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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

#71
post #52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey look, it's this guy. Troll of every Microsoft thread.

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

#72
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Higher than "simple to medium" scale/complexity situations are probably their priority when it comes to optimisation, on the basis that most smaller scale/complexity apps won't experience the difference and those that do can be tweaked by the programmer. A major factor to consider when optimising anything particularly something as generic as a large framework is that an optimisation for small scale situations can hav…

Exactly. Bubble-sort is really fast for more-or-less pre-sorted data. But it's terrible in the worst case.

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

#73
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I read the article one more time, it does seem to be much more lucid now. I'll attribute my bad interpretation of it on the fact I read it very late last night - when it seemed to me he was saying that HTML5+JS was replacing .NET and WPF. He still makes some absurd claims though: "... they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Win…

He was saying, I think, that that was the public perception. I'm pretty confident, though I obviously don't speak for him, that that's not his own opinion. At the end of the article, he seems to make that clear.

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

#74
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 net…

Don't underestimate this. Over the last five years I worked in corporate IT I heard more and more request for "iPhone" versions of our apps and saw more and more emphasis put on making things look good, with Apple's design aesthetic defining "good". Microsoft ignores this growing tide at its peril.

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

#75
post #62

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.

It's not HTML+JS, it's HTML + JS + vendor-specific bindings + vendor-specific packaging & signature. At best you'll be dealing with another fat abstraction layer with same kind of annoying small incompatibilities that plague(d) web browsers.

I believe that abstraction layer is currently called PhoneGap.

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

#76

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.

The greater the diversity in the market, the more appealing HTML5 becomes. It's bad enough supporting two platforms but 3-4 is going to push a lot of shops to the browser. Unfortunately, both Apple and Microsoft have significant incentives to make sure the browser experience is always inferior to a native app.

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

#78

After a few minutes on the internets I discovered a little gem of a thread: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79... In this thread you'll see much more clearly what MS is planning. It's not just HTML/JS for these immersive apps. Rather it appears that the CLR will become a first class part of Windows. If you are a Windows dev or are interested in Windows dev, this is a must read thread. In fac…

I read that a couple days ago and here are the two most interesting posts... Microsoft's own immersive html application is just a thin layer over native code http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79... .NET Ahead-Of-Time compiler is probably coming http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79... [EDIT] And for those worried Silverlight developers, scan that thread for DirectUI.

Is this what the "IE is native" PR claims are about? That HTML DOM and CSS are going to map directly onto the window system instead of a virtual window (or whatever it is called) in the browser engine?

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

#79
I seriously doubt a lot of the legacy development stories in .NET are ending. But those are brownfield development stories of apps that were on the drawing board years ago.

I am looking forward - and I just dont think Microsoft has its act together or even beleives its "Developers, Developers, Developers" mantra any more.

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

#80
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

Yes, but none of that was a surprise (we knew about Unity, Gnome and KDE 4 long before any of that hit the distros), we could influence the decisions (arguing in favor of other directions) and, if enough people disagree with the the leaders, they can always make a viable fork.

You can't force an open-source developer to work on something he/she doesn't like and agree.

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