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Comment by mickeyp | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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