And it begins (again)
Well, Microsoft has done something curious. Well, something seemingly curious, but ultimately not so much. They are trying to kill off traditional desktop development in Windows 8. They are trying to do this in a number of ways. But the most salient is where it hits developers. They aren't allowing any traditional desktop development in the Express editions of Visual Studio.
This is curious of course, because, with the exception of a relatively small number of devs who have pre-emptively jumped on the Metro bandwagon, all of Microsoft's external development base is having their platform(s) eradicated. I'm not including ASP.Net in my terminology because in my opinion they aren't Microsoft developer's. Yes they use Microsoft's stack and likely IDE, but they are targeting the web which is platform agnostic (in theory). Also, ASP.Net is alive and well in VS 2012 Express.
It is not so curious, because as numerous have noted, for Windows 8 to not be a repeat of Vista or ME, they need more Metro applications. And for WinRT not to fail the way Android is failing in the tablet market they need more Metro applications. Now, there is a tremendous flaw in this plan. And unless I hear something new and official from Microsoft this is a huge flaw. You see, at Build Microsoft basically said that they don't expect Productivity applications and development applications and the like to be published as Metro applications. And they also basically have a validation process that could kill off your application before it reaches the public if it isn't Metro enough. Since there are a lot of companies and developers in that sphere of products, and applications can't be officially side-loaded outside of the Windows Store, they may have just committed corporate suicide.
But, there is an upside. Metro is WinRT (or maybe they have PR'd that name to mean just the ARM version of the OS, but that is irrelevant). And WinRT is a new run time. It is modern. It has a better security, more OS interactivity features and options in the SDK. Applications written for it will run on ARM and x86. It is a revolution not seen since the days of Win32. Maybe not as complete a departure from Win32 as many (including myself) would have liked, but enough of one that most people will never need to deal directly with it.
And to that end, I finally reach the point I had intended to write from the beginning. I've basically scrapped the nearly complete next version of Veronica's application. I'm going to once again try and revive this as a WCF service.
Though this time I'm separating the business logic into a core library so that if I want to reuse the business logic in the future, all I need to do is write the UI and call into the core library directly. Frankly not sure why I hadn't thought of this in the past. Then the WCF service will simply be a layer expose the calls the UI('s) needed through IIS.
Then there will be a Windows 8 Metro application. Though I will probably just configure Veronica's machine as a development machine and side load it that way since it is definitely not the sort of thing I would want to put through the actual MS store (especially considering that the server side part wouldn't be globally available). And maybe one day I'll actually write an ASP.Net UI so she can access the application in a cross device fashion (though honestly, I don't see the reason to expose the whole app in this fashion, maybe some parts would make sense like reports).
And done. For today.
This is curious of course, because, with the exception of a relatively small number of devs who have pre-emptively jumped on the Metro bandwagon, all of Microsoft's external development base is having their platform(s) eradicated. I'm not including ASP.Net in my terminology because in my opinion they aren't Microsoft developer's. Yes they use Microsoft's stack and likely IDE, but they are targeting the web which is platform agnostic (in theory). Also, ASP.Net is alive and well in VS 2012 Express.
It is not so curious, because as numerous have noted, for Windows 8 to not be a repeat of Vista or ME, they need more Metro applications. And for WinRT not to fail the way Android is failing in the tablet market they need more Metro applications. Now, there is a tremendous flaw in this plan. And unless I hear something new and official from Microsoft this is a huge flaw. You see, at Build Microsoft basically said that they don't expect Productivity applications and development applications and the like to be published as Metro applications. And they also basically have a validation process that could kill off your application before it reaches the public if it isn't Metro enough. Since there are a lot of companies and developers in that sphere of products, and applications can't be officially side-loaded outside of the Windows Store, they may have just committed corporate suicide.
But, there is an upside. Metro is WinRT (or maybe they have PR'd that name to mean just the ARM version of the OS, but that is irrelevant). And WinRT is a new run time. It is modern. It has a better security, more OS interactivity features and options in the SDK. Applications written for it will run on ARM and x86. It is a revolution not seen since the days of Win32. Maybe not as complete a departure from Win32 as many (including myself) would have liked, but enough of one that most people will never need to deal directly with it.
And to that end, I finally reach the point I had intended to write from the beginning. I've basically scrapped the nearly complete next version of Veronica's application. I'm going to once again try and revive this as a WCF service.
Though this time I'm separating the business logic into a core library so that if I want to reuse the business logic in the future, all I need to do is write the UI and call into the core library directly. Frankly not sure why I hadn't thought of this in the past. Then the WCF service will simply be a layer expose the calls the UI('s) needed through IIS.
Then there will be a Windows 8 Metro application. Though I will probably just configure Veronica's machine as a development machine and side load it that way since it is definitely not the sort of thing I would want to put through the actual MS store (especially considering that the server side part wouldn't be globally available). And maybe one day I'll actually write an ASP.Net UI so she can access the application in a cross device fashion (though honestly, I don't see the reason to expose the whole app in this fashion, maybe some parts would make sense like reports).
And done. For today.
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