Industry Watch: Microsoft's Windows 8 mysteries
October 11, 2011 —
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Never in my recollection has so much—and so little—been shared at a technology conference. But Microsoft managed to pull off the dubious feat at the recent BUILD Conference in Anaheim.
(For the sake of disclosure, I was not in attendance; what follows was gleaned from multiple discussions and interviews with folks who were on site.)
It began in the run-up to the event, as Microsoft put the clamps on corporate lips, leaving many in the industry to try to piece together what Windows 8 would and would not support, what the future held for Silverlight, XAML and the .NET Framework, and what the new development stack would look like.
Then came BUILD, and developers were handed a tablet running the new operating system with the Metro styling and touch capability, and attendees raved. New toys will do that to people. Developers couldn’t wait to go to sessions to learn more, then to scurry back to their hotel rooms to play with the tablets and see what made them tick.
In keynotes, Microsoft executives laid out a vision for the future of development. Use your existing skill sets in the development tools you already own, and now you’ll target 450 million Windows users with your applications. Not desktop users, or tablet users, or phone users, but all of them.
Now BUILD is over, and Microsoft again seems to have put a gag order on its field people, telling them they cannot discuss any of the things that were unveiled at the conference.
Why?
Here is a brief list of things Microsoft should be discussing:
Silverlight: Microsoft didn’t say it’s dead, but it didn’t say it’s alive either. In fact, Microsoft didn’t say anything at all about Silverlight. That’s a shame, because for now, Silverlight remains the only tool in the Microsoft arsenal that enables rich Internet applications to run cross-platform. With HTML5/CSS/WinJS, “as soon as you develop against the WinRT stack, you’re tied to Windows 8. You can’t lift it out and plug it into a browser,” explained Scott Lock of Excella Consulting.
Related Search Term(s): BUILD, Microsoft, Windows 8
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