Metro interaction with another application running in Win8 ?
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Something I am curious about is to what extent the "universes" of Metro and Win8 apps (XAML, WRT, whatever) can dynamically interact. Let's say you are "in Metro mode:" can the Metro application communicate with a .NET based application ? thanks, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
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Something I am curious about is to what extent the "universes" of Metro and Win8 apps (XAML, WRT, whatever) can dynamically interact. Let's say you are "in Metro mode:" can the Metro application communicate with a .NET based application ? thanks, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
They've strongly discouraged devs from attempting to do that. WinRT/Metro apps have a life-time that is unpredictable. At any time, they may be suspended, or auto-terminated by the runtime. So you can never guarantee that they are alive. And add to that the fact that most inter-process communication like named pipes, messages, intra-app socket communication etc. is blocked by the Metro sandbox. So short answer - no, not supported. You can hack around it but it'd be a bad idea.
Regards, Nish
My technology blog: voidnish.wordpress.com
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Something I am curious about is to what extent the "universes" of Metro and Win8 apps (XAML, WRT, whatever) can dynamically interact. Let's say you are "in Metro mode:" can the Metro application communicate with a .NET based application ? thanks, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
Bill, you may find this[^] thread interesting. It's something that Microsoft covered at //build/.
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos
My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier - my favourite utility
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They've strongly discouraged devs from attempting to do that. WinRT/Metro apps have a life-time that is unpredictable. At any time, they may be suspended, or auto-terminated by the runtime. So you can never guarantee that they are alive. And add to that the fact that most inter-process communication like named pipes, messages, intra-app socket communication etc. is blocked by the Metro sandbox. So short answer - no, not supported. You can hack around it but it'd be a bad idea.
Regards, Nish
My technology blog: voidnish.wordpress.com
Thanks, Nish-ji, I find myself wondering if this 'sand-boxing' is the result of absolute technical necessity. Having a clearer picture of the 'only one of us in here is a personality at any one time' paradigm here increases my sense that the current early roll-out is indeed a 'schizophrenic' model :) best, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
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Bill, you may find this[^] thread interesting. It's something that Microsoft covered at //build/.
Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads
"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos
My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier - my favourite utility
Thanks, Pete, I have been studying the SO thread, and the article on InfoQ. Exchange of information by mutual file-change-watching seems as advanced as lighting bon-fires on a series of cliffs twenty miles apart to warn the King of an approaching hostile armada :) As I commented to Nishant, I wonder if this 'two degrees of separation' is the result of absolute technical necessity and/or marketing strategy (all your Metro are belong to Store, and thanks for the 30%). best, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
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Thanks, Nish-ji, I find myself wondering if this 'sand-boxing' is the result of absolute technical necessity. Having a clearer picture of the 'only one of us in here is a personality at any one time' paradigm here increases my sense that the current early roll-out is indeed a 'schizophrenic' model :) best, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
Hi Bill, I haven't read much on the subject (I'll wait for it to mature first), however I expect they really want two separate worlds: - on the one hand you have Metro, which also runs on small, mobile, non-x86/x64 platforms; - on the other hand you have Windows, which runs on x86/x64 only. The Metro side needs all new development; the Windows side runs most (all?) legacy stuff. So you'll get PC's that run "real Windows" and can also run an occasional Metro app (like enhanced Vista/Win7 widgets); and you have slates and phones that are app oriented, but can run an occasional real Window application provided all the necessary hardware is there (starting with an appropriate CPU and a power supply or a huge battery). As soon as you build an application that needs both worlds, you are making things difficult for the developer and for the user, and you lock yourself in to the PC-like hardware. Furthermore I bet MS doesn't want you to develop more of the same PC applications with a newer foxier UI, they want you to expand their market by developing Metro apps, real ones, running on millions of phones and slates. They don't want to give you a bridge, they want you to give them a bigger market. :)
Luc Pattyn [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum iSad
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Hi Bill, I haven't read much on the subject (I'll wait for it to mature first), however I expect they really want two separate worlds: - on the one hand you have Metro, which also runs on small, mobile, non-x86/x64 platforms; - on the other hand you have Windows, which runs on x86/x64 only. The Metro side needs all new development; the Windows side runs most (all?) legacy stuff. So you'll get PC's that run "real Windows" and can also run an occasional Metro app (like enhanced Vista/Win7 widgets); and you have slates and phones that are app oriented, but can run an occasional real Window application provided all the necessary hardware is there (starting with an appropriate CPU and a power supply or a huge battery). As soon as you build an application that needs both worlds, you are making things difficult for the developer and for the user, and you lock yourself in to the PC-like hardware. Furthermore I bet MS doesn't want you to develop more of the same PC applications with a newer foxier UI, they want you to expand their market by developing Metro apps, real ones, running on millions of phones and slates. They don't want to give you a bridge, they want you to give them a bigger market. :)
Luc Pattyn [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum iSad
Thanks, Luc, I appreciate your comments. I would be curious to overhear a conversation taking place now, or in the near future, between some MS representative to some major corporation that has 50k Windows machines running extremely complex, and highly secure, LOB applications, and, perhaps, have already done small-scale experiments on using iPads as field-entry devices with limited access to back-end databases ... A conversation where the MS rep is asked: what's Metro going to do for us ? At the point that the software world "congeals" into Apple, MS, and Googlish "stores," all harvesting 30% of sales, in order for your application to even run ... I can only hope that anti-trust legislation is not ... extinct. best, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
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Thanks, Luc, I appreciate your comments. I would be curious to overhear a conversation taking place now, or in the near future, between some MS representative to some major corporation that has 50k Windows machines running extremely complex, and highly secure, LOB applications, and, perhaps, have already done small-scale experiments on using iPads as field-entry devices with limited access to back-end databases ... A conversation where the MS rep is asked: what's Metro going to do for us ? At the point that the software world "congeals" into Apple, MS, and Googlish "stores," all harvesting 30% of sales, in order for your application to even run ... I can only hope that anti-trust legislation is not ... extinct. best, Bill
"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish." Steven Wright
I expect the clients becoming smaller, cheaper, dumber; and the real value of the apps to reside on servers (no Metro there), clouds or other. Bandwidth increasing all the time, we won't continue to carry around big apps. Web services, or whatever fancy name will be in vogue then, and pretty simple client stuff, mostly presentation layer. What client software remains is a browser, some social networking items perhaps, and a lot of gadgetry. We won't be running ERP or SAP locally.
BillWoodruff wrote:
A conversation where the MS rep is asked: what's Metro going to do for us ?
So once more the MS answer will be: everything you need. :-D
Luc Pattyn [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum iSad