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Comment by joshka | Hacker News Reader

Having spent the better part of the last couple of months on a commercial windows 8 xaml app, the number of WTF moments per day was phenomenal. If the devs writing the OOTB software were anything like us, it's pretty easy to see why they're turned out crap. WinRT takes the best parts of .Net, XAML etc from the last 5 years and just ignores that it ever existed. The problem is that it tries oh so hard to present as if it's just an incremental change. It's not. Small things changed all over the place, no documentation on why, no progressively better software, because it's a totally new implementation of a bunch of things.

I recommend that people should treat Windows 8 metro as a 1.0 product (maybe do the standard wait for the service pack). It's worrying that it will RTM in 2 weeks time.

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I haven't yet developed for Windows 8 and RT yet but having developed apps for the Windows scene since the 90s I have seen a lot of technologies come and go, and invariably -- and not having done the work you've done I may well be completely wrong here -- people will say it's not like the preceding technology stack and ipso facto is crap.

For instance: MFC/Straight-up GDI devs moving to VB/Delphi/Powerbuilder; Delphi users moving to .NET; .NET Winforms developers having to relearn everything when WPF came out; etc.

Is it anything like that or is it truly busted?

In my opinion, though, that's precisely a part of the problem: every couple years, there's a new One True Way to develop for Windows. I understand that breaking with old development frameworks is sometimes a good and necessary thing to do, but the sheer frequency of non-incremental changes to Windows development methodologies seems problematic to me.

Microsoft keeps (us Windows) developers in business; it may not be great for the businesses who retain our services, but it sure is great for developers. And actually, I'm not entirely convinced that MS reinvents all that much more than, say, the OSS web developer community do.

There are many places where it's really busted. For example, in WPF, you could pass a ListView a predicate to filter the visible items in it. That is mysteriously gone in WinRT. System.Xml.XPath is mysteriously gone. The list of omissions I've found is full of things like that. It's a very similar development model to WPF, there's just lots of pieces missing.

That being said, I would encourage anyone looking at developing a windows 8 app to strongly look at the html/javascript API for building apps. There's some oddities there too, but in my experience (which is admittedly limited) they are easier to deal with.

XPath functionality's gone? Hmm.. pretty massive oversight. Microsoft's not one to rest on their laurels when it concerns their cash cow though. I expect this'll all make a reappearance very soon enough.

Also, C# (and .NET) were lacking quite a bit in the early days as well.. now C# is pretty much a kitchen sink language.

The fact that it's RTMing in 2 weeks is irrelevant. What you're looking at (the release preview) was released May 31st, 2012. That means that before RTM hits, there will have been 2 months and a week or twos work put into it. While I think the apps won't be that clean in RTM yet, by the time GA rolls around I'm confident that they will be pretty good.

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