What is stored for developers in Windows 8

Now that the BUILD conference comes to end. It time to reflect what were the announcements made in it. I would especially give my thoughts from the developer perspective. I will summarize it in few points that matter most to the developers.

• SILVERLIGHT IS ALIVE AND KICKING : I think Microsoft has silent its critics who were telling that Silverlight is dead and HTML 5 and JavaScript would be native development technology for Windows 8. With new version of Silverlight about to release by this fall. Tons of new features and improvements have been done in new version and I’m looking forward to develop my first production app. Microsoft has also given importance to new trend where the competition is heading that is HTML 5 and JavaScript. The developer has the option to develop in this language also. My old friends of C++ don’t get disheartened your skills are still in demand and you can program on Windows 8. So this summarizes that there is not one technology on which you can develop apps. Folks at Microsoft has kept their promise of backward compability.

• WINDOWS RUNTIME (WINRT): Welcome to this new acronym. Uptill now you must have heard about .net framework but to develop the apps for Win8 you would require to enter new arena of Windows Runtime. This still will be managed code according to the speculations it is the subset of .net framework only where MS has picked and choose the namespaces and classes which could very well gel with new platform. Tim has a great blog post mystifying the facts and speculations of new runtime. You can read it over here.

•  METRO STYLE APPS : Get yourself acquainted with this new style. As windows 8 natively support touch input natively. All the apps that you would be developing should support this style. This is something that is derived from Windows Phone 7. I had always loved Metro theme, smooth and fluid. All the apps should be touch centric and chromeless. You need to get your application certified before publishing it to the store. There are guidelines available and once you follow them there are 100 % chances that your application would pass in one attempt. As mentioned above keeping the backward compability in mind you can still continue to develop the apps in traditional old style like desktop or standard web apps running in the browser. MS has committed that whatever that is running in Windows 7 will run in Windows 8. All you need is to switched to the desktop mode. You have Visual Studio 2011 IDE for doing the development of this types of apps. It comes with preinstalled templates and each template comes with lot of boiler plate code to get you quickly started. Blend 5 now support HTML authoring also.

• HARDWARE AGNOSTIC : This is the perhaps the best feature I like about new platform. As windows 8 runs equally well on all the form factors (various screen sizes ranging from dual monitors to tablets). It will run on Intel based processers as well as ARM based. I was mesmerized when I saw the demo where Steven Sinofsky showing Win8 running on ATOM based processor with 1 GIG of RAM. Awesome simply awesome. Imagine here the opportunities that lies for you as a developer, your app running on laptops,desktops and now even tables or slates. You can always monetize your efforts and earn few extra bucks besides your day job. I am not saying that it will make you millionaire , but opportunity is definitely there.

I have been in this industry now for more than decade and this is probably the best time I am having in my career span. Lot of excitement times ahead and huge opportunities for developers to seize.

So start brushing up your skills

HAPPY CODING