Windows Hardware Engineering Conference

The Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) is a series of technical conferences and workshops, where Microsoft elaborates on its hardware plans for Windows devices.

The WinHEC from 1992 to 2008, which stood for Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, was an annual software and hardware developer-oriented trade show and business conference, where Microsoft elaborated on its hardware plans for Microsoft Windows-compatible PCs. From 2008 to 2015, WinHEC was then replaced in Microsoft's schedule by the Professional Developers Conference, later merged into the Build conference.

On September 26, 2014, Microsoft announced that WinHEC will be returning in 2015 in the form of multiple conferences held throughout the year. The first conference is going to be held in Shenzhen, China on March 18 to 19. The industry has changed quite a bit since Microsoft last held WinHEC event, with innovation happening at a much quicker pace and across more geographically diverse locations. Because of that, Microsoft is evolving WinHEC to be more than a single annual conference. Looking ahead, WinHEC will consist of technical conferences and smaller, more frequent, topic focused workshops that are local to the hardware ecosystem hubs. The WinHEC acronym has changed its meaning to the Windows Hardware Engineering Community.