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Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#11

Post by cageface »

This article seems to be making the assumption that the Windows 8 api will be vanilla HTML5/JS. My impression from the presentation was that they might be using HTML as the layout format and JS as the language but that there would be a lot of non-standard widgets and APIs exposed to both layers.

If so, it's too early to dismiss the technology as "inadequate".

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#12

Post by mathgladiator »

daeken wrote: post #3

I'm not horrified and I don't know any Windows developers that are (although I'm sure there are some out there). This is being blown way out of proportion, I believe. Edit: I especially like the assertion that WPF is not fast. Evidently the author has never done much with the 3d transform functionality in WPF -- you can do insanely performant graphically-intensive apps using it. The fact that most developers don't un…

> The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works

This signals a usability fail in my mind.

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#13

Post by teyc »

Yhippa wrote: post #6

What developers are horrified by this? I thought for your enterprise apps that you can continue to use the Windows 7 skin. For developers of the new Windows 8 platform I think this is a great opportunity for developers to get content into the hands of traditional users in a new way.

MS has lost a lot of trust when they killed off VFP and then VB6. People with large codebases had to migrate and it means loss of competitive advantage making new code do old things.

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#14

Post by johns »

powertower wrote: post #2

Windows 8 is giving developers one more option: In tablet mode you can write the UI part of the application (the widget) in HTML5 and JS. Author's profile: (Microsoft Contributor) "Peter Bright dropped out of university (after about five minutes) to work as a software developer writing C++ and C#." After reading that article I propose that he must have also spent another 5 minutes programming before deciding on his n…

Do you know that as fact or are you speculating?

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#15

Post by nettdata »

mathgladiator wrote: post #12
daeken wrote: post #3

I'm not horrified and I don't know any Windows developers that are (although I'm sure there are some out there). This is being blown way out of proportion, I believe. Edit: I especially like the assertion that WPF is not fast. Evidently the author has never done much with the 3d transform functionality in WPF -- you can do insanely performant graphically-intensive apps using it. The fact that most developers don't un…

> The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works This signals a usability fail in my mind.

I see it more like sometimes shit is just hard to do well, taking time and effort to learn, and some developers don't put in the required work to reap the rewards.

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#16

Post by pedalpete »

Further to the other comments on this thread, the articles comments re "HTML5 remains true to its text mark-up heritage; its structure and semantics are still geared towards creating structured text documents, not application user interfaces" can't possibly be true, or we wouldn't have the vast number of very usable web-apps we have today.

Corporations should be (and are) embracing the capabilities of web technologies for building internal tools quickly and enabling quick changes.

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#18

Post by eropple »

powertower wrote: post #2

Windows 8 is giving developers one more option: In tablet mode you can write the UI part of the application (the widget) in HTML5 and JS. Author's profile: (Microsoft Contributor) "Peter Bright dropped out of university (after about five minutes) to work as a software developer writing C++ and C#." After reading that article I propose that he must have also spent another 5 minutes programming before deciding on his n…

I know Peter personally, and he is one of the more well-educated, intelligent, and astonishingly competent developers I know.

Nice flamebait, though.

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#19

Post by daeken »

mathgladiator wrote: post #12
daeken wrote: post #3

I'm not horrified and I don't know any Windows developers that are (although I'm sure there are some out there). This is being blown way out of proportion, I believe. Edit: I especially like the assertion that WPF is not fast. Evidently the author has never done much with the 3d transform functionality in WPF -- you can do insanely performant graphically-intensive apps using it. The fact that most developers don't un…

> The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works This signals a usability fail in my mind.

They made it very easy to get things up and going, and easy to optimize if you understand that graphics and WPF work. Most people don't, which is why most OpenGL and D3D apps that haven't been heavily optimized over time are very slow; graphics are hard, even without the extra burden of understanding how your GUI layer functions. It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with WPF, but it also makes it easy for people to design really efficient apps if they take the time to learn how it differs from other GUI toolkits.

Re: Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

#20

Post by tjogin »

X-Istence wrote: post #9

At this point you know it is a non-issue because Arstechnica is covering it about six weeks too late[1]. I have talked to many different developers and every one of them that is developing in C# and .NET are not worried at all. Main reason? This stuff is not really going to fly well within the corporate world, corporations still need their custom built applications (using older source bases most of the time), they st…

I think you're right. But the consequence of that is, of course, that the touch driven "immersive" part is only going to be skin deep. Which in turn means that Windows 8 is going to fail spectacularly on tablets, for the exact same reasons every previous Windows tablet failed.
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