In January we shared some thoughts on our approach to developer events, including a commitment to come back with more on our plans for an event this coming fall. Well, here it is: our next developer conference will be this fall, and it's (again) called BUILD. It will be held on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, from October 30th until November 2nd. Yes, that's right ... it's the week after Windows 8 becomes generally available worldwide. And in addition to Windows 8, we will have lots of other stuff to talk about, too: Windows Azure, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and much more.

BUILD 2012 will be on the Microsoft campus, and I know what you're thinking ... if it's not in some cavernous convention hall, then it must be a dialed-down version of last year's event, etc. ... but don't be confused: this will be unlike anything we've held on our corporate campus in a long time. More details to come . And, as we talked about in the January post, if you've gone to a Microsoft developer event, you know that most of the speakers and participants are from our engineering teams, so a campus event puts you in the thick of things along with the engineers directly responsible for our products and the platform opportunities they represent. This one's not to be missed.

So what happens next? Well, at 8AM Pacific time on 8.8 (see what we just did there?), we will open registration for BUILD 2012 at www.buildwindows.com. At that point, we'll start sharing details over time about keynoters, sessions, content, and more, but for the time being, set a reminder for August 8th.

That's it for now. Because my thesaurus was unable to suggest a decent synonym for "super excited", let's just say we're stoked about BUILD 2012, and we hope to see you there.