Microsoft Build (often stylised as ) is an annual conference event held by

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, Washin ...

, aimed at software engineers and web developers using

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 ser ...

, Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft technologies. First held in 2011, it serves as a successor for Microsoft's previous developer events, the Professional Developers Conference (an infrequent event which covered development of software for the Windows operating system) and MIX (which covered web development centering on Microsoft technology such as

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

and ASP.net). The attendee price was (US)$2,195 in 2016, up from $2,095 in 2015. It sold out quickly, within one minute of the registration site opening in 2016.

Format

The event has been held at a large convention center, or purpose-built meeting space on the Microsoft Campus. The Keynote on the first day has been led by the Microsoft CEO addressing the press and developers. It has been the place to announce the general technology milestones for developers. There are breakout sessions conducted by engineers and program managers, most often Microsoft employees representing their particular initiatives. The keynote on the second day often includes deeper dives into technology. Thousands of developers and technologists from all over the world attend.

Events

2011

Build 2011 was held from September 13 to September 16, 2011 in

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 ...

. The conference heavily focused on

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012, codenamed "Windows Server 8", is the sixth version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It is the server version of Windows based on Windows 8 and succe ...

and Visual Studio 2012; their Developer Preview versions were also released during the conference. Attendees also received a

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

tablet shipping with the Windows 8 "Developer Preview" build.

2012

Held on Microsoft's campus in Redmond from October 30 to November 2, 2012, the 2012 edition of Build focused on the recently released Windows 8, along with Windows Azure and

Windows Phone 8 Windows Phone 8 is the second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system from Microsoft. It was released on October 29, 2012, and, like its predecessor, it features a flat user interface based on the Metro design language. It was s ...

. Attendees received a Surface RT tablet with Touch Cover, a Nokia Lumia 920 smartphone, and 100GB of free SkyDrive storage.

2013

Build 2013 was held from June 26 to June 28, 2013 at the

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 ...

(North and South) in

San Francisco 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 ...

. The conference was primarily used to unveil the Windows 8.1 update for Windows 8. Each attendee received a Surface Pro,

Acer Iconia The Acer Iconia is a range of tablet computers from Acer Inc. of Taiwan. Acer presented its first tablet during a global press conference in New York on 23 November 2010. The family includes a big screen smartphone called Iconia Smart. The Ico ...

W3 (the first 8-inch Windows 8 tablet) with a Bluetooth keyboard, one year of

Adobe Creative Cloud Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications and services from Adobe Inc. that gives subscribers access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, along with a set of mobile applications an ...

and 100GB of free SkyDrive storage.

2014

Build 2014 was held at the

(West) in

from April 2 to April 4, 2014. Build attendees received a free

Xbox One The Xbox One is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. Announced in May 2013, it is the successor to Xbox 360 and the third base console in the Xbox series of video game consoles. It was first released in North America, parts of ...

and a $500

Microsoft Store Microsoft Store (formerly known as Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It started as an app store for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform app ...

gift card. Highlights: * Windows Display Driver Model 2.0 and

DirectX 12 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

Microsoft Cortana 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, Washin ...

* Windows Phone 8.1 * Windows 8.1 Spring Update
Windows free on all devices with a screen size of 9" or less and on IoT
*

Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...

Knowledge widget and app linking * .NET Native
AnnouncementProduct Page
*

.NET Compiler Platform .NET Compiler Platform, also known by its codename Roslyn, is a set of open-source compilers and code analysis APIs for C# and Visual Basic (VB.NET) languages from Microsoft.

(Roslyn) *

Visual Studio 2013 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 ...

Update 2 RC * Team Foundation Server 2013 Update 2 RTM *

TypeScript TypeScript is a free and open source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language. It is designed for the development of large app ...

1.0 *

.NET Foundation The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014, by Microsoft to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework. It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft. T ...

2015

Build 2015 was held at the

(West) in

from April 29 to May 1, 2015. Registration fee is $2095, and opened at 9:00am PST on Thursday, January 22 and "sold out" in under an hour with an unspecified number of attendees. Build attendees received a free HP Spectre x360

ultrabook Ultrabook is a marketing term, originated and trademarked by Intel, for a category of high-end laptop computers. They were originally marketed as featuring ultra thin form factor and light weight design without compromising battery life or per ...

. Highlights: *

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

Windows 10 Mobile Windows 10 Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft. First released in 2015, it is a successor to Windows Phone 8.1, but was marketed by Microsoft as being an edition of its PC operating system Windows 10. Wind ...

* HoloLens and

Windows Holographic Windows Mixed Reality is a platform introduced as part of the Windows 10 and 11 operating system, which provides augmented reality and virtual reality experiences with compatible head-mounted displays. Its flagship device, Microsoft HoloLens, w ...

Windows Server 2016 Windows Server 2016 is the eighth release of the Windows Server Server (computing), server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was developed concurrently with Windows 10 and is the su ...

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the related ...

2016 * Visual Studio 2015 *

Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code comple ...

2016

Build 2016 was held at the

from March 30 to April 1, 2016. The price was $2195, an increase of $100 compared to the previous year. The conference was sold out in 1 minute. Unlike previous years, there were no hardware gifts for attendees. Highlights: *

Windows Subsystem for Linux 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 ser ...

* Cortana chatbot on

Skype Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, deb ...

* "Power of the Pen and the PC" * .NET Standard Library * ASP.NET Core * Browser extension support for

Edge Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed ...

* Windows 10 Anniversary Update *

Xamarin Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch), which are cross-platform implementatio ...

** Free for individuals, open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams. ** Remoted

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

Simulator for Windows

2017

The 2017 Build conference took place at the

Washington State Convention Center The Seattle Convention Center (SCC), formerly the Washington State Convention Center (WSCC), is a convention center in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington, United States. It consists of several exhibition halls and meeting rooms in building ...

in Downtown

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region ...

from May 10 to May 12, 2017. It had been at Moscone Center for the previous four years. However, Moscone center was undergoing renovations from April through August 2017. The Seattle location brought the conference close to the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The price remained at $2195 for the 2017 conference. There were no devices given away at this conference to attendees. Highlights: * Azure Cosmos DB *

Visual Studio for Mac MonoDevelop (also known as Xamarin Studio) is an open-source software, open-source integrated development environment for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its primary focus is development of projects that use Mono (software), Mono and .NET Framework. Mo ...

* WSL: Fedora and SUSE support * Xamarin Live Player * Windows 10 Fall Creators Update * Microsoft Fluent Design System

2018

The 2018 Build conference took place at the

in Downtown

May 7 to May 9, 2018. The price has increased $300 to $2495 for the 2018 conference. The conference was preceded by the Windows Developer Awards 2018 ceremony. Highlights: * .NET ** .NET Core 3 **

ML.NET ML.NET is a free software machine learning library for the C# and F# programming languages. It also supports Python models when used together with NimbusML. The preview release of ML.NET included transforms for feature engineering like n-gram c ...

* Azure ** Azure CDN ** Azure Confidential Computing ** Azure Database Migration Service ** Azure Maps *

Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name M ...

* Microsoft Store: increased developer revenue share (95%; Non-Game App via deeplink only) * Visual Studio ** App Center ** IntelliCode **

Live Share Live may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Live!'' (2007 film), 2007 American film * ''Live'' (2014 film), a 2014 Japanese film *'' ''Live'' (Apocalyptica DVD) Music *Live (band), American alternative rock band * List of albums ...

* Windows 10 Redstone 5 ** Cloud Clipboard **

Microsoft Notepad Windows Notepad is a simple text editor for Windows; it creates and edits plain text documents. First released in 1983 to commercialize the computer mouse in MS-DOS, Notepad has been part of every version of Windows ever since. History In May ...

: Unix/Linux EOL support * Xamarin **

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded W ...

Android Emulator ** Automatic iOS Device Provisioning ** Xamarin.Essentials ** Xamarin.Forms 3.0

2019

The 2019 Build conference took place at the

in Downtown

from May 6 to May 8, 2019 plus optional post-event learning activities on next two days. The price decreased $100 to $2395 for the 2019 conference. Registration started on February 27. Highlights: *

.NET 5 The domain name net is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used in the Domain Name System of the Internet. The name is derived from the word ''network'', indicating it was originally intended for organizations involved in networking technologies ...

: next multi-platform .NET Core * Azure: Azure SQL Database Edge * Fluid Framework * Visual Studio: IntelliCode * Visual Studio Code: Remote Development Extension Pack *

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

* Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 *

Windows Terminal Windows Terminal is a multi-tabbed terminal emulator that Microsoft has developed for Windows 10 and later as a replacement for Windows Console. It can run any command-line app in a separate tab. It is preconfigured to run Command Prompt, Pow ...

cmd.exe Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows (Windows NT family and Windows CE family), and ReactOS operating systems. On Windows CE .NET 4.2, Windo ...

PowerShell PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management program from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and the associated scripting language. Initially a Windows component only, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-sou ...

, and WSL in tabs

2020

Microsoft announced the dates for Build, and their other large conferences on September 16, 2019, with pricing set at $2395. The physical 2020 Build conference, scheduled to take place in downtown

from May 19 to May 21, 2020, was initially cancelled due the

coronavirus pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identifie ...

. On April 20, 2020, Microsoft opened sign-ups for a replacement, virtual event, held the same date as the originally intended physical event; the virtual event was free of charge. Highlights: *

.NET Multi-platform App UI Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono (software), Mono, Mono (software)#Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Mono (software)#Xamarin.i ...

(.NET MAUI) *

(WSL) ** GPU support (for

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...

and DirectML) * Windows Package Manager

2021

The 2021 conference, once again a free-of-charge virtual event, was held on May 25 to 27, 2021. Highlights: *

.NET 6 The domain name net is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used in the Domain Name System of the Internet. The name is derived from the word ''network'', indicating it was originally intended for organizations involved in networking technologies ...

* Azure ** Azure AI Services ** Azure Bot Service ** Azure Metrics Advisor ** Azure Video Analyzer **

Azure Cognitive Services 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 ...

* Power Fx *

PyTorch Enterprise PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is free and ope ...

on Microsoft Azure * Microsoft Build of OpenJDK * Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI (WSLg)

2022

The 2022 conference, once again a free-of-charge virtual event, was held on May 24 to 26, 2022.

Attendee Party Venues

*2011: The Grove *2012: Seattle Armory *2013: Pier 48 *2014: AMC

Metreon The Metreon is a shopping center located in downtown San Francisco, California, United States at the corner of 4th Street and Mission Street. It is a four-story building built over the corner of the underground Moscone Center convention cen ...

*2015: AMC Metreon *2016: Block Party Yerba Ln *2017: CenturyLink Field *2018: Museum of Pop Culture / Chihuly Garden and Glass *2019: CenturyLink Field *2020: Online *2021: Online *2022: Online

References

External links

*
Build Event on MSDN Channel 9

Build Sessions on Microsoft.com

Events on Microsoft Docs

DevBlogs on Microsoft.com
{{Microsoft Microsoft conferences

Format

Events

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Attendee Party Venues

See also

References

External links