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How Microsoft Is Wooing College Kids To Write Apps For Windows 8
SquarePixel writes "Bloomberg has an interesting story about Microsoft's efforts to simultaneously woo younger workers and to get more apps into its Windows Store. Quoting: 'Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, designed Windows 8 for touch-screen technology included in the company's first tablet, Surface, and other devices coming this year. To gain share in tablets, a market expected by DisplaySearch to reach $66.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft needs enough apps to challenge the more than 200,000 available for iPad. Using student recruits is one way Microsoft can woo app developers who are used to building programs for mobile phones and tablets, where the company has little and no share, respectively. Luring programmers before graduation is particularly critical for recruitment in the U.S., which lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers.'"
I loved losing apps I paid for on Windows Mobile Marketplace.
NEVER AGAIN.
And Visual Studio coupled with XNA sure sounds better than how we had it back in the day.
Did you have to program in the snow? Uphill? Both ways?
When I look back at the code I created in college, compared to what I was capable of after a few years of real world development experience... The difference is pretty stark. I understand the get-em-while-they're-young approach, to influence development decisions later in life. But if they're betting the success of their platform on the output of students with limited-to-no real world experience, I fear for the quality of the apps in their store.
Literally all of the apps in the windows 8 store suck terribly. I've tried a good portion of them. I don't see how wooing 200k apps out of people who've never built something significant is going to change this fact. I think this is a way of desensitizing future developers with respect to a walled garden app store and closed platform with proprietary tools. nothing good can come of this. For ref i sit in front of visual studio for 5 hours a day at the moment so I'm not some crazy zealot. Crazy perhaps.
The product is free and lacks a lot of very useful/needed things for a full-fledged development environment. Here's the list:
* No profiler support
* No 64-bit compiler (32-bit only)
* No resource editor (important for GUI-based bits)
* No MFC support (some may consider this a good thing, but MFC is still in use today, like it or not)
* No ATL support (less of a concern)
To me, the first 3 are absolute deal-breakers. So effectively what Microsoft has given the world for free is something that barely gets the job done -- and given that model, I would say it would definitely appeal to the same demographic they're advertising Windows 8 development to: college students.
You know, 12 years ago. Not exactly new news. They gave us tons of free development software and tools. It was amazing. Most of it got re-sold on ebay to pay for beer.
You spelled shill wrong.
And by turning machine, I mean wheel.
I saw Microsoft do it in 2001 with .NET, now they attempt to do it again. It's not a shortage of languages or toolkits. This is about platform lock-in as always. I can understand if PC programming (native apps) and Web apps don't get unified to the vastly different architectures (monolithic PC vs Client/server) , but in this day and age, what is going on?
Why can't I just import the Win8 libraries into Python? Or Java, or .NET (C#)? Or Qt's QML? HTML5 is not a save-all, and I'm ok with that, but why won't we make it easier on each other and admit the emperor is just wearing different clothes. Why for that matter won't WP7 apps run on WP8?
There was a time when MS has tweaks for every program and backwards compatibly was preserved, but those days are long gone. To keep their market share, they have to keep everyone upgrading into the Microsoft corner, fracturing the market place, which sets us back.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
+1 to above
I'm the college kid, with the macbook pro, in the computer science class.
Surprisingly macbooks are becoming more popular yet our teachers still insist on using MS products and languages. I know in the *real* world there are a lot of MS jobs etc, but there are also a lot of cross platform jobs too (i'm a php developer, dont judge). Drives me nuts when I have to spin up a VM just to use a program thats Windows specific because the requirements for the project/program/lesson are for a windows machine. Some teachers are willing to accept alternatives, but not all.
How much of Apple's App Store success is brought about by the development tools and niceness of Object-oriented programming / interface design?
I'm biased, since for a long while a NeXT Cube was my primary machine (and for a while, I had access to machines running Windows, Mac OS and NeXTstep all w/ similar processor and memory specs), but some of the nicest applications I've ever used began on NeXTstep, and pretty much all the apps I have a real fondness for were heavily influenced by OO-environments (FutureWave Smartsketch which became Flash, but started on Go Corp.'s PenPoint):
- Altsys Virtusoso (which became FreeHand v4)
- TeXview.app (TeXshop.app was inspired by it)
- Lotus Improv
- Mail.app
- TouchType.app
- a bunch of other apps / utilities which no longer exist / are remembered
- Doom (okay, I'm reaching, but it was initially developed on NeXTstep)
Would there be as many IOS apps if XCode didn't benefit from decades of NeXT/OPENSTEP development and user-interface design work?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
So, instead you have to spend $500 for a cheap PC to build windows apps on? Windows doesn't offer Visual Studio on the Mac just like Apple doesn't offer XCode on Windows. XCode is a free download btw.
Having said that, I've programmed on both environments and this is what I've found:
1. Programming for C# has been a joy. It's easy to go from C,C++ or Java and pick up on what's different. The additional features make sense and are simple to use and well documented. Programming for ObjC has been really ugly- the language is combination of 2 languages in the same way that two cars hitting each other become one - the result is just an ugly mess.
2. Visual Studio Express may be free, but it does have some missing features. For instance, in much older versions of VS you could load in a binary file and look at the bytes in hex. Not true in this latest version. I'm not sure about the $1000 version though.
3. XCode is about as buggy as iTunes. They release version frequently and you can expect the bug that are frustrating you to go away, but you can be sure that newer more annoying ones will appear. One version I downloaded would show you incorrect values in the debugger. Pretty sad.
4. XCode was written for 2 groups of people - 1- those who know nothing about programming, and 2- those who are developers. This means that there are 2 ways of doing everything. These 2 methods are incompatible with each other and the gui is clumsy and confusing.
5. Apple apps crash. I've used a LOT of apps and almost every one of them has crashed at some point. Even the "Settings" program that's part of the phone! This seems to indicate to me that either 1- The IOS environment is flawed, or 2- The programming environment is exceedingly difficult to write to without creating issues that cause it to crash.
In conclusion, in my experience C# has a better environment to program to, and you can now use Mono to run apps on Linux (Free) and Mono-Touch (though very expensive) to port apps to iphone. I makes me almost want to buy a Windows mobile device..... almost, but not quite.
I'm the college kid, with the macbook pro, in the computer science class.
So you're him!
So effectively what Microsoft has given the world for free is something that barely gets the job done -- and given that model, I would say it would definitely appeal to the same demographic they're advertising Windows 8 development to: college students.
As a college student I take great offense at the thought that pile of kludge is aimed at me. I have only met one person (in meatspace, all others I view with suspicion that it might be Balmer just trolling forums) that tried the windows 8 prerelease and liked it. (before that i thought he was a bit odd anyway but that just cemented it.)
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Your last 3 points are irrelevant for Win8 apps - you don't write them in MFC/ATL, and you don't use Win32 resource files for them. 64-bit is also not needed.
Also, IIRC, there's a basic profiler in 2012 Express.
What University do you go to? CS at my Uni is 80% Macs, 10% Linux machines (disproportionately Ubuntu, for better or for worse), 5% Windows machines, and the rest never bring laptops (and borrow a mac from the Uni to do work on).
Again, all of our software is either on a central server that can be SSH'd to with X access (and thus any machine can be used to get to it), it's cross platform, or it's OS/X or Linux. I can only think of maybe one specific class that you *must* have a windows machine for (and it's like a C# class or something) and even then, I think they meet in a computer lab of Windows machines.
Any mac can be setup for development trivially quickly and easily. I'm not at all a mac fanboy (quite the opposite) but Apple did figure out how to treat their developers well. It wouldn't surprise me if a great amount of Universities are pretty Windows leaning, but it's not the de facto standard by any shot. OS X has a good hold on the Universities (and most programmers) and I strongly suspect it will continue grow. (Personally, they can have my Arch laptop when they can pry it out of my cold dead hands).
In college maybe 80% of the time was spent writing code and 20% in design, testing, fixing bugs, archiving, documentation and sales. In the real world this ratio is reversed. Especially when you count team members whose main duties are non-coding.
But that's the concern. I have a thing I can barely see the outline of, and it might just well be a rake. Do you really insist I call a rake a spade(ethnic stereotype)?
Well, back in *my* day, we didn't have any of those fancy, dancy Eye Dee Eees. We soldered together wires to our vacuum tubes from instructions sets carved in clay tablets. That's the way is was and we *liked* it!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Plus, no version of Visual Studio is 64bit.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2516436/visual-studio-64-bit
Sorry about the mess.
If you read the Microsoft metro app store policy you will start laughing, especially at "3.2 Your app must not stop responding, end unexpectedly, or contain programming errors", I mean look who's freaking talking here. Windows 1 to Windows 7, office 1 to office 2010, all had and have freaking issues(freezing, crashes, bugs, glitches) xbox 360 hardware failure, and yet they got the balls to tell you not to fuck it up. Shit, how many freaking times my windows 7 kept freezing because i did not set the storage(both winodws & amd SB drivers sucked) configuration from ide compatibility to ahci in the bios while the linux distros had no issues with this.
Microsoft also has the right to cancel your account and wipe all your apps off from the store any time if they think you are not conforming to their policy. For students, learning c & c++ would make it easier for them to adapt other languages much quicker. Writing efficient and inventive Algorithm's is the most important aspect of any programming language.
He was referring to the ability to compile 64-bit apps, not to VS itself being 64-bit.
Liar! You must be an anti-microsoft shill. I know because nobody ever bought anything from the Windows Marketplace!
It should be noted that students have access to the full Visual Studio suite, alongside the Expression suite and Windows Server (I think it goes back to 2003 up to 2012) through DreamSpark. I've used it in the past and I have to say this is one of the nice things Microsoft does in comparison to, say, Adobe. Autodesk also provides free educational software, but theirs is branded as such whereas Microsoft's stuff seems like the full Professional versions with no strings attached.
At my university we keep stats on what students are connecting to our network. As far as wireless connections go trend is now 60% macs to windows laptops. Disclaimer (It's a private institution so that could explain some of the higher apple product numbers)
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
When I was 13/14 and used win9x and wanted to learn to program, there was no visual studio express at all. Only paid tools costing hundreds of dollars.
So you know what I did?
Switched to Linux.
Even today, I have no idea how to write a Windows program (managed to write a DLL I needed a few years ago though.. using Visual studio express C++).. but I've been writing Linux/BSD software in C for 15 years.
Point is, Visual Studio express may be crap.. but if they had it 15 years ago.. I'm sure I would have learned to program in Windows instead. Might never have switched to Linux at all.
So IMO, it's a smart/critical piece of software from MS. It's a bit much to expect people who are learning to program to immediately spend hundreds of dollars.
Wait - you're saying that Heathkit provided clay tablets? Since when?
Hell, back in my day, they tattooed the instructions on the flayed skin of an EE intern and sent that.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Do you visit often? This pattern of posting has been going on consistently for some time now.
It may be shilling. It may be trolling. One thing it is not, however, is honesty and constructive commentary.
Your objections are naive.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The stupid - it is strong in you...
When I saw that in US universities, students are actually taught to use Windows, Visual Studio, and to program in C#, I was shocked at how influential Microsoft was in the US, and how bad the situation was.
Doing this is a terrible idea, reliance on a IDE means they don't understand how the compilation tool chain works, and they get stuck using this sub-par software, which, to top things off, is also proprietary and restricted to Microsoft platforms.
No wonder Inda and China are better, American students are not taught software engineering, they're taught how to be code monkeys.
And yet .. for years now (Y-E-A-R-S!)I have comfortably developed 64-bit code in Linux. With a 64-bit toolchain including compiler, debugger, all that good stuff. On a 64-bit kernel. With the full array of drivers, programs, modules, and other software available that were available under 32-bit.
Why, exactly, do you care if the IDE or the compiler themselves are 64-bit? If they were, what difference would it make to you?
Note that VS can be used to develop 64-bit code - it's a fully supported scenario. And it will run on a 64-bit Windows with a 64-bit kernel.