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ForumsDiscussion Forum → Windows 8
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Windows 8
2011-06-06, 6:43 PM #41
I like the Metro stuff, but for a desktop/laptop computer, I'd much rather have Metro as "the desktop" (or integrated into it or somehow), rather than as a layer on top that you then push to one side to get down to the old-style shell.

And I'm not convinced by having access to the old-style shell on a tablet is a particularly good idea - the whole idea of the tablet as a "consumer device" rather than a mini computer seems to run counter to that. I mean, do you complain that your radio doesn't have a desktop? Addressing the lack of a "filesystem" is good, but I wish they'd not seem to be satisfied with just porting the "hierarchical folders and files" filesystem concept across - that metaphor isn't a fundamental law, it's just what we're used to, and I'm sure that they've got the brains to come up with something more natural that could work easily with other computers that do still use that concept (no, I don't have any ideas as to what that might look like).
2011-06-06, 6:44 PM #42
It's also interesting to note that they're talking about HTML5/Javascript as the programming language for Metro tiles - where's the WPF love since you've been pushing Windows app developers in that direction for the last 5-odd years, Microsoft?
2011-06-07, 8:23 AM #43
Originally posted by Giraffe:
It's also interesting to note that they're talking about HTML5/Javascript as the programming language for Metro tiles - where's the WPF love since you've been pushing Windows app developers in that direction for the last 5-odd years, Microsoft?

HTML/CSS/JS have been around FAR longer than WPF and a lot more people are familiar with those concepts. Making tiles would only require notepad. If you made it in WPF, it would require Visual Studio. And also, I really don't think WPF caught on with .NET devs. I find myself gravitating to Winforms if I need to make a desktop app at work.
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2011-06-07, 8:37 AM #44
Yeah, html/css/js have a way wider reach. Easier customization ftw.
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2011-06-08, 8:24 AM #45
MS has made it pretty clear recently that HTML5 is their plan for the web because it's easier to get it to work with many devices. Silverlight is their platform of choice when it comes to native applications on their devices (mostly just WP7 right now, but the 360 is supposed to be getting a Silverlight SDK soon) though, as well as rich business applications (there's a pretty big demand for Silverlight in the business world, and I was doing a lot of it before I quit my consulting job a few months ago). As far as WPF goes, it doesn't get used all that much, and it sort of exists in a weird state where it's just a superset of Silverlight for the most part. I do prefer it to Winforms though.
2011-06-08, 11:50 AM #46
Originally posted by Giraffe:
It's also interesting to note that they're talking about HTML5/Javascript as the programming language for Metro tiles - where's the WPF love since you've been pushing Windows app developers in that direction for the last 5-odd years, Microsoft?

WPF is great and all, but it's quite heavyweight. You need Visual Studio to write apps. There's a high learning curve. HTML5 and JS aren't great but they're a hell of a lot better than Swing, Winforms and other traditional GUI toolkits. The rapid development alone is enough to warrant their use. Hell, you can even use MVVM in JavaScript using something like Knockout.js. Then use CoffeeScript over the whole thing to avoid some of the dumb pitfalls of JS as a language.

Like it or not JavaScript is here to stay. It'll be interesting to see metalanguages that evolve on top of it to solve its problems. HTML/CSS at least are vector based, declarative and easy to style. Especially when you're pushing UIs as simple as Metro, you hardly need any of the really powerful effects from WPF. Most of those you can probably do in the browser with SVG anyway.
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