Microsoft on Tuesday announced that its BUILD 2013 developers conference will be held June 26-28 on Apple's home turf, San Francisco's Moscone Center.
Apple has hosted its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Moscone since 2003, and will likely again this year. The probable dates for this year's WWDC, according to the venue's calendar, are June 10-14.
BUILD 2013 will focus on Windows 8, according to the website Microsoft relaunched today, but it will also cover other technologies, ranging from Azure and Internet Explorer to Office 365 and Windows Phone.
Microsoft has not yet posted an agenda for the conference, but it did peg the opening of registration for April 2 at 9 a.m. PDT. Developers should set an alarm to ring before the ticket kick-off; last year, BUILD sold out in under an hour.
Prices for BUILD remained flat compared to last year: $1,595 for the first 500 who register, $2,095 for all others.
BUILD 2012 was held on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., while the 2011 edition took place in Anaheim, Calif.
Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft's chief evangelist in the company's developer and platform evangelism group, who announced the BUILD dates, also noted that it had been ages since the firm had held a San Francisco developers conference. "It's been a while since our last developer event in the Bay Area, and we're looking forward to a fantastic gathering," Guggenheimer wrote on a Microsoft blog.
Microsoft's now-discontinued Professional Developers Conference (PDC) had been held in San Francisco -- at the Moscone Center, in fact -- two decades ago, most recently in 1996. It later relocated to Los Angeles for a five-event run between 2001 and 2009. Microsoft has not hosted a major developer conference in San Francisco since Apple settled into the Moscone Center 10 years ago.
Developers unable to score a ticket -- or unwilling to pay the registration fee -- should be able to follow the conference online. Last fall, Microsoft live webcast two keynote addresses, and posted all developer sessions to its Channel 9 within 24 hours for on-demand viewing.
Apple also typically webcasts the opening keynote of WWDC, but offers on-demand, offsite viewing of session videos only to registered developers.
Registration will take place on Microsoft's BUILD website next week.
The graphic tells it all: BUILD 2013 will take place in San Francisco, at the same venue where Apple has hosted its WWDC developer confab since 2003. (Image: Microsoft.)
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.
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