Microsoft Answers Coder Cries Over New Development Kit | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Answers Coder Cries Over New Development Kit

wired.com

44 pointsFedons31 comments

It seems like the risk of not collecting $500 from a bunch of developers is peanuts compared to the real threat MSFT now faces of people choosing to develop non Windows-specific apps which happen to still work on Windows. How many "apps" have you installed lately which are really just local servers with web front-ends? Qt-based stuff? Java SWT/Swing? What else? While many of these apps likely are built upon 3rd party components developed using Visual Studio (perhaps a free version), the makers of these apps almost always provide a Mac and Linux version. Microsoft has passed a dangerous tipping point where it is now like Apple in the early 90's -- fighting to attract developers who will provide killer, platform-specific apps. We all laughed as Ballmer screamed, "Developers, developers, developers!" However, he's all too well aware of the danger Microsoft faces of losing its dominance as a platform provider. I'd say "lost" as I believe they're already running on fumes, but they still control a huge portion of the desktop market. They should be worrying that developers won't develop anything at all which relies on their APIs and forgo the overly ambitious goal of buying developers' use of Metro. In a storm, any 'ol port will do.

True they still control a huge proportion of the desktop market, but most of that is business desktops. Apple's market share is heavily lopsided towards the high end consumer market. It's similar to their position with the iPhone. They have a minority market share, but its the most valuable part of the market.

For over a decade Microsoft has essentially been able to behave as if they have no competition, while Apple still has a culture of being lean, mean and hungry - plus they now have a hundred billion dollar war chest. I'm glad I'm not working for a competitor of theirs right now. At least

Microsoft does seem to be well aware of the problem, but the question is are they too big and slow to be able to react effectively? In mobile the answer was no. On the desktop they have the advantage of a real and significant market share dominance. It's going to be very interesting to see where things stand in 3 or 4 years time.

That's exactly what the motivation for the "Metro/WinRT" strategy for Windows 8 was in the first place, though - to get more developers writing directly for (new versions of) Windows rather than relying on third-party (or even first-party) runtime layers.

WinRT feels foreign on many fronts.

I'm evaluating Win8 for us, and I compiled few of the examples that MS provided. My absolute first impression was that it's hard to debug these applications:

While there was a time, where few or more files were auto-generated, now there are dozens more. On top of that not one project, but two - one container (dll, your app), the other one - the runner (some small exe).

And then press F11 (debug), and see what happens - you are debugging full screen app (metro), and your debugger is running on the desktop. I don't have two monitors, so it might be better there - but what about people with laptops, or other mobile forms that ARE supposed to be the Windows 8 primary devices?

It seems like Windows 8 is collection of ideas, not very well stringed together. I like the "hooking" of one app to another, but it seems too limited - I was much more expecting docking of apps, even if it had some hard limits, but not only 2 apps side-to-side.

Things might improve, but I doubt many people would do professional software that is entirely for Metro. Once you do that, you are taking away from people the ability to run other apps at the same time on top of them.

For example, I regularly run DeskPins, and then I can pin on a window to stay on top - for example notepad, or something else. Now this is not possible.

The File Open/Search aspect is also strange. One thing that I loved of the Open File Dialog in normal Windows is that I can actually put a real URL from http, and it would download the file somehow, and later I can reopen it. Now this is gone.

The whole direction makes sense for mobile devices, but not for professional tools, unless the tools are modified that much that it won't hurt.

In our game studio, it's typical to see Maya/Motion Builder working together with two or three other tools opened, and often they cooperate - one tool displays data, the other edits it - now how... and why would I want to change this into the Metro way?

Oh, I wouldn't consider Metro style apps as any kind of replacement for desktop apps or most professional tools. I've been running Windows 8 for a while now, but to me on desktops or larger screened laptops they are just fancy gadgets that live off the left side of my screen. I like having them because they are isolated and suspended when not running, so I can use lots of them without impacting the system (or even cluttering the taskbar). I just grab one from the switcher or the start screen, check something or do something simple, and then click in the upper left corner to go back to the desktop. It's a bit like I might have a phone next to me while using a PC and check mail on it sometimes, but there are some advantages such as being able to use your keyboard to enter text, being able to click on a link and have it open in the desktop, etc. However for integrating into any more involved workflow I would stick to desktop apps for the reasons you mentioned. (I also agree that the Metro open file dialog is really lame, it somehow manages to be even worse than the Windows folder browser dialog and I didn't think such a thing was even possible).

There is a lot of weird FUD about the desktop being "legacy" and on its way out, and although that's not something Microsoft has actually said it does come partly from them being overeager to hype their new thing because it's their new thing, and partly from the press echo chamber liking to hype things in general. But it's completely absurd.

re debugging, I think there is an "emulator" you can use which is really a remoting session into your own machine, but it will run your app in a window.

Off topic: the "headlinese" title of this article results in syntactic ambiguity.

I read it as: The coder who built Microsoft Answers (http://answers.microsoft.com/) cried because of a new development kit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_blossom#In_headlines

Headlines That Capitalize Every Word can be annoying. Normal capitalization provides semantic value.

Same. Then I read the article and couldn't figure out who was crying. Had you not posted anything, I'd have spent the rest of my evening scratching my head on that one.

For everyone else who is still confused (including me until a minute ago), join coder and cries with a dash.

Thanks, I now parse it as "Microsoft replies to coder concerns about new development kit".

"Microsoft Answers", coder cries ...

In before the hate train starts rolling full steam ahead right over Microsoft. This is a fantastic decision, they obviously really had no choice otherwise a lot of people would have abandoned Windows 8 development and Microsoft would have looked bad launching an OS that didn't have many supported applications.

As for Windows XP support, why would Microsoft add in support for an OS they don't really support any more? It has been 11 years, well almost 12 since XP came out and the fact people want to support the outdated OS is like asking Google to start supporting Internet Explorer 6 again.

     As for Windows XP support, why would Microsoft
     add in support for an OS they don't really support 
     any more?

Because Windows XP is stable, it works and a lot of companies and people are still using it.

If anything, Microsoft is to be blamed for not providing a compelling reason to upgrade. Windows Vista was awful, while Windows 7 is just a re-branded Vista with a little more polish applied. Which is why at home I still have Windows XP on my desktop.

     It has been 11 years, well almost 12

Windows 7 was released at the end of 2009, while XP was released in Aug 2001. That's 8 years in which people had no real upgrade option. Can you really blame them if they are a little conservative?

     the fact people want to support the outdated OS is like asking 
     Google to start supporting Internet Explorer 6 again

That's not a fair comparison, as downloading Firefox/Chrome is painless, is free, doesn't require a hardware upgrade, normal people can do it by themselves and they don't risk losing their data ... saying that upgrading Windows is painful would be an understatement.

Show me the person that's still running 2001 hardware with XP

yo. (of course, it did take two days to post...)

That's wrong. 7 is really good. Comparing it to vista or xp shows you don't know what you are talking about.

Name 3 differences between Vista and XP that don't involve minor UI tweaks.

I understand that Microsoft does not want to perpetuate Windows XP support but, for this single reason, I will not be able to upgrade to VS 2012. This means missing on the latest c++ features and also means maintaining two developement trees if I decide to develop a WinRt version.

Latest C++ features are in MinGW and clang! And latest C features (C99) are there too.

Yes but my main project is all on VS' toolchain and I would guess there are many others like me. Good to know that here are alternatives though.

To be fair, you'd need two development trees for WinRT anyway - the namespaces are different, for one thing, and the UIs are of course radically different and incompatible.

Are they going to include 64bit support? The earlier versions of Visual Studio Express didn't which was a right royal pain for me. I produce a Python library and since Windows users don't have compilers have binary downloads available. To get 64 bit command line compiles I had to do an unholy wedging of VSE and the platform dev kit. (I'd much rather the Python developers used free software instead of forcing this stuff onto the rest of us.)

If anyone is curious you can see the downloads and popularity at http://code.google.com/p/apsw/downloads/list

I think that if you install the Windows 7.1 SDK, you should be able to choose Platform SDK and target it, rather than the built in compilers.

WSDK7.1 is VS2010, but at least latest IDE would be used.

If only it was so easy. The existing Python versions need VS2008 so I have to use Platform SDK 7.0 (not 7.1). Then it and VS2008 won't play nice with paths, so in the end I just hardcoded them in my setup script. http://code.google.com/p/apsw/wiki/Win7build

The next Python release is using VS2012 so I'll have to have it, whatever it takes to get it and 64 bit binaries, plus VS2008 and PSDK 7.0 all installed at the same time.

The ultimate cause of all this is Microsoft bundling the C library with the compiler, and not being able to have more than one version of the C library in a process which forces the executable and all dlls to be compiled with the same compiler version.

Yup. For that reason I stick with the WDK 7.1 (and target MSVCRT.DLL by linking with msvcrt_win2000.obj, and this works on XP). Yes this would not work for Python built with VS2008, but it would not require me to carry MSVCRxx.DLLs everywhere.

I'm still converned over the fate of the x64 compilers.

Funny ... I haven't heard anyone crying.

Oh yeah, they're all developing HTML5 applications that will run on Chrome and Firefox and maybe Internet Explorer. Why worry about the OS' look and feel?

Given that there were about four or five posts on the front page about the changes to the express version changes it would that a lot of people care.

I'm glad Microsoft listened to people on this one.

I've only seen this one. Is HN bubbling us in? By this I mean an effect similar to google search results being personalized to the person who is searching.

Sorry I meant when they announced a few weeks ago that the expression version wouldn't support native Windows apps.

Isn't my answer in essence the same as ShabbyDoo's (currently atop this thread)? Let me rephrase it (minus the sarcasm):

As developers, isn't platform independence finally within our reach? We've been corralled into corporate SDKs, libraries and APIs for years and we've now broken free in much the same way we did on the CLI when C became standardized (yeah ... there are still issues with that too).

At the same time I'm wondering what corporate users are going to think of a radically different desktop (and one that looks more "toy-like"). We're a pretty adaptable crowd, but retraining costs are going to be as bad as when Office became ribbon-based. And where's my "Start" menu?

I'm not a Microsoft hater, but I don't think it's bad that they're less dominant.

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