Windows 8 Reactions from Build: Dev Experts Weigh In

This week Microsoft lifted the veil on Windows 8 (and Visual Studio 11) at its Build conference. We asked four experts -- Andrew Brust, founder of Blue Badge Insights and a Microsoft Regional Director; Alan Stevens, co-founder of Wild Endeavor Inc., an MVP in C# and a member of ASP Insiders; David Platt, who teaches .NET programming at Harvard University Extension School and was named a "Software Legend" by Microsoft; and, Steve Riley, Technical Leader, office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology -- to share their reactions to what they've seen of Windows 8 so far this week.

We also want to hear from you! Please add your thoughts by posting in the comments.

Andrew Brust:

    We knew it would be nuts to dump the old stack and dump all the people trained on it. It would have to be an inclusive story. On the other hand, the notion of everything running in a separate managed framework, probably given that it was the Windows team, wasn't going to be seen as ideal. So there needed to be some way to unify all that. It appears that they've done that.

    The support for XAML is now native in the operating system. I expected that the C# and VB support would be native as well, but apparently the CLR is invoked when you program in those two languages. That wasn't talked about in the keynote.

    I expected to look at the HTML 5 and JavaScript stuff and keep walking. I found, to my surprise, that it looked pretty compelling. Because it's not just natively supported on Windows; it's completely supported in Visual Studio. Suddenly, it just doesn't look so nutty. It's not that I'm whipping out Visual Notepad to write some markup and some scripting code. It's professional development, just as it is with other languages. That came as a bit of a surprise. It looks like a really good way to build these rich applications really quickly.

    What they have said is that the immersive applications will work on both (high-powered processors and ARM procs). What they haven't said is what the story is for desktop mode on an ARM device. I'm interested to see. I think the pattern is going to be for heavy-duty enterprise apps to stay on the desktop for the foreseeable future, and that means it's going to stay on Intel machines because they're going to be mostly stationary desktop or laptop machines where this work's going to get done. Office is still going to be a desktop application, but it would be nice if we had a Reader++ on the [mobile] side, so we could make relatively trivial edits when necessary.

    I could see putting that pattern in on enterprise apps, especially CRM. Looking at my pipeline in a CRM application on a tablet and seeing the revenue funnel visualized, that makes huge sense on a tablet.

Alan Stevens:

    The biggest fundamental change for developers was the Windows Runtime, JavaScript inside the Windows OS. I don't know what that means yet.

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