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Comment by aristidb | Hacker News Reader

Having finally (almost) finished the article...

It looks like in many places, dogma and internal turf wars are behind the decisions. Some things however seem quite reasonable, like having one comprehensive API available to both .NET and native applications and scripting languages - but then only Win Store apps can use most of them... sigh

Oh, and no threads for you, and all I/O is dogmatically asynchronous. Ryah (of node.js) would be proud.

More hilarity: "As is this case with most of WinRT, contracts aren't usable in desktop applications. This means that, for example, a desktop e-mail client such as Outlook can't be used as a share target."

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MS pushes the line that desktop apps shouldn't depend on Windows store apps being installed on the same machine, and vice versa. In other words, there's no official bi-directional communication method between the two.

Some further info on this here for those interested: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7465517/how-can-a-metro-a...

> Oh, and no threads for you, and all I/O is dogmatically asynchronous.

Not so much. Don't confuse WinRT, an optional helper library, with the system calls you're actually allowed to make inside an app container.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...

WriteFile is available in Windows Store applications. You have to use CreateFile2 to get a HANDLE, but CF2 can still create synchronous IO handles.

>> a desktop e-mail client such as Outlook can't be used as a share target

So basically Metro apps can only share with Metro apps? So a Metro Outlook can be shared with.

Yes. Kind of sad, because I think these "contracts" are an awesome idea, and I don't like them being artificially limited like that.

Yep. Not only can you not share to desktop apps, you can't share from desktop apps, though they still have the Charm on the side for it. So you get this wonderful little flyout:

http://i.imgur.com/THJHM.png

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Reminds me of what happened when you dragged something to an open application in the taskbar in WinXP (and maybe later versions too).

You got a message saying, essentially, "the computer knows what you want to do but refuses to do it for you".

It's borderline insultingly user-hostile.

> Oh, and no threads for you, and all I/O is dogmatically asynchronous.

All I/O has been asynchronous since Windows NT. Any blocking calls are just the CRT helping you out.

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