Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 106 posts

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

#51

Post by rbanffy »

dorian-graph wrote: post #45
rbanffy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's one of the many things I like in open source - there are no secrets, no big surprises and nobody ever forces you anything.

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

#52

Post by rbanffy »

maxxxxx wrote: post #50
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?

> why can't MS optimize

They can. They just prefer to make every Windows developer jump through hoops, as it's so much more cost-effective.

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

#53

Post by Joeri »

mattmanser wrote: post #43
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…

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

Why would you deliberately handicap yourself on the HTML side? Ext JS + Ext Designer + IDE with automatic linting and auto-completion. That's one possible way to build rich web apps.

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

#54

Post by dorian-graph »

rbanffy wrote: post #51
dorian-graph wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .. 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.

That's one of the many things I like in open source - there are no secrets, no big surprises and nobody ever forces you anything.

There is still dislike and complaints about new directions (Unity, Gnome3, KDE4, etc.).

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

#55

Post by Stormbringer »

As someone who has been recently actually doing Windows development using HTML and Javascript I have a couple of observations.

#1 Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows what they're talking about, naturally this will get downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely knew thee. :D

#2 In order to actually get anything done you have to 'bust out' into the Windows APIs anyway. See here for a prime example:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aew9yb99(v=vs.85).as...

#3 For budgeting/political reasons I won't go into, I can say that this is possible with only the use of notepad. Speaking programmer to programmer, I strongly advise you to get better tooling than that. Really. This thing is an absolute pig to code and debug by hand.

#4 The horror is entirely justified. This is how bad it is... it actually makes those retarded Java enterprise projects, where you have to cobble together 14 different frameworks that are fundamentally incompatible, look good.

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

#57

Post by jimbobimbo »

sofuture wrote: post #56

Windows 7 widgets were also written in HTML and JS. This is the dumbest controversy ever.

Vista and Windows 7 presentations were never about "here's your widgets and that's it". The way the whole story about HTML+JS on Windows 8 was presented ("a new platform" and not a peep about what else's there) is what legitimately pisses people off.

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

#58

Post by MatthewPhillips »

rbanffy wrote: post #38
cageface wrote: post #11

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".

I was quite sure that would be the case, as Microoft would never allow such an easy way to port Windows apps to other environments. Whatever glue is tied in HTLM/JS environment, it'll run deep into the Windows APIs in such a way no HTML5/JS app will be easily ported to, say, Google's ChromeOS.

Chrome has plenty of its own APIs too.

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

#59

Post by raganwald »

Stormbringer wrote: post #55

As someone who has been recently actually doing Windows development using HTML and Javascript I have a couple of observations. #1 Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows what they're talking about, naturally this will get downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely knew thee. :D #2 In order to actually get anything done you have to 'bust out' into the Windows APIs anyway. See here for a prim…

  Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows
  what they're talking about, naturally this will get
  downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely
  knew thee. :D
Do not ignore the possibility that your comment will garner downvotes for talking about being downvoted. Your observations are worth reading. Why bury them underneath meta-commentary that does not add to the discussion?

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

#60

Post by d4nt »

It occurs to me that all this stuff is primarily for tablets, and tablets mostly use ARM chips. Microsoft have said Windows 8 will run on ARM, but it will take a lot of work to make the .NET CLR run on ARM. If I read anything into this its that there probably isn't an ARM version of .NET coming.
Post reply on HN