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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

#81

Post by rbanffy »

coderdude wrote: post #71
rbanffy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can hardly afford the time it would take to do that.

Besides that, I think my assessment of the situation is solid. It is much more cost-effective to make your developers (who will follow you, as they have huge investments on your platform already and wouldn't be willing or able to switch) move the direction you want than move in the direction they want. In their position, being able to do whatever is convenient for them regardless of how inconvenient it is to their users, I'd do exactly the same.

It's a delicate act of balancing your inconvenience of moving along with your vendor and your cost of migrating to another. As long as the second half is kept high enough, they can do a lot of inconvenience on the first.

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

#82

Post by matwood »

teyc wrote: post #13
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.

People didn't have to migrate though. I know we still have some internal VB6 apps floating around that work fine and do the job they were made to do. Of course they are on the 'upgrade to .net eventually' list, but so far there has been no rush.

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

#83

Post by pasbesoin »

coderdude wrote: post #71
rbanffy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This strikes me as a particularly un-HN-like comment. Accusatory tone is not a valued conversational technique here.

Be mindful of not slipping into the more emotional tone that some have observed nipping at the edges of the HN community.

(I don't mean to sound as if I'm speaking from a position of moral superiority, nor expertise with regard to the topic at hand. Just an observation and suggestion.)

P.S. For the record, I did not downvote anything. That is coming from elsewhere.

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

#84

Post by PetrolMan »

I may simply be missing something but I think HTML and Javascript make a lot of sense for basic applications. I've never quite understood why someone would want to jump into Silverlight for an application that simply handles data input and retrieval. I also know that Silverlight has capabilities that HTML doesn't but it's also got some deficiencies that IMO are glaring.

There is a lot to be said for what you are comfortable with using but at the end of the day HTML is a truly cross compatible technology that is becoming more and more capable every day. This could also bring in a lot of potential "developers" if the cost of entry is lowered.

I also understand that you don't want the technologies that you invested in to become extinct overnight but I simply can't imagine that happening.

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

#85

Post by tjogin »

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

I think Windows 8 powered tablets are going to suck just as much for corporate as for consumers.

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

#86

Post by wmf »

lurker19 wrote: post #78
hugh4life wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Microsoft earlier explained that "native" means "not cross-platform".

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

#87

Post by maxxxxx »

DougWebb wrote: post #65
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…

I've been doing web application development with HTML+CSS+JS for many years, most on Unix but recently fully embedded in the .NET world. I can tell you from my experience that as good as VS and the .NET framework can be, they're way behind when it comes to web application development for cross-platform clients. (And by cross-platform I mean browsers other than IE.) For years most of my time has been spent developing…

Winforms did not replace Win32 and WPF did not replace Winforms. That's the problem.

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

#88

Post by pnathan »

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.

I would argue that the gap is getting bigger.

Tablets, no-desktop households, webapps: all of these are key consumer devices. Speed, flexibility are key

Enterprises are stuck on the desktop workstations with local apps. Managability of the apps by IT is key.

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

#89

Post by pnathan »

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.

I would argue that the gap is getting bigger.

Tablets, no-desktop households, webapps: all of these are key consumer devices. Speed, flexibility are key

Enterprises are stuck on the desktop workstations with local apps. Managability of the apps by IT is key.

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