Windows 8

I'd say getting rid of aero was more for style consistency than anything. I've no idea how much impact it had on the fact that metro is the 'shell' now and not explorer.

I'll credit them that they've got confidence in metro, misguided or not after all the negative feeling around it, to keep on pushing it, but I get the impression they've got no plan-B for why W8 should be a big deal.

*Legion* wrote:

Valve is porting Steam and the Source Engine to Linux, and apparently a big reason behind that is Gabe Newell thinking Windows 8 is crap.

Good. Blaming Microsoft for the Episode 3 delays feels much more... natural than blaming Valve

Scratched wrote:

...I'll credit them that they've got confidence in metro, misguided or not after all the negative feeling around it, to keep on pushing it, but I get the impression they've got no plan-B for why W8 should be a big deal.

The technique seems to work well for Apple. Continuing to push icons of spiral bound calendars upon users who have never used one, never used a leather-bound address book but somehow the metaphor is supposed to carry across to both desktop and mobile devices, etc. Apple seems to think that everything old is new again (and again and again), so I at least give MS credit for trying to do something different.

What does altering the way in which a free product functions have to do with violating anti-trust rules? Not trying to be snarky, I'm curious. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a dumb move on their part to try to drag people into Metro whether they want it or not

I highlighted the important bit. I think antitrust regulators would have looked at that with a gimlet eye.

Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly, so it's legal for them. The rules are different for monopolies.

Limiting a free product hardly counts as an anti-trust violation. Pretty much its just limited free development tools.. you can always buy the more expensive version to develop anything you want.. or hey.. use some other IDE to develop for Windows 8.

Yeah, Microsoft got slammed by the EU because they not only bundled Internet Explorer with Windows but also knotted it together with core Windows processes. Nothing of the kind here.

As a developer, I don't understand how other developers work on Microsoft platforms and don't end up just hating life.

MS development technologies are an endless death march of new development technologies replacing last year's set, with no appreciable benefit.

It's basically what Joel Sposky describes in his post Fire and Motion:

Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET - All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That's probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can't spend writing new features.

MS reinvents their stack over and over again, with a new pile of alphabet-soup technologies, solely for the sake of reinvention. It's suppressing fire. MS developer resumes are a mile long, just from listing all of the alphabet-soup checkboxes.

If you bang on three or four random letters on your keyboard, and at least one of them is a vowel, you have approximately a 71.2% chance of creating a string of characters that's actually being used as a name for some MS dev technology.

It's community versus corporate focus. I can't remember where I saw it, but a blog post said something about the big difference between MS developers and those working on open source stacks are that the open source developer community determines the path that their technologies take by choosing what to embrace and what to ignore. On the Microsoft side, however, MS charts the path, and does so primarily with concern to their strategic interests (selling software licenses) rather than the quality of the technologies, and the MS-world developers march down that path, with no influence as to the path's direction.

Some of those technologies are, in fact, very good, but as far as the MS developer tech strategy goes, that fact seems to be almost ancillary to the point. There will be a manufactured "need" to replace it with something else, and who knows if the replacement will be as good?

EDIT: That might have gotten away from me a bit and went a little rant-y.

TheGameguru wrote:

Limiting a free product hardly counts as an anti-trust violation. Pretty much its just limited free development tools.. you can always buy the more expensive version to develop anything you want.. or hey.. use some other IDE to develop for Windows 8.

Yeah, its like these companies don't understand we own any software they make! How dare they!

An example of why restricting the tools this way is kind of sh*tty:

Microsoft is ending production of "free as in beer" compilers.The number of people we have who will be prepared to fork out $500 or so for the new Visual Studio is severely limited, I suspect. It would for example make it much harder to ask people to maintain buildfarm animals, or test patches. From our point of view this is unquestioningly a bad move on Microsoft's part. It's a good thing we have a fallback tool chain we can use.

So the PostgreSQL folks expect to be pretty much forced by this to use MinGW, rather than being able to use the officially supported MS compilers.

*Legion* wrote:

It's community versus corporate focus. I can't remember where I saw it, but a blog post said something about the big difference between MS developers and those working on open source stacks are that the open source developer community determines the path that their technologies take by choosing what to embrace and what to ignore. On the Microsoft side, however, MS charts the path, and does so primarily with concern to their strategic interests (selling software licenses) rather than the quality of the technologies, and the MS-world developers march down that path, with no influence as to the path's direction.

Some of those technologies are, in fact, very good, but as far as the MS developer tech strategy goes, that fact seems to be almost ancillary to the point. There will be a manufactured "need" to replace it with something else, and who knows if the replacement will be as good?

EDIT: That might have gotten away from me a bit and went a little rant-y. :)

The .NET Framework / Visual Studio / SQL Server stack is hands down the most accessible stack for beginning and mid-experienced developers. Not that they don't have enterprise features and power, but you'll be hard pressed to find something as cohesive and easy to use elsewhere.

I mean, the other communities, like Java in particular have a ton of really talented people in them, but there's so much crap you have to wade through, and the fragmentation is ridiculous.

Hypatian wrote:

An example of why restricting the tools this way is kind of sh*tty:

Microsoft is ending production of "free as in beer" compilers.The number of people we have who will be prepared to fork out $500 or so for the new Visual Studio is severely limited, I suspect. It would for example make it much harder to ask people to maintain buildfarm animals, or test patches. From our point of view this is unquestioningly a bad move on Microsoft's part. It's a good thing we have a fallback tool chain we can use.

So the PostgreSQL folks expect to be pretty much forced by this to use MinGW, rather than being able to use the officially supported MS compilers.

This sucks.

Is there some reason people can't continue using the free VS2010 editions?

That's apparently their plan for the moment, but they're already being locked out of good compiler advances that are in the 2011 version. They're saying that they have a free option if necessary. It's not presently necessary, but it eventually will be, if Microsoft does not change course.

Something you used to be able to do with the windows SDK (before VS express versions if I recall correctly) was that you could get the compilers in the SDK, but you would need VS for the IDE. No idea if they're going to juggle it again. That said, the compilers for each language are still there in VSE '11, it's the support for non-metro stuff which is going away.

Right, so they're being locked out of the good compiler advances, since they need to be able to use their code base to generate a binary for the desktop, not for f*cking tablets. (curse intended for Microsoft, not you. )

Scratched wrote:

Something you used to be able to do with the windows SDK (before VS express versions if I recall correctly) was that you could get the compilers in the SDK, but you would need VS for the IDE. No idea if they're going to juggle it again. That said, the compilers for each language are still there in VSE '11, it's the support for non-metro stuff which is going away.

You still get the compilers (C++ and C#) with the Windows 7 SDK today, so you can compile from the command line even without Visual Studio (Express or otherwise). That's apparently going away in the Windows 8 SDK, which will contain only the libraries, docs, etc and not the build tools any more.

What I'm wondering is, even though the VS11 Express IDE is designed to only target Metro, can you still use its actual compiler from the command line? Unless Microsoft are actually making two separate compilers (not just different IDEs with the same backend compiler under the hood), it should still be possible to download VSE11 and then do a command line build that targets any version of Windows, if you can live without the IDE.

After playing around with the PR, it's still a pain to use from my perspective as a desktop mouse/keyboard user. I just can't get over the lack of (for want of a better word) 'clues' in the interface as they've eliminated chrome. Sure it looks clean and tidy, but it's too minimalist. If I'm looking to do something there's nothing to lead me on to how to accomplish it, and for a lot of metro UI tasks it seems there's one and only one way of doing it.

I really wish MS had just made "Metro" a different and separate branch of their OSes.

Oh yeah, I downloaded it yesterday but forgot to set up a new VM. Guess I won't make it a priority.

As you could probably expect, it's not a massive change from the CP release, so yes, low priority (unless you're rubbernecking at a crash like I am).

I was under the impression that a lot had changed in this version based on user feedback. I hope that's the case. I've been tasked with evaluating this for work so I was waiting for this version before doing so. We'll see if I can get used to it. I'm really down on the Start Screen so it's got an uphill battle to convince me.

I guess there could be a lot of minor tweaks, but the broad strokes are the same from my brief (30m?) usage of it.

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

Also, Skulls of the Shogun is officially Win8 exclusive, which is saddening. I remember at PAX East they told me they were launching with Win8 but I didn't realize they meant you needed Win 8 to play it. This makes me really sad and expecting that the rumors of Ms. 'splosion Man and Zen Pinball launching with Win 8 are going to be exclusive as well.

shoptroll wrote:

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

I think it's just Metro that doesn't support XNA. So you run those from desktop, like most other regular games.

shoptroll wrote:

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

Also, Skulls of the Shogun is officially Win8 exclusive, which is saddening. I remember at PAX East they told me they were launching with Win8 but I didn't realize they meant you needed Win 8 to play it. This makes me really sad and expecting that the rumors of Ms. 'splosion Man and Zen Pinball launching with Win 8 are going to be exclusive as well.

You'd have thought that they learned that lesson from the disasterous Shadowrun launch. I guess it must've been the developer's fault, not the idiocy of making it exclusive to a new (crappy) OS.

MannishBoy wrote:
shoptroll wrote:

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

I think it's just Metro that doesn't support XNA. So you run those from desktop, like most other regular games.

Ok, that's good to know. It would be really strange for them to just outright drop support for the runtime when they had a new version released only 8 months ago.

Nevin73 wrote:
shoptroll wrote:

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

Also, Skulls of the Shogun is officially Win8 exclusive, which is saddening. I remember at PAX East they told me they were launching with Win8 but I didn't realize they meant you needed Win 8 to play it. This makes me really sad and expecting that the rumors of Ms. 'splosion Man and Zen Pinball launching with Win 8 are going to be exclusive as well.

You'd have thought that they learned that lesson from the disasterous Shadowrun launch. I guess it must've been the developer's fault, not the idiocy of making it exclusive to a new (crappy) OS.

Reading that piece, it sounds like they're probably doing at least optional touch screen control, which means it might make more sense to program with Win RT for the Metro interface. Not sure where the APIs are for Win 32 programming, or how XNA for desktop would support it.

(All guesses, could be wrong)

Nevin73 wrote:
shoptroll wrote:

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

Also, Skulls of the Shogun is officially Win8 exclusive, which is saddening. I remember at PAX East they told me they were launching with Win8 but I didn't realize they meant you needed Win 8 to play it. This makes me really sad and expecting that the rumors of Ms. 'splosion Man and Zen Pinball launching with Win 8 are going to be exclusive as well.

You'd have thought that they learned that lesson from the disasterous Shadowrun launch. I guess it must've been the developer's fault, not the idiocy of making it exclusive to a new (crappy) OS.

I can almost hear the bullet passing clean through their foot from here...

I'd worry that this was a sign of how MS was going to be treating all their triple-A games released on windows going forward but...

...

...

.... nope, got nothing...

stevenmack wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:
shoptroll wrote:

Can anyone confirm that XNA isn't supported on Win8? That seems like a step backward in terms of supporting gaming on the platform to me. I've got a couple of indie games (Magicka and ARES) which run on XNA and I think this is the first I've seen MS actually pull something like this.

Also, Skulls of the Shogun is officially Win8 exclusive, which is saddening. I remember at PAX East they told me they were launching with Win8 but I didn't realize they meant you needed Win 8 to play it. This makes me really sad and expecting that the rumors of Ms. 'splosion Man and Zen Pinball launching with Win 8 are going to be exclusive as well.

You'd have thought that they learned that lesson from the disasterous Shadowrun launch. I guess it must've been the developer's fault, not the idiocy of making it exclusive to a new (crappy) OS.

I can almost hear the bullet passing clean through their foot from here...

I'd worry that this was a sign of how MS was going to be treating all their triple-A games released on windows going forward but...

...

...

.... nope, got nothing...

IMO, it's a pretty obvious play for the dev to have an early game that runs on Win Arm tablets as well as x86 hardware. Only way to do that is to use Win RT development which is exclusive to Win 8 on the desktop.

I don't think this was an MS led thing, I think it was a play to be an earlier mover in the Win tablet space. It's an educated gamble.