7 ms·

Well, there are a few good reasons for that: coding for WinRT is harder than it should be A lot of us haven't even gotten far enough to figure that out. Micro

Well, there are a few good reasons for that: coding for WinRT is harder than it should be A lot of us haven't even gotten far enough to figure that out. Microsoft just switched us all over to a new UI toolkit (Windows Presentation Foundation) with the release of .NET 3 five or so years ago. We've invested a lot of time and money into getting up to speed with this new technology. And now we're already being asked to migrate away from it and onto yet another Next Big Thing. Meanwhile, Microsoft zinged its mobile developers (the very ones they're so desperate to court) even harder by deciding that the new mobile platform they brought out only two years ago would not be compatible with the new mobile platform they're bringing out now. It was twelve years ago this month that Steve Ballmer did his famous monkey dance while repeatedly shouting "Developers!" and apparently slipping into some sort of fugue state. Well, it turns out that all those developers he wanted to make such a big deal of saying are such a big deal? They're are all kind of pissed off and disgruntled right now.

pjmlp 14y ago
Metro is WPF based.
- mariusmg 14y ago
  Technically. In reality WinRT is missing A LOT of stuff from WPF (heck WinRT doesn't even reach parity with Silverlight). Simple stuff la x:Static, x:Array are not available. WinRT 1.0 is basically a subset of Silverlight with a few specific controls thrown in.
  - beagle3 14y ago
    > heck WinRT doesn't even reach parity with Silverlight That reminds me: WPF is not even a superset of Silverlight; There's functionality I need in Silverlight (regarding media codecs) which is not available in WPF, and my only way to get it is to instantiate a browser, run a silverlight app inside, and somehow bridge it all underneath in my app. Pure madness.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  You can use Xaml with WinRT. But beyond that cosmetic similarity, it gets pretty different. WPF is implemented in .NET, whereas WinRT is more of a replacement for Win32. You can still write WPF apps for Windows 8, of course, but they won't be Metro apps, they won't run on ARM tablets and, significantly for the current conversation, they won't be allowed in the Windows app store.
MattRogish 14y ago
Fire and motion, my friend. Fire and motion: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
- z92 14y ago
  That article was exactly what I was thinking of while reading this post. Thanks that you posted the link.
- beagle3 14y ago
  Yep. And like in the battlefield, fire and motion works when you already have an advantage, but doesn't when you're in an inferior position (Which Microsoft is right now in the mobile market - and are not as dominant in the desktop[1] market) [1] by which, I don't mean they are remotely in danger of being dethroned. Just that they can't dictate application standards anymore, because most activity happens on the web.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Fire and motion refers to your own forward momentum. Using it to put developers within your own ecosystem off-balance is an antipattern.
xradionut 14y ago
"A lot of us haven't even gotten far enough to figure that out. Microsoft just switched us all over to a new UI toolkit (Windows Presentation Foundation) with the release of .NET 3 five or so years ago. We've invested a lot of time and money into getting up to speed with this new technology. And now we're already being asked to migrate away from it and onto yet another Next Big Thing." Bingo! Talked about disrespecting your developers/users by changing the rules of the GUI every couple of years. Only the hardcore fans, pioneers and draftees are jumping into Windows 8. (The rest of us are keeping it locked up in virtual machines.) There's enough work in the Windows development universe, a developer can ignore Metro till it grows up or decent third party tools come out. For f--ks sake, Redmond, I've got real apps, (both web and desktop) to write.
- beagle3 14y ago
  I guess a lot of the people here are too young to remember - but it's always been this way with Microsoft, and admittedly, with most other infrastructure companies out there (Sun had an era like that, NetScape did too). MFC, ATL, ADO, DAO, ...; Win8 might be breaking new ground in how "out of place" your app will be if you don't adopt the latest and greatest, but if you wanted nice modern menubars and toolbars ("Coolbar"), you had to switch from Win32 to MFC in the past. You had to go through hoops to get somethings done with COM without using ATL (with quite a few things working through ATL but not if you try to use COM directly; because no one in Microsoft ever tried to use them NOT through ATL). And for a long time, it made everyone happy - because jumping on the new thing kept you employable, and actually shipping working products mattered less. Microsoft did not change its ways. The world did.
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    True most young lads, have this notion that only Microsoft keeps changing the thechnology stack, when actually all companies do the same. As anyone noticed how many MacOS X APIs have been deprecated since the early days? Or the API changes in Android? Every corporation plays this game, as you point out. I still remember the early COM days, where the only API was C based, and COM was called OLE.
recoiledsnake 14y ago
>Meanwhile, Microsoft zinged its mobile developers (the very ones they're so desperate to court) even harder by deciding that the new mobile platform they brought out only two years ago would not be compatible with the new mobile platform they're bringing out now. WP7 apps will run on WP8 without any modifications or even without anything needing to be done by the developers. >Well, it turns out that all those developers he wanted to make such a big deal of saying are such a big deal? They're are all kind of pissed off and disgruntled right now. Citation needed and content farms like TNW who will "print" anything to drive clicks don't count. I know it's hip on HN to rag on Microsoft, but cmon, two thousand apps for a platform that is a month away from release(only available to MSDN users right now) and everyone is predicting doomsday? Perhaps developers are making use of the last month to further enhance apps before submitting them?
narrator 14y ago
Way back in the day I used to be a Microsoft developer. I got tired of them changing the database API every other year. All the open sources platforms are much more stable. Knowledge in these other platforms doesn't decay as quickly or is at least somewhat useful even after 10 years. In contrast, Microsoft will just go and kill whole platforms from time to time (e.g Visual Basic) rendering useless years of experience building deep understanding of a platform.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Like any other commercial vendor.
  - bunderbunder 14y ago
    I think Microsoft is worse about it that other commercial vendors. Perhaps due to a perception (not necessarily incorrect) on their part that their customers are locked in. If a vendor who only supplies a single product decides to torpedo the APIs that you rely on, they create an easy opportunity for you to switch to another vendor entirely. Whereas historically Microsoft could wreak havoc upon an entire development platform (Visual Basic) knowing that probably all you'll be able to do about it is huff and puff around a bit on the Internet. After all you couldn't jump ship on Windows development - all your customers were Windows users, or your entire IT department was built around Windows, or your corporate intranet is all dependent on IE6, or whatever.
    - cooldeal 14y ago
      Funny you say that, because Microsoft's software problems are often attributed to bending over backwards to be backward compatible while other vendors like Apple quickly kills compatibility with almost ever release, with even point releases. Take this game bundled with Windows 95. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe It runs even on Windows 8. Upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 As I said in another comment, I still see some ASP and Visual Basic usage even after all these years, those applications are still supported in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Microsoft stopped making new versions because it wanted to move on to better technology. Want to take a poll on HN about what developers think of Visual Basic and Classic ASP? A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't.

pjmlp 14y ago

Metro is WPF based.

mariusmg 14y ago
Technically. In reality WinRT is missing A LOT of stuff from WPF (heck WinRT doesn't even reach parity with Silverlight). Simple stuff la x:Static, x:Array are not available. WinRT 1.0 is basically a subset of Silverlight with a few specific controls thrown in.
- beagle3 14y ago
  > heck WinRT doesn't even reach parity with Silverlight That reminds me: WPF is not even a superset of Silverlight; There's functionality I need in Silverlight (regarding media codecs) which is not available in WPF, and my only way to get it is to instantiate a browser, run a silverlight app inside, and somehow bridge it all underneath in my app. Pure madness.
bunderbunder 14y ago
You can use Xaml with WinRT. But beyond that cosmetic similarity, it gets pretty different. WPF is implemented in .NET, whereas WinRT is more of a replacement for Win32. You can still write WPF apps for Windows 8, of course, but they won't be Metro apps, they won't run on ARM tablets and, significantly for the current conversation, they won't be allowed in the Windows app store.

MattRogish 14y ago

Fire and motion, my friend. Fire and motion: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

z92 14y ago
That article was exactly what I was thinking of while reading this post. Thanks that you posted the link.
beagle3 14y ago
Yep. And like in the battlefield, fire and motion works when you already have an advantage, but doesn't when you're in an inferior position (Which Microsoft is right now in the mobile market - and are not as dominant in the desktop[1] market) [1] by which, I don't mean they are remotely in danger of being dethroned. Just that they can't dictate application standards anymore, because most activity happens on the web.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Fire and motion refers to your own forward momentum. Using it to put developers within your own ecosystem off-balance is an antipattern.

xradionut 14y ago

"A lot of us haven't even gotten far enough to figure that out. Microsoft just switched us all over to a new UI toolkit (Windows Presentation Foundation) with the release of .NET 3 five or so years ago. We've invested a lot of time and money into getting up to speed with this new technology. And now we're already being asked to migrate away from it and onto yet another Next Big Thing." Bingo! Talked about disrespecting your developers/users by changing the rules of the GUI every couple of years. Only the hardcore fans, pioneers and draftees are jumping into Windows 8. (The rest of us are keeping it locked up in virtual machines.) There's enough work in the Windows development universe, a developer can ignore Metro till it grows up or decent third party tools come out. For f--ks sake, Redmond, I've got real apps, (both web and desktop) to write.

beagle3 14y ago
I guess a lot of the people here are too young to remember - but it's always been this way with Microsoft, and admittedly, with most other infrastructure companies out there (Sun had an era like that, NetScape did too). MFC, ATL, ADO, DAO, ...; Win8 might be breaking new ground in how "out of place" your app will be if you don't adopt the latest and greatest, but if you wanted nice modern menubars and toolbars ("Coolbar"), you had to switch from Win32 to MFC in the past. You had to go through hoops to get somethings done with COM without using ATL (with quite a few things working through ATL but not if you try to use COM directly; because no one in Microsoft ever tried to use them NOT through ATL). And for a long time, it made everyone happy - because jumping on the new thing kept you employable, and actually shipping working products mattered less. Microsoft did not change its ways. The world did.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  True most young lads, have this notion that only Microsoft keeps changing the thechnology stack, when actually all companies do the same. As anyone noticed how many MacOS X APIs have been deprecated since the early days? Or the API changes in Android? Every corporation plays this game, as you point out. I still remember the early COM days, where the only API was C based, and COM was called OLE.

recoiledsnake 14y ago

>Meanwhile, Microsoft zinged its mobile developers (the very ones they're so desperate to court) even harder by deciding that the new mobile platform they brought out only two years ago would not be compatible with the new mobile platform they're bringing out now. WP7 apps will run on WP8 without any modifications or even without anything needing to be done by the developers. >Well, it turns out that all those developers he wanted to make such a big deal of saying are such a big deal? They're are all kind of pissed off and disgruntled right now. Citation needed and content farms like TNW who will "print" anything to drive clicks don't count. I know it's hip on HN to rag on Microsoft, but cmon, two thousand apps for a platform that is a month away from release(only available to MSDN users right now) and everyone is predicting doomsday? Perhaps developers are making use of the last month to further enhance apps before submitting them?

narrator 14y ago

Way back in the day I used to be a Microsoft developer. I got tired of them changing the database API every other year. All the open sources platforms are much more stable. Knowledge in these other platforms doesn't decay as quickly or is at least somewhat useful even after 10 years. In contrast, Microsoft will just go and kill whole platforms from time to time (e.g Visual Basic) rendering useless years of experience building deep understanding of a platform.

pjmlp 14y ago
Like any other commercial vendor.
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  I think Microsoft is worse about it that other commercial vendors. Perhaps due to a perception (not necessarily incorrect) on their part that their customers are locked in. If a vendor who only supplies a single product decides to torpedo the APIs that you rely on, they create an easy opportunity for you to switch to another vendor entirely. Whereas historically Microsoft could wreak havoc upon an entire development platform (Visual Basic) knowing that probably all you'll be able to do about it is huff and puff around a bit on the Internet. After all you couldn't jump ship on Windows development - all your customers were Windows users, or your entire IT department was built around Windows, or your corporate intranet is all dependent on IE6, or whatever.
  - cooldeal 14y ago
    Funny you say that, because Microsoft's software problems are often attributed to bending over backwards to be backward compatible while other vendors like Apple quickly kills compatibility with almost ever release, with even point releases. Take this game bundled with Windows 95. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/games/public/AAS/Hover.exe It runs even on Windows 8. Upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 As I said in another comment, I still see some ASP and Visual Basic usage even after all these years, those applications are still supported in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Microsoft stopped making new versions because it wanted to move on to better technology. Want to take a poll on HN about what developers think of Visual Basic and Classic ASP? A case of damned if they do, damned if they don't.