Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

After a few minutes on the internets I discovered a little gem of a thread:

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...

In this thread you'll see much more clearly what MS is planning. It's not just HTML/JS for these immersive apps. Rather it appears that the CLR will become a first class part of Windows. If you are a Windows dev or are interested in Windows dev, this is a must read thread. In fact I'm shocked that no major publications have noticed it.

There are lots of really interesting nuggets in there. In many regards I think they're finally delivering on a lot of the promises of Longhorn.

I must say I'm excited about it, and looking forward to September now. MS screwed up on the PR, but I think they may have gotten the technological direction right.

View on HN

I read that a couple days ago and here are the two most interesting posts...

Microsoft's own immersive html application is just a thin layer over native code

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...

.NET Ahead-Of-Time compiler is probably coming

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/26404-Windows-8-(79...

[EDIT]

And for those worried Silverlight developers, scan that thread for DirectUI.

Is this what the "IE is native" PR claims are about? That HTML DOM and CSS are going to map directly onto the window system instead of a virtual window (or whatever it is called) in the browser engine?

Microsoft earlier explained that "native" means "not cross-platform".

It reminds me of the old joke: Microsoft knows about cross platform code, as some of their stuff runs on WinXP and Vista

Er, no, they didn't. They mean fully (or significantly more fully) hardware accelerated, and they've said that many times - hence all the benchmarks of 2D canvas in IE9 vs Chrome.

Personally I think IE9 is a shitty browser - no 3D context for canvasses, gradients, history, or 3D transforms. But you don't need to represent MS to prove that.

http://www.winrumors.com/silverlight-isnt-dead-its-the-heart...

There is another article too in relation to this. Also, Mary Jo Foley and others have posted 'information' about Jupiter and whatnot.

It seems people are quickly taking advantage of this 'outrage' on the internets for some 'good' news stories.

Looks to me that it's not so much that "the CLR will become first class" as they've broken down the CLR and .NET into little pieces (GC = SLR/Redhawk, type system/metadata = WinRT/WinTypes.dll, XAML = Jupiter/DirectUI, C# = the new AOT compiler, if it exists), and are using each one individually where appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com