Just another step towards a closed, locked down world where every app is vetted, approved and ultimately constrained to not compete with the business interests of the two largest tech companies in the world.<p>I know, people will say, this hardly makes a difference, right? But all the steps hardly make a difference. OSX Mountain Lion defaulting to only allow apps signed with a certificate from Apple? Why, the user can just disable that ... not including Flash or Java? Sure, just install them! It all hardly makes a difference. But all these steps put together - they make a difference!<p>Slowly and surely we're being led like lambs to the slaughter to a world where everything we say or do with our technology will be under the control of giant tech companies that ultimately care only about their own profit. This is just one more little step to ensure that developers preferentially make apps for Microsoft's walled garden rather than free apps that run anywhere and might compete with their interests.<p>Edit: correction about Mac App store vs signed apps
Although I think HTML5 is actually a pretty lousy software stack for application development, I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to the arguments that the evolution of the web is absolutely essential for the survival of free & open computing.<p>It was bad enough that their mobile platforms are so locked down, but with Apple and Microsoft now turning the screws ever tighter on their previously open desktop platforms and development tools the future is looking grim. Remember, once a freedom is relinquished it can be very difficult to get it back.<p>As much as I dislike trying to build complex apps on the web stack I'm starting to feel an almost moral obligation as a hacker to throw my weight behind the web, for whatever it's worth.
This doesn't really seem like news to me. I've never met anybody doing real development in the .NET world who didn't have a paid copy of VS.NET.<p>With BizSpark or similar, you're looking at something like $400 total to get as many copies of VS.NET as you need for your entire team. And all the other dev tools everybody needs. And Windows licenses for all their boxes. And Office. And everything else Microsoft makes.<p>So even assuming a team size of one, it's still closer to free than it is to a day's worth of your bill rate. Considering how much better the paid version of VS.NET is than the "Express" version, it's not even something worth thinking about.<p>Given that, the fact that the Free version does this or doesn't do that has pretty much zero bearing on the life of a guy writing software on the Microsoft stack.
Do we have to pay the Windows Store registration fee to deploy a Metro app? Or is there still way to send out an .exe to our friends and colleagues?<p>Even if we get free development tools it would sucks if we can't share our work for free.
+ Freelancer devs will be 'encouraged' to develop for Win 8, an argument can be made this will positively impact Win 8 sells, albeit it will be a difficult argument<p>- Open source development on Windows will take a hit<p>- Freelancers will either stick with older and less effective tools, or will choose to abandon Desktop<p>- Users will tend to get less new software for their Windows 7<p>+/- Will not affect big corporations, e.g. gamemakers, who use the professional version<p>- This will provide no additional motivation to bulk of the users (e.g. corporate, gamers) to switch to Windows 8<p>- This will further 'encourage' piracy of VS11
I think they should instead focus on making Metro appealing to develop on, rather than making it the only free option.<p>At least they still allow other compilers and any programming language.<p>I wish Ubuntu would step up their development resources game, so that it becomes less painful to do anything there.
How will this affect applications like Matlab 2012 64bit, which require a compiler (such as in the Win 7 SDK) to be installed to use certain features such as SIMULINK?<p><a href="http://www.mathworks.com/support/compilers/R2012a/win64.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.mathworks.com/support/compilers/R2012a/win64.html</a><p>Will there even be a compiler they could licence from MS and bundle?
It's long past time since Visual Studio was the only game in town. Back when it was between VS6 and Borland C++ Builder, I was initially attracted by Builder's drag-and-drop UI construction - it seemed very odd at the time that "Visual" studio didn't offer that functionality. But Borland's descent into bug-ridden stagnation and my discovery of wxWidgets pushed me into the VC++ world for upwards of a decade.<p>But now with Eclipse reaching maturity (it's the main IDE at the banking multinational where I recently worked), I'm finding less and less justification to stick with Visual Studio when my MSDN subscription expires. Another very promising tool is Qt Creator: <a href="http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools" rel="nofollow">http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools</a><p>This has less of the UI quirkiness of Eclipse, and the built-in documentation is great. Qt is now using Clang for code validation, but can be set to use Gcc or the Microsoft compiler. So given that I'm using Qt anyway for cross-platform UI, this may be the way forward.
Alternative article on Ars Technica: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/no-cost-desktop-software-development-is-dead-on-windows-8/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/no-cos...</a>
The more accessible the grass route tools the greater the chance of adoption. Adoption for Win8 / RT maybe acceptable with the new Express options but frankly I don't see C# developers of the future applying for licences for IDEs to compile their software. They'll just adopt a different more (immediately) accessible platform. Companies will struggle to recruit for server hosted line of business applications. The ecosystem will suffocate. Managers and engineers will consider different platforms as part of their due diligence, as a result I predict less Windows licences will be sold.
Walled garden platforms are taking over partly because all operating systems are fundamentally broken with regard to privilege isolation, security, and application installability/uninstallability.<p>The fact is that for the average non-techie user, allowing unsigned/untested apps results in a system full of malware and crappy software that destroys it. That's because the OS is not isolated from apps, and apps are not isolated from each other.<p>The popularity of virtualization is also due in large part to this. Why can't you just rent accounts on large Linux servers? Why is KVM, OpenVZ/Parallels Virtuozzo, etc. necessary? Because everything requires root and everything pollutes the OS space.<p>Broken, broken, broken.<p>The way Macs package .app directories full of all files related to an application is a huge step in the right direction. The next step is to utterly forbid "installers" and make everything work this way, and to add stronger privilege isolation and organized APIs for apps to talk to each other. These should probably be based around peer-to-peer networking so that an app can locate and talk to another app regardless of what box it's on.<p>That would be significantly less broken.<p>Then allow apps to have their own addresses. We probably have to wait for IPv6 for this, but not necessarily. Then an app can bind, run services, etc. without requiring root.<p>Finally, banish the entire concept of root/administrator except for OS developers and OS maintenance. The vast, vast majority of users (even power users) should never need to even know these exist.<p>The bottom line is that the entire concept of "installing" something "on" the OS needs to be killed. Installers are ugly nasty hacks. Package management (ala rpm, deb, etc.) is <i>also</i> an ugly hack. Signed apps in walled gardens is an even nastier and downright evil hack to get around the brokenness of these ugly hacks.