Cringe, laugh or cry if you will, but LoB development has essentially moved to the web.<p>Overall I think Microsoft's metro/winrt/client focus really abandoned their position of strength in the enterprise. This essentially forces existing Microsoft-friendly enterprises to switch technology stacks (WinRT is a non-trivial migration target) and at the same time gives a significant boost to HTML- the long trail of abandoned platforms should give everyone pause when considering a new one.<p>I'll put much of the responsibility (blame?) of this on Sinofsky who essentially wanted a clean slate for WinRT to ensure apps were designed for Metro and not half-assed ports. This strategy was fairly cocky and I'll argue could have been done with more finesse to not destroy as much marketshare- right now Win8 needs every inch it can get.
Perhaps this could be retitled "Having cake and eating it too: No good options."<p>Big companies want technologies they can invest in that will remain stable and supported for a decade or more. Hell, many of them are upset that XP isn't being supported for longer than that.<p>If as a big company you had been a leader and built a web-based app in, say, 2005, it would most likely be a mess of hand-built DOM libraries that sniffed for specific browsers and most likely were wired to IE6 or IE7 (remember, jQuery didn't even exist yet). The "good options" that corps are choosing to use today mainly involve forcing newer versions of Internet Explorer into IE7 or IE5-Quirks mode so they don't have to lift a finger to change that festering pile of custom JavaScript.<p>I'm not convinced that any technology exists today that will be so set-it-and-forget-it wonderful that companies should plan to build it now and leave it the hell alone for a decade. But that's what they've demanded of the last generation of apps they built.
Many of these technologies are certainly supported (WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, etc). It's just that there isn't and won't be any new development on these products in the future. Microsoft is putting all of their focus into WinRT and Web development. On the one hand, yeah it kind of sucks that the platforms they built over the last 10-12 years are obsolete. On the other hand, they're moving an incredible pace around developing tools for WinRT and Web development (especially Web, which I keep up with in my day job).
WinForms are still an option in VS 2012-how are they not supported? Is this just an alarmist piece of writing, or are WinForms no longer around in VS 2013?
So many problems with this article. For starters, he gives apple way too much credit. He also nitpicks about RT not being able to run .net apps. So what? Get a non-RT tablet. Can you run mac programs on any iPad version? No.
I don't think it takes 3-4 times longer to do something in a web app versus a WinForms app. It all depends on what you are doing of course. Simple grids and data entry type input stuff is simple to do in web apps.
I think the author is experiencing and commenting on the challenge of building business apps for mobile in general - not just Windows/WinRT. WinRT suffers from the same limitations as iOS and Android when it comes to servicing business' needs. The good news is that WFP is going to be supported and improved upon (despite what the author says) until WinRT is a viable alternative.<p>In the future I can see a small business owner linking all his computers together with a master Microsoft account and then buying a POS app that's downloaded to all of his computers linked under that account. If that can be done, it'd be a major leap from where we're at right now.
Um, there is Adobe AIR which seems like a very reasonable option for building Line of Business Apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever. I know it's not cool to like Adobe AIR/Flash but it would certainly get the job done and allow for easy updates, etc. outside of the Windows Store.
You could always build your apps in IronPython with GTK#.<p>Or even straight Python with QT. Or Java or Groovy or...<p>If Microsoft doesn't provide a tool that does what you need, then choose another tool. There are an awful lot of choices out there and you gain greater control over your destiny.