AtmaWeapon

I believe they left out "Express" from that. VS 11 can target .NET 4 and before, there's no reason those apps couldn't run on XP. BUT, Express can only do Metro, and Metro isn't going to work on XP. Or Vista. Or Win7. So VS 11 Express is like a super-special VS that can only target Win8. It's a bold gamble. I guess they mean VS 11's C++ support will have a new version of MFC or whatever that isn't compatible with XP?

Otherwise I have no clue what they're talking about. I don't target XP with .NET. I target the .NET Framework. It's sort of admirable MS is bothering, considering they officially don't support XP.

Cerian Knight

Apparently the Metro claws are dug in... and we get rants that would be hard to surpass in terms of ferocity (scroll down to see it):
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Mic...ack,15831.html

dilettante

Not sure how many saw this:

Windows 8 Release Preview: RIP, Aero (2003-2012)

The guy makes a fantastic point about the UI-awfulness that is The Ribbon in passing as well.

AtmaWeapon

I quit when he got to his blacked-out image. To suggest that the tree structure for navigation in Windows Explorer is chrome is silly. The next shot with a minimized ribbon shows it has pretty much the same footprint as Win7's explorer. I don't like this particular ribbon, but it's because I've been using alternative file managers and keyboard shortcuts for years.

Personally I turn off transparent borders. It's really agitating when I can't read my title bar because of my desktop background, or some something is animating and tricking me into believing that part of my focused window is updating.

Cerian Knight

8/Metro Thumbs down:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Win...rak,15901.html

dilettante

I understand those feelings about the overused transparency in Aero. It's worse on Win7 because of the washed out colors philosophy baked into the Shell as part of trying to make Win7 look different from Vista, but the same issues are there even in Vista.

I suppose they were desperate to try to change the UI to look like it was doing something amazing using video capabilities they were not exploiting in the XP Shell. It is hard to make any argument that this isn't entirely form over function though. You're hardly going to read emails through transparent caption bars and gain screen estate, and since they made the window chrome fatter to show this pointless glitz off you can argue they stole screen real estate.


More likely than not Aero and even Luna before it were marketroid knee-jerk responses to the high gaucherie you see in so many "flopped on top of a console OS a la Win95" GUI shells in the Linux and BSD world. These all trigger a bit of a gag reflex, being based on the Liberace and RuPaul schools of fashion. But Metro is hardly any answer to that.

hDC_0

From the link in post #23 of this thread:
Not Linux - Apple.
Even though the Mac OS has a small share of the desktop market it has a huge mindshare
for mobile iOS devices (and Apple really sets the standard for glossy interfaces).

That is what is so curious about Metro.
Who are the Microsoft "marketroids" trying to win over market share from
in coming out with an "ugly blocks" interface?

Thinking about the gutting of Aero has me concerned about DirectX for Windows 8.

Could the merging of DirectX SDK into the Windows SDK mean that
DirectX is going to just "disappear" altogether except for
developing games for the XBox platform?

Of course anyone who wanted to program DirectX with a managed
language (like C#.Net or VB.Net) was marginalized at best before,
but now according to the Microsoft moderator on this social.msdn forum post:
This is confirmed by the "Create your first Metro style app using DirectX" page,
where all the links lead to C++ code only.

Many in this thread may say, "so what?"

However I've used the C++.Net 2010 Express Edition and consider "crippled" because
its missing ATL and MFC support.

Moving to WinRT, things are only going to get worse.
You can do low level COM or use the somewhat higher level
C++ Component Extensions (or C++/CX for short).

by the way - WinRT is a native COM based framework, and C++/CX produces 100% native binaries --no .Net framework needed per this Nish (Nishant Sivakumar) blog page.
Note: After reading thru his enlightening "C++/CLI in Action" book, I put him in the "expert" category for C++ coding, and he has been a Microsoft MVP since 2002 according to his CodeProject profile page.

However I've heard the WinRT replacement for ATL is the
Windows Runtime Library (or WRL for short).
WFL (and WFL authoring of components) are relatively poorly documented at this point,
(try googling for:
WRL "Windows Runtime Library" MIDL Authoring of components
and see how many results you get..)
..and, AFAIK, the current C++.Net Express edition has no support for this as well.

So I sense its going to be require more time (and expense) to be an entry level
DirectX programmer with fewer code samples out "in the wild" (freely available on the Internet).

I don't see how this could be beneficial to anyone (including Microsoft).

PlausiblyDamp

The more I see / read about windows 8 the more I fail to understand it

From a developer point of view it seems to be brushing aside 10+ years of .Net development and advances and returning to the days of COM but under a different name. Limiting the ability for the Express editions to actually now create full blown applications seems a way to force people into the new style against their will.

From a consumer point of view I can't see what benefits there are unless you are running a tablet or phone, however Microsoft are hardly dominating that market place so I fail to see how forcing this on people will help in the slightest. Any power user who regularly runs several apps at once seems to be ignored by the new UI in favour of forcing the new look on to the user base.

From a business point of view this looks like a massive amount of training and reskilling with no apparent benefit to the company whatsoever. From a personal view point I can see very few business users benefiting from the Metro UI, the tile based UI or the inability to switch to a standard desktop.

As much as I like my touch screen smartphone I have no desire to use my PC in the same way. At the moment I am sat typing away on my desktop PC sort of sprawled with my feet up and the keyboard on my lap; I have a 22" monitor that is perfectly clear to see from my position (and fingerprint free as my 7 year old son has been kept away from it, unlike my phone) and is more importantly just out of reach - the mouse is next to me and works just fine without me having to shift my position and stretch to select things though.


Saw this the other day - https://www.eviscerati.org/comics/co...design-duality and it seems to hit on a slight marketing issue very nicely.

AtmaWeapon

Slight off-topic: I wouldn't read anything into the death of Managed DirectX; it lived for I think a year. It's been unsupported since I think 2009 and I seem to remember being agitated I had to hunt down a 2-year-old version of DX just to get documentation for it when I was dabbling.

It wasn't discontinued due to lack of interest; it was discontinued because it had some terrible bugs. PInvoke is really hairy when you're dealing with expensive unmanaged resources, and there was an "app crashes at startup" bug for which the only workaround was "Keep restarting and hope it starts next time." It would've taken a major rearchitecture for the developers to find and fix all the race conditions, XNA was released, and demand for MDX was really low. It made no business sense to continue support.

So don't read it as "Win8 is deprecating DX." Read it as "Win8 is deprecating a technology that was end-of-lifed as defective 4 years ago and a small minority still uses."

AtmaWeapon

Well, that was a pretty quick reversal.

dilettante

Maybe the left hand found out what the right hand was doing. Seems to be unusual over there in Redmond anymore.

Cerian Knight

Apparently it is my fault that the Start button is gone under Win8:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sta...oft,16153.html

AtmaWeapon

That one's hard for me to legitimately argue. Slashdot started off innocently with "I use the Start button often" then it turned into a "Oh yeah? I use it 15 times per second to launch beowulf clusters!" wee-wee competition.

The vast majority of computer users use *maybe* 4 programs, the vast majority of them IE. If it's pinned to the taskbar, there's no reason to dig around in the start menu. Before Windows 7 let them pin it to the taskbar, they were likely clicking on a desktop icon. Once I made the mistake of removing IE from the desktop at home and my mother railed at me for "deleting internet" from the computer. You can call it stupid, but it's how the majority of users live. These people don't use the Start Menu because it's a list of hundreds of options they may or may not remember.

Heck yeah people like you and I need the start menu. Well, sort of. My Start Menu has 210 items in it, and maybe 12 of them are useful to me. I could learn how to dig through all the garbage for what I want. Or I could use search. Instead of Start>All Programs>Microsoft Visual Studio 2010>Visual Studio Tools>Visual Studio 2010 Command Prompt, I type Start>"2010 Command" and I'm done. What's it like in Metro? Start>"2010 Command". Nothing's changed.

The Start Menu isn't gone. It's been replaced by Metro. It's no less difficult to search through 210 little tiles of applications than it is to search through 210 items in a hierarchical list. That's why you have a search box. From that angle, I never use the start menu because I search for what I want to run.

Cerian Knight

I have the arduous task of needing to routinely ransack through others Windows installs... in many cases not knowing what I'm looking for until I find it. Sometimes, nothing more than a gut feeling leads me in a relevant direction. I'm not perturbed by layout changes... I'll find my way. Its still the tired old argument of standards and practices vs. innovation and modernization. Adapt or become obsolete.

AtmaWeapon

Also for reference: Mac OS X has no "start menu". The dock lays out all your applications in a flat list. I hid mine, and use Spotlight instead. It's pretty much the same thing as the Vista/Win7 search menu. Heck, even in VS 2010, the best feature of ReSharper is letting me push Ctrl+T and type the name of the file I want, or keywords to search for. Maybe I'm just a search junkie, but the more I have to manage the less I think UI is the solution. Give me a shortcut key to a search box and I'm happy.

surfR2911

But it does have an Apple Menu (which is the probably the closest equivalent).
I remember how annoyed my Mac friends were when Apple made it harder to customize the Apple menu
with their own shortcuts (aliases).

There was even a huge uproar in the first public beta for OSX where the
icon for the Apple menu was left in and the actual menu was left out.

However, the Mac fanatics eventually got their Apple menu back when
OSX was finally realized (although the Apple menu did undergo a
significant revision).

I seen a bunch of graphic designers (who will only use Apple/Mac computers),
resort to an Unsanity program called FriutMenu to get back the "classic" menu under Snow Leopard.

Personally I use the ClassicShell utility to get back the start button menu to "normal" under Windows 7.
Don't use Search to startup programs (or the start menu) - all my programs and applications are hotkey-ed using Launchy.

For multi-monitor spread desktop setups Windows7 should give the option
to show the taskbar across all monitors present, but it does not.

Fortunately there are a few utilities that can fill in the gap
(for now until Metro spoils everything) like this one.

I also use a free utility called "Fences" to corral my desktop icons onto
the desired part of my multi-monitor spread desktop space,
but fair warning, there is no real uninstall utility for this utility so see my instructions below
to give yourself some uninstall options..

Note: I mention all of the above because Metro has the potential to mess up
a lot more on my desktop than just the start button.

Been there..done that.
Windows Security Updates are especially insidious..

Now (for my own sanity), I create system restore points constantly
(and especially before installing anything,
I always do a system restore point
in addition to performing a regedit backup of my whole registry beforehand --
even though I use at least two uninstall-helper utilities (as well)
which help track and regulate registry changes).

Cerian Knight

Well, moving forward, might as well settle in (and get the Start Menu back in the process):
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/win8-tip...view-1778.html

dilettante

Umm....

If you've actually tried that you'll find you end up on the desktop post-boot, but with just a vestigial Start Menu and a severely crippled experience.

Cerian Knight

No... I haven't tried yet. Which option are you speaking of?

dilettante

Sorry, I assumed you were referring to #2 there, booting to the Start Menu.