Next Wednesday (November 9th), I’ll be at the Microsoft Days 11 as a member of the Ask The Expert team. I’ll be playing with the Samsung Slate I got at //BUILD/, discussing WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8.
Don’t hesitate to stop by and say hi if you’re coming to this event !
In the last few days I had many questions about the “good” way to run Windows 8 developer preview from a Virtual Environment. It turns out the Windows engineering team wrote a blog post last friday about that.
The popular options are the following:
Functional:
Non-functional:
If you’re running Windows 8 developer preview in a virtual environment you probably should also take a look at the Windows 8: Tips and Tricks for mouse/keyboard users article on WinRumors.
Finally if like me you a bit disoriented by the lack of the classic Windows menu in the desktop mode, you should now that if you press the Windows key and start typing using your keyboard it will actually start filtering applications and show you those which match your search.
Enjoy your Windows 8 time !
This blog post is part of my BUILD series.
I’m having a very busy week here in Anaheim ! I’m meeting many new people and had the chance to enjoy the conference from the inside. I’m also playing with this new Windows 8 slate Microsoft gave us ! I’m not going to do a blog post trying to summarize everything because there is just so much to say.I’m going to try to share my point of view on what I’ve seen here.
Our new platform
The original picture shown during the keynote to introduce the new platform was this one:
There has been a lot of confusion about that because of having XAML with C# in the Metro Style Apps without any reference to the CLR… Doug Steven did a pretty great job (blog post is here) by discussing with key people from the engineering team of Microsoft and creates this new more accurate picture:
Here is a quick summary:
New opportunities
Before //BUILD we had already many choices to choose our development environment. we now have even more:
I personally think that Silverlight in a web browser has not a great future. Microsoft just announced for example that the immersive version of IE will not run any plugins (so no Silverlight in the Metro UI) and we ‘ll know Microsoft is pushing HTML5 very strongly.
For classic desktop apps we have 2 options: WPF and Silverlight. Each of them has advantages and the choice we’ll have to do will depend on our constraints (deployment, business needs, connectivity…). I think there is room for the 2 platforms there.
For the Metro UI, you can choose between XAML and HTML. Microsoft told us they will keep a good feature parity between the 2 options. If you choose XAML and managed code you’ll be able to leverage a subset of the .Net framework.
I think another important aspect is that Metro will be available on Windows 8 only. Even though this new version of the OS might have a fast deployment rate (thanks to the slates), in many companies I don’t think it will be that fast.This, plus the fact that some LOB apps will not benefit the Metro UI leaves a lot of work to do in the desktop applications world (where we have both WPF and SL)… For WPF, we now have a new version coming in .Net 4.5. You can check out the new stuff here in the documentation.
In my next blog post I’m going to try to go deeper in the new WinRT/XAML world and see how it looks like for us, WPF and Silverlight developers.