Microsoft Build 2025 is just around the corner (May 19-22), and we’re fired up about all the developer-focused content we’ve got lined up for you! Whether you’re a Visual Studio power user, a VS Code fan, all about Azure, looking for the newest in .NET, or just pumped about AI in development, this year’s Build is going to be amazing!
The virtual experience is perfect if you can’t make it to the event in person, letting you stream sessions, keynotes, and participate in engaging conversations with other developers worldwide. Let’s dive into some tips and highlights to make the most of your Build experience!
🚀 Register & Build Your Schedule
First up – if you haven’t registered for Build 2025 yet, do it NOW! It’s going to be incredible, and registration gives you access to both in-person and digital experiences.
Tip
It’s great to get registered now so you can use the “Add to Schedule” button to bookmark any of the sessions mentioned in this post to build your personalized agenda. This makes it easy to manage your schedule in-person at Build (the popular sessions fill up fast!) and catch either the live streams or the session recordings on the website.The Build website’s got some fancy new filtering options this year. Try these custom filters to focus on Developer Division content:
- 🟣 All Visual Studio sessions
- 🟦 All VS Code sessions
- 🐙 All GitHub & Copilot sessions
- ☁️ All Azure DevOps sessions
- ⚡ All .NET sessions
Tip
Check out the dedicated GitHub at Microsoft Build 2025 page for a curated list of GitHub-focused sessions and activities!We’ve got a comprehensive guide to .NET content at Build on the .NET blog that includes over 75 fantastic sessions spanning AI integration, app modernization, and more. Definitely worth checking out if you’re a .NET developer.
🎤 Keynotes You Won’t Want to Miss
🗓️ Microsoft Build Opening Keynote with Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott
Don’t miss Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott kick off Build 2025 with Microsoft’s vision in this era of AI. They’ll share how our platforms are creating new opportunities and how our tools, services, and AI capabilities are evolving to help you create next-generation applications. This keynote sets the tone for the entire conference with major announcements and exciting demos.
When: Monday, May 19 | 9:05 AM – 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time | KEY010
🗓️ Unpacking the Tech Keynote
Join Jay Parikh, Charles Lamanna, Scott Guthrie and friends as they dig deeper into the news announced on Day 1, with a focus on:
- 🏢 Enterprise AI adoption – The role developers play in helping enterprises successfully embrace AI and digital transformation
- 🔧 Platform innovation – The latest in Copilot, Azure, GitHub, and Windows AI innovations
- 🔒 Trust and security – The significance of trust, security, and governance in all we do
When: Tuesday, May 20 | 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time | KEY020
🗓️ Scott and Mark Learn to…LIVE
Join Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman as they put everything they have learned at Microsoft Build together into one epic demo for the ages. No slides (ok that’s a lie, Mark loves slides and who is going to tell him no?), nothing but pure code, Copilot PCs, local models, massive frontier models, vibe coding, Visual Studio, and maybe a robot.
This closing keynote promises to be a high-energy, hands-on demonstration of the latest technologies showcased throughout Build.
When: Thursday, May 22 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Pacific Daylight Time | KEY040
⭐ Can’t miss session: Reimagining Software Development and DevOps with Agentic AI
You’ve got to check out the Reimagining Software Development and DevOps with Agentic AI session by Mario Rodriguez, Chief Product Officer at GitHub and Amanda Silver, CVP and Head of Product for Developer Division. This talk dives into how Agentic AI is transforming the entire Software Development Lifecycle. From brainstorming new ideas to implementing plans, crafting new code, reviewing it, releasing software, and bringing insights back to the team—Agentic AI is making everything smoother and more efficient. Plus, you’ll see how GitHub Copilot is being reimagined to boost productivity across teams.
When: Monday, May 19 | 11:15 AM – 12:15 PM Pacific Daylight Time | BRK100
✨ Some Top Sessions & Demos
Beyond our incredible .NET lineup (detailed in the .NET Build guide), here are some top developer sessions you might want to bookmark:
🛠️ Visual Studio & Development Tools
| Session | Description |
|---|---|
| 👨💻 Hands on with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio | Experience the deep integration of GitHub Copilot within Visual Studio, the premier IDE for Windows developers. This hands-on lab will guide you through leveraging Copilot to enhance your daily coding workflows, providing intelligent assistance and boosting productivity. |
| 🔄 Mastering Git in Visual Studio | Explore how to make Git work for you in Visual Studio. Learn practical tips for version control, collaboration, and conflict resolution. Plus, discover how AI can enhance your Git workflow, making tasks like code reviews and merge conflict resolution faster and easier. |
💻 Visual Studio Code
| Session | Description |
|---|---|
| 🎬 VS Code, Live from Build! | Join us for a session filled with interactive demos, dev sneak peeks, and a behind-the-scenes look at all the latest announcements. No slides. Just code, conversation, and good vibes, and a few surprises we promise you’ll want to see. |
| 🤖 Agent Mode in Action: AI Coding with Vibe and Spec-Driven Flows | Discover how GitHub Copilot’s agent mode transforms your coding workflow. Learn to harness autonomous AI for multi file code generation, error fixing, and context management. |
🐙 GitHub & Copilot
| Session | Description |
|---|---|
| 🧠 Develop, Build and Deploy LLM Apps using GitHub Models and Azure AI Foundry | Learn how to leverage GitHub Models and Azure AI Foundry to build and deploy powerful LLM applications with enterprise-grade security and performance. |
| 🤖 The Agent Awakens: Collaborative Development with GitHub Copilot | Discover how GitHub Copilot’s agent capabilities transform development workflows through intelligent collaboration, enhancing productivity across the entire development lifecycle. |
| ✨ Under the hood and into the magic of GitHub Copilot | Dive deep into the technology powering GitHub Copilot, understand how it works, and learn advanced techniques to maximize its effectiveness in your development process. |
| 🔒 Shift Left: Secure Your Code and AI from the Start | Learn how to integrate security practices early in your development cycle with GitHub’s security tools, ensuring your code and AI implementations are secure by design. |
Note
For a complete list of GitHub-led sessions, check out the curated GitHub sessions page to discover how you can bring even more AI power to your workflow.☁️ Azure Development
| Session | Description |
|---|---|
| 🔬 Inside Azure innovations with Mark Russinovich | Join Azure CTO Mark Russinovich for a deep dive into the latest Azure innovations, architectural decisions, and technical breakthroughs powering the platform. |
| 🚀 Accelerate Azure Development with GitHub Copilot, VS Code & AI | Learn how to supercharge your Azure development workflow with AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot and VS Code to build and deploy applications faster than ever before. |
| ☁️ Innovate, deploy, & optimize your apps without infrastructure hassles | Discover how to focus on your application code while Azure handles the underlying infrastructure, enabling faster innovation and optimized deployment pipelines. |
| 🌉 Power your AI apps across cloud and edge with Azure Arc | Explore how Azure Arc enables you to extend Azure’s management capabilities to any infrastructure, running AI workloads seamlessly across cloud and edge environments. |
| 📐 Maximizing efficiency in cloud-native app design | Learn the latest patterns and practices for designing cloud-native applications that maximize efficiency, scalability, and resilience in Azure environments. |
| ⚡ Event-Driven Architectures: Serverless Apps That Slay at Scale | Discover how to build high-performance, scalable applications using event-driven architectures and Azure’s serverless capabilities. |
🤖 AI Development Focus
| Session | Description |
|---|---|
| 🔄 Model Context Protocol: Building the Universal AI Interface | Understand how MCP is becoming the standard for AI model communication and how to leverage it in your applications. |
| 🤖 AI Agents for Developers: Build, Test, Deploy | Get a comprehensive overview of our agent development platform and see how it integrates with our broader developer tools. |
| 🛠️ End-to-End Agent Development with Microsoft Tools | Watch as we build, test, and deploy an intelligent agent using Visual Studio, GitHub, and Azure services. |
| 💻 Use VS Code to build AI apps and agents | Learn how to explore different models, iterate on prompts, run evaluations, and build and deploy agents —all within VS Code—using the AI Toolkit, Azure AI Foundry, and the Azure SDK. Streamline your workflow and bring AI-powered solutions to life faster. |
🧪 Hands-On Labs
Get your hands dirty with these interactive learning experiences:
| Lab | Description |
|---|---|
| 📱 Build Multi-platform Hybrid Apps with Blazor & .NET MAUI | Learn how to create cross-platform applications that share UI and business logic across mobile, desktop, and web using the latest Blazor and .NET MAUI capabilities. |
| 💡 Hands on with GitHub Copilot in VS Code | Get firsthand experience at how Copilot can transform your workflow with agent mode, boost productivity without sacrificing code quality, model selection strategies and which models to leverage for your specific scenarios. |
| 🚀 Integrating and Enhancing Applications with .NET Aspire | Explore how to build cloud-native applications with .NET Aspire, focusing on service discovery, health checks, resilience patterns, and observability. |
| 🧠 Building GenAI Apps in C#: AI Templates, GitHub, Azure OpenAI & More | Get hands-on experience building generative AI applications using C#, leveraging AI templates, GitHub integration, and Azure OpenAI services. |
| 👨💻 Hands on with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio | Master GitHub Copilot’s advanced features in Visual Studio to accelerate your development process, from code generation to debugging assistance and test creation. |
| 🧪 Real-World, Enterprise-Scale End-to-End Testing with Playwright | Learn how to implement robust end-to-end testing for enterprise applications using Playwright, covering web, mobile, and API testing strategies. |
| 🤝 Collaborating with agents in your software development workflow | Discover how to integrate AI agents into your development workflow, enhancing collaboration and automating repetitive tasks across the software development lifecycle. |
| 🐍 Build your code-first agent with Azure AI Foundry in Python | Create intelligent agents using Python and Azure AI Foundry, focusing on code-first approaches to build, train, and deploy AI agents that solve real-world problems. |
Okay, we’re a bit biased here since we’re both leading some of the above labs, but… Hands-On Labs are an amazing opportunity at Build! It’s easy to spend a week watching a lot of great sessions and wonder how much you’ll actually remember. Hands-On Labs are a great way to absorb the info by actually writing code… and a few bugs… and fixing the bugs. You know, developing. That’s the best way to actually learn the new stuff, with access to experts who can help you when you get stuck.
Important
Labs have limited capacity for in-person attendees. Be sure to register for these sessions as soon as your registration is confirmed! The content for some of these will be available on-demand, but it’s great to get in the lab with a preconfigured lab machine and live help from the speakers and proctors.✨ Interactive Experiences at Build
🎮 Vibe Coding & GitHub Experience
New for Build 2025, the “Vibe Coding Experience” zone is an electrifying space where developers can witness coding magic in action. It’s more than just a showcase – it’s an interactive hub where creativity, collaboration, and innovation thrive.
In The Hub, you’ll find the GitHub Experience area where you can:
- 🐙 Build your own custom Octocat – Create a personalized version of GitHub’s mascot to take home
- 🎁 Grab exclusive GitHub swag – Limited edition Build 2025 GitHub merch you can’t get anywhere else
- 🎮 Test your prompting skills with Pixel Pilot – A super fun game showing the power of AI-assisted development
- 👩💻 Connect with GitHub experts – Meet the brilliant folks behind GitHub Copilot
There are also product booths where you can try hands-on demos of the latest GitHub Copilot features.
Subscribe to the Microsoft Developer YouTube channel to watch the Vibe Coding streams live!
🌐 Remote Experience
Can’t make it to Seattle? The remote experience has been completely redesigned for 2025:
- 📺 HD Livestreams – All keynotes and breakout sessions will be streamed live in high definition.
- 🧪 Virtual Labs – Remote attendees can participate in all hands-on labs through our new cloud-based development environments.
- 🌐 Digital Networking – Connect with speakers and other attendees through our improved networking platform.
- ⏱️ On-Demand Access – All content will be available on-demand within 24 hours.
If you’re going to be joining remote, you’ll still want to register now and load up your schedule. Once the conference starts, it’s great to have an agenda already set up with the sessions you really want to catch live… so you can be sure to block your calendar and have your coffee ready!
🎒 Get Ready for an amazing Build!
Here’s our personal checklist to get the most out of Build:
- Install the essentials – Update your Visual Studio, VS Code, and GitHub tools before the event
- Set up your dev environment – Many demos will use the latest SDKs and tools
- Join the conversation – Follow the #MSBuild hashtag and join our Developer Discord channel
- Bring your questions – Come armed with your toughest questions for our experts
- Plan your networking – Schedule time with Product Group Meetups, Ask the Experts sessions, and Community Zone activities
Need some tips as you pack? We’ve got you covered!
Note
Pro tip: Consider bringing a project you’re actually working on, especially if you’d like help integrating AI or implementing MCP during the hands-on sessions!Wrapping Up
Microsoft Build 2025 is going to be an incredible opportunity to level up your development skills, especially in the AI space (which, let’s face it, is moving at warp speed). The team has been working tirelessly to create content that will help you build better, faster, and smarter.
We’re super excited to meet many of you in Seattle or connect with you online. If you see me wandering around, please say hi! I love chatting with developers and hearing what you’re building.
What are you most excited about for Build this year? Let us know in the comments below!
See you at Build!
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