19–20 May 2020, online. The first fully digital Build, scheduled into a continuous 48-hour stream because there was no time zone left to favour. Free, no badge, ~200,000 registered attendees.
We watched the keynote in our home offices a few weeks before formally registering the GmbH — Build 2020 is the conference where the stack we'd bet on started shipping.
What we took away
- Blazor WebAssembly 3.2 GA. Client-side .NET in the browser, in production. The story for building bilingual marketing pages, admin consoles, and internal tools without ever switching languages started here.
- .NET 5 Preview 4 with the matching ASP.NET Core and EF Core previews — first wave of "one .NET" tooling.
- Project Reunion (later WinUI / Windows App SDK) unifying Win32 and UWP API surfaces.
- Windows Terminal 1.0 GA, plus GPU compute and Linux GUI apps coming to WSL.
- Azure Static Web Apps introduced — managed JAMstack/Blazor hosting with built-in GitHub Actions CI/CD.
- Fluid Framework open-sourced.
Why it mattered
Blazor WebAssembly going GA in the same month we were finalising our company registration was a useful signal. The components we'd later build into Xircuit and Outastory would lean heavily on Blazor; the team that wrote those projects' first prototypes did it knowing the framework had Microsoft's full commercial backing.
"Every developer is welcome." — Scott Hanselman's framing for the developer keynote, which became the show's unofficial tagline.
That stuck with us. Two months later we were starting a company on it.