It is a smörgåsbord of great quotes. Windows 8 is going to be awesome 🙂
“working with Windows 8 is simple and enjoyable”
“In those seven weeks, we’ve managed to create a solid first version, that works across all resolutions, laptops, desktops and tablets, whether they use a touch screen, pen or mouse. Development was easy”
“The fact that you can develop native applications for Windows using HTML and JavaScript is huge: in our case, it meant that every single engineer in our company already knew how to develop for Windows.”
“I have paused all our Android development in favour of Windows 8”
Editing HTML files in a text editor (perhaps Visual Studio)
Editing XAML files in a text editor (perhaps Visual Studio)
But… far fewer of us are familiar with Expression Blend… which turns out to be a “must have” for Windows 8 Metro style app development as it does a great job of editing HTML and XAML.
The sixth edition from Charles Petzold is all about Windows 8 Metro style app development using C# and XAML … and an absolute bargain at $10 if you buy the eBook in May (with a sliding scale on price post May)
I did … and Charles has done a really good job making it digestible and engaging.
Are you a Windows Forms developer looking to develop a touch enabled application?
Perhaps a touch enabled application that sports the latest Windows 8 Metro style of applications?
One choice would be to take forward your .NET skills and learn the new XAML presentation framework that comes with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11. This would give you a great solution… but it would only work on Windows 8,. For many companies this is not a problem as they are targeting deployment through the App Store. However for some applications (LOB being a great example) the limitation is too restrictive and for others, learning a new presentation framework may not make sense right now after making a significant investment in Windows Forms.
There are alternatives and one I have recently come across is teleriks RadControls for Windows Forms which now includes a Metro theme.
Check out the video. Very nice.
P.S. In case you were wondering, Windows 8 Metro style applications have many other helpful features other than offering a great experience for touch. These include roaming support, lifecycle management, notifications, contracts and more.
Two great posts by the Telerik team documenting what it took to move a Windows Phone app to a Windows 8 Metro style app. I would recommend you download a high resolution pdf (7MB) of the posts.
