This is a market strategy. Microsoft knows desktop apps, WPF, Silverlight are losing the battle against HTML5/CSS/JS based apps, the most obvious movement Micro

This is a market strategy. Microsoft knows desktop apps, WPF, Silverlight are losing the battle against HTML5/CSS/JS based apps, the most obvious movement Microsoft could have done is create a 2 minute video of their next OS and say "hey Web Developers, you can use your web skills here too". Also, this video says nothing about the architecture behind this "Launcher"(because that what it looks like), there are a lot of possibilities. May be IE10 has some kind of <protected-frame> element so you can specify certain permissions like network access, file system access and stuff, maybe it requires a manifest in which you can specify what "DOM manipulation technology" do you want to use, the most obvious options are: - A Javascript (IE9 code-name "Chakra" engine) based file. - A JScript.NET file. - Any DLR based language file. - Any .NET assembly decorated with some fashion attributes like <Windows8Launcher.TileDomBehindAttribute(typeof(MyTileHandler))> or something which you can easily compile with any .NET compiler like C#, VB.NET, C++ CLI, etc. May be developing in HTML is completely optional and each Tile can be developed using Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation technologies... we don't know. We know that Microsoft is a legacy company, they will not abandon .NET anytime soon.