Looking at http://www.jobsite.co.uk/ there are less than a tenth of WPF jobs there were a year go, and not even 1% of the jobs are Windows 8 Metro, where WPF and Silverlight were being invested in heavily by stock markets, scientific and engineering disciplines, and Rx was the best thing since sliced bread.

A number of big businesses are now heterogeneous, in developing iOS and Android as Microsoft have lost the trust of their core developers. I am seeing people moving away from SQL due to the 2012 licensing so even though 60 million licenses of Windows have been sold, talk to me about VS 2012.

The Windows 8 XAML stack will never take off, unless they honor their legacy in investing in the desktop, so the hard decision they need to make, is to continue to lose market share to iOS and Android while people wait in the hope of forcing people into Metro land, or do the sensible thing and invest equally in both

Microsoft do themselves the worst amount of damage, vocally deprecating their platforms and saying they will continue to be supported, rather than praising their rich platforms and introducing new stacks like Metro without rubbishing what they did previously.

That is why pretty much everyone who worked on their core desktop platforms have left the company

16 minutes ago, TexasToast wrote

@vesuvius: That's a lot doom and gloom.   I happen to believe what ketch just said that WINRT will grow to cover all of desktop apps and Windows 8 store apps.   We will all use our favorite managed language to call into the OS.   .NET is dead.  (long live WinRT)  

The doom and gloom comes from the market. The only jobs available now in .NET are ASP.NET, the desktop is in the doldrums and your faith in RT is clearly not based as someone that commissions or consults on large IT projects.

For the hobbyist or semi-professional developer WinRT might seem promising. Show us the Visual Studio 2012 sales, show us no doom and gloom there.

1 hour ago, TexasToast wrote

@vesuvius: That's a lot doom and gloom.   I happen to believe what ketch just said that WINRT will grow to cover all of desktop apps and Windows 8 store apps.   We will all use our favorite managed language to call into the OS.   .NET is dead.  (long live WinRT)  

sad thing is that I think he is just about spot on with that he wrote....  MS has managed to really get a lot of folks to have no faith in MS from the developer side of things with all the platform switching / mixed up messages and failure to better explain what they are doing. that and the way that so many folks have went to iPads and mac and android ... and the lack of news about stuff that is supposed to keep going but given the history with MS that tends to mean it's next in line to get the old boot...

as far as I can tell unless MS pulls a major change in what they are doing this is the end of a lot of things at MS and the end of many developers spending more time on the MS platform.

in 2000 when .net came out I was loving it. in 2013 I wonder if it will be put on the shelf like an old DVD and forgotten about in 10 years.

sure things change and all that but I feel that we are seeing some great stuff go to trash due to bad management and leadership at MS.

2 hours ago, TexasToast wrote

 .NET is dead.

Huh? You know that you can use .NET inside of a Metro app right?

What's the problem again? Also, apparently, nobody actually read exoteric's question?

C

12 minutes ago, Charles wrote

You can write .NET WinRT apps and .NET desktop apps on all machines that run Windows 8.

What's the problem again? Also, apparently, nobody actually read exoteric's question?

C

well as of right now we can not use WinRt for a desktop app as the current version does not allow that. Right now have no idea what will happen in the next release  of windows. So what can we say ?  spin the magic 8 ball time ?? 

my thoughts:  WinRT is a start of something that might be good *IF* MS finishes it and makes it possible to use it for non-metro apps.  But we have to see what happens.  .Net has great possibilities but is getting only half the use I thought it would.  Xaml / WPF / Silverlight all have great abilities and half of that seems to be dumped .....  sorry Mr. C but MS has not impressed me of late.

3 hours ago, exoteric wrote

... one wonders if the next version of Windows* will do the same for desktop applications. Thoughts?

Yes, I think WinRT will be extended to desktop applications. I believe Microsoft focused on Metro apps first for the Win8 release because it was the most urgent one (tablets) while desktop apps already have an existing ecosystem. Now the focus is on bringing WinRT to the desktop so that these new apps can be integrated with the App store and communicate with other WinRT/Metro apps.

2 hours ago, ZippyV wrote

*snip*

Yes, I think WinRT will be extended to desktop applications. I believe Microsoft focused on Metro apps first for the Win8 release because it was the most urgent one (tablets) while desktop apps already have an existing ecosystem. Now the focus is on bringing WinRT to the desktop so that these new apps can be integrated with the App store and communicate with other WinRT/Metro apps.

I agree.  It took a huge effort, and all available resources, just to get Win8 and related products out the door.  They obviously chose to defer desktop updates to get the new products out the door, as would anybody.  I expect it was in the plan all along that the next wave would move some attention back to the desktop.  WinRT (or some variant of it) will be extended to bring the same programming models and APIs to the desktop.  XAML (and HTML) clearly will play the same role there.  .NET is no different than it was other than targeting WinRT now.  It only matters to the compiler.  Write in a .NET language or a native language as you wish, it doesn't matter.  I think (hope) that the next releases will show a lot of unification and cleaning up of the rough spots.

The big problem has been a string of developer-relations disasters.  So, they wanted to keep the details of Win8 a secret -- fine.  But a series of poorly worded statements, followed by deafening silence did a lot of damage with developers.  Products that people were deeply invested in have been orphaned without any real direction of where things are headed.  Old technologies still work, but for how long?  Microsoft used to be so good about developer/product roadmaps -- one of the best companies I have ever seen for laying out the plan for where things were going and when they would arrive.  We need that back.  A lot of confidence has been lost.  We all know how much harder it is to bring customers back after you have lost them.  MS needs to let the world in on the secret sooner than later, before programmers slip any further away.