Microsoft’s hold on the operating sector may be weakening, but the prospect of finding out about Windows 8 is still big enough news to sell out an entire conference even though there are still no details of what the sessions are or who’s giving the keynote.

What’s more, with just a month to go, the  pre-conference day has been abandoned, leaving many attendees  at Build with a spare day to sample the delights of Anaheim, California.

Build, to be held September 13-16,  is the conference that is replacing PDC, the Professional Developers Conference, and HEC, the Hardware Engineering Conference, and the expectation is that attendees will show off a range of Windows 8 features. Until recently, while the details were sketchy, the Build website was promising a four day conference starting on the Tuesday and preceded by a day of pre-conference activities.

However, as Mary Jo Foley has now highlighted,  the pre-conference day scheduled for September 12th has disappeared.

Microsoft’s rationale for removing the pre-conference day is that:

“In order to better focus on all the new content that will be covered at BUILD, we decided to optimize for the four main days of the event, which will include an enormous number of speakers and sessions. Registration is open on Monday but there will not be any formal sessions for attendees that day. We’re communicating the change now so people have the option to change their travel arrangements.”

This isn’t particularly rational; anyone who’s already booked to attend will have sorted their flights and hotel rooms out, and changing these details a month before travelling won’t be cheap or easy.

Just why Microsoft is being so evasive about what sessions will be on offer, and why it has dropped the pre-conference sessions, isn’t clear. Attendees are hoping to find out not just what Microsoft’s plans are for Windows 8, but also to get some answers about whether HTML5/JavaScript is the favored web platform, along with clues about the relevance (or otherwise) of Silverlight and .NET in general.

Build should answer a lot of questions about how we’ll be developing apps in the coming years, but we’re not going to get the answers just yet. You can check out the empty agenda for Build here: http://www.buildwindows.com/Agenda - who knows they might have filled in some of the details by the time you land on the site!

Of course there is always the possibility that Build wont answer anything and it will be as vague as the lead up to the conference. If this is the case Microsoft needs to prepare itself to deal with some angry developers.

Further reading

Microsoft's new developer conference - Build/Windows

Was .NET all a mistake?

Dumping .NET - Microsoft's Madness  

 The Downfall of Silverlight

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