Build is Microsoft’s developer conference for its Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server and Azure platforms, and the company just announced that Build 2013 will take place June 26-28 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Registration will open Tuesday, April 2, at 9am PT, and early-bird pricing for the first 500 registrants starts at $1,595.
As Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and chief evangelist, notes in today’s announcement, “it’s been a while since our last developer event in the Bay Area.” The last Build, which happened last October, right after the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 launch, took place in Redmond, where the company erected a massive tent on its sprawling campus to host a few thousand developers. Build 2011 was held in Anaheim California.
Guggenheimer, of course, didn’t reveal anything about the company’s plans for Build besides saying that Microsoft will “have updates and talk about what’s next for Windows, Windows Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio and more. Build is the path to creating and implementing your great ideas, and then differentiating them in the market.”
Blue
Earlier today, however, Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of corporate communications, publicly acknowledged that “product leaders across Microsoft are working together on plans to advance our devices and services, a set of plans referred to internally as ‘Blue.'” This, as far as I can see, marks the first time the company has publicly acknowledged this project, and chances are we will hear quite a bit more about it come June 26.
As is tradition at Microsoft now, Shaw also took a less-than-subtle swipe at Google in an earlier post today. “While some folks were out doing ‘spring cleaning,’ we used the opportunity to look back a bit at what has happened in the past season, and to look ahead at what we have coming,” he wrote in the post, which recapped some of Microsoft’s product releases over the last year.