Windows 8: .NET Versus HTML5 Metro App Development

An anonymous reader writes "Will Microsoft take advantage of .NET's Java-like CIL and allow .NET code to run on Windows 8, or force developers to switch to HTML5 Metro apps instead for porting apps to Windows 8? This article brings up important insights into both paradigms' advantages and disadvantages, and even correlates the options with Microsoft's past NT-era support of MIPS and PPC, as well as Windows CE's way of supporting embedded architectures."

Comments

A question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Microsoft allow .Net to run on Windows 8?!??! Are you seriously asking this? The answer is a resounding YES for so many obvious reasons that it seems ridiculous to even respond to this.

Then you can be the smartest guru on the cinder.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I've been through a number of cycles of The One True Greatest Solution For All Time a whole bunch of times now.

As The Comedian says, "It's a joke. It's all a joke."

Great, massive, scalable frameworks that we are to write once in, and that's it, it's nothing but code reuse and minor tweaks for as far as the eye can see...until three or four (or two) years goes by and it's all changed and you have to re-write everything all over again...once and for all.

Until the next few years goes by.

Entire graphical e-z layouts with auto code generation. General purpose driver systems. Document data sharing models. Database storage systems with query languages.

It's a joke. It's all a joke. Mother, don't you dare fuckin' forgive them.

Re:No brainer

[Anonymous Coward]

That is great for the corps and the users. Anual updates beats 6 weeks and intranet developers need to certify which browsers they support.

Re:No brainer

[slack_justyb]

Um, no. I don't know of any other JS engine that implements the WinRT namespace. The Chakra JS engine is what will separate any browser from being able to run Metro apps. A metro app isn't a web app, it is important that people understand this. Even though the two are written in the same language, they are not the same thing. Just like Java applets and Android apps are two very different things, they are both written in the same language, Java.

So yeah, Microsoft can still use HTML5 to lock in people into their product, so long as the HTML targets Metro and not the web. Granted it *might* make it easier for one to port from Metro to Web and that's exactly what Microsoft is trying to sell. I don't know how exactly true that is however. But HTML+JS for Metro and HTML+JS for Web are two different things with the same language. Pass it on.

What has happened to Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, has this site simply become a cesspool of trolls, view farmers and ad fairies? Once upon a time there were members that could opine in a relevant manner how they used an OS. Now, it's nothing but mindless, jobless, irrelevant whiners. Does anyone here actually possess a job doing actual work that actually improves our world?

The answer is no, so don't bother. The quality of content here is appalling. The opinions are nearly worthless. The hate-meter so high.

This site now feels like the FOX news of wannabe nerds. However, there are no nerds remaining. Nerds come here now to make fun of the proletariat.

Re:What has happened to Slashdot

[jellomizer]

Technology is no longer a game for the young anymore...
That is the problem. When Slashdot started it was full of 1990 hipsters, who were raking in the dough on the Dot Com Madness. They talk about jobs raking in 6 figures, where they spend half the day playing video games, and most of the jobs were either simple Web Development, or going into legacy code and changing the size of the year from 2 to 4, then finding spots on the form do deal with the change. Articles were about things people did with their excess dough, and the new technology that companies were buying, that they were using at work. Linux was the new OS, it showed promise but lacked corporate support, so when ever a company ported some (often closed source) software to Linux, it was a big deal, with a lot less nagging about Open Source purity, because it was a sign of growth in Linux. The complains about Windows were very valid, Compared to other OS's of the day it was very unstable crashed all the time and had huge security problems, the frustration was that the worse operating system was the dominate one.
Then came 2003... The bubble popped... A lot of developers were laid off many of those making six figures had their salaries cut in half those 100k jobs were no 50k, often your quality of your life isn't how much you make, but how much you budget for, when you get a big cut in your income, even if it is still a good salary, you feel the pain, from the change... Things you never needed to budget for you now need to save up for, and everything seems so much more expensive. Getting jobs became more difficult, a lot of those jobs were rushed to India. Windows XP came out, and it was a vast improvement in Windows but Slashdotter who are now under budget constants, and are already miserable and pessimistic, had already put a lot of emotional equality in Linux. Their tight budgets meant that they need to expand their PC Buying time lines, and will wait much longer between PC cycles, thus stuck with an OS designed to run better on slower systems. Anything new was now put off as a new attempt to take our money and give us junk, and justify to ourselves and others why, we are not getting the new and greatest anymore.
Then there was the Microsoft black hole where We have been on Windows XP and IE 6 for far too long. Early on Windows XP had some security problems, but those for the most part were controlled, then 4 year later Windows Visa was a Flop. Then finally Windows 7 which was good to stand on its own again. However during this lag, Linux got a big boost in popularity (with Firefox) early on then those gains were pushed away by Apple, with popularity of the iPod, and iPhone. Apple also picked up some geek cred by having OS X being Unix based OS. That allowed for many Linux fans to switch without missing much (Technically, not in terms of "freedom" lost). So the OS we had put so much emotional investment in hasn't grown much in an area where it had huge opportunity. Microsoft also has gotten a big hit. While early on they got huge market share, they are unable to grow much these days. People are getting less PC's and going to smart phone and tablets. So Microsoft is pushing to stay relevant it has actually done a lot of real good work, however Slashdot users who are now old and bitter from loosing their spot in the 1%, are still holding onto their old ways of looking at things. Microsoft Windows 7 is the same quality as Windows ME, just with a fancier UI, which I don't need anyways. Windows 8 is just there to confuse the users. But can you blame them for being bitter, once they were gods among men, now they are like everyone else.

Re:Intel will not allow MS a free hand...

[liamoshan]

This Slashdot submission must hail from bizzarro world:

The summary is concise and has decent grammar

The blog post it links to raises interesting questions without shoving a viewpoint down your throat

It mentions Microsoft, but has no kneejerk M$ bashing

The blog post it links to has no ads!
What has happened to the real Slashdot?

Re:Intel will not allow MS a free hand...

[oiron]

Tell me, how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application? How do you write 3D graphics in HTML5?

Native is still consumer; you still need fast, close-to-hardware work for many things like image processing (iPhoto), audio processing (look at all the people raving about garage band on the iPad), games and the like. If anything, the "enterprise" is the one who doesn't need native. Who needs SSE and OpenCL for a billing application, email or even displaying a presentation? Write that in HTML5 + JS or whatever, your users wouldn't notice.

Your basic point is correct, but I think you stressed it too much. Native code isn't going anywhere, and if anything, it's going to get even hotter. It'll be for the superstar apps like Photoshop and Blender. Your flashlight apps and Yet Another Calculator are going to run on the interpreter. What's over is the days of 200 lines of COM gibberish to write Hello World. That was an avoidable fiasco which they're trying to correct in all kinds of ways now.

Re:Intel will not allow MS a free hand...

[hairyfeet]

I agree with MOST of what you posted except the bit about Joe sixpack. As a guy who actually builds and sells to Joe I can tell that the ones buying tablets? Yeah they usually have a desktop AND a laptop which is where all these "the death of the desktop!" pundits are royally fucking up. they see the X86 numbers but don't understand what they mean, when in reality the tablet has taken a different niche, its used to poke at a screen during the commercial to look something up, or as a portable PMP.

The thing all these pundits and apparently MSFT doesn't seem to understand is thus: For Joe the PC went past "good enough" and into "insanely overpowered" several years ago and with solid caps and a little TLC frankly the things just don't die so they just aren't getting replaced constantly like cell phones are. Hell I have customers i support that are using 5+ year old laptops and first gen dual core desktops, are they poor? Nope they just don't see a point in replacing a machine that frankly they aren't even stressing. I just recently talked my doc into letting me find him a nice netbook because he didn't like the weight of his laptop, it was going on 7 years and had had 2 batteries since he bought it, now the old one is a kitchen nettop for his wife.

The problem is MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled during the MHz wars and thought the 3 year cycle would last forever, but as i see everyday there are a TON of people still using Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s that are fricking 7 years old simply because they can't even stress these old chips out and the machines they are in simply aren't dying. the giant fuckup MSFT is making is by coming in too late into the ARM game and trying to use the Windows UI and name to shove their way in. this is the same dumbshit move they made for damned near a decade with WinCE which was a big fail and it'll be a big fail again.

You are right that businesses (no AD support, WTF?) and legacy apps are seriously gonna hurt them but I'd argue what is gonna hurt them worse is the very market they are badly attempting to target, the consumers, as they simply aren't giving them any reasons to choose WinRT over iPad and Android. What they SHOULD have done is left the desktop alone, maybe added a few bells and whistles but that's it, and instead focused the Metro UI on ONLY tablets and phones and moreover give the consumer a reason to buy them. For example made it incredibly simple for someone like my dad to remote in to his desktop at work on a WinRT pad at home if he needed to check some figures, and tried to make Windows 8 + WinRT + Xbox 360/720 as seamless and "push one button and it works" as much as possible. Instead using Win 8 CP at the shop frankly the ONLY nice thing I can say is "maybe it'll be nice on a cell phone" which is NOT what you want your customers thinking when they use your flagship desktop OS, and now that I know the ARM apps won't work on x86 anymore than the x86 will work on ARM I have even less of a reason to buy a WinRT anything..