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The Longhorn Dream Reborn
gbjbaanb writes "Early this month, Microsoft dropped something of a bombshell on Windows developers: the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET. Cue howls of outrage from .NET developers everywhere, but here Ars Technica describes what's more likely to have been going on and why Microsoft is finally getting its act together for developers."
Toss a few chairs and you'll get over it.
RTFA.
Windows developers want to be able to build immersive applications, and they don't want to have to use HTML5 and JavaScript to do it. They won't have to. ... Far from being left behind on the legacy desktop - which was the impression that many took from the presentation - native C++ and managed C# will both be first-class, supported ways of developing immersive, touch-first, tablet-friendly Windows 8-style applications.
DATABASE WOW WOW
If anything, we should be surprised that anyone's surprised. Whether or not TFA's theory is true, one thing is absolutely clear: .NET, like any Microsoft technology, has an expiration date.
Anyone remember COM, VBX, and other MS-Windows technologies of yesteryear? Or the Visual Basic debacle of more recent vintage. For as long as I can remember, there's been a steady churn of Microsoft technologies, coming and going.
Microsoft makes a lot of money from selling its development tools, documentation, etc... to its developer base. Microsoft simply runs the whole show. They are in full control, and call all the shots. And they understand perfectly well that if they keep the same technology platform in place, over time, they lose a good chunk of their revenue stream. That's why they have to obsolete their technology platforms, time and time again. They need revenue. It makes perfect sense. If you are a Microsoft Windows developer, one of your primary job functions is to generate revenue to Microsoft. Perhaps not from you, directly; maybe from your company. Whoever pays the bills for Visual Studio, MSDN, and all the other development tools. Maybe it's not you, personally, but it's going to be someone, that's for sure.
So, perhaps this is the death knell for .NET. Perhaps not. If not this time, maybe next year. But it's inevitable. It's a certainty. If you are a .NET developer, your skills will be obsolete. If you were a COM developer, or a VB6 developer, your skills became obsolete a long time. I see no reason why .NET developers will escape the same fate. It's only a matter of time, but that's ok: all you have to do is invest some time and money to retrain yourself on the replacement Microsoft Windows technology, whatever it's going to be, when its time comes. But, it'll come.
Originally I came from a Unix background. Many, many moons ago I explored the possibility of boning up on the MS-Windows ways of doing things. But, after a bit of some exploratory peeks and pokes, this became painfully clear to me; that whatever I learned, all of it was going go to waste, in its due time. And that was pretty much the end of my venture into the Windows landscape.
Well, I'm happy to report that read(2), write(2), and all the other syscalls that make up POSIX, and its derivatives, still work the same as they did decades ago. Everything I have learned, as the sands of time have rolled on and on, I still put to good use today, and I make a pretty good living using them. Nothing has gone to waste. Honestly, this is more than I could say for my peers who practice their craft on MS-Windows. A lot -- not everything but a lot -- they learned decades ago is now completely and totally worthless to them, and to anyone else.
So, whether Windows 8 is Longhorn reborn, as TFA says, or not, one thing can be said for certain. .NET is dead. It's just a matter of time. Good luck learning its eventual replacement. Of course, you understand that it'll be dead too, some years after that, of course; just keep that in mind, as you make your long term plans.
They're not dropping Silverlight or .NET. Try to pay attention. Nobody with any sense ever thought they were going to, but the usual suspects took every opportunity to make a "Durr hurr, Microsoft screwing over developers" thing out of it when there was no indication whatsoever this would happen.
Nobody sane wants to develop large applications in fucking native JS and HTML5, and Microsoft knows that.
It's harder to obsolete a library when people can just fork it and keep on as they always were. Unfortunately, they're free to do so whether or not the new option is worse than the older one.
im somewhat of an audophile, and despite i have been using windows xp with extra software like srs audio sandbox (cryztalizes and clears sounds) and a good sound card (original x-fi x-treme music, from the production batch which got the good chips) with crystallizer and so on, on top of an altec lansing fx6021 speaker set (in-concert array microdrives totaling 12, crystal clear) for a long time,
i was dumbstruck with the audio quality pulseaudio + x-fi x-treme music + audacious media player with crystallizer plugin gave, when i switched to linux.
now im switching to linux every time i want to listen to music in high quality.
Read radical news here
You'll never find a shortage of people who will take anything they can to shout about how microsoft is screwing everyone (these days it's often done with Apple too). Seriously this is entirely based on the fact that they announced that the apps they showed were based on HTML5 and Javascript, yet from that you end up with morons shouting 'MS are killing silverlight and .Net!!!'.
You mean that rumor I heard about Steve Ballmer turning tricks in Bellingham are false?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As opposed to all those MFC apps I wrote 15 years ago, which no longer work. Oh, wait... they do work.
No, because they looked at Windows 8. And because anybody who's not, literally, mentally defective knows Microsoft isn't going to abandon .NET. You have to be a little smarter (say, 105 IQ) to know they're not going to abandon Silverlight, so I'll cut you a little slack there.
The idea is ridiculous. You seriously think people are going to write complex end user and enterprise apps in JS/HTML5? Seriously?
You mean that rumor I heard about Steve Ballmer turning tricks in Bellingham are false?
I wouldn't go that far ;)
The thing about talking about something so significant in highly abstract terms is you'll tend to imagine it doing precisely what *you* think the words mean and how you think a vision could be realized.
Then, when you actually get to touch it, you realize their vision either isn't the same as yours, or even if it matches what you had in your head, in practice it won't work out so well.
The ultimate end-user filesystem experience hasn't changed in years for good reason. Any generic approach is going to be fraught with too much work to bother. Sure, Music, Video, Document, etc applications could use the filesystem as a standardized way to store metadata instead of proprietary databases here and there, but much of the time a file containing data is a shared thing in a central place, with much of the pertinent metadata a user caring about specific to their view, making combining that data in the filesystem awkward. Notably some permament attributes (that should go with the file on transfer so it can't just exist outside the file) like title, release year, etc exist that are global in nature, but personal tags, ratings, bookmarks, etc just don't mesh.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Originally I came from a Unix background. Many, many moons ago I explored the possibility of boning up on the MS-Windows ways of doing things. But, after a bit of some exploratory peeks and pokes, this became painfully clear to me; that whatever I learned, all of it was going go to waste, in its due time. And that was pretty much the end of my venture into the Windows landscape.
I have to disagree, as anything learned is an advantage you can leverage in future learning.. Also, during the time that 'xyz tech' is in vogue, you are employed and making money from it.. that's not a waste in my book..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unfortunately the article doesn't explain how they arrived at that conclusion other than it being their own opinion and possibly their own wish. That whole Longhorn WinFX finally coming to reality thing is another opinion piece. We heard many similar stories for Cairo many moons ago and that whole object oriented operating system rubbish around Windows 2000.
The article says windows is getting a new API, WinRT, which is a modern version of Win32. .NET and C++ development will both be updated for WinRT and have the same capability as each other so you can work in the environment you choose. Silverlight is supported, updated and renamed (codenamed?) Jupiter. Some other new things were added. In summary, .NET developers, you're getting new functionality. C++ developers, you're getting new functionality. Plus it will be easier than ever to go back and forth between the two because, underlying it all, is a new unified API.
The whole idea is to confuse you, so that you won't jump ship, and the ______ that you use now will kinda sorta be ok, and hey, imagine stuff working from phones to tablets to notebooks to desktops, any of which could have a cool GPU to do stuff, and you can maybe sorta use your old code.
Got it? Great. Logon now. Please. Pretty Please. HTML5! Java! You're a FOSS guy, right? You like that Java stuff! We promise not to fork it! Not like that stuff that's in court facing a huge settlement with Oracle, right? C'mon, please???
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The article is something that I have never seen before -- Microsoft fanfiction.
What creates an interesting problem -- since Microsoft fanfiction exists, according to the rule 34 there must be Microsoft slash fanfiction. But since there is only one instance of Microsoft fanfiction and it is not slash, someone on the Internet must write Microsoft slash fanfiction.
Go, Internet, go!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
> No, because they looked at Windows 8.
Except that they didn't. They looked at a random build. Remember that Sagans of KLoCs were written for Longhorn and then abandoned. That wasn't the first time and it won't be the last. People wrote articles based on those leaked copies too, because they were intentionally leaked for just that purpose. It has always been thus, everyone else's shipping products are compared to what Microsoft says it will ship 'RSN.' Then it eventually ships and isn't anything like what was promised. Rinse and repeat every couple of years.
About all that can be stated with any certainty is that Windows 8 will probably ship sometime between 12 and 24 months from now and will add support for ARM and a tabletish touch interface. The tablets are a done deal because they would totally piss off OEMs who are already putting product into the pipeline that they would ship Android or Meego if Microsoft changed course on em.
Windows 7 is the only product that resembled the prerelease hype and that was because the goals were so minimal, Make a Windows Vista that doesn't suck donkey balls. Since they had eliminated most of the worst suckage by Vista SP1 (and people generally were buying it on new hardware instead of upgrading by then) about all that was left was to reskin it so people who had heard that "Vista Sucks" wouldn't look at 7 and instantly associate it with Vista.
Democrat delenda est
For that matter Peter Bright is wrong, whether he believes the hype or not, because there was no bombshell to begin with. At no point it was said that "the new Windows 8 touch-friendly immersive style would use a developer platform not based on .NET". The only thing that was said is that you will be able to develop for Windows 8 using HTML5 & JS. A few people took the latter to imply the former, and published stories where said implication was treated as plain fact - like the one mentioned in TFA - and from there the hysteria took over.
As usual, if you want to know what's actually going on, stick to the primary sources - in this case, Win8 presentation videos. And they say: 1) There will be HTML5/JS, and 2) Full dev story will be told on BUILD in September. That's all there is to it for now.
So why did this post get a zero rating? I am a .NET developer and agree 100%. Visual Studio 2010 is a fantastic development experience. I tried to do some iPhone development and hated XCode on the Mac. Objective C seems like going back in time. Why would I give up my managed environment and want to worry about de-constructors and managing resources. Anyone who criticises .NET development has probably never done any.
Keep in mind, MSDN licenses are annual subscriptions - so MS developers pay for the dev tools EVERY YEAR, and they keep on paying .......
what happened to "developers developers developers" ?
They moved into the "O-cloud-O cloud-O cloud"
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Maybe the response from .net developers is more rooted in the fact that a JS/HTML5 based application development language brings a whole lot more developers to the party with less of a learning curve.
All Anonymous Coward posts default to 0.
Cocoa's evolution goes way back to the early 80s, so it does have some cruft. However, Objective-C on the Mac has included garbage collection for quite a long time. Managing resources is really a non-issue in the parent's case.
What I find most interesting about Cocoa is how many recent projects have been inspired by the API. Cappuccino, SproutCore, and SNAP to name a few. While I personally have nothing bad to say about Windows development on .NET, I do find it interesting that nobody has really adapted the API outside of Windows. Mono does to some extent, but typically use their own frameworks where compatibility is not needed.
Did you even read TFA? The entire article is about how Windows 8 will not lack .NET support, nor native C++ support.