalists who were using early builds or Alphas would leak out information and criticize incomplete and buggy software publicly and violate NDA’s, and some developers would leak information as well.

      Microsoft wants to control when and how the information is released.

    • Won’t Be Fooled Again

      You’re joking, right?  Couldn’t be more transparent – on the heels of Microsoft’s greatest public relations nightmare of all time, you can’t expect that the Redmond crew’s going to come actually come clean, acknowledge the backlash they never saw coming and admit there is and never has been a master plan.  Tell the lie often enough and it becomes indistinguishable from the truth, right?  Of course they were going to claim the conference sold out well in advance – you start expecting, say, 3000 attendees and find that only ten have registered – what do you do?  You tell the public you only expected nine.

      Anyone for which this isn’t completely obvious will need serious medication come September…

      “I went to Build and all I got was this lousy t-shirt, ‘Silverlight is Dead’.

    • Lord Steve’s Bane

      Much as it devastates me to acknowledge the degree to which you’re right…

      You’re right:

      http://www.riagenic.com/archives/694

    • Lhudson

      Whaaaaaa?????  I have seen some rambling posts on here, but this pretty much takes the cake.  It is sold out.  The number of seats they had are the number of seats they had.  Believe me, they would take more if they could.

      As far as Silverlight being dead, it is not dead until Microsoft comes out and says it is dead.  Reading the internet posts of someone who was let go from Microsoft in that group does not make it a fact that something is done.

      Glad you are not part of the media…you would be part of the problem.

    • Lhudson

      Whaaaaaa?????  I have seen some rambling posts on here, but this pretty much takes the cake.  It is sold out.  The number of seats they had are the number of seats they had.  Believe me, they would take more if they could.

      As far as Silverlight being dead, it is not dead until Microsoft comes out and says it is dead.  Reading the internet posts of someone who was let go from Microsoft in that group does not make it a fact that something is done.

      Glad you are not part of the media…you would be part of the problem.

    • Lord Steve’s Bane

      Wow, L, the other dude seems to have touched a nerve, almost as if you’re fearful he’s right, and sadly, he is.  Whether you believe Scott Barnes has any credibility or not, having spent a lot of time in Redmond myself, and still working closely with a number of highly-regarded Microsoft partners, I can tell you that Microsoft’s put a great many of their partner projects on hold indefinitely, providing little reassurance that they’ll continue beyond September’s big revelations.

      It’s long been suspected by those still connected on the inside that WPF is dead and as much as it appears to upset you to the same degree it upsets me, all signs so far suggest that further investment in Silverlight and .NET itself are drawing to a close…

    • Guest

      That’s simply retarded.  To suggest that microsoft is gonna discontinue .NET, silverlight and wpf is…  I’m speechless.

      Windows phone = silverlight.
      Freaking visual studio is now built in WPF.

      Just about every software company that builds business software does it by using .NET and winforms, XAML or ASP.  Discontinuing these technologies would leave them with what exactly to convince the businessworld that windows is still the way to go?
      And then what?  Replace it with HTML5 and javascript?  Come on now…

      Will .NET and xaml continue to evolve?  Absolutely.  What I expect to see is a new GUI layer that will bring xaml based technology to C++.  Perhaps both .NET and C++ devers will use the same GUI, I don’t know. 

      What I do know… is that .NET and every technology it brought forward (winforms, xaml, asp, wcf, …) will continue to stay relevant for years to come.

      HTML5 and javascript is nowhere near ready to replace the awesomeness that is .NET
      And I doubt it ever will be.

      And C++… well, in most LOB applications, that’s just straight up overkill.

      .NET and XAML is not going anywhere.
      We are getting a new platform, yes.  The other platforms aren’t going anywhere.
      It’s like you drama queens expect MS to include “and we will still support ” every time to announce something new.

      I don’t get it.

  • http://twitter.com/jimmyfal Jimmy Fallon

    Mary joe, mary joe. She uses chrome because she says IE 9 is so slow. There is obviously something wrong with her Windows 7 installation or something ELSE is going on there. She also says she is not a “power user”. Something wrong with Windows bloggers who can’t fix their own computers if you ask me. BUT, to cut her some slack, she does seem to come up with some tidbits that no one else had first a lot. So Mary Joe, lets find out what’s wrong with your IE9 install. I’m even BETTING that MS will remote control your pc for free to fix it. Not too much to ask for such a popular Ipad using Windows blogger is it?

    • Anonymous

      Yes very good point, I heard her rant about IE9 being very slow so she uses chrome, I use Chrome as my main Browser as well simply because I can link my Chrome browser across the different machines that I use and have all by book marks and password available .

      As for speed they are basically a tie with either browser being slight slower or faster depending on the site.

    • Mailinator

      Hey, you can use Windows Live Mesh to keep your Internet Explorer in sync across different machine (though probably not linux :P ).

      It’s even available for mac but I’m pretty sure it’s just folder syncing.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks, I’ll try it out.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks, I’ll try it out.

    • Tom

      It’s probably her IE add-ons. Like she said, she isn’t a power user.

      What’s with the irony?

  • http://doctorwhofan98.wordpress.com/ doctorwhofan98

    I wish I could go… Shame I’m in the wrong country… :-(

    • Childhood’s End

      If it helps any, Doc:

      1) Our country’s going broke, so chances are that by this time next year, yours will own ours, and,
      2) Once Silverlight and .NET have been officially acknowledged dead and it’s become clear to all that HTML5 is nothing more than yet another false messiah, you’ll look back at Build 2011, especially given that there will be no reason to attend any further MS conferences from here on out anyway, and realize you missed nothing at all…

      Having been at MIX11, it was resoundingly obvious that our best days with Microsoft technologies are already behind us.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Pedro-Roque/100000194503830 Pedro Roque

    Glad I’m already registered!
    Now, it would be great if MS repeated what they did in PDC 2009, when they gave every attendant a Notebook. Only this time it should really be a tablet, running Windows 8!

    And, by the way, PDC was not a yearly event. It was held in preparation for a major technology release.

  • Aaron

    Well crap.  I was in the middle of getting approval from my manager to sign up.  There goes my chance at a free Win 8 tablet :(

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000678662470 Vincent Haakmat

    Huh, sold out already? There goes my free ticket to Disneyland :(

  • Anonymous

    ill tell you guys how it was!

  • http://twitter.com/oolong2 oolong2

    The last PDCs sold out pretty quickly as well so I think this is pretty much normal.

  • Anonymous

    I attended the last LA PDC and it was the coolest ever. Seeing Azure and Win7 come out of the wood was fantastic. Was it really worth the price? hell no. These days with all the sessions beng published on streams a day or two after as well as people tweeting all the news out as they happen, missing on build is really just missing on  a damn nice geek vacation. nothing else.

  • veldar

    only if it was near me =(

  • MicrosoftInTrouble

    Google I/O 2011 sold out in 59 minutes … what does that tell you?

    • Guest

      Fanboys will eat anything.

      A: Develop for Chrome!
      B: No no don’t be silly, Android.
      A: Well I’m not giving you the latest changesets.
      B: I’ve got an unfinished Telephony stack and you don’t!

    • Anonymous

      Yep..Lol!!!

    • Anonymous

      Yep..Lol!!!

  • Xdz

    I really hate the really hate Thurrot
    and now Mary Jo … these two are the most stupid people. Their show is a joke
    and now I have had enough of these guys. To Paul everything Apple or Google
    does is good, and everything Microsoft does is bad. This is the guy who was so
    negative about the whole Kinect project that he now shamelessly tries to trush Avator
    Kinect just because he does not understand it. Microsoft does not need him …
    and his crappy books. Fuck Thurrot.