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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

#41

Post by mhw »

contextfree wrote: post #27
tjogin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

consumer != corporate

But all corporate employees are also consumers, and the last ten or so years of consumer-oriented web and native application development has raised everyone's expectations about how software can look and behave. The corporate IT shops are not immune from the demands that these expectations create.

For example, a significant proportion of them are now having to work out how to support Apple's devices for corporate network access, email, document sharing and delivering apps for internal users and consumers, and all because corporate executives are also consumers.

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

#42

Post by chrisjsmith »

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…

I think people are going on the assertion that every-day apps written with WPF (i.e. Visual Studio 2010) are a step back from their old GDI-based ancestors with respect to performance.

I mean we've had to buy a shit load of graphics cards to get acceptable performance on our (definitely not shoddy) kit.

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

#43

Post by mattmanser »

tluyben2 wrote: post #40

Stop whining ; it's one of few actual smart moves coming out of MS in years. And my MS developer friends are not complaining; it makes their life easier because now they can easily switch, get more jobs and do stuff that's actually 'cool' again (yep, programming for Win is very not cool in most every corner of the world while building hip stuff in HTML5 is); it makes nice money but things you have to do for 30+ years…

It's not whining, the article perfectly sums it up:

it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools

Seriously, try xaml and VS compared with [insert vim, emacs, etc] + html5.

They're light years apart in terms of capabilities.

On the other hand, I'd think it's far too early to worry, apart from MS have now gone all clam, which is worrying. They're fanning the flames themselves

It doesn't really affect me, but I can understand why a lot of developers would be anxious.

They don't want to use a clearly inferior technology and quite frankly a crappy language like JS.

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

#45

Post by dorian-graph »

rbanffy wrote: post #36
Sandman wrote: post #32

tl;dr: Based on a comment by Microsoft VP, Julie Larson-Green, that a certain weather application they recently made was done using a platform based on HTML 5 and JS, ars technica's Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform, and then goes into a long rant on how disastrous this will be for all the Windows developers because it…

> Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform Actually, unless my memory fails me, it was that Microsoft video showing the tiled interface of Windows 8 that did that - it kind of implied HTML5 was the tool of choice (or, at least, the glue) for tiled and that tiled was the future. The thread kenjackson pointed out tells another s…

> .. but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.

Well, Microsoft may not have explained everything at once (Who does?) but that doesn't explicitly mean they forced people to overreact.

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

#46

Post by contextfree »

adambyrtek wrote: post #33
contextfree wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

consumer != corporate

The gap between consumer and corporate is getting smaller every day. This trend is only going to continue, so betting on something appealing only to enterprise, not consumers, is a self-defeating strategy.

what I actually meant with my perhaps too self-satisfied pithy post was that whether or not an immersive Office is ready or will be ready for Win8 release, I'm sure they will have a suite of consumer-oriented apps similar to the built in WP7/smart phone apps (or Windows Live Essentials): music, photos, maps, search, social networking, messaging, games. They'll probably fund internal and external development of other key apps as well, again like WP7.

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

#47

Post by maxxxxx »

I think a lot of developers are simply getting tired of MS cranking out half baked technologies and abandoning them after a while. If you want to write a desktop app there simply is no obvious platform of choice. You have Winforms (abandoned), WPF (slow, future unclear, do fonts render OK now?), MFC (has been out of date for 10 years), Win32 (hard to use), Silverlight (direction changes every 3 months). They all have different problems MS doesn't seem to interested addressing.

I wish MS would make a decision to bet everything on one platform (I don't care which), stick to it and make it really good.

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

#48

Post by xradionut »

None of the Windows developers I work with or know in the community are not even concerned about this. Corporate and independent development in the .NET community are conservative and unlikely to jump on the latest thing from Redmond. They have been there, done that and got the free t-shirts for numerous hyped technologies. Most folks still haven't upgraded to VS 2010 or SQL Server 2008R2 yet. There's no point when the money in Windows development doesn't demand the latest and greatest fad. The smart ones wait and see what works, choosing to skip crap like Vista for Windows 7 and concentrate on the good stuff like C#.

As for Peter Bright, (as long time Arstechnica reader and forum participant), I have observed that his articles are designed to get page views. Arstechnica does this by blasting Microsoft and fawning on Apple. As a cynic this doesn't bother me, I can filter the noise and realize that Peter and Conde Nast have bills to pay.

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

#49

Post by iamelgringo »

Anyone else notice that within a year, you'll be able to write cross platform html5+js apps that run Black Berry, Windows 8, WebOS, Android and iOS?

If this becomes the standard, like I suspect it will, one of the biggest losers will be companies that run big app stores.

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

#50

Post by maxxxxx »

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…

A simple to medium complexity WPF app will be slower than its Winforms or Win32 counter part. It will use a lot more memory too. There may be ways around this but why can't MS optimize it instead of forcing every developer to jump through the same hoops?
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