Discussions

When I tried WiX some years ago I found it kind of brain-twisting, IIRC the difficulty being not so much WiX's own per se but more that it was a fairly thin wrapper over the underlying Windows Installer model and it was that model itself that was difficult to grasp. I've heard it's gotten at least somewhat easier though.

At some point there are going to need to be verifiable, transparent, secure, auditable etc. standards for exactly how data gets used after it goes to someone's servers, not just a vague privacy policy.

I understand the frustration at WP7 devices not being upgradable to WP8 but at this point you're not going to convince the phone team to move back to Windows CE. It would just introduce another incompatibility in the other direction.

If I ran the finance world MSFT stock would be down like 20% on this news But thanks to Channel 9 for so much great content, hope the people left from Erik's team can continue to give us wonders like Rx and friends ...

oh wow, that sux for MSFT. Hope to see more greatness from Erik in the future though ...

I have an automated computer scientist/engineer on my PC who writes assembly language programs for me according to my specifications ...

And I don't think computer scientists can automate everything without the help of domain experts in the things they're automating!

I worked in SBG on my last contract - implemented a few small parts of a data visualization tool called GeoFlow which you can see demoed in the recent TechFest keynote here: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=185933 (around 22:00).

It was a really cool project & fun team to work on!

@DeathByVisualStudio:

20 minutes ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

Stardock has shown there is no detriment to adding the start menu back, restoring windowing, and integrating apps of all types to the taskbar.

The only reason I can fathom on why they want to two worlds separate [...]

I think one detriment of supporting this officially is that developers would then be expected to design and test for resizing to resolutions below 1024x768. One of the goals of the WinStore app model was to reduce the amount of stuff like that developers had to worry about (because they thought issues like this were one of the reasons developers were drawn away from PC and towards platforms like iOS).

Now I'm actually positively surprised by how well the apps do resize despite this.  I guess since the WWA/XAML frameworks and controls are designed to adaptively scale, the apps get a fair amount of sensible resizing behavior for free even when not designed or tested for it. However, obviously there are some significant glitches and brokenness here and there (look at the chart control in the Bing weather app for example), that would take extra work for the developer to fix (and remember the cliché that the last 20% of polish takes 80% of the effort ...) and while it's OK for a third-party mod to expose behavior like this, I think it's much too flaky for an officially supported feature (OK, the apps are flaky in some ways already, but this would make them EVEN MORE flaky).

Personally I think a good approach for an official feature like this would be to just leave it up to developers whether their particular app supports it or not, and hide/disable the UI control to change modes for apps that don't.  Then devs who don't want to worry about supporting resolutions under 1024x768 still don't have to, and devs who think their userbase includes a lot of people interested in using the app on the desktop can do the work to support it properly. (and people who really want to resize apps that don't officially support it can still use third-party mods to do it without putting an expectation burden on the developer ...) Additionally if apps know whether they're running on the desktop or not they can make some appropriate modifications to their UI - e.g. it's silly having both window chrome with a title that says "Store" and a giant header that says "Store" (well, tbh I think it's silly having a giant header that says "Store" even when the store is running fullscreen, but it's doubly silly on the desktop).

@jinx101: It's almost as though UI header display text is different from body text in forum posts!

I wasn't expecting to like this since I'm mostly happy with Windows 8 as it is and don't see the need for stuff like emulating old versions of the start menu, but it's actually pretty sweet. You can set it up so WinStore apps run fullscreen like normal, but with the ability to basically turn the app into a desktop app (and back again) with a simple keystroke or GUI button press, which actually feels fairly quick and natural. This is ideal for me because again I'm happy with the default behavior *most* of the time (on my laptop), but occasionally hit a situation where I want to see something else at the same time and the snap view doesn't show what I'm interested in.   

My biggest issue - which tbh is kind of a dealbreaker in terms of my buying this and keeping it installed, but since it's a beta maybe it'll be changed/fixed (or made optional to the extent it's intentional) by release - is that the recent apps thumbnail list on the left is (IMO) basically broken by this. It borks the switching animation (which I find makes the system feel smoother and doesn't slow anything down significantly, plus the non-animation here adds some weird flicker as well), and WinStore apps running in "desktop mode" still appear in the thumbnail list and switch to the app on the desktop, which I find disconcerting.

Basically, what I'd personally prefer is that apps running in "new UI mode" should behave and be treated by the system exactly as WinStore apps are now (so they should suspend/resume, be shown in the thumbnail list, NOT be shown on the taskbar, etc.) and WinStore apps running in "desktop mode" should as much as possible behave and be treated exactly as desktop apps are now (so they should NOT suspend/resume, NOT be shown in the thumbnail list, be shown in the taskbar, etc.). I know some people like the idea of having a unified taskbar but I actually like having apps that suspend/resume be off to the left as it clears up the taskbar for more pinned desktop apps. I also think it makes sense for apps with completely different lifecycle mechanisms to have different UI for managing their lifecycles. If not for this issue I'd definitely pay the $5 for this otherwise very cool mod.