Tickets for the BUILD 2012 Microsoft developer conference went on sale yesterday (08/08) at 08:00 PDT and the event was sold out an hour later.

Early bird registration, with tickets priced at $1,595 for the first 500 applicants, sold out within minutes, the more expensive seats ($2,095) were gone around 09:00 PDT  and those who arrived at the registration site later were greeted with this message:

Tim O'Brien, Microsoft's general manager of developer and platform evangelism, commented:

Build 2012 sold out in less than an hour. Build 2012 will be unlike anything we've held on our corporate campus in a long time. For those unable to attend, there will be a world class online experience and local developer events throughout the world.

The fact that the event, which runs from October 30th until November 2nd, is being held on the Microsoft campus at Redmond rather than a big convention center means that the number of places was fairly limited - one participant in last year's event estimated it to be no more than 5,000.

So will there be a worldwide online audience for this event. Interest in Windows 8 appears to be slow to get of the ground.Microsoft, itself appears to be pretty disinterested in it. Since the leaked news that term "Metro" was not to be used there's be nothing official to tell us what to use rather than "New User Interface" or "The User Interface Formally Known As Metro".

Despite Microsoft having said when the date was announced, that the schedule and program would be made public on August 8th there's still no more information - perhaps it's all subject to a furious re-write to remove all the references to "Metro".