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Building Windows 8

blogs.msdn.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Building Windows 8

#14
post #4
post #3

I have been a mac/ubuntu user for the last ten years, but Windows 8 is the first time Microsoft has really caught my attention since the xbox came out.

Wow, really? Which parts, exactly? I'm genuinely curious, as someone who's been a Windows user for basically his entire computing life.

I feel the same way; what we've seen of Win8 marks the first rethinking of desktop computing since the original WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers). (Not the first, actually, but the first to actually see the light of day from a vendor as big as MS). And the fact that it's HTML5-based doesn't hurt. :)

Re: Building Windows 8

#16
I really like the fact that they mentioned "performance" a bunch of times. Windows has needed some serious streamlining and performance tweaks for a while now.

Re: Building Windows 8

#17
post #6

Seems like an awful lot of words to say (a) computing has changed much in the last 15 years [you don't say!], and (b) we're going to start talking about changes early so the market isn't surprised or apprehensive. Not much meat in there.

Indeed, a very long-winded way to say "don't forget about us, we are working on something".

Re: Building Windows 8

#18
"Building the next release of Microsoft Windows is an industry-wide effort that Microsoft approaches with a strong sense of responsibility and humility" and "we learned some great lessons and renewed our sense of responsibility to the community"

Given that this was full of stuff worded like this, I sort of doubt that. You feel like you're being snowed from the first sentence onwards. I realize this is somewhat orthogonal to the technology that might be included. However, this is supposed to be from "inside the engineering team", and it's almost completely tone-deaf. Either they need to hire more intelligent PR people or, I don't know, let actual engineers talk about what they are building.

Re: Building Windows 8

#19
post #14
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, really? Which parts, exactly? I'm genuinely curious, as someone who's been a Windows user for basically his entire computing life.

I feel the same way; what we've seen of Win8 marks the first rethinking of desktop computing since the original WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers). (Not the first, actually, but the first to actually see the light of day from a vendor as big as MS). And the fact that it's HTML5-based doesn't hurt. :)

What exactly are they rethinking? To me it looks like a desperate attempt to catch up with the tablet trend without leaving their massive existing customer base out in the cold.

Re: Building Windows 8

#20

This headline would have a different meaning if it was an open source project.

Yup, I honestly expected an article about the build environment and stuff like build times. Can you compile Windows from scratch on a regular development machine in a decent time frame? I guess it depends on whether you're thinking of the Windows kernel or Windows the desktop environment.
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