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Microsoft Releases Windows 10 SDK
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today launched developer tools for the Windows 10 Technical Preview, including a software development kit (SDK). Developers can use the new tools, currently in preview, to start building universal Windows apps for Microsoft's upcoming operating system. A universal Windows app is Microsoft's verbiage for an app that can run across different form factors, including PCs, tablets, and phones. Developers can publish these apps in the Windows Store, which will be available across all types of Windows 10 devices.
It turns out I had to write the UI twice: once for tablets/desktops, and once again for "Windows Phone".
IDK about you, but if I were advertising a "Universal" SDK, it would mean that one app would be able to write without any code changes between platforms - with the optional ability to change UI layout according to form factor, but graceful degradation otherwise.
God fucking dammit.
Even "desktop" applications are going to have over-sized text and clunky controls now?
Why would you even do anything for the windows phone platform? It was a stillbirth.
Your own subject title refers to 8.1 while TFA is about 10.
It's just another example of poor naming.
For 8.1 there were Universal Apps which are the one project, multiple heads, common core code.
For 10 there is UAP which is one project, one set of code with an adaptive UI if desired.
See windows-10-developer-tooling-preview-now-available-to-windows-insiders for more info on Adaptive UX and UAP.
Pretty much this.
One of the best things about CSS is you can create rules that will target various hardware types, resolutions, bit-depths and so on.
Sadly so very few people actually use it because so many don't even know it exists, or the developers in question are those awful kinds that create bandwidth-wasting desktop websites instead of creating actual good websites in the first place that dynamically allocate resources based on hardware type, a thing that has existed for years now.
Visual presentation should never have to interfere with HOW a program works.
A window manager should mangle and twist a UI to fit any screen, even if you don't want it to, in order to force developers to DEAL WITH IT PROPERLY.
The use of off-screen loading by setting UI elements beyond screen resolution can be done through setting a flag on said UI elements.
All this minimum-width window crap pisses me off.
Especially Chrome. Fuck you, you don't get to decide what size my windows should never shrink beyond.
That's some funny stuff! Recent stats like these show that Windows isn't just popular, it's still the dominant OS, even when considering the millions upon millions of non-Windows mobile devices out there.
Of those 1.37 billion web requests, over 58% came from a Windows system. Even Windows 8.1 alone has more users than OS X does in total, and that's one of the most despised versions of Windows!
The desktop is still king. Windows is still king. Everything else is a joke compared to them.
But how long until they kill it?
Windows phones and Tablets are less than 3% of the market. Why even develop for such a small market share?
Android (Which is linux) has 51% of the phone market and 61% of the tablet market.
It's not the year of the Windows Phone or Tablet, just like it is not the year of the linux desktop. :P
app store only = fail
.... don't you think it's about time to retire the stained glass window in favor of the real Windows logo?
The gag was never particularly original, clever or funny --- and what passes for geek humor isn't known for aging well.
See, you tried 8.1 and then to get it working under 10.
You should have coded for 8.1, recompiled under Win 9, and then pushed the Win 10 build.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
But how long until they kill it?
Well, I think the internal code name is Bertha, so give it a few years of failure before they kill it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Windows 10 has an adaptive UX framework to get around using css hacks
http://saveie6.com/
This is Microsoft, not Google. So it's going to last either a few months or a few decades.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
New APIs introduced, from
#if(WINVER >= 0x0600)
WINBASEAPI
BOOL
WINAPI
SwitchToMetro(
);
#define SwitchToDesktop()
#define IsUserAPirate() (false)
#ifndef _NTOS_ // #define LinuxIsStupid() (true) // issue 872354,
#if defined(_M_IA64) && !defined(RC_INVOKED)
caution, Kurt got fired for this.
#endif
#endif
LONG
__cdecl
MakeTheUserAcceptMetro (
__inout LONG volatile *Penor
);
#endif
A whole SDK is needed now for a BSOD?
Sounds like you really like this guy.
You had me till that last sentence.
"Everything else is a joke compared to them."
Keep telling yourself this. Your future looks great from here!
You mean like silverlight?
If it was 1995 I'd be really excited right now!
Or Zune? Kin? XNA? PlaysForSure? Flight Sim? Encarta? Expression Suite? SteadyState?
Yes, no one drops their products as much as MS does.
Good luck for Windows 10 SDK , may be useful to the user throughout the world .
Nothing for Win32, just WinRT. Once again, Microsoft pretends Win32 desktop developers don't exist.
Beta everywhere.
Except google, though they kill products which people actually use.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
well what it leads to is just apps being first developed on 7.0, then having stuff fixed for 7.5, then being rewritten for 8.0 and then again the project reworked for 8.1 and then a total rewrite for 10.
so fucking universal!
and yes, the thing is, this is the _exact_ same marketing stuff they were hyping out with wp8 and windows 8. they were showing slides of how it's all unified and you get the same app running on everything and all that. they made such a big deal about it, despite you never going to be able to run wp8 apps on your win8 tablet(unless said tablet is a x86+vt and you have the sideload package and you run the wp8 emulator on said tablet, which is basically more trouble than running android apps on said x86 computer).
it's a mess. wouldn't trust them about this before they have phones, tablets and the desktop out and the sdk to do it out and it actually can run the same app on everything.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You forgot to mention TrainSim! Waaaaah!
It's true that Microsoft have dropped some products quickly (and their support for APIs can be faddish), but they have also supported a lot of products for very long times. In fact, some of your examples seem a bit out of place with Flight Simulator lasting 24 years and Encarta lasting 16 years.
Really? It has some kind of mechanism that converts between a touch-based app and a mouse/keyboard based app?
Because they are fundamentally different. Not that you can't use the same UI for both, but one or both REALLY sucks unless the UI is rather specific to the input methods.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Microsoft is their own worst enemy. They're trying to break into mobile apps and this is now their THIRD set of APIs for doing it. This amount of churn is extremely annoying and frustrating for devs. At least when Google produces new Android APIs they tend to be incremental and where necessary they'll even backport them.
I think, it would be better, then windows 8, because most people still use Windows 7 nowadays!
This flight simulator? http://store.steampowered.com/app/314160/
Well, we're really discussing dropping platforms, not specific products. It doesn't inconvenience many developers that they've stopped working on Encarta or the Flight Simulator series.
It's universal in the sense that it works on any machine/device running Windows 10. That's about as far away from a mess as you can get. It only becomes a mess if you insist that it magically fixes things which happened in the past, which just makes you look rather foolish ;)
By way of comparison the Dave420 OS doesn't even exist but "big Dave" the troll critic knows all. Too bad your mama bans you from the computer on weekends Dave. It gives away you can't even afford a computer of your own.
For several versions Android required that too, until they came up with fragments in (if I am not mistaken) Android 4.0 which works well enough for touch (and touch only) devices.
It's universally known Dave420's mama bans him from computers on weekends and he can't afford one of his own. Why no posts between Saturday and Sunday Dave420? We know why. See above.
Now we can have ransomware for our phones.
"well what it leads to is just apps being first developed on 7.0, then having stuff fixed for 7.5, then being rewritten for 8.0 and then again the project reworked for 8.1 and then a total rewrite for 10."
There was a Windows 7.5 ?
Because it is too early to count Microsoft out.
There is a lot to like about where Microsoft is attempting to go (and admittedly Microsoft is being partially dragged by users telling them what doesn't work), and they seem to be closest to the end goal of one application that adapts and works regardless of where the user is running it.
PlaysForSure was the worst. Not only because their actions contradicted the name, but because it took away things that people had already paid for. It's different from discontinuing Zune; sure they weren't making any more of them, but the Zune you already owned still worked.
Flight Simulator had a good run. So did Encarta, until the internet and Wikipedia made it obsolete.
There was a Windows Phone 7.5, and even a mostly ignored Windows Phone 7.8 that was thrown out as a sop to the owners of Windows 7 phones that would never be upgraded to Windows Phone 8. There was no desktop Windows 7.5.
I've got several apps in the store. Most of the UI code is fully shared, and moderately adoptive to screen size. In a few places, I needed something special for one or the other.
My trick is that the 8.1 universal apps have two mainpage.xaml files (one for desktop, one for phone). I just make a shared UserControl. Each MainPage just has one object, which is the shared control
(BTW: I work at Microsoft, but not in the group that does XAML; my way works but that doesn't mean there isn't a better way)
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A broken window is a broken window. What's is exactly your problem?
The problem I have is that it encourages unusually stupid and frivolous posts, even by Slashdot standards.
"Of those 1.37 billion web requests, over 58% came from a Windows system. Even Windows 8.1 alone has more users than OS X does in total, and that's one of the most despised versions of Windows!"
Lets think back to 2000 or so when around 99% of web requests were coming from Windows and think about just how far Windows has fallen in that time. While I agree that Mac OS X isn't really setting the world on fire (and I say that as a Mac user) I do see an awful lot of Macs out there and far more than there were in 2000 so Apple has certainly made up a lot of ground. Also, consider that when you're sitting at a desktop you're likely using the web a lot, but a phone is just occasional use so the fact that 42% of web requests aren't coming from Windows tells you a lot about how much kit is out there that is connecting to the internet. The important change since 2000 is that you could barely manage on the web without IE on Windows. I know, I was a Linux user then and browsing was very painful at times. These days, the web is much better to use because it has to handle all these different browsers on phones and alternative desktops. The thing that kept Windows at the top for all of the 90's was the fact that alternatives couldn't get a shoe in the door. These days, it is very easy to drop Windows. If you want a nice desktop, a Mac is a really good place to go because you get a real desktop OS without all that touch screen, phone UI rubbish shoved into it. You want a phone that works well as a phone and has lots of software? Android and iOS have you covered. Windows has lost the software high ground and the only reason it still has 58% of web requests going to it is simply inertia. MS is desperate to slow the slide but it keeps on going down. I've used Windows 10 and I don't see anything there that will stop this process if they can't get devs to actually put out apps that are unique to Windows and attractive. I don't think they can get back to the heyday of the 90's and having lived and worked through it, I don't think they ever should because we're in a much better place today with real choice. MS should be happy that they still have any customers under the circumstances given just how badly they treated everyone when they were on top.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
How ignorant of reality to some of the people here really need to be to substantiate their own bizarre world view?
Windows Phone may not be as popular as Android or iOS mainly because it was late to the game and not disruptive, it isn't bad but it's not a game-changer so obviously didn't disrupt the incumbents. Yet it still has a higher percentage marketshare of the smartphone market than Linux has of the desktop computer market. Not liking Microsoft is one thing, but pretending your fantastical view of the world is reality is quite another.
Or Zune? Kin?
They stopped making new ones because people didn't like them, obviously flogging a dead horse is a silly thing to do so they did the right thing and dropped them.
XNA?
Still exists.
PlaysForSure?
Market changed and this was no longer necessary, again you would rather them flog the dead horse?
Flight Sim? Encarta? Expression Suite?
If they arent profitable then why put effort into making new versions? If you want to use them then just use the existing versions.
SteadyState?
Obsolete, it was no longer necessary so why keep making new versions?
Yes, no one drops their products as much as MS does.
Except Google and with Google they actually kill the product rather than simply not making new versions, you can't just use the old version.
You can share as much or as little of the UI as you want. You can make custom controls or entire views with XAML with shared code (that gets compiled twice) or with Portable Class Libraries (compiled once and linked twice).
The beauty of the M-V-VM pattern is that a huge amount of code can be reused because the ui binds to the viewmodel. Everything except the very low level navigation plumbing if you want. Not only does this pattern allow for huge reuse it also allows for great testability.