Riding on the Metro
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Even though I have access to the Windows 8 pre-release versions, I haven't gotten around to installing them as I'm still not sure what to make of this particular little sleigh ride. I'm delighted to see MS finally taking all those pesky smart phones and tablets seriously, even if they are seriously late to the party. After all, I have a vested interest in MS technologies succeeding since they put money in my bank account. That said, trying to be all things to all people is a patently bad idea, and I just don't get Metro on the desktop. While the Internet loves to bandy about the phrase "post PC era" in reference to mobile devices, the truth is that they're two completely separate creatures. Desktops are for creating content. Mobile is for consuming. An interface that's optimized for the latter is a dubious environment for the former. To be sure, I get the vision. Wouldn't it be great if, as developers, we could easily sling MS code that would automagically create killer desktop apps that ran with a UI appropriately optimized in a mobile environment? Metro looks like a good first step for the latter. But for desktop apps? Granted, I have zero exposure to this API and am only reflecting what I read in the tech media but my understanding is that Metro is at heart an HTML development environment. Great. A markup language that was never intended to be a development platform is now the arena in which we're going to create desktop applications. Really? Yeah, I know. You can press a magic button and get to a "classic" Windows desktop. But Metro is their push to become relevant in the mobile world, and that's a goal I enthusiastically support. I also like the dream, fantasy though it may be, of a "write once, run everywhere (where have I heard that before?)" platform that lets me harness the power of the desktop and leverage mobile with the same code. I'm just wondering if Windows 8 will be a Vista experience (reviled or ignored by the masses) on steroids. After all, aren't we supposed to skip every other version of Windows? With that in mind, how many of you are currently writing Metro apps? Is it a serious desktop dev environment, or just something that will let script kiddies say that they can now write native apps? Sooner or later (depending on the success of Win 8, of course), people are going to start asking me to sling Metro code. Just wondering if I should dive in now or wait for the whole idea to grow up a little bit.
Christopher Duncan Author o
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Even though I have access to the Windows 8 pre-release versions, I haven't gotten around to installing them as I'm still not sure what to make of this particular little sleigh ride. I'm delighted to see MS finally taking all those pesky smart phones and tablets seriously, even if they are seriously late to the party. After all, I have a vested interest in MS technologies succeeding since they put money in my bank account. That said, trying to be all things to all people is a patently bad idea, and I just don't get Metro on the desktop. While the Internet loves to bandy about the phrase "post PC era" in reference to mobile devices, the truth is that they're two completely separate creatures. Desktops are for creating content. Mobile is for consuming. An interface that's optimized for the latter is a dubious environment for the former. To be sure, I get the vision. Wouldn't it be great if, as developers, we could easily sling MS code that would automagically create killer desktop apps that ran with a UI appropriately optimized in a mobile environment? Metro looks like a good first step for the latter. But for desktop apps? Granted, I have zero exposure to this API and am only reflecting what I read in the tech media but my understanding is that Metro is at heart an HTML development environment. Great. A markup language that was never intended to be a development platform is now the arena in which we're going to create desktop applications. Really? Yeah, I know. You can press a magic button and get to a "classic" Windows desktop. But Metro is their push to become relevant in the mobile world, and that's a goal I enthusiastically support. I also like the dream, fantasy though it may be, of a "write once, run everywhere (where have I heard that before?)" platform that lets me harness the power of the desktop and leverage mobile with the same code. I'm just wondering if Windows 8 will be a Vista experience (reviled or ignored by the masses) on steroids. After all, aren't we supposed to skip every other version of Windows? With that in mind, how many of you are currently writing Metro apps? Is it a serious desktop dev environment, or just something that will let script kiddies say that they can now write native apps? Sooner or later (depending on the success of Win 8, of course), people are going to start asking me to sling Metro code. Just wondering if I should dive in now or wait for the whole idea to grow up a little bit.
Christopher Duncan Author o
Gee I hear hornets buzzing about you didn't stir them up did you? :)
VS2010/Atmel Studio 6.0 ToDo Manager Extension
Version 3.0 now available. There is no place like 127.0.0.1 -
Even though I have access to the Windows 8 pre-release versions, I haven't gotten around to installing them as I'm still not sure what to make of this particular little sleigh ride. I'm delighted to see MS finally taking all those pesky smart phones and tablets seriously, even if they are seriously late to the party. After all, I have a vested interest in MS technologies succeeding since they put money in my bank account. That said, trying to be all things to all people is a patently bad idea, and I just don't get Metro on the desktop. While the Internet loves to bandy about the phrase "post PC era" in reference to mobile devices, the truth is that they're two completely separate creatures. Desktops are for creating content. Mobile is for consuming. An interface that's optimized for the latter is a dubious environment for the former. To be sure, I get the vision. Wouldn't it be great if, as developers, we could easily sling MS code that would automagically create killer desktop apps that ran with a UI appropriately optimized in a mobile environment? Metro looks like a good first step for the latter. But for desktop apps? Granted, I have zero exposure to this API and am only reflecting what I read in the tech media but my understanding is that Metro is at heart an HTML development environment. Great. A markup language that was never intended to be a development platform is now the arena in which we're going to create desktop applications. Really? Yeah, I know. You can press a magic button and get to a "classic" Windows desktop. But Metro is their push to become relevant in the mobile world, and that's a goal I enthusiastically support. I also like the dream, fantasy though it may be, of a "write once, run everywhere (where have I heard that before?)" platform that lets me harness the power of the desktop and leverage mobile with the same code. I'm just wondering if Windows 8 will be a Vista experience (reviled or ignored by the masses) on steroids. After all, aren't we supposed to skip every other version of Windows? With that in mind, how many of you are currently writing Metro apps? Is it a serious desktop dev environment, or just something that will let script kiddies say that they can now write native apps? Sooner or later (depending on the success of Win 8, of course), people are going to start asking me to sling Metro code. Just wondering if I should dive in now or wait for the whole idea to grow up a little bit.
Christopher Duncan Author o
My understanding is that desktop development for Windows 8 is very similar to Silverlight (XAML) sitting on top of either C# or VB. With this in mind I've been doing Silverlight development for my desktop applications with the expectation that they'll port to the new technology rather easily. That said, it will be years before we move to Windows 8 and I'm okay with that since I'd like to see the development tools blow through a couple of iterations first. I didn't start working with Silverlight until Silverlight 4 for that very reason.
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Even though I have access to the Windows 8 pre-release versions, I haven't gotten around to installing them as I'm still not sure what to make of this particular little sleigh ride. I'm delighted to see MS finally taking all those pesky smart phones and tablets seriously, even if they are seriously late to the party. After all, I have a vested interest in MS technologies succeeding since they put money in my bank account. That said, trying to be all things to all people is a patently bad idea, and I just don't get Metro on the desktop. While the Internet loves to bandy about the phrase "post PC era" in reference to mobile devices, the truth is that they're two completely separate creatures. Desktops are for creating content. Mobile is for consuming. An interface that's optimized for the latter is a dubious environment for the former. To be sure, I get the vision. Wouldn't it be great if, as developers, we could easily sling MS code that would automagically create killer desktop apps that ran with a UI appropriately optimized in a mobile environment? Metro looks like a good first step for the latter. But for desktop apps? Granted, I have zero exposure to this API and am only reflecting what I read in the tech media but my understanding is that Metro is at heart an HTML development environment. Great. A markup language that was never intended to be a development platform is now the arena in which we're going to create desktop applications. Really? Yeah, I know. You can press a magic button and get to a "classic" Windows desktop. But Metro is their push to become relevant in the mobile world, and that's a goal I enthusiastically support. I also like the dream, fantasy though it may be, of a "write once, run everywhere (where have I heard that before?)" platform that lets me harness the power of the desktop and leverage mobile with the same code. I'm just wondering if Windows 8 will be a Vista experience (reviled or ignored by the masses) on steroids. After all, aren't we supposed to skip every other version of Windows? With that in mind, how many of you are currently writing Metro apps? Is it a serious desktop dev environment, or just something that will let script kiddies say that they can now write native apps? Sooner or later (depending on the success of Win 8, of course), people are going to start asking me to sling Metro code. Just wondering if I should dive in now or wait for the whole idea to grow up a little bit.
Christopher Duncan Author o
It need not be HTML5 although it can be. You can develop using HTML5 with JavaScript OR you can use XAML with either VB, C# or even C++ as the code behind (thats right even C++) I am developing to keep my feet wet and I see market potential. Why not? I figure slab some apps out there and see what sticks. Maybe make a few bucks in the process. If not I atleast keep learning. Lots of gripe about it being a Desktop and Mobile OS. Funny thing is this gripe comes a lot from developers whom have probablly countless times argued to their manager about how they must merge 2 different systems for efficiency. Yes build once deploy multiple times qould be great. But the reality is MS is doing this for internal reasons. Maintaining multiple OSes is difficult as it is. (predecessors, embedded etc.). Creating a whole different stack is not smart. What they are doing is good. It may not be the best OS out the gate but it will certainly have resources to make it great. The alternative would have been split the MS developer pool which could have damaged the capability of one over the other.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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Even though I have access to the Windows 8 pre-release versions, I haven't gotten around to installing them as I'm still not sure what to make of this particular little sleigh ride. I'm delighted to see MS finally taking all those pesky smart phones and tablets seriously, even if they are seriously late to the party. After all, I have a vested interest in MS technologies succeeding since they put money in my bank account. That said, trying to be all things to all people is a patently bad idea, and I just don't get Metro on the desktop. While the Internet loves to bandy about the phrase "post PC era" in reference to mobile devices, the truth is that they're two completely separate creatures. Desktops are for creating content. Mobile is for consuming. An interface that's optimized for the latter is a dubious environment for the former. To be sure, I get the vision. Wouldn't it be great if, as developers, we could easily sling MS code that would automagically create killer desktop apps that ran with a UI appropriately optimized in a mobile environment? Metro looks like a good first step for the latter. But for desktop apps? Granted, I have zero exposure to this API and am only reflecting what I read in the tech media but my understanding is that Metro is at heart an HTML development environment. Great. A markup language that was never intended to be a development platform is now the arena in which we're going to create desktop applications. Really? Yeah, I know. You can press a magic button and get to a "classic" Windows desktop. But Metro is their push to become relevant in the mobile world, and that's a goal I enthusiastically support. I also like the dream, fantasy though it may be, of a "write once, run everywhere (where have I heard that before?)" platform that lets me harness the power of the desktop and leverage mobile with the same code. I'm just wondering if Windows 8 will be a Vista experience (reviled or ignored by the masses) on steroids. After all, aren't we supposed to skip every other version of Windows? With that in mind, how many of you are currently writing Metro apps? Is it a serious desktop dev environment, or just something that will let script kiddies say that they can now write native apps? Sooner or later (depending on the success of Win 8, of course), people are going to start asking me to sling Metro code. Just wondering if I should dive in now or wait for the whole idea to grow up a little bit.
Christopher Duncan Author o
I am just testing the waters using Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 along with Team Foundation Server 2012. So far the technology looks promising It's been a long time since we have seen innovation at such a large scale from Microsoft. I like the WinRT concept that you can have one common business and entity code base for all your desktop, tablet and mobile applications. I very much understand and appreciate Microsoft’s end goal - one operating system and one experience on all your devices: your phone, your Xbox, your desktop, your laptop, your tablet, your hybrid computing device you don’t yet know how it looks like. If they succeed with this vision, they will change how we use computers and devices forever. Finally, Windows 8 is, in my humble opinion, the most innovative version of Windows Microsoft has released since Windows 95. Regards, Kishore http://kishore1021.wordpress.com/[^]
Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; Professionals built the Titanic.
