It is a really hard paced week here at the Build Windows (8) launch event (//build/). The 3500-5000, roughly, developers who are here are all scrambling to keep up while picking up pieces of our brains from the floors since most of what we see here in Anaheim CA is blowing our mind! Yes almost literally. Color me impressed folks!
The fact that we were given a Preview Tablet with Windows 8 and all the new development tools was really awesome:
With this we can get going immediately and develop the new Metro style apps with use the new Windows Runtime APIs and also use the new Cloud Syncing data service offerings that Microsoft are providing us. And then I’ve not even gotten started on Windows 8 Server.
Let’s try to break things down a little:
The new Metro design to the Windows 8 desktop is a HUGE shift in focus for Microsoft. This is a touch first design where a lot of research and attention to detail has been placed into making something beautiful as well as very easy to use. This will be a major change for users who begin using it when it comes out. Gone is the start menu with dead icons and hello there Live Tiles – big blocks of styled content which will bring you updated information at your fingertips from the status of your apps.
The new Windows Runtime APIs some say is the announcement of the death of Win32. It is strange how we humans seem to love to relish in the negative. Win32 will be around for very many years. .NET is all staying around too btw. Another fun comment/question I heard here at Anaheim. There is no difference here for .NET or the CLR or the BCL. They are all evolving and sticking around. The new thing, WinRT, is a set of native APIs which we can use code almost no code at all to access the underlying hardware and many more things which I am just now coming into grasp on. But wait a minute! Did I just write native? Does this mean we have to do PInvoke and stuff in order to use this? Not at all! Microsoft has gone and changed the way we call from managed into unmanaged code and even provided us with rich metadata on the native libraries. This is as easy as adding a reference and addressing the namespaces in there. Really major for us developers! With just a few lines of code we can reach out and touch the camera or what have you connected to the system.
As many of you know I am a Windows Azure Cloud geek. Naturally one of the greatest parts of this for me was the massive new syncing services that Microsoft are enabling for us. Again with just a few lines of code! You see as a user on a Windows 8 system you can opt to associate a LiveID with your device and hey presto! Settings, session state and even your logins are migrated between your apps! Yes that’s right: I saw a key note demo of a login to a web app on one device, a workstation Windows 8 PC and that same login being re-used on a different device standing right next to it. No magic – just some real powerful sync services in the Cloud at your beck and call. Developers really only have to write data to be synced to a service – again a one-liner in order to make this happen.
The new and improved Developer Tools; Visual studio 11 and Expression Blend just have too much new goodness for me to even begin to cover today!
Dive right into the new Windows Dev Center download the Windows Developer Preview and get crackin’!
And you Swedes can go to the Swedish Build site Build Sweden to learn how to catch up to the latest and the greatest – and naturally “Everything about Windows” Allt om Windows.
Cheers,
M.