I have a while ago just finished watching the live stream of the first keynote (yes there will be one tomorrow as well), at Microsoft BUILD. Having attended / presented, at quite a few of these kind of events - and being somewhat jaded (well OK then, a lot jaded), I must still say that I am impressed.
As quite a few other developers I have been fairly worried about what will happen when Win 8 comes; .NET/WPF/SilverLight is dead - long live HTML etc., but at least for now it seems that the fears have been un-founded. I.e, the .NET as we know and love is still there, SilverLight as well (come to think about it, nothing much was said about WPF). And it seems pretty straightforward to build the new “Metro” style apps using the tools we know.
What do I think then: well, Win 8 promises to be really, really slick and cool - but we have been here before (Longhorn anyone?), so let’s wait and see until we get to RC stages. However, the whole Win RT, i.e the underlying “goo” of Windows (graphics, networking, etc) being exposed to all different types of programming languages; native, .NET, HTML/JavaScript, etc., seems very, very cool. I can’t wait to get my hands on some bits and start playing around with this. Speaking of that; bits will apparently be released later.
So at this stage I am fairly optimistic, and I would not rule out, myself running Win 8 on a couple of machines here at home. I am looking forward to the keynote tomorrow, where they will talk more about the development experience, and hopefully drill deeper into Visual Studio.Next.
Having finally seen the session-list, there are some really interesting sessions during the week. I really, really hope these ones will be videoed:
- F# 3.0: data, services, Web, cloud, at your fingertips, by Don “Mr F#” Syme:
- What’s new in .NET Framework 4.5:
- Lessons learned designing the Windows Runtime:
- Deep dive into the kernel of the .NET Framework:
- Using the Windows Runtime from C++:
- Using the Windows Runtime from C# and Visual Basic:
That’s all for now “folks”. Will hopefully post more as the week and the conference goes by.
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