3 hours ago, Bass wrote

The API treadmill definitely happens for non-Microsoft stuff as well. One example I think of is Java XML marshaling libraries, and web frameworks. Java has many of both, in various stages of "hotness" and approaches.

But the difference is in the non-Microsoft world there is no "cathedral model", where a bunch of "high priests" come out every year to command some new form of development that everyone must follow.

In the Java world evolution happens in a distributed ("bazaar") style, where the developer community organically moves to various technologies as time progresses, and these technologies rarely comes from the original sponsor of Java (Sun). It works like natural selection.

That's why we got stuff like the Spring Framework which pretty much eclipses the "cathedral"-competitor EJB. It's more even more true in Python and Ruby communities which have nothing resembling a centralized commercial sponsor.

What is the Microsoft world?  Is that Windows?  Or is it Microsoft dev tools?  Because I have a ton of different dev tools I can use for Windows, many that don't originate from Microsoft. 

If you're referring to MS dev tools then it is a tautology.  Every dev community has its own high preists.  Go to Rails and they are even more hardcore about "only one right to do things".  That's the whole notion of opinionated frameworks, "We know better, so listen to us, or go home". 

But the MS high preists have typically been quite good, compared to the open source world.  Even the great high preist of open source dev tools, gcc, just recently because decent. 

But the MS dev community doesn't blindly follow the preists.  When the preists came out and said, Visual Source Safe then later TFS, for SCC everyone said that is blasphemy.  And everyone used SVN, Mercurial, Git, etc...

The world is never as nice and neat as some would like you to believe.

8 minutes ago,Frank Hileman wrote

Consider the "metro style" rules for applications. Is it worth paying lots of attention to the metro profile? It may disappear soon. We have no way to know.

Isn't that always the case?  Technologies progress.  People used Prototype, now they use CoffeeScript.  What will it be next week?  People used tables, then only divs/spans, now grids and flexbox, what will it be next week? 

This is why the core of a good developer should be fundamentals.  If you ask me to RoR, I can pick it up in a day or two.  If you want me to ASP.NET MVC, the same thing.  Was up and running with WPF in a few days coming from scratch.  HTML/JS -- literally felt comfortable in a few hours.  Haskell, give me a week to be comfortable.  Learned QT (from w/ C++) in a couple of days.

Sure I'm not a language lawyer in that time, but I'm "early" productive in that time, and learning.  But I've built the foundation and I supplement it with these languages and frameworks.

If you feel like you're on a treadmill, it's because you have no foundation.

11 hours ago,DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

@felix9:

IMO, C++ is the winner because windiv is winning. It was quite clear from build that there is still a great division between windiv an devdiv. WinRT (COM with a little sugar) and Metro is what Microsoft is betting the farm on. They are both products of windiv and they seem to be running the show right now. C++ or Javascript...anything windiv controls is golden. Their architecture diagram says it all.

Also IMO you will see more and more of .NET APIs being swallowed up by WinRT until .NET is relegated to apps akin to vb6 apps today.

Actually WinDiv and DevDiv split the pot.  Windows came in and basically won the battle that you can't use the CLR for doing systems development.  They effectively rewrote the BCL as native code.  But DevDiv won the API story.  All the APIs look like DevDiv APIs, not WinDiv APIs (including Xaml as the markup for C++ apps even).  In one of the sessions the WinRT guy even said that the Windows API design review process is modeled from the DevDiv one. 

I personally like the split.  I want the improved perf from more native code in the stack, but I did hate the Windows APIs, while the .NET APIs have been great.  And we still keep C#.  With that said, I'm not a super fan of Xaml.  I mean I like it, but if I could somehow bind HTML/CSS to C#, I'd happily use that too.

10 minutes ago,NitzWalsh wrote

*snip*

...and in this case, it's likely 90% DirectX.  It's not showing an application with Metro design.  If you include sample apps for a new development/GUI framework, then should show it off - this is the equivalent of showing off Metro by launching a video through the start screen.

 

I don't think the goal was to show off Metro as much to show how to use it and some practices they've learned along the way.  Sinofsky was very clear that these are not shipping apps.  He said it like three times to hammer it home.  And then hammered it home that interns built these.  He's setting expectations.  At the same time, the fact that you haven't seen any real Metro apps means you'll see them closer to launch.  I think there' s decent chance we're going to get Office:Metro at launch.

56 minutes ago,cbae wrote

*snip*

Let's see what you can throw together in 10 weeks.

10 weeks starting 10 weeks ago.  That means a much less stable platform.  Moving parts, probably having to install new Windows builds daily, and providing detailed bug reports and feedback.  And in some cases I suspect the interns had to learn XAML, Javascript, C#, and C++ (since I bet they had different groups use different technologies). 

2 hours ago,wastingtime​withforums wrote

Is it just me, or is there a huge anti-trust issue with this concept? If you can get Metro apps only through the app store, I can see already other "store" providers like Amazon and Valve calling the courts.

And I know, Mac has an app store too, but it also had a bundled browser almost as long as Windows and no one cared.

They don't have a 90% marketshare with Metro.  Only with classic desktop.  You can still get classic desktop apps anywhere you like.  If you don't like the Metro app store there are other markets of comparable size.

9 minutes ago,NitzW wrote

 

27 minutes ago,

 

 

*snip**snip*

Yes, because it didn't need it - the Start Menu search (for me at least) was mainly used as a quick program launcher or familiar file launcher.  Start typing the first few characters of the app/document, <Enter> - boom, app launched, or drag the document that you need opened into a new window (or right-click and delete it, copy it, get properties, etc). Now through Win8:

• Windows key - launches Metro, a completely alien GUI compared to the one you were just in. 
• With the mouse, select Apps or Files.
• Enter in your search text.
• Select the app/file, hit return. Or, you wanted to drag and drop?  Pfft.

Yes, you can use the search field in Explorer - after you open up the Window, mouse the mouse pointer or hit Tab several times, type in your query.

Many more steps to replicate the functionality of a hotkey - which now launches a completely distinct GUI.  Wonderful.

 

Can't you just start typing in Metro and it searches immediately.  Why do you need to select Apps or Files?

28 minutes ago,jamie wrote

*snip

- zoom out shot - shows c9 guys with lights turning darkness and graveyards into day / parks/gardens  - moving across the country side

 

TAGLINE:

METRO: The OS youve been waiting for.

BRAND:

MIcrosoft
Awaken the GIANT in you.

I actually like it.  Maybe not the steak part, but for the most part, I like it.

34 minutes ago,cbae wrote

*snip*

It was pretty clear from the get-go that Microsoft wasn't going to address any individual concerns until Build. Right or wrong, that was Microsoft's intent, and it was obvious that 4 months of vociferousness and threats to abandon Microsoft's developer ecosystem weren't going to cause Microsoft to change its plan. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft knows that it burned some bridges, perhaps a lot of them, over the past few months. They're now giving you an opportunity to tell them how they can win you back. They can't read your mind. If you think they need to grovel, give you free $hit for life, contractually promise never to pull this $hit again, and say "pretty please", then you need to let them know that.

If you have no interest in going back to Microsoft development, go build your Java application or whatever and destroy your competitor's .NET solution in the marketplace. Taking one last swipe at Microsoft isn't going to do $hit. What's done is done.

Microsoft really screwed the pooch on this one.  They didn't have to say much, but even if they said, "At BUILD, we think you'll be pretty pleased." rather than the message of "Windows8 apps are built with HTML/JS".  MS didn't need to be specific, but by saying something controversial and then nothing gave the impression that they were about to screw existing devs over.  In 1997 that was fine.  Devs had no where else to go.  In 2011 I have to convince devs to stay on Windows -- almost all devs are now getting Macs and beginning to focus on web/iOS/Android.

In any case, this is what I want answered at BUILD:

1) When is Windows 8 shipping?

2) Can the old shell be made the default?

3) What is the Windows Phone story post Mango/Tango?  Does it intersect Windows desktop?

4) Can we get decent Windows tablet HW?

5) Perf has been a killer with modern MS dev tools.  Can we get productive tools/frameworks that don't cripple machines?

6) What is the Office story and Windows8/Metro? 

7) What coming in VSNext?

If MS would have just specified an aspect ratio and a minimum screen resolution (800x480 being the minimum) that would have been a lot better, IMO.

1 hour ago,vesuvius wrote

Not read this for a while but have just had a nosey and boy have the adverts multiplied. It is impractical to request their omission, but I am sick of adverts, page after page of them

MSDN is probably the one magazine where I like the ads.  As someone who purchases controls and libraries regularly, I've found the ads a great mechanism to learn about them.  I do miss the "Toolbox" section of MSDN. 

I wish they did reviews of controls and libraries, but I understand that it may be hard to be viewed as impartial when they take in ad dollars.

4 hours ago,W3bbo wrote

*snip*

By "host integration" I'm referring to how WPF exists completely independently of whatever preexisting frameworks exist in the host OS: WPF makes no attempt to integrate or use them, instead it re-implements them itself, which gives us applications that "don't seem quite right" because users are given the WPF version of some system feature instead of the original, canonical OS feature or service. One example is the control library: WPF's common controls (textboxes, checkboxes, etc) are all 100% re-implemented (they don't even use the visual styles API so they don't look the same). Another is the file open/save dialogs, or type (text) rendering, or child-window management, this list goes on.

The "Initialization delays" I speak to refer to the loading times for both the CLR and the WPF components. No matter what I do I can't seem to get it below 3-5 seconds for a completely cold start, which is very jarring if it's for a simple application. Imagine if Notepad.exe had these same delays.

OK, understood.  Regarding the host integration, this is by design.  WPF was supposed to rev faster than Windows and also with lookless controls the idea was that people would style these themselves in most cases.  There weren't even UI guidelines for WPF because it wasn't meant to be constrained to look like Windows proper.  You have to remember when it was being worked on, the common complaint was that everything looked the same on Windows.

Cold start is too slow.  I think this is something they'll have to fix in Win8.  Whatever Jupiter is will startup at CRT speeds hopefully, and not CLR/WPF speeds.  The iPad startup for everything is amazingly fast.  You'd think there was a 16-core CPU with 32GB of RAM in it.

1 hour ago,W3bbo wrote

*snip*

WPF is not conducive to a great user-experience because it isn't native (in both sense of the word), doesn't integrate well with the host, and has large initialization delays.

What is host integration?  Is that airspace or something else?  And what are initialization delays?  Is that loading the Fx on startup or something else?

29 minutes ago,figuerres wrote

*snip*

well i think the need to buy a different disk and re-install the OS just to add features is areally bad idea.

and if they can sell addons to the base how will that be something shareholders or the board would not want?  the idea that selling the basic OS for the basic price !=  not making the same amount of money.

one of the flaws i saw in some of the prior versions of windows was having to many versions and not finding out what features / addons were really the ones that folks wanted to buy.

if users can pick what they want then MS might even be able to make more money by offering more stuff that folks want and will pay for.

I agree.  This is a good idea for many reasons.  I do think they can make more money from it. Why?

1. Reduces piracy.  Sure you can still pirate the OS, but the OS is now only $59 (or whatever the price will be).  But you still will pay $30 for all the features you like.  Home Premium Upgrade today is $119.  So you save $30 over Home Premium upgrade.  BUT Microsoft gets $30 revenue from a whole lot of people who didn't pay anything before.

2. With $5 apps introduced over time MS can make a lot of money on new sets of features.  With Windows Vista they had that Ultimate Upgrades (or whatever it was called), but MS had no motiviation to provide new functionality.  Now each team has motivation in that they can directly monetize it.

3. Since people will pay for each feature this will incentivize teams to do a better job.  You can't hide behind the fact that you're shipped in Home Premium.  If your feature sucks, it will get bad reviews and people won't buy it.  This will force the features to update more often, get better, and will result in a better Windows -- which will result in more sales.

4. As Jeremy noted, a cheaper OS price gets more people in the door.  And then you get recurring revenue over time as they buy new features.

I really think this can be a great move if they do it right.  I really like the direction they're going with Win8.

2 hours ago,Ray7 wrote

TechCrunch doesn't care much for the Windows8 Explorer, and says so. Diatribe aside, the writer does make one interesting point: having run pretty much in parallel when developing the user experience,  Apple and Microsoft are now diverging. Microsoft is sticking with the file-centric view, while Cupertino is going for a more task-centric future where 'files' are no longer relevant.

To be clear, it's not that TechCrunch does't like Win8 Explorer -- they don't like anything from Microsoft.  In particular MG Siegler doesn't.  He's on par with John Gruber as an Apple fanboy (John Gruber though being the much better writer).

In my view MS is doing the right thing.  There are really fundamentally different things you do at work versus when you're mobile versus when you're on the couch.  Apple seems to want to shove everything into iOS.  In any case, I think this is all a win for the consumer.

1 hour ago,vesuvius wrote

I have not read through the comments yet, but recalcitrance from the majority of developers will be that they are now spending all their resources in this new platform i.e. WPF and silverlight are now no longer a priority yet they are still buggy and unfinished. Why should I invest more in a company that changes direction so often? Unless investment continues with significant commitments in WPF and silverlight, Sifnosky has failed to grasp the precipice that Microsoft are standing on.

Vesuvius, if you allow me to play devil's advocate.  Here's is Fake Steve Sinofsky talking:

<fakeSteve>

Now some have said, what about everyone who invested in WPF/Silverlight apps?  My response is, well, what have you done?  Name a handful of interesting WPF apps.  Name a handful of Silverlight apps of interest.  I can name one, Netflix.  For all the talk of a great dev experience the iPhone and iPad have eaten our dev ecosystem.  The apps people want today are written in HTML/JS and Objective-C. 

The current crop of developers on the MS platform are the best enterprise devs in the world.  We'll continue to support them with our current tooling.  But really our dev ecosystem hasn't churned out high quality apps.  You can say that maybe what we're doing here isn't the right thing, but neither is continuing what we were doing, but hoping for different results.  Our app ecosystem speaks for itself.  It's shoddy. 

</fakeSteve>

I'm a WPF/SL dev by day myself.  I'm probably one of the few people that learned WPF before HTML/JS.  But I've actually found HTML/JS pretty simple.  Layout is a pain, but hopefully flexbox and grids will fix that.  All in all, I don't mind writing HTML/JS.  And JS compilers seem to be progressing a lot faster than the CLR JIT.

17 minutes ago,cbae wrote

Paper is thin so you fit many sheets into a small amount of space. I don't see there being a use case for stacking 200 tablets into a briefcase.

That's not the reason why paper is thin.  Paper was thin far before people ever collected 200 sheets together. 

In any case paper thin tabletis are useful for a variety of reasons, a key one being that it takes up less space on my person.  Given that I can carry an iPad in my inside jacket pocket, a thinner form factor is useful. 

When you pick up a piece of paper, you're not trying to avoid touching a certain part of it, are you? 

I was -- I was pretending it was a paper thin tablet.

Try holding up a piece of paper deep in your palm with your fingers fanned out underneath it with your thumb anchoring it near the EDGE of the paper (i.e. as if to avoid touching the screen on a tablet). You're essentially pinching it with the SIDE of your thumb up against the base of your index finger OR you have to bend your thumb down in an awkward way.

Now do this with a paperback book. You can hold it deep in your palm, but because it's thicker you can wrap your thumb over the top and anchor the book more with the pad of your thumb. This is far more stable and more comfortable.

Now do this with a cardboard box that's about 2" thick. You can anchor it on the corner along the top surface with the top pad of your thumb. This is even more stable and comfortable IMO.

I guess you're just more evolved than me because I don't have any of the problems you profess to have. 

BTW, here's a hint, you can't win over your competitions customers by telling them, "Sure you think its comfortable, but its really not."  Those jedi mind tricks just work in movies.

People that drink the Kool-Aid tend to not complain about the flavor.

Apparently less evolved humans are succeptible to this apparent iPad design flaw.  I'm looking forward to how well your 2" thick tablets sell to the more evolved aliens who have yet to land on this planet.  I guess this will be the new MS tablet marketing motto, "Sure the iPad is great if you're a human with normal fingers.  But advanced beings much prefer this 2" thick tablet."  Actually it sounds like their current marketing messages.

Then why did you bother saying this?

I miswrote.  Meant to say partners. 

1 hour ago,cbae wrote

*snip*

Why? Because Steve Jobs says so? Again, there's utility to having something ultra-light. There's very little practical advantage to having something ultra-thin. If anything, I think it's safe to say that the latest tablets have reached a point of diminishing returns on thinness.

They aren't close to reaching diminishing returns on thinness yet.  When I can put a tablet PC in folder alongside paper, each about equal thickness, then we talk about it being too thin. 

If you're trying to hold the device with one hand, anchored with your thumb while trying to keep it on the bezel, then it's way more comfortable if your thumb doesn't have to be butt up against your index finger. The human thumb is designed to be opposable. When you grab something thick (at least 1"), you can see your thumb turn over to oppose your fingers. Try to do the same thing with something really thin. Your thumb doesn't turn over, and you end up simply bracing the object against the side of your thumb. Your thumb has little leverage this way, and it's uncomfortable as hell.

Honestly, we must have different anatomy.  I just picked up a sheet of paper and my thumb turned over.  Furthermore the way you hold the tablet with one hand is with four fingers in the back, not just the index finger.  Given the fact that of the 30+ million iPads used I've heard this "it's too thin to hold" argument surprisingly infrequently leads me to believe its less of an issue for the general population than you might conclude.

I can guarantee that Microsoft won't ship Touchpad size/weight tablets.

Easy to guarantee because MS doesn't ship tablets.  But their partners do.  And I hope they don't ship things that look like the Touchpad.  Again, they really should look at the iPad2 and say, "That's the ugliest device that we'll ever ship".  The iPad2 should be the baseline for the lowend device.  Unfortunately these little previews that show off features like "BluRay support" or "removable batteries" make me fear that their partners still don't get it.

1 hour ago,cbae wrote

When it comes to tablets, thinness is only ancillarily related to the more important criterion--weight. If I had to choose, I'd rather have something lighter than thinner. In fact, the thinness of the current crop of tablets, Galaxy Tab 10.1 and iPad 2, make them more difficult to hold IMO.

Both are important.  You really need both to be compelling.  Although I disagree that the thinness of the current crop of tablets makes them difficult to hold.  I hold an iPad2 regularly and have held a GT10.1.  Both feel great in my hands.  With that said, I'd love them to be half the weight.  But who wouldn't? 

MS can't ship Touchpad size/weight tablets though with Win8 and expect much in the way of sales. 

46 minutes ago,Minh wrote

Did you guys forget THE iPad killer that swept the world recently... It wasn't thinner than the iPad 2, the hardware is more like the iPad 1 and no longer supported, its OS has been discontinued... People LOVE the HP TouchPad... not for its form factor... but for its price...

There's no way a W8 Tablet could be selling for $99 of course... but what about $250 compared to the $700 iPad 2? You think people think about the few mm and oz?

The iPad makes $250 per unit.  The Touchpad was losing $200 per unit.  You can't build a business model around those types of loses (especially since the app store can't make up that much revenue loss). Heck, I'd buy a Motorola Xoom for $49, but it doesn't mean that it's a good tablet or iPad killer.  It just means that there's a price where you can move anything.

You can't make a decent $250 tablet to compete against the $700 iPad.  The $700 iPad is probably about $405 in parts.  And that's using Apple's supply chain.  For anyone else, they can't order 3 million units.  They have to go much smaller, and they lose the supply chain efficiencies and discounts.  So you're looking at costs that look a lot more like $550 in parts.  So you'd have to sell that tablet at $300 loss per unit.  So if you sell 1M you've lost $300M.  I don't think that is likely to happen.  Plus it hurts the HW ecosystem for Win8 tablets in that no one will want to buy any tablets that cost $500.  We'll be stuck in a situation where Windows tablets are cheaply made, and the iPad ones are beaufitul because those customers don't have the expectation of a $250 tablet.

They should have been upfront with the programming model.  No consumer cares about that.  Keep all the UI and user features hidden (like they're doing with the Buidling Win 8 blog).  And then announce the UI and consumer features at BUILD. 

They should have been upfront with the programming model.  No consumer cares about that.  Keep all the UI and user features hidden (like they're doing with the Buidling Win 8 blog).  And then announce the UI and consumer features at BUILD.