Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was a series of conferences for

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, Computer programming, programming, software documentation, documenting, software testing, testing, and Software bugs, bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applic ...

s; the conference was held infrequently to coincide with beta releases of the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

operating system, and showcased topics of interest to those developing hardware and software for the new version of Windows. In 2011, PDC was merged with Microsoft's

web development Web development is the work involved in developing a website for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web applications ...

conference

MIX Mix, mixes or mixing may refer to: Persons & places * Mix (surname) ** Tom Mix (1880-1940), American film star * nickname of Mix Diskerud (born Mikkel, 1990), Norwegian-American soccer player * Mix camp, an informal settlement in Namibia * Mix ...

to form the Build Conference.

Events

* July 1992 -

Moscone Center The George R. Moscone Convention Center (pronounced ), popularly known as the Moscone Center, is the largest convention and exhibition complex in San Francisco, California. The complex consists of three main halls spread out across three block ...

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

** Known as Win32 Professional Developers Conference ** First demonstration of the Win32 API and first mention of "Chicago", which would eventually become

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

** Estimated attendance of over 5,000 developers ** Windows NT 3.1 Preliminary Release for Developers (build 297) was sent to all conference attendees * December 1993 -

Anaheim Convention Center The Anaheim Convention Center is a major convention center in Anaheim, California and is the largest exhibition facility on the West Coast of the United States. It is located across from the Disneyland Resort on Katella Avenue. The original comp ...

Anaheim, California Anaheim ( ) is a city in northern Orange County, California, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. As of the 2020 United States Census, the city had a population of 346,824, making it the most populous city in Orange County, the 10th-most p ...

** Windows "Chicago" ** Win32 and

Object Linking and Embedding Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control Extension (OCX), a way to develop and use custom user i ...

version 2 ** Estimated attendance of over 8,000 **

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...

public demonstration, including the Object File System * March 1996 -

** Microsoft demonstrated the power of new tools, renamed ActiveX ** The ActiveX demos were impressive despite occasional technical difficulties. Microsoft and other industry leaders presented VBScript, an implementation of OLE Scripting; ActiveX Controls, for embedding OLE Controls into HTML documents; ActiveX Conferencing, which enables sharing data as well as applications over TCP/IP; the Internet Control Pack, allowing developers to make their applications Internet aware; and numerous other ActiveX technologies. * November, 1996 -

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a city in Los Angeles County, California. It is the 42nd-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 466,742 as of 2020. A charter city, Long Beach is the seventh-most populous city in California. Incorporate ...

November 3–7, 1996 * September 1997 -

San Diego Convention Center The San Diego Convention Center is the primary convention center in San Diego, California. It is located in the Marina district of downtown San Diego near the Gaslamp Quarter, at 111 West Harbor Drive. The center is managed by the San Diego Con ...

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

** First demonstrations of Windows NT 5.0, release of Beta 1 to developers ** Estimated attendance of 6,200 * October 11–15, 1998 -

Colorado Convention Center The Colorado Convention Center (CCC) is a multi-purpose convention center located in Downtown Denver, Colorado. At 2,200,000 square feet (total space) it is currently the 12th largest convention center in the United States. It opened in June 19 ...

Denver, Colorado Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

** Windows NT 5.0, the release of Beta 2 to developers. ** Windows DNA technology announced, including

COM+ Com or COM may refer to: Computing * COM (hardware interface), a serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers * COM file, or .com file, short for "command", a file extension for an executable file in MS-DOS * .com, an Internet top-level d ...

2000-2009

* July 11–14, 2000 -

Orange County Convention Center The Orange County Convention Center is a convention center located in Orlando, Florida. Opened in 1983 as the Orange County Convention and Civic Center, it is the primary public convention center for the Central Florida region and the second-lar ...

Orlando, Florida Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County, Florida, Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Greater Orlando, Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, acco ...

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

and

Visual Studio .NET Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platfor ...

announced, initial beta release given to attendees ** C# programming language announced and demonstrated ** ASP+, the successor to

Active Server Pages Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's first server-side scripting language and engine for dynamic web pages. It was first released in December 1996, before being superseded in January 2002 by ASP.NET. History Initially released as an add ...

was announced; this was renamed ASP.NET later in the year **Announcement of the end of the

Windows 9x Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a series of Microsoft Windows computer operating systems produced from 1995 to 2000, which were based on the Windows 95 kernel and its underlying foundation of MS-DOS, both of which were updated in subs ...

line, culminating with a planned 2002 release of a new operating system, "Whistler" **

Internet Explorer 5.5 Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) is a graphical web browser, the fifth version of Internet Explorer, the successor to Internet Explorer 4 and one of the main participants of the first Browser wars, browser war. Its distribution methods and Wi ...

was released **Estimated attendance of 6,000 developers * October 22–26, 2001 -

Los Angeles Convention Center The Los Angeles Convention Center is a convention center in the southwest section of downtown Los Angeles. It hosts multiple annual conventions and has often been used as a filming location in TV shows and movies. History The convention center, ...

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

**Release candidates of the

and

were announced during

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

' keynote. **

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

was officially released. **Introduction of

Tablet PC A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being comput ...

, including a software development kit. **.NET My Services (codenamed

HailStorm Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets (American English "sleet"), though the two are often confused. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. Ice pellets generally fal ...

) announced. **

.NET Compact Framework The Microsoft .NET Compact Framework (.NET CF) is a version of the .NET Framework that is designed to run on resource constrained mobile/embedded devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, factory controllers, set-top box ...

introduced. **First discussions of

Internet Information Services Internet Information Services (IIS-pronounced 2S, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. ...

version 6. **

Counting Crows Counting Crows is an American rock band from San Francisco, California. Formed in 1991, the band consists of guitarist David Bryson, drummer Jim Bogios, vocalist Adam Duritz, keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, David Immerglück, bass guitarist Mil ...

performed at the PDC party at the

Staples Center Crypto.com Arena is a multi-purpose indoor arena in Downtown Los Angeles. Adjacent to the L.A. Live development, it is located next to the Los Angeles Convention Center complex along Figueroa Street. The arena opened on October 17, 1999; it was ...

. * October 27–30, 2003 -

**Windows Longhorn revealed - Avalon, Aero, Indigo, WinFS * September 13–16, 2005 -

**Windows Vista build 5219 handed out to attendees **Internet Explorer 7 demoed **Office 12 demoed with ribbon bar **.NET 2.0 * October 27–30, 2008 -

. **First demonstration of

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

as well as

Office 14 Microsoft Office 2010 (codenamed Office 14) is a version of Microsoft Office for Microsoft Windows unveiled by Microsoft on May 15, 2009, and released to manufacturing on April 15, 2010, with General availability release, general availability on ...

for the Web . **Introduction of

Windows Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

, Microsoft's data center hosting platform. **Outlook to .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and a new .NET Application Server (codenamed "Dublin"). **Release of

Microsoft Surface Microsoft Surface is a series of touchscreen-based personal computers, tablets and interactive whiteboards designed and developed by Microsoft, running the Microsoft Windows operating system, apart from the Surface Duo, which runs on Android ...

SDK and first demonstration of SecondLight, a next generation Surface prototype. * November 17–20, 2009 -

**Vision of ''Three Screens and a Cloud'' **Emergence of

with billed, commercial service to begin in February 2010. **Many back-end announcements: ***Microsoft AppFabric, based on the earlier .NET Application Server and the caching technology (formerly codenamed "Velocity"). ***Microsoft SQL Server Modeling Services (SSModS) released (formerly codenamed "Oslo") ***BizTalk Server 2009 R2 announced with new features like an improved mapper for early 2010 release **Many front-end announcements: ***Release of first public betas for Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Silverlight 4 ***Early revelations about Microsoft

Internet Explorer 9 Internet Explorer 9 or IE9 (officially Windows Internet Explorer 9) is a web browser for Windows. It was released by Microsoft on March 14, 2011, as the ninth version of Internet Explorer and the successor to Internet Explorer 8, and can replace p ...

and its objective of better

Acid3 The Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. If the test is successful, the results ...

performance and

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

CSS3 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as Scalable Vector Graphics, SVG, MathML or XHTML). CS ...

compliance. **A special "PDC 2009" Acer 1420p Multi-touch Tablet PC was given out to all attendees (the BIOS referencing MSFT in the 'about' information.) * October 28–29, 2010 -

Microsoft Campus The Microsoft campus is the corporate headquarters of Microsoft, located in Redmond, Washington, United States, a part of the Seattle metropolitan area. Microsoft initially moved onto the grounds of the campus on February 26, 1986, shortly before ...

Redmond, Washington Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 census, up from 54,144 in 2010. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. With an an ...

** Announced new Platform Features for Cloud Computing ** VmRoles announced to port existing on-premises Applications to the Cloud ** Microsoft "Dallas" renamed to Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket ** Windows Azure Marketplace Applications announced ** An unlocked Windows Phone 7 smartphone was given out to all attendees ** Microsoft limited the number of attendees to 1,000 ** Many public viewing events all over the globe (e.g. Tokyo, London, Cologne, Vienna)

Other Microsoft developer conferences

*Dev Connections * Microsoft TechEd *

Mix Mix, mixes or mixing may refer to: Persons & places * Mix (surname) ** Tom Mix (1880-1940), American film star * nickname of Mix Diskerud (born Mikkel, 1990), Norwegian-American soccer player * Mix camp, an informal settlement in Namibia * Mix ...

PASS Pass, PASS, The Pass or Passed may refer to: Places *Pass, County Meath, a townland in Ireland * Pass, Poland, a village in Poland *Pass, an alternate term for a number of straits: see List of straits *Mountain pass, a lower place in a mountai ...

SQLBits SQLBits is the largest community-led SQL Server and Microsoft Data Platform conference in Europe, founded in 2007 by a group of individuals who are passionate about the Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure, Azure product suite. Volunteers includ ...

*VSLive!

References

External links

Professional Developers ConferenceVideo Archive Of KeynotesBuild Windows
{{Microsoft Microsoft conferences

Events

2000-2009

Other Microsoft developer conferences

See also

References

External links