Windows 8 For developers - what’s new?

Windows 8 For developers - what’s new?

Today in BUILD,  it was all about Windows 8 and it seems like a very big change from what we’ve known so far.

And what is the big change?

JavaScript & HTML have become a native part of windows application. That is something completely new for us. HTML comes out of the browser for windows 8 and it can be a UI for a “regular” windows application.

The Metro style applications, meaning that application doesn’t stand alone but it is a part of “Application web” as put by the keynote various speakers.
It means that if you write some text in a word processor and you want to translate it using a translation app, you can pick the translation app after selecting text instead of Copy –> Open translation app –> Paste –> translate.

This is done by contracts. These contracts defined by the OS and each application can choose whether and how to implement them.

This means that the applications share content, not only by the clipboard. The applications share content using contracts.The contract are predefined by the OS (Picker, Share & Search contracts)

To see the whole story let’s take a look at the “Windows 8 Platforms and tools” below:

The WinRT API is a native API but it can be easily used by C# & VB (easier than win32 API)
but moreover, by JavasScript. From this picture we can also see that a XAML application
can be written in C/C++ rather than just .Net language, that’s because XAML was re-implemented natively and now can serve native code as well.

To sum things up: Building application for windows has changed. The most important news, if you ask me, is the contracts that allows application to speak with one another (aka Metro-Style apps).  The second most important is the ability to develop application using HTML & Javascript. There are of course some other things like the new App store, the fact that the apps  I’ll post more about the development tools as the convention continues.