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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."
as the article suggests, to port .Net apps to the ARM architecture. Arm-twisting both ways in the Wintel duopoly, first it was the turn of MS, now it's Intel's turn.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
While it is true, Microsoft may just be hoping for a foot in at this point. HTML5 is touted as the one stop shop to port an app to Android, IOS and windows. Microsoft is entering the mobile phone war late in the game and way behind, interchangeability at this stage of the game is a plus for them. They just need plans to mess that up late in the game if they take the lead.
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.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Now who's the idiot? CLR is a calcium, lime, and rust cleaner. It doesn't compile anything!
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.
Yup, just more Microsoft word-spooge onto the faces of the developmentally naive.
Someone left an MSDN magazine lying around in work. It had an article titled something like "Leveraging code re-use via multiparadigmatic metaprogramming lambda expressions". After some head scratching, I eventually figured out that they were talking about implementing macros in C#.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"This guy is a complete moron. First, it's called the CLI, not the CIL."
No it's not. CIL is the Common Intermediate Language, it is .NET's bytecode format, that is part of the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) and runs on top of the CLR (Common Language Runtime). The CIL is important for portability as it is effectively the abstraction layer that separates the actual code, from the underlying architecture. The CLR then acts as an architecture specific implementation to execute that bytecode on the architecture in question.
"Second, it's called the Windows Runtime or WinRT and it runs .NET apps and HTML5/js apps."
Just to clarify, as someone responding to you didn't seem to quite get it, it doesn't run existing .NET apps, that's done elsewhere. It does allow you to write new apps utilising parts of the .NET toolset however.
Despite this, I agree, the guy is indeed a complete moron writing an article about something he generally doesn't really seem to get.
This guy is a complete moron. First, it's called the CLI, not the CIL. Second, it's called the Windows Runtime or WinRT and it runs .NET apps and HTML5/js apps. This is all quite plain to anyone that has even a tiny understanding of the system. This architecture diagram has been posted for quite some time, and clearly shows C# and VB as well as C/C++ apps running under WinRT/Metro.
Hi, I'm the "complete moron" who wrote the article. I most definitely meant CIL and not CLI, as I was referring to the Common Intermediate Language, and not the Command Line Interface. One is used to interact with an operating system through mostly text (curses and cursor-based terminal graphics being a stark exception), and the other allows multiple human-written programming languages to be compiled to a common bytecode form for interpretation by a .NET virtual machine runtime, and the basis of this article was that the same VM can be ported to Windows 8 on ARM in place of Metro apps. And your diagram does not clearly note anywhere that it is valid for Windows 8 on ARM as it is for x86/x86-64. Next time, don't be so quick to jump to conclusions and throw the words "moron" and "idiot" around. Thank you in advance.
He didn't mean Command Line Interface.
Common Language Infrastructure
Complete moron still applies, I think.
The fundamental problem is that it's all entirely backwards.
The web is moving more towards apps so rather than continuing to butcher HTTP and HTML into supporting apps, we'd be better off creating a new protocol handler (is app:// taken?) and creating a set of technologies better meant to facilitate that.
XAML may not be the best option, but it illustrates the concept - it would make much more sense to have something like this built for the web/desktop than it would badly butchering HTTP/HTML.
I agree with you on where HTML5 is going but it frankly scares me, it's a throwback to the bad development practices that came around in the 90s, culminating in Visual Basic 6 being used for actual commercial apps.
I get the feeling it's a new generation of developers pushing all these things, one that hasn't learnt from the mistakes of the previous generation. All the problems with HTML5 have long be solved, but for some reason the solutions have been ignored, and so the problems are merely being repeated. I get the feeling we've got a decade of really bad software ahead of us. Time will tell I guess.