Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/html5-centric-windows-8-leaves-microsoft-developers-horrified.ars

by e1ven • 15 years ago

132 103 15 years ago

powertower2• 15 years ago

Windows 8 is giving developers one more option: In tablet mode you can write the UI part of the application (the widget) in HTML5 and JS.

Author's profile: (Microsoft Contributor) "Peter Bright dropped out of university (after about five minutes) to work as a software developer writing C++ and C#."

After reading that article I propose that he must have also spent another 5 minutes programming before deciding on his new career path of writing sensational crap.

nigelsampson• 15 years ago

This seems the most likely option in my opinion. A lot of panic and scaremongering based off a few snippets.

I imagine we'll see other ways to build into the tablet UI apart from html5/js.

ElliotH• 15 years ago

Read the article to the end. It says almost exactly this.

johns• 15 years ago

Do you know that as fact or are you speculating?

ericflo• 15 years ago

Rampant speculation is exactly what the author of the article is doing, I don't see why it can't go both ways :)

eropple2• 15 years ago

I know Peter personally, and he is one of the more well-educated, intelligent, and astonishingly competent developers I know.

Nice flamebait, though.

powertower2• 15 years ago

I read the article one more time, it does seem to be much more lucid now. I'll attribute my bad interpretation of it on the fact I read it very late last night - when it seemed to me he was saying that HTML5+JS was replacing .NET and WPF.

He still makes some absurd claims though:

"... they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8"

Flamebait. FUD. Just look at the comments there.

daeken2• 15 years ago

I'm not horrified and I don't know any Windows developers that are (although I'm sure there are some out there). This is being blown way out of proportion, I believe.

Edit: I especially like the assertion that WPF is not fast. Evidently the author has never done much with the 3d transform functionality in WPF -- you can do insanely performant graphically-intensive apps using it. The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works doesn't mean the API doesn't kick ass. I'm not a fan of XAML, but everything else about WPF is really, really nice.

mathgladiator• 15 years ago

> The fact that most developers don't understand how the API works

This signals a usability fail in my mind.

nettdata• 15 years ago

I see it more like sometimes shit is just hard to do well, taking time and effort to learn, and some developers don't put in the required work to reap the rewards.

daeken2• 15 years ago

They made it very easy to get things up and going, and easy to optimize if you understand that graphics and WPF work. Most people don't, which is why most OpenGL and D3D apps that haven't been heavily optimized over time are very slow; graphics are hard, even without the extra burden of understanding how your GUI layer functions. It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with WPF, but it also makes it easy for people to design really efficient apps if they take the time to learn how it differs from other GUI toolkits.

Quarrelsome• 15 years ago

Nah the API just uses a different pattern from the "classic" WinForm development that most developers are used to.

yesimahuman• 15 years ago

I did find the official WPF docs and examples rather simplistic. Most of the advanced stuff I luckily stumbled upon on forums or blog posts. Perhaps developers don't have enough information to build upon the simple examples.

chrisjsmith• 15 years ago

I think people are going on the assertion that every-day apps written with WPF (i.e. Visual Studio 2010) are a step back from their old GDI-based ancestors with respect to performance.

I mean we've had to buy a shit load of graphics cards to get acceptable performance on our (definitely not shoddy) kit.

maxxxxx3• 15 years ago

A simple to medium complexity WPF app will be slower than its Winforms or Win32 counter part. It will use a lot more memory too. There may be ways around this but why can't MS optimize it instead of forcing every developer to jump through the same hoops?

rbanffy9• 15 years ago

> why can't MS optimize

They can. They just prefer to make every Windows developer jump through hoops, as it's so much more cost-effective.

dspillett• 15 years ago

Higher than "simple to medium" scale/complexity situations are probably their priority when it comes to optimisation, on the basis that most smaller scale/complexity apps won't experience the difference and those that do can be tweaked by the programmer. A major factor to consider when optimising anything particularly something as generic as a large framework is that an optimisation for small scale situations can have a detrimental effect on larger ones (and vice-versa, though as problems are more noticeable on larger scales of size or complexity optimising for that at the expense of the smaller situations is the better over-all choice in many cases).

kenjackson• 15 years ago

After a few minutes on the internets I discovered a little gem of a thread:

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...

In this thread you'll see much more clearly what MS is planning. It's not just HTML/JS for these immersive apps. Rather it appears that the CLR will become a first class part of Windows. If you are a Windows dev or are interested in Windows dev, this is a must read thread. In fact I'm shocked that no major publications have noticed it.

There are lots of really interesting nuggets in there. In many regards I think they're finally delivering on a lot of the promises of Longhorn.

I must say I'm excited about it, and looking forward to September now. MS screwed up on the PR, but I think they may have gotten the technological direction right.

hugh4life• 15 years ago

I read that a couple days ago and here are the two most interesting posts...

Microsoft's own immersive html application is just a thin layer over native code

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...

.NET Ahead-Of-Time compiler is probably coming

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...

[EDIT]

And for those worried Silverlight developers, scan that thread for DirectUI.

lurker19• 15 years ago

Is this what the "IE is native" PR claims are about? That HTML DOM and CSS are going to map directly onto the window system instead of a virtual window (or whatever it is called) in the browser engine?

dorian-graph3• 15 years ago

http://www.winrumors.com/silverlight-isnt-dead-its-the-heart...

There is another article too in relation to this. Also, Mary Jo Foley and others have posted 'information' about Jupiter and whatnot.

It seems people are quickly taking advantage of this 'outrage' on the internets for some 'good' news stories.

contextfree3• 15 years ago

Looks to me that it's not so much that "the CLR will become first class" as they've broken down the CLR and .NET into little pieces (GC = SLR/Redhawk, type system/metadata = WinRT/WinTypes.dll, XAML = Jupiter/DirectUI, C# = the new AOT compiler, if it exists), and are using each one individually where appropriate.

Yhippa• 15 years ago

What developers are horrified by this? I thought for your enterprise apps that you can continue to use the Windows 7 skin. For developers of the new Windows 8 platform I think this is a great opportunity for developers to get content into the hands of traditional users in a new way.

teyc4• 15 years ago

MS has lost a lot of trust when they killed off VFP and then VB6. People with large codebases had to migrate and it means loss of competitive advantage making new code do old things.

rbanffy9• 15 years ago

Most VB6 shops I know took the kool aid and went VB.Net or C#. It would take a whole lot lot of disappointment for them to move away from Microsoft.

matwood• 15 years ago

People didn't have to migrate though. I know we still have some internal VB6 apps floating around that work fine and do the job they were made to do. Of course they are on the 'upgrade to .net eventually' list, but so far there has been no rush.

cheez• 15 years ago

No one is horrified. HTML/CSS are great for some user interfaces but it's always going to be behind WPF.

I think it's just marketing BS from Microsoft, to be honest.

becomevocal• 15 years ago

I'm really, really excited about this direction for Windows 8. I could see myself jumping on the bandwagon if they handle the API correctly.

X-Istence2• 15 years ago

At this point you know it is a non-issue because Arstechnica is covering it about six weeks too late[1].

I have talked to many different developers and every one of them that is developing in C# and .NET are not worried at all. Main reason? This stuff is not really going to fly well within the corporate world, corporations still need their custom built applications (using older source bases most of the time), they still need to use all of their productivity apps, and they don't think the office team is suddenly going to re-write Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for a touch based graphical user interface.

All the noise I've heard so far are just the news sites blowing it out of proportion. Frankly it is getting annoying seeing it pop up every couple of days.

[1] (I really don't care what the actual timeframe is)

tjogin2• 15 years ago

I think you're right. But the consequence of that is, of course, that the touch driven "immersive" part is only going to be skin deep. Which in turn means that Windows 8 is going to fail spectacularly on tablets, for the exact same reasons every previous Windows tablet failed.

X-Istence2• 15 years ago

MSFT has to realise that eventually for the good of the company they WILL have to do something to cut part of their love-child windows out of something. They are unwilling to sacrifice Windows, even a small part of it, for the greater good. That is why MSFT will once again release a product that is not fit for tablet PC's.

contextfree3• 15 years ago

consumer != corporate

barrydahlberg• 15 years ago

Why the media has made Microsoft developers horrified about their random speculation.

cageface3• 15 years ago

This article seems to be making the assumption that the Windows 8 api will be vanilla HTML5/JS. My impression from the presentation was that they might be using HTML as the layout format and JS as the language but that there would be a lot of non-standard widgets and APIs exposed to both layers.

If so, it's too early to dismiss the technology as "inadequate".

rbanffy9• 15 years ago

I was quite sure that would be the case, as Microoft would never allow such an easy way to port Windows apps to other environments. Whatever glue is tied in HTLM/JS environment, it'll run deep into the Windows APIs in such a way no HTML5/JS app will be easily ported to, say, Google's ChromeOS.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

Chrome has plenty of its own APIs too.

pedalpete• 15 years ago

Further to the other comments on this thread, the articles comments re "HTML5 remains true to its text mark-up heritage; its structure and semantics are still geared towards creating structured text documents, not application user interfaces" can't possibly be true, or we wouldn't have the vast number of very usable web-apps we have today.

Corporations should be (and are) embracing the capabilities of web technologies for building internal tools quickly and enabling quick changes.

vegai• 15 years ago

The same idea that made Palm developers jump for joy makes Microsoft developers "horrified"? Yeah, sure.

nxn2• 15 years ago

"But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8."

I stopped reading there. It's amazing that spreading unfounded trash like this can be called news. All this is is an attempt to twist and stretch the truth in hopes of provoking a reaction and attention -- simply pathetic.

Tichy• 15 years ago

On the upside, you can now become a Microsoft Certified JavaScript developer (I suppose).

Who knows, all those poor Microserfs might feel liberated in the end, when they get to use a technology that has not been designed to fuel the consulting business - needlessly complex and bloated, that is.

gamble• 15 years ago

I doubt this is going to be an issue in the long run, because I don't expect this next iteration of Microsoft's "tablets that are really notebooks running a mix of tablet apps and standard Windows applications" is going to be any more successful than its predecessors. Assuming this sees the light of day, it will be at least a year before Win8 tablets are available - just in time to compete with the iPad 3 and Android 4.x+.

Sandman• 15 years ago

tl;dr: Based on a comment by Microsoft VP, Julie Larson-Green, that a certain weather application they recently made was done using a platform based on HTML 5 and JS, ars technica's Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform, and then goes into a long rant on how disastrous this will be for all the Windows developers because it will make all their current knowledge useless and will force them to use a suboptimal technology to develop their applications. At the end of the article he concludes that, yeah, that's not actually going to happen, because Microsoft isn't stupid.

rbanffy9• 15 years ago

> Peter Bright somehow comes to a conclusion that this means that HTML 5 is now going to be Microsoft's preferred development platform

Actually, unless my memory fails me, it was that Microsoft video showing the tiled interface of Windows 8 that did that - it kind of implied HTML5 was the tool of choice (or, at least, the glue) for tiled and that tiled was the future. The thread kenjackson pointed out tells another story, but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.

dorian-graph3• 15 years ago

> .. but we can blame Microsoft for some confusion here.

Well, Microsoft may not have explained everything at once (Who does?) but that doesn't explicitly mean they forced people to overreact.

nxn2• 15 years ago

The video the article links to has Julie Larson-Green going over the tiled interface. Different video from the one you are referring to I believe, but it covers almost the same exact material in a very similar manner.

Here's the link used in the article: http://allthingsd.com/20110601/microsofts-windows-8-demo-fro...

freechoice1• 15 years ago

If Microsoft wants to destroy itself then it should focus only on HTML5/Javascript. Corporations are all about speed and efficiency and to compare .Net vs HTML5/Javascript is insane.

I've been programming in .Net for years now, but recently as I got new projects I figured to use them in HTML5/Javascript instead. But after countless of hours research it turns out .Net is by far the most efficient and only option in terms of speed and most direct relation to the hardware, which was important for my projects. They both play a part and neither should be ruled out. Using HTML5/Jquery for web projects and .Net for projects which requires quick access to local resources. Two different worlds. If I were Microsoft I would focus fuse those two worlds together. And if they can add 1+1 this is their intent.

The developers and corporations will continue to use whatever means to maximize profit with the most efficient way for their app. And the corporations in whole is who steer the direction of the consumer market in the end. Not one or two companies. Corporations use .Net not because Microsoft tells them to do so, but because it is most the efficient.

From a consumer point of view it might not be so easy to understand how these things works, as all you see in media is Microsoft that and Apple that and then one might think that's all there is to it.

tluyben2• 15 years ago

Stop whining ; it's one of few actual smart moves coming out of MS in years. And my MS developer friends are not complaining; it makes their life easier because now they can easily switch, get more jobs and do stuff that's actually 'cool' again (yep, programming for Win is very not cool in most every corner of the world while building hip stuff in HTML5 is); it makes nice money but things you have to do for 30+ years, 8 hours/day should not be about money alone.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

It's not whining, the article perfectly sums it up:

it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools

Seriously, try xaml and VS compared with [insert vim, emacs, etc] + html5.

They're light years apart in terms of capabilities.

On the other hand, I'd think it's far too early to worry, apart from MS have now gone all clam, which is worrying. They're fanning the flames themselves

It doesn't really affect me, but I can understand why a lot of developers would be anxious.

They don't want to use a clearly inferior technology and quite frankly a crappy language like JS.

Joeri• 15 years ago

Seriously, try xaml and VS compared with [insert vim, emacs, etc] + html5.

Why would you deliberately handicap yourself on the HTML side? Ext JS + Ext Designer + IDE with automatic linting and auto-completion. That's one possible way to build rich web apps.

timinman• 15 years ago

Putting aside the fact that no one from Microsoft has actually stated that they are throwing away the other apis, it is a +1 for open, community driven technologies. OSX dev's take note.

maxxxxx3• 15 years ago

I think a lot of developers are simply getting tired of MS cranking out half baked technologies and abandoning them after a while. If you want to write a desktop app there simply is no obvious platform of choice. You have Winforms (abandoned), WPF (slow, future unclear, do fonts render OK now?), MFC (has been out of date for 10 years), Win32 (hard to use), Silverlight (direction changes every 3 months). They all have different problems MS doesn't seem to interested addressing.

I wish MS would make a decision to bet everything on one platform (I don't care which), stick to it and make it really good.

marshray3• 15 years ago

I agree with you about their ridiculous amounts of API churn. I think it happens for (IMHO) two main reasons:

1. MS wanted to keep Windows APIs growing quickly to keep anyone from making a compatible platform. I can't imagine how many $B a year it costs to maintain that. This is probably less of a goal than it used to be, as the baseline Windows install is now so many GB that it's an impediment for the nimble VMs and ultra-portable clients that are the future.

2. MS seems to pitch to (and staff from) a young audience, folks in school and moving to the workplace as application software developers. This crowd has a natural turnover period of only a few years.

But one thing they really are quite good at is supporting stuff for a long time. You can today build an app with .Net framework 2.0 with VS 2005 and it will install and run about as well as it ever did. For native code compatibility typically goes all the way back to Win95 apps. When old apps don't work it's usually a result of unambiguous security or stability improvements made to the OS. Even then Windows often provides virtualized registry and filesystem areas that trick the apps into working.

xradionut• 15 years ago

None of the Windows developers I work with or know in the community are not even concerned about this. Corporate and independent development in the .NET community are conservative and unlikely to jump on the latest thing from Redmond. They have been there, done that and got the free t-shirts for numerous hyped technologies. Most folks still haven't upgraded to VS 2010 or SQL Server 2008R2 yet. There's no point when the money in Windows development doesn't demand the latest and greatest fad. The smart ones wait and see what works, choosing to skip crap like Vista for Windows 7 and concentrate on the good stuff like C#.

As for Peter Bright, (as long time Arstechnica reader and forum participant), I have observed that his articles are designed to get page views. Arstechnica does this by blasting Microsoft and fawning on Apple. As a cynic this doesn't bother me, I can filter the noise and realize that Peter and Conde Nast have bills to pay.

KeyBoardG• 15 years ago

Totally agree. As a technical lead I tend to stay atleast one major release behind the lastest. However, you should try 2008R2. Its pretty darn good. :)

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

Anyone else notice that within a year, you'll be able to write cross platform html5+js apps that run Black Berry, Windows 8, WebOS, Android and iOS?

If this becomes the standard, like I suspect it will, one of the biggest losers will be companies that run big app stores.

pornel• 15 years ago

It's not HTML+JS, it's HTML + JS + vendor-specific bindings + vendor-specific packaging & signature.

At best you'll be dealing with another fat abstraction layer with same kind of annoying small incompatibilities that plague(d) web browsers.

DougWebb3• 15 years ago

And yet web browsers support a far larger world of applications than .NET has. Consider that every website is essentially an independently-developed HTML-based application; do you think there are more of them than there are .NET-based applications?

Those small incompatibilities may be annoying, but they're a small price to pay for the otherwise easy development and broad reach of the HTML+JS+etc platform.

pilom• 15 years ago

I believe that abstraction layer is currently called PhoneGap.

teyc4• 15 years ago

They can be quite different.

For instance, HP WebOS uses additional attributes to turn DIVs into Buttons.

I've no idea what MS is going to come up with.

cageface3• 15 years ago

The greater the diversity in the market, the more appealing HTML5 becomes. It's bad enough supporting two platforms but 3-4 is going to push a lot of shops to the browser. Unfortunately, both Apple and Microsoft have significant incentives to make sure the browser experience is always inferior to a native app.

Stormbringer3• 15 years ago

As someone who has been recently actually doing Windows development using HTML and Javascript I have a couple of observations.

#1 Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows what they're talking about, naturally this will get downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely knew thee. :D

#2 In order to actually get anything done you have to 'bust out' into the Windows APIs anyway. See here for a prime example:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aew9yb99(v=vs.85).as...

#3 For budgeting/political reasons I won't go into, I can say that this is possible with only the use of notepad. Speaking programmer to programmer, I strongly advise you to get better tooling than that. Really. This thing is an absolute pig to code and debug by hand.

#4 The horror is entirely justified. This is how bad it is... it actually makes those retarded Java enterprise projects, where you have to cobble together 14 different frameworks that are fundamentally incompatible, look good.

raganwald• 15 years ago

  Since I'm the only one in the thread who actually knows
  what they're talking about, naturally this will get
  downvoted to oblivion. Farewell sweet karma, I barely
  knew thee. :D

Do not ignore the possibility that your comment will garner downvotes for talking about being downvoted. Your observations are worth reading. Why bury them underneath meta-commentary that does not add to the discussion?

Stormbringer3• 15 years ago

On general principle I downvote meta discussions about karma/upvotes/whatever shiny beads and shells the site in question is using as faux currency. I wouldn't expect anything different from anyone else.

DougWebb3• 15 years ago

I've been doing web application development with HTML+CSS+JS for many years, most on Unix but recently fully embedded in the .NET world. I can tell you from my experience that as good as VS and the .NET framework can be, they're way behind when it comes to web application development for cross-platform clients. (And by cross-platform I mean browsers other than IE.)

For years most of my time has been spent developing through a terminal, with Vim as my editor and the world of Gnu command-line tools as my toolset. My primary development language was a scripting language, and my code-run-test iterative cycle took seconds. Now that I'm developing on .NET, it can take 20-30 seconds to restart my application to test a change I just made, not counting getting back to the part of the app I was working on. That's using the built-in IIS server; once I deploy to a real one I've got another round of testing and coding to do because they don't work the same way.

I was much more productive in the old environment. I'm happy to see Microsoft moving towards making HTML5+JS a full-fledged member of their development system; it means that their tools are going to get much better at developing web applications, and maybe I'll be able to reach my old productivity level again.

PS: I don't get the wailing about WPF getting replaced. WPF replaced WinForms, which replaced Win32, which replaced Win16, and I'm sure I'm missing some of the intermediates. The same kind of succession has occurred in most other parts of the Windows development stack. Microsoft has a long history of deprecating APIs and replacing them with completely different and incompatible APIs. All of these WPF developers, who I assume are simply too young to remember the earlier shifts, should be grateful that the new API has a fully backward-compatible history going back to the mid 90's and can carry them forward to any platform they might need to work on in the future.

maxxxxx3• 15 years ago

Winforms did not replace Win32 and WPF did not replace Winforms. That's the problem.

wallflower• 15 years ago

> #2 In order to actually get anything done you have to 'bust out' into the Windows APIs anyway.

I remember this being the case when we did VB6 application programming. We were constantly "shelling" to Win32. I'm surprised it is still so like that.

Our favorite call was Win32 LockWindowUpdate.

sofuture• 15 years ago

Windows 7 widgets were also written in HTML and JS. This is the dumbest controversy ever.

jimbobimbo• 15 years ago

Vista and Windows 7 presentations were never about "here's your widgets and that's it". The way the whole story about HTML+JS on Windows 8 was presented ("a new platform" and not a peep about what else's there) is what legitimately pisses people off.

d4nt• 15 years ago

It occurs to me that all this stuff is primarily for tablets, and tablets mostly use ARM chips. Microsoft have said Windows 8 will run on ARM, but it will take a lot of work to make the .NET CLR run on ARM. If I read anything into this its that there probably isn't an ARM version of .NET coming.

maresca• 15 years ago

Back when WPF/WCF and Silverlight was being pushed, I was initially cautious. I gave the technologies a few tries and ended up not liking them. I didn't like WPF because it seemed like an over-engineered version of SVG. I didn't like WCF because I was used to Remoting and didn't need another layer on top to learn. I didn't drink the Silverlight cool-aid because I knew javascript would get faster and Silverlight would eventually get overtaken by more open options. My guess is many microsoft devs felt the same way and didn't adopt these technologies because if they did, these technologies probably would have made it into Windows 8.

sambeau• 15 years ago

The strategy seems fairly simple to me:

* HTML -> Web apps

* Silverlight -> Native Apps & Mobile Apps (DirectUI?)

* WPF -> Dead

mikerg87• 15 years ago

I seriously doubt a lot of the legacy development stories in .NET are ending. But those are brownfield development stories of apps that were on the drawing board years ago.

I am looking forward - and I just dont think Microsoft has its act together or even beleives its "Developers, Developers, Developers" mantra any more.

PetrolMan• 15 years ago

I may simply be missing something but I think HTML and Javascript make a lot of sense for basic applications. I've never quite understood why someone would want to jump into Silverlight for an application that simply handles data input and retrieval. I also know that Silverlight has capabilities that HTML doesn't but it's also got some deficiencies that IMO are glaring.

There is a lot to be said for what you are comfortable with using but at the end of the day HTML is a truly cross compatible technology that is becoming more and more capable every day. This could also bring in a lot of potential "developers" if the cost of entry is lowered.

I also understand that you don't want the technologies that you invested in to become extinct overnight but I simply can't imagine that happening.

podperson• 15 years ago

If nothing else the article should be titled "How..." rather than "Why...". Any purported horrifying is surely unintended.

voidr• 15 years ago

Just create a .NET library that generates HTML and JS, you know like GWT and leave it be. If not Microsoft, someone will probably create one, there is no reason for all this rage.

Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

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