Cycling is one of my main hobbies and Tuesday is the main event for cycling in the area. This reduces the number of awesome events in our city I can attend during that evening, so I don’t normally get to attend things like the GSP Developers Guild. This weekend I took a spill on my bike that caused enough injury for me to take a short break from the sport, and I was well rewarded.
The room at Greenville Tech was packed. It was a ‘sell-out’ crowd, in that we ran out of free pizza. Glen started the presentation with a quick demonstration of some of the new features in Windows 8. I had seen pictures and reviews of most of them but without having seen it in action, or used it myself, this was a good review.
Glen was demonstrating everything on an older laptop that folds down into a tablet. I had one of these a few years ago and really miss it. It had just enough power to do all my development needs and all kinds of portability. Everything ran smoothly on the older hardware and almost everything was supported. The one feature he discussed but couldn’t demonstrate was improvements of the OS with regards to pen input. Now, when you write on your tablet, you can write just like you would on a piece of paper, with your palm resting on the screen. Even though the screen would normally register that as input, but since the pen is near the screen, the OS knows to disable touch input. I am looking forward to new hardware possibilities that Windows 8 will support.
After the general Win 8 demonstration, we dove into the code. The application Glen created used HTML5/Javascript as the presentation layer. The similarity between this and a single page web application are no accident. This should make for an easier conversion from single page web apps and keep the presentation layer close for both web and windows. The Windows Phone 8 announcement was that night, so Glen would not comment on the unification desktop platform with the phone. As we all suspected, the announcement confirmed our suspicious, a unified platform for desktop, tablet, and phone. Windows 8 (and Windows Phone 8 we learned after the announcement) is a reset for Microsoft. With HTML5 replacing Silverlight as the go-to web platform, and XML presentation layers still in vogue, Microsoft decided to repurpose XAML as a possible presentation layer for WinRT. The status quo will still work for x86 platforms, but Metro apps will be the only choice for both ARM and x86 devices.
Overall, I really enjoyed Glen’s talk. Despite some hurdles retooling for Metro, Windows 8 offers interesting new user experience options that we are excited about exploring.